Listen to the word that God has spoken;
Listen to the one who is close at hand;
Listen to the voice that began creation;
Listen even if you don’t understand.
Amen.
A reading from 1 John chapter 4 verses 7 to 21
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Following the protests in Charlottesville – Alan Zimmerman, the president of congregation Beth Israel in located in Charlottesville – published a letter detailing what he had seen and the threats that his congregation had received.
In the letter he recounted his experiences with men in fatigues standing opposite of the synagogue during their worship services. He detailed how he felt watching self identified Nazi’s and white supremicists marching by the synagogue chanting “Seig Heil” and other slurs.
He went on to write – “When services ended, my heart broke as I advised congregants that it would be safer to leave the temple through the back entrance rather than through the front, and to please go in groups.”
He wrote that he later learned that that Nazi websites had posted a call to burn the synagogue.
All of this happened in 2017 in the United States of America.
His words are heartbreaking and painful. The precipitating actions are shocking and infuriating. I have heard the various arguments and seen and read the various discussions – How did we get here – Whose fault it is – and over and over i have heard the question:
“where do we go from here?”
The common thread I have identified in all these discussions is that they identify that hate has become the new normal. America’s original sin of racism has reared its ugly head and come to the front and center of our collective social and cultural experience.
Here is the thing – hate isn’t just a word – Hate is a verb. It’s an action. It’s what is happening – Hate has become mainstream. We see it in the language used to describe immigrants. We see it spray painted on mosques and synagogues. We hear it in language that tells our neighbors to “go home” even when they were born here. We hear it in language that argues for “rule of law” but fails to enforce that same law equally. We see it in online discussion in the comments and spilling out into protests and counter protests. Hate is in the language we speak, and in the way we react to each other.
However –
Even in the face of all this negativity, hope is not lost. In the same letter – Alan Zimmerman recounted the following exchange that gives me hope
“A frail, elderly woman approached me Saturday morning as I stood on the steps in front of our sanctuary, crying, to tell me that while she was Roman Catholic, she wanted to stay and watch over the synagogue with us. At one point, she asked, “Why do they hate you?”
Zimmerman writes – I had no answer to the question we’ve been asking ourselves for thousands of years.
He went on to say that at least a dozen complete strangers stopped by as they stood in front the synagogue Saturday to ask if we wanted them to stand with us. This happened while our rabbis stood on the front lines with other Charlottesville clergy, opposing hate.”
These people saw what hate does and how hate acts and they responded in God’s love by standing with the oppressed.
In 1 John we see God’s expectation as to how we are to we are to act toward one another.
In our reading today, the writer says to us
“My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. ”
The author’s call to us is this – let us show this love to one another because love belongs to – and is from – God.
We know that God loves us because before we were able to offer any response – God loved us. The author of this passage is not talking about a romantic love, but the sacrificial, self inhabiting love of God who has claimed us before we were born.
It is useful to look at the greek for this passage. In the greek, the root word that we translate as love in this passage is αγαπη (agape) – which is defined as not as a romantic or brotherly love, but in the words of CS Lewis – Agape is the highest level of love known to humanity: [it is] a selfless love that is passionately committed to the well-being of others.
Passionately committed to the wellbeing of others.
I said earlier that Hate is a verb, but even more so than that – I believe that Love is even more truly a verb. Love is the actions by which we show others how much we care for them. We show love by how we treat one another in the small and large interactions of our day.
We show love in how we work for one another. We show love in how we obey God’s commands to care for each other. When we show love for one another, we are expressing the love that has been shown to us.
God’s actions toward the whole of humanity reveal the depth of God’s love for all of us. God has shown us love – not that we loved God first and then as a response to our Love – then God sent Jesus to us. No – it was not and is not a transactional love, nor the kind of love that requires action before an action is returned. First – God loved us and sent God’s own self in the form of God’s Son to us. So before we loved God, God had already loved us. God loves us So much so that God sent God’s only Son into the world so that we might be reconciled to God through Jesus’ work on the cross.
To understand this – it is important that we first address the concept of sacrifice. In our modern parlance a sacrifice is most often perceived as a negative or something not willingly given, whereas in the time 1 John was written, a sacrifice was known to be a gift willingly given to restore a relationship. In ancient cultures including those of Greece and Israel – the term sacrifice meant “to give” and the emphasis in the sacrifice was not on loss, but on the relationship between humanity and the deity being sacrificed to.
In Christ’s willingly given sacrifice, we see the depth of God’s love for us. I believe that what we refer to as a sacrifice and where we focus on the loss involved in the act, was really a gift from God, of God’s own self to reconcile humanity back to God and God’s own perfected love.
This is how we are to able understand what perfected love looks like – God’s act of love was to give God’s self as a gift to restore the relationship between humanity and God’s self, to save all of humanity, to transform us, to liberate us from the bondage of sin, to help us become new persons in love, and to reconcile us to God and to one another.
We see in God’s actions toward humanity the revealed depth of God’s love for us. God sent God’s only Son into the world where he was crucified, died, and rose from the dead so that we might live through him. That sacrificial act is paramount in understanding how much we are loved.
Author and minister Norman Vincent Peale imagined a conversation between God and the Son, prior to Jesus’s arrival on earth where God says “Son, I hate to see you go. I am sure going to miss you. I love you with all my heart. But I do want you to go down to earth and tell those poor souls down there how to live and point them to the way that will lead them back home.” Peale thought that the last thing God said to Jesus was “Give them all my love.”
The author of 1 John then goes on to say –
“Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God – but – if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”
In the greek τετελειωμένη (teteleiomene) is the word that we translate as “perfected”. In verse 12 where it says “his love is perfected in us” “perfected” means to make fully complete, without error or possibility or necessity of a reapplication. It is fully perfected – the full implication is that as God lives in us, God’s love is and has been completed in us. We are the recipients of God’s love and as we share God’s love with one another, that love is completed. We are intended to love one another to share God’s love.
Love, like hate, is a verb. Even more than that – Love is what we are called to embody. Our scripture today tells us that we are to love as we are loved. Not just in our actions, but in our thoughts, responses, and whole being. Our love is a response to God’s love. How do we reconcile our call to love with acts of hatred? How do we address those people who claim to act from love, but whose actions bring pain and discord? How do we know what love acted out looks like?
I think that Reading verses 20 and 21 from Eugene Peterson’s Message paraphrase can offer us some perspective on what God expects from us.
“If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both.”
Thats is. It’s all that simple and all that hard – You’ve got to love both.
As a confessing church, we have articulated what we believe about what “love as a verb” looks like. In the confession of Belhar we confess that “We believe … that the church must therefore stand by people in any form of suffering and need, which implies, among other things, that the church must witness against and strive against any form of injustice, so that justice may roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream;”
This is our call and command – that we do this work of standing by people in any form of suffering or need out of our love for God and our love for God’s children – our brothers and sisters. These are huge commands and scary ones at that.
It is understandable that we might not know where to start or that there is anxiety around how it might affect us in our relationships either socially or culturally. There may be times where standing in love for justice may mean standing in opposition to the authorities of the land but punishment in the pursuit of justice is nothing to fear.
Reading again from the Belhar confession –
We believe that, in obedience to Jesus Christ, its only head, the church is called to confess and to do all these things, even though the authorities and human laws might forbid them and punishment and suffering be the consequence. Jesus is Lord. To the one and only God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be the honor and the glory for ever and ever.
Just like the apostles faced with Jesus’s crucifixion, we may fear the repercussions of our actions – we can look to Simon Peter’s denials of Jesus as an example, but we need to remember how that story ends – Jesus comes back to Simon Peter and commands him to feed my lambs, care for my lambs, and to feed my sheep. Even our fear does not separate us from the love of God.
In love – we belong to God and we respond to God’s gift of sacrificial, indwelling love by loving one another. Like Simon Peter, all the apostles – past and present, We hear God’s commands to: feed my lambs, care for my lambs, and to feed my sheep.
From the prophets we are told explicitly:
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.
By following these commands – we show love.
It is in love – God’s perfected love – that we belong to God. It is in that love – a selfless love that is passionately committed to the well-being of others- that we respond to God’s sacrificial, indwelling love. We respond by standing together to witness against and strive against any form of injustice.
So let us love one another because love belongs to God. God’s gift of of Love to us through the work of Jesus Christ on the cross calls us to work to restore our human relationships in love. Our love is modified by God’s Spirit indwelling in us, and that indwelling of the Holy Spirit brings us closer to the divine nature. We are called to work together in love and to show our love by working for justice and being just people.
So let us come together – and make love – God’s perfected love – what we are known for. Let us turn to God and work for justice for all of God’s children. Let it begin with us – here and now. Let us stand up against hate and injustice. Let us stand with oppressed people and communities. Let love flow from us like a river so that justice may roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Amen.
Matthew Messenger
09/15/17
Matthew Messenger 