May 3, 2009 - In Truth and Action - 1 John 3:15-24

            Have you ever noticed how easy it is to dislike someone?  How easy it is to find fault, to condemn someone else’s vises and short comings?  How easy it is to think the worst of someone instead of hoping for the best?   - Or even how easy it is to assume evil from people instead of expecting good from them?

            In our post-modern age we are, as a culture, quick to judge and slow to forgive.  We rush to our newspapers and televisions to find out the latest details of some new scandal, the latest humiliation of some famous person, while their vindication, when it comes, is never mentioned or at best is relegated to a side bar on the back page.

            We see the whole world as a daily battle between ‘us’ and ‘them’:  Republicans versus Democrats, Whites versus Blacks versus Latinos versus Somalis, Catholics versus Protestants versus Jews versus Moslems, even young versus old and city versus country.

            We live in a world where we close ourselves off from those ‘others’ who are not like us – and we in turn are turned away by those on the other side.

            The first century the church knew all about this kind of ill-will.  They were disliked by the non-Christian majority where they lived.  They were considered poor citizens because they did not worship the local Gods.  They did not participate in the local festivals – and they held all those ‘love feasts’ – and we can all imagine the kind of thing that happened there!

            When John wrote this first letter, the church was facing prejudice from those outside the church – but they were facing prejudice from those inside the church as well.  Already, the church was not what it had been.  It was not the united, communal gathering of those who love Jesus that it had started out to be.  False teachers had come in and were trying to tear the community apart and they were causing bad feelings everywhere.

            Even within the church, feelings of love were becoming hard to find – and love in action was becoming ever rarer.  And so John writes them to say something to them that will knock their socks off:  ‘All who hate a brother or sister are murderers (1 John 3:15 NRSV)’.  The problem, he says is not so much those outside the church who hate you, it is that inside the church you hate one another.

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            Some years ago the Disciples of Christ had had a wonderful commercial on television.  It was a scene of a moderately sized church just before a Sunday morning worship service.  We see this only because we catch glimpses of just a few people at a time sitting throughout the church.  Over here, a woman with a crying baby, over there a homeless man, a few rows back a person of color and on the other side of the aisle, a gay couple.  One by one, these apparently unsuitable attendees are catapulted from their seats as if someone in the church held an eject button.  One by one, the nice church people rid themselves of all those ‘others’, those who are not ‘their kind’.  The noisy, the smelly, those other people who simply don’t fit in. 

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            I laughed out loud every time I saw it.  I think most people who saw it laughed at it – but we all laughed because in so many churches it’s true.  The weekly gathering for worship has been called the most segregated hour of the week. 

We all feel uncomfortable sitting next to people we don’t know, people who aren’t like us or even people with whom we’ve had a disagreement in the past week.  Each of us would rather, if the truth be known, be surrounded by our comfortable little crowd. Each of us, if the truth be known, kills those others, just a little bit, every time we give them the sideways glance, when we refuse to meet their eyes, when we mutter about them under our breath, or scoot farther down the pew to get further away.

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            Sadly, if we look deep enough inside ourselves, each one of us will know that somewhere in the world there is someone who would push the eject button on each of us.  Every one of us is different enough from someone to have been rejected by them.  Each of us has suffered at the hand of another Christian who refuses to treat us as a brother of sister and who murders us bit by bit with their refusal to show love.

            The world is overflowing with what Lloyd John Ogilvie calls ‘the walking dead, love-starved people’[1] whom each of us murders a little more every time we throw up barriers to keep them away – and the saddest part of all is that these people, these love-starved walking dead’ may be sitting in the pew next to you, across the aisle, or just a few rows away.  The thing they might need most in the world is the healing love of God and the healing acceptance of the family of Christ and we keep that love to ourselves as if it were some treasure too precious to give away. 

We know this not just because we can look back at our lives and see that we have been guilty of it – but we can also remember times when we have been in desperate need of that love ourselves – and we were rejected as well.

Why is this so?  How have we failed?

1. We love our stuff too much.  Verse 17 of this morning’s scripture passage asks us: ‘How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help? (1 John 3:17, NRSV).’  All over the world people will fall asleep tonight hungry and naked.  People in our own town scrape by from paycheck to paycheck, working full time jobs and living below the poverty level.  And we try not to notice them because we work too hard to enlarge our bank accounts, drive our nice cars and but our nice toys.

2. We are afraid of being hurt.  No one reached adulthood without being rejected.  Having been hurt already, we turn our backs on those who might really need us emotionally.  It’s hard work.  They might see through our well painted façade and see that we are not as secure and well-adjusted as we want people to think we are.

3. We lack the faith to live as Christ lived.  Jesus gave everything – everything – to show us not how to feel love but to act with love.  God gives us the promise of more to come, the assurance that what we see around us is only a taste of all that has been prepared for us.  The Spirit gives us the power to do live as Jesus lived.  But we hold back.  We look after ourselves first.  We fail the test of love because our faith is too small.

            If this last pronouncement was the end of the sermon, there would be little Good News for us this day.  But it is not.  This morning’s scripture doesn’t end with verse 16.  This morning’s scripture goes on to tell us that even though our conscience may condemn us for our failures, God is greater than our hearts and knows everything.  Part of that everything God knows is that at our core there is a little child in each of us, one who wants to love and be loved, but lacks the courage to do so.  And so here are three things we can do to fix the problem:

            How can we fix it?

1. Be willing to take chances.  With God on our side, we are more than conquerors.  If God can take a chance on loving us, poor of soul and wounded in spirit as we are, certainly, filled with God’s grace we can take a chance on loving one another – on being available to one another – on accepting one another as we - are without trying to change them – God can do that without our help.

2. Act first and feel second.  Hollywood has sold us a bill of goods.  Love is not candy and flowers and cute cards.  Love is late nights with a crying baby.  A cup of coffee with a friend going through a crisis.  A smile and a kind glance to someone who needs to know that someone - anyone - can really see them.  It is a five dollar bill for gas money for someone down on their luck.  Is it not what we feel, but what we do – and it is not because we make a judgment call and give because we think any of them deserve it, but simply because it is needed.  Share our wealth, share our time, share ourselves.  We could all use a lesson on how to ‘Live simply so that others may simply live’.  Not to do without, but to refocus our attention on materiality and whether we are defined by our things.

3. Trust in God.  Verse 23 of this morning’s text says that this is God’s commandment: Believe in the name of Jesus Christ and act with love toward one another because all who obey these commandments abide in God and God abides in them.  If we believe – if we can stake our lives and our futures on our faith in God, then we will trust God to fulfill the promises that have been made.  We will take a chance on loving others and, like God; we will also act first and feel second.

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            In the past 2,000 years the message of the gospel has traveled a long way.  It has traveled to different continents.  It has been translated into different languages.  It has been presented and re-presented to different people in different cultures, in different times and in different situations.  But one thing has remained the same:  God tells us – God commands us - to love one another.  In sending Jesus, God has shown us how to do it: not just with pretty words, but in truth and action – and the very Spirit of God makes it possible. Amen.