Sunday, April 19, 2009
Easter 2B
1 John 1:1-2:2
Note: When I stood up to begin, what had been emotions just underneath the surface boiled out in the form of tears. To stand with these folks whom we have grown to love so much and know that they are walking through this valley (Donald’s (Leslie’s father) illness) with us was simply overwhelming at that point this morning. I expressed our profound gratitude to them, to let them know that the knowledge that we were going through this together is making all the difference, and was finally able to gather myself enough after a few minutes to continue into the message.
1 We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— 3we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 4We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
5This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. 6If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; 7but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
8If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
2My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; 2and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.
This epistle, this letter to a church or a group of churches, is traditionally held to have been written by John, the apostle, towards the end of his life, as a response to a form of teaching that was on the rise that took the Gospel and twisted it and began to propose that living a … unified life … a life where the physical aspect reflected the spiritual – where there was a sense of cohesion between the two – was not required. We’ve spoken of it before: Gnosticism.
It took two very distinct forms as a result of the view that the physical body and the spirit or soul of a person were actually separate and distinct, and did not affect one another: the first resulted in people who ascribed to this understanding of Gospel choosing to live a life of extreme asceticism – in other words, they lived a life of extreme self-denial – depriving themselves of any number of comforts as well as some of the NEEDS that the body requires in order to function properly. On the other extreme were those who believed and practiced that, since the two ‘parts’ of the body cannot affect each other, living a life of physical indulgence had no bearing on the spiritual health of the person, and so gave themselves permission to engage in just about anything imaginable, according to the writings of the church fathers who argued and fought against the rise of The Gnostics.
John, by virtue of his apostleship and close relationship to Jesus, had over the years become something of an overseer of this group of churches in what is today Western Turkey and Eastern Greece, and as a loving father figure to them, he wrote to them to both warn and instruct them in regards to what this up-and-coming theology truly was.
If in the reading of the passage you heard echoes of the Gospel of John, you weren’t just hearing things. It is very evidently running through similar themes – about the Word, true Life, and Darkness and Light.
John first reminds his ‘children’ that what he has learned and taught them has been firsthand knowledge. “What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands” is a simple and straightforward affirmation that he didn’t come up with what he taught the followers of Jesus on his own – that it is from Jesus himself, because that is who John learned it from.
After laying that groundwork, John states his thesis: That God is light, and there is no darkness in God. Again it echoes the themes that we find throughout the Gospel of John.
Then he begins to elaborate some on what that means in terms of how it applies to those who call themselves followers of Jesus, or God-fearers: he says that if we say we know the love of God, but if the way we are living our lives doesn’t show that, then we really DON’T know the love of God,
Or at the other extreme, if we say we know God so WELL that we don’t SIN, we are lying to ourselves, because we have all sinned, and will continue to sin, until we are beyond this pale, and in the presence of God. Until then, he reiterates, the blood of Christ cleanses us from all unrighteousness IF WE CONFESS OUR SINS.
So John establishes a clear and strong link between living a life that is made up of harmonious action between the spiritual and the physical. The one cannot be had without the other. They are all part of the whole.
The beauty of it is that he doesn’t separate the love of God from the demands of the Gospel on how we should live our lives. He knows who he is writing to. He knows them well. He is able to express to them that he’s writing this letter to them so that they WON’T sin, and in the very next breath he tells us that IF WE DO SIN, we have an advocate before God in the person of Jesus Christ, ‘the righteous’.
Notice he doesn’t simply stop at that – as if to say ‘he IS righteous, but it’s yet to be seen how effective his righteousness is.’ Not at all – there is an immediate word of assurance as to the efficacy of Jesus’ sacrifice: ‘not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world.’ In other words, Jesus’ sacrifice is MORE than sufficient for you or for me – no matter WHAT we’ve done – again – NO MATTER WHAT WE’VE DONE. Sometimes we tend to gloss over those words – but they really are true. I don’t want to dwell on that necessarily, but it bears repeating – perhaps not just to ourselves, but to someone you know – someone who has not felt worthy to be in church? Someone who feels they might be judged if they came TO church?
What does this mean for
I was talking with a local youth this week, and he began to share with me about his father – how he LIKED to go to church, but that he felt conflicted about going. On the one hand, he liked the sense of family he got from a small group of people, the sense of fellowship and care that can be found there, he didn’t like going somewhere where he didn’t know anybody. On the other hand, that same closeness made him at times more than a little uncomfortable.
The thing is, the one comes with the other. Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt, but rather caring. For some of us, that caring can seem constraining, cloying. John spells it out –
7but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another,
Leslie and the kids spent the better part of the day yesterday at the Little League fields. We went back yesterday evening for Hannah’s game – which turned out to be a double-header that lasted until well past 10:00. Over the course of the evening, Judson and Caleb and Elizabeth and Aaron and some of their other friends were playing various games around the area, and at some point Judson’s Crocks popped one of the plastic rivets that keeps the strap on. He came and got me and we explored a little, but it is a dark gray or faded black piece of plastic, and since by that time it was dark, the artificial lights were casting shadows in the grass. It was a nearly impossible task to try to find something that small and that dark in an area that was filled with small dark patches. I realized that it was going to be nearly impossible to find a little dark gray piece in a field of green and black and dark gray patches. I told him we would need to come back while the sun was out if we had any chance of finding the piece. We have yet to go back … we will probably just end up getting another pair of shoes for him.
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But that is what it is like to live in fellowship. Living the message – living in community, caring for one another and loving each other intertwines our lives in a way that bonds us together and MAKES us the body of Christ. Some of you were here Wednesday evening when I shared about Uncle Lamar Tribble. He’s not my Uncle in the sense that we are related by OUR blood somehow … but he IS my Uncle insofar as we are bonded together through the experience of living and through his working alongside my parents as a missionary in
The question becomes, do we understand that we here at Jerusalem can be – actually ARE that for our children, our youth and young adults – even for each other – no matter our age? I guess the word of warning would be that it can cut both ways – we can serve as examples of what it DOESN’T mean as easily as what DOES mean to be a follower of Christ.
That is why the invitation is to live the message – to live the Gospel and to live in THAT light. Because that light … casts no shadows.
Let’s pray
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But it’s that way when you are in close fellowship.
Close fellowship brings discovery, brings knowing each other well – to reality. In the best of all possible worlds, that fellowship is marked and branded by love, by caring, by selfless giving, by words of encouragement. Yes, part of it is accountability, and responsibility to the body, but it … how can I … some of you were here Wednesday night when I shared with you about my uncle Lamar Tribble. He is one of my missionary uncles. I know it can be sometimes be tiring to hear me reference growing up as an MK, and talking about missionaries, and my aunts and uncles, and you never can know if I’m talking about the brothers and sisters of my parents or of my aunts and uncles in the faith.
But what marked me growing up was the fellowship that I saw between my aunts and uncles – my missionary aunts and uncles – my missionary ‘cousins’ – well, we’d just as soon shoot each other at times (laughing).
But we had a group of 50 or so is what I have in mind, of faithful, dedicated, loving people who spanned the entire spectrum of Baptist theology. Uncle Lamar and Aunt Betsy are probably some of the most fundamentalist people I know, and yet, the love that they expressed to me, to my family, to my parents, regardless of those differences, marked who I am, had influence, had a formative effect on who I am. Getting through our adolescence with my fellow MKs, I think all of us, I don’t know of any of us who are not … who don’t have a “default setting” where we wouldn’t open our doors to any one of us, who happened to come through , who needed a place to stay, who needed a meal. Or we would go to get them if they were stranded somewhere, if they were in range.
See, that’s where I learned what it means to be in fellowship in Christ. That first hymn that we sang “He Lives” – it is one of those hymns that we always sang at the beginning of Mission Meeting, and … yeah. I couldn’t get through it, because it reaches down and pulls at the heartstrings, it pulls right at who I am. And the thing is, that fellowship … not because … it wasn’t because – and hear me say this – it wasn’t because they were missionaries, it wasn’t because they were special in any other way besides being obedient in living their faith – that same fellowship, that same impact that they had on MY life is what YOU ALL continue to have on me, and what you ARE HAVING on my family, and on the children and youth and young adults in this church…
Christ’s call to community is that bond, that … glue (?) that constrains us to love each other in the love of Christ, that calls us to care for each other in the care of Christ, that calls us to model to – not just each other – but to our children, our grandchildren, and the folks outside these walls what it means to be a follower of Christ.
Living the message of the Gospel is that, is making an impact on the lives around you by the way you live yours. And I mean ‘yours’ in the sense of a community, of a congregation – yes, also individually, that goes without saying – but the way we live our lives TOGETHER is what is going to make the difference. It’s what is going to make people hopefully sit up and take notice, and when you say you belong to or attend
That’s the call, that’s the challenge, that’s the invitation; to be a loving family. Loving doesn’t mean not having disagreements; it means that in spite of the disagreements we continue to love each other. Disagreements are part of being human.
So, we have this task, ongoing. It is a task that we do not, by definition, do alone, that we, by definition get tired doing, but that we have … a resource, and I know that is a cold word … that we have this well that we can draw from, to use … I’m sure there’s a hymn that has that image in it, that we can draw from and drink deep of the water of life.
Let’s pray.
Lord in a world that is fractured, that is splintered, you have called us to grow together. You have called us to mend the breaks, to form one body. And even as our bodies work together, when we walk, when we run, when we lift, when we sit, when we stand, when we lay down, you call us as a body of believers to do the same – to work together in unity and in love. So we ask, Lord, that as we work toward that end, that you would not only bless our efforts, that you would infuse us, that you would teach us as days go by, as opportunities present themselves, what it means to love in the midst of disagreements, what it means to model your giving, your caring, both to each other and to the world around us, through Christ our Lord who gave himself for the whole world.
Amen.
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