May 7, 2006 - We know love by this
4th Sunday of Easter
7 May 2006
Psalm 23; 1 John 3.16-24
We know love by this
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
I got one of my mother’s chatty emails last week. Some are chatty; others are important. The important ones are about making sure I don’t wear my pant legs the length of a rap artist’s. I delete those. I like the chatty ones.
In last week’s chatty email, she wrote about how nice our new church website is and about our newsletter—all the “heroes” we come up with and the opening of the free clinic. She told me about people in her little retirement community of ministers and missionaries, especially the one who borrows my sermon tapes and sends them all over the country. I don’t know if they’re ever listened to, but they’re possibly the most traveled sermon tapes in recorded history. Mom also told me about the pancake breakfast and trying to get my brother and sister and their families over for that. There was the engine repair that could have been impossibly expensive but was only ridiculously expensive, and then she had to go to the swing dance class she’s been putting on over the last several months.
Then she wraps it up. “So it goes,” she writes. “Isn’t it great that this mom is fed, watered and otherwise provided for here—even when my car breaks down. That is the whole idea of being here.”
Little church school children won’t be learning my mother’s email by heart for the next few thousand years, like they have the twenty-third psalm, but it’s the same idea. We don’t get through it all on our own; we have help. When we look around and notice how beautiful most of it is—and how much help it is just to have someone with us in the dark valleys—it restores our soul. The psalmist wrote, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me, . . . and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.” My mother wrote, “That is the whole idea of being here.”
And you know, it pretty much is the point of it all—to dwell in the Lord’s presence all our lives, goodness and mercy following us all along the way. Goodness and mercy followed Jesus along the way, for instance, by his doing good and showing mercy, and the author of 1 John thinks if it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for us. “We know love by this,” it says in 1 John, “that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” [v. 16]
Jesus, as I understand him, laid down his life for us day by day, not just once at the end, and my regular prayer is to do the same. I think it is what the author of 1 John meant, that we ought to lay down our lives for one another daily, like Jesus. “We know love by this,” it says in 1 John.
And then this question: “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 help?”
That’s a good question. For people like us, especially, who have the world’s goods, it is not only a good question but a pertinent one. We have the world’s goods in wide array. We have the good of comfortable homes and of safe streets. We have the good of books to read and the freedom to read the ones we like. We have the good of freedom to say what it occurs to us to say without worry that the powerful will hurt us for saying it. We have the good of people we love around us. We have the good of a church in which to worship, which, though it is here because of God, it is still in its way the world’s good, because the church is a thing we need here on earth in order to give us the idea of heaven. Heaven will be presumably something much more and probably in some ways less than what the church is here for us now in the world.
What the author of 1 John advises us is that all these goods we enjoy in the world say nothing about us, unless we do something with them for a brother or sister in need. “Little children,” he says, “let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” Well, come to think of it, this is what we teach our children. We notice that they at some point learn to show love in word and speech, and we know the time is coming for them to show love in truth and action. So, next Sunday, a teenager will give his mother a Mother’s Day card—words—and then she will want him to come home with a good report card and clean his room—truth and action.
Okay, it goes a little deeper than that. After Mother’s Day and the arrival of report cards, some of our children will go do something out of love for others. In our family, Blake will be taking his first mission trip with the high school youth group. Frank & Heidi White have been taking our children, who “have the world’s goods,” on such trips these last few years, and they learn the deep reward found in loving others by laying down a week of their life for people they don’t even know. A few weeks later, Doug Johnstone will be taking our daughter Emily in a group to Mexico to build homes and provide some basic medical care. Our children and their leaders will likely come home to tell us about their experiences, and some will talk through their tears. This is growth in faith beyond words and speech into truth and action.
This is growth into a more profound level of faith. The author of 1 John speaks of it as a movement in the heart. Through truth and action, something transforming happens in our heart that makes the difference between spiritual self judgment and spiritual self confidence.
I had a conversation recently with a high school senior named Deanna who spent a week and a half building homes in Nicaragua last fall. She noticed two things: (1) it feels great to do something to help those who have so little; and (2) it feels confusing to see the difference between their heart and our heart. “They have so little and they’re so happy,” she said, “and we’re so unhappy and have so much.” Deanna’s heart, to use the language of 1 John, condemns her with the comparison.
Now, I get very careful, at this point, because I don’t believe we have done the work of faith by making ourselves do something in order to make the feeling of shame go away. Indeed, we notice that, for Deanna, doing something came first, and then her heart felt its troubling sting. The sting seems to be that we who have so much are still unhappy, not that others are happy with less. There is more sadness than shame. Deanna has learned that there is a kind of happiness which she has been neglecting, and her way of life that is rich in the world’s goods seems to be growing sadness in its place. What shall she do? What shall any of us do?
The author of 1 John teaches that lesson from Jesus which keeps surprising us, no matter how often we keep learning it. You don’t soothe the sting of unhappiness by trying to be happier. You can make up your mind to look happy to others, which fails to fool all of the people all of the time. You can’t buy something that will make you happy, even if “retail therapy” may leave you giddy for a day. You can’t be happy by dulling the pain, though you can drink, smoke and otherwise ingest substances to dull your unhappiness.
No, the surprising truth that Jesus proved with his life—and the author of 1 John commends with such vigor—is that we grow more happy the more we love. “Let us love,” our spiritual teachers tell us, “and by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us.” Only the reassured heart can be happy.
Through love “in truth and action” we discover that we have emerged from truth into joy, and our stinging hearts are reassured. This is not what I’ve always been taught. Sincere Christian people have usually taught me that I have to embrace a certain “truth” (some doctrinal formula); then I will be happy about my salvation, then I will know how to love. The author of 1 John puts it just the other way. First, love in truth and action, he says; then your heart will be reassured; finally, you will see that you have gotten there from the truth of who God is for you and what God made you for.
Another thing happens in our hearts. We become “bold before God.” That’s a little hard for me to imagine. I’d have a hard time being bold even before the president. One day, I stood before President Richard Nixon—I took his ticket to see 1776 when I worked at the Music Center in Los Angeles—and afterward I thought of a dozen ways I wished I’d been bold before him. But I wasn’t bold before the president, and I think a lot more of God than I do the president.
So I don’t know what it would be like to feel bold before God. But I think I get the idea. Through loving action, the sting of the unfulfilled life has been soothed and we see more clearly the truth of the love of Christ we come from. Then we lose the fear of self-consciousness before God and release ourselves from condemnation and shame.
Whatever we do next can only look like boldness, even before God.
Tomorrow, we will celebrate for the eighth time the memory of Albert Merritt. Talk about bold before God. That son of slaves, whose livelihood as a sanitarium porter never supplied him much in the way of worldly goods, felt as if he all the same had sufficient worldly goods to give them away in love through truth and action for the boys in the poor north end of town. Thus becoming bold before God, it was no effort for that African-American man to grow bold before a wealthier white community, where some churches would let the boys of his Stay Out of Trouble Club in their pews, but not him who was laying down his life for his young brothers.
I wonder if my own heart will ever feel as reassured to me as Albert Merritt’s must have felt to him, so I could feel as bold before God. Well, actually, I have my days. Don’t you?
The thing is, we all do have our days. We know there are children on our streets in need of care and structure and opportunity. We know there are refugee families in the camps of Sudan whose rations just had to be cut again for lack of funds. We know there are villages in Nicaragua and Mexico in need of sturdy walls, solid floors, and safe water. And we know God’s love does not abide in us as long as there is a brother or sister in need and yet we refuse help. So we send money to some of these places, and in ones and twos and sixes and eights we go into some of these places to love in truth and action.
Our hearts had been stinging with what 1 John says is condemnation, but what I would call the deep, sad loneliness of people whose worldly goods have obscured their spiritual joy. Our hearts that had been feeling that sting, now having acted in love, are reassured. We notice better the beauty of the green pastures, and the still waters more fully refresh us. The dark valleys are still dark, but we are more aware of and strengthened by the presence of that wounded shepherd we worship who walks in the dark with us. Our soul restored and our heart thus reassured, we become sure of ourselves and bold before God.
This is how love abides in us. Love sees the longing and loss, the hunger and suffering, the fear and the sorrow in the world, and it points us to the next place to be. Love shows us what to do there and where the truth comes from that has given us hope to supply the world’s need and repair its brokenness. Love reassures our hearts and makes us bold before God, as much because we have surrendered ourselves to love as because we have done something good.
Love has become our teacher. Love has taught us who we are and what we’re here for, and in so doing has taught us where our truth comes from and what this God is like who empowers us with such bold love. When we enact love in truth, we learn from love, our teacher, about our heart. We are more fully nourished in the green of the meadows and grow more deeply still by the still waters, and with our hearts reassured, it restores our soul.
We sit at the table prepared for us, more bold, now, in the presence our enemies, having grown in boldness before God. We trail goodness and mercy behind us like confetti in a victory parade, and it is hard to tell whether goodness and mercy are actually following us or if they’re the residue of life as love has taught us to live it. The world may not yet be righteous and perfect. The world may not be at peace in the way our messiah will bring us peace, but we have made peace through the power of love—here and there, now then—where there was not peace before. That is a miracle of faith, and we know love by this. Amen.
7 May 2006
Psalm 23; 1 John 3.16-24
We know love by this
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
I got one of my mother’s chatty emails last week. Some are chatty; others are important. The important ones are about making sure I don’t wear my pant legs the length of a rap artist’s. I delete those. I like the chatty ones.
In last week’s chatty email, she wrote about how nice our new church website is and about our newsletter—all the “heroes” we come up with and the opening of the free clinic. She told me about people in her little retirement community of ministers and missionaries, especially the one who borrows my sermon tapes and sends them all over the country. I don’t know if they’re ever listened to, but they’re possibly the most traveled sermon tapes in recorded history. Mom also told me about the pancake breakfast and trying to get my brother and sister and their families over for that. There was the engine repair that could have been impossibly expensive but was only ridiculously expensive, and then she had to go to the swing dance class she’s been putting on over the last several months.
Then she wraps it up. “So it goes,” she writes. “Isn’t it great that this mom is fed, watered and otherwise provided for here—even when my car breaks down. That is the whole idea of being here.”
Little church school children won’t be learning my mother’s email by heart for the next few thousand years, like they have the twenty-third psalm, but it’s the same idea. We don’t get through it all on our own; we have help. When we look around and notice how beautiful most of it is—and how much help it is just to have someone with us in the dark valleys—it restores our soul. The psalmist wrote, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me, . . . and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.” My mother wrote, “That is the whole idea of being here.”
And you know, it pretty much is the point of it all—to dwell in the Lord’s presence all our lives, goodness and mercy following us all along the way. Goodness and mercy followed Jesus along the way, for instance, by his doing good and showing mercy, and the author of 1 John thinks if it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for us. “We know love by this,” it says in 1 John, “that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” [v. 16]
Jesus, as I understand him, laid down his life for us day by day, not just once at the end, and my regular prayer is to do the same. I think it is what the author of 1 John meant, that we ought to lay down our lives for one another daily, like Jesus. “We know love by this,” it says in 1 John.
And then this question: “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 help?”
That’s a good question. For people like us, especially, who have the world’s goods, it is not only a good question but a pertinent one. We have the world’s goods in wide array. We have the good of comfortable homes and of safe streets. We have the good of books to read and the freedom to read the ones we like. We have the good of freedom to say what it occurs to us to say without worry that the powerful will hurt us for saying it. We have the good of people we love around us. We have the good of a church in which to worship, which, though it is here because of God, it is still in its way the world’s good, because the church is a thing we need here on earth in order to give us the idea of heaven. Heaven will be presumably something much more and probably in some ways less than what the church is here for us now in the world.
What the author of 1 John advises us is that all these goods we enjoy in the world say nothing about us, unless we do something with them for a brother or sister in need. “Little children,” he says, “let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” Well, come to think of it, this is what we teach our children. We notice that they at some point learn to show love in word and speech, and we know the time is coming for them to show love in truth and action. So, next Sunday, a teenager will give his mother a Mother’s Day card—words—and then she will want him to come home with a good report card and clean his room—truth and action.
Okay, it goes a little deeper than that. After Mother’s Day and the arrival of report cards, some of our children will go do something out of love for others. In our family, Blake will be taking his first mission trip with the high school youth group. Frank & Heidi White have been taking our children, who “have the world’s goods,” on such trips these last few years, and they learn the deep reward found in loving others by laying down a week of their life for people they don’t even know. A few weeks later, Doug Johnstone will be taking our daughter Emily in a group to Mexico to build homes and provide some basic medical care. Our children and their leaders will likely come home to tell us about their experiences, and some will talk through their tears. This is growth in faith beyond words and speech into truth and action.
This is growth into a more profound level of faith. The author of 1 John speaks of it as a movement in the heart. Through truth and action, something transforming happens in our heart that makes the difference between spiritual self judgment and spiritual self confidence.
I had a conversation recently with a high school senior named Deanna who spent a week and a half building homes in Nicaragua last fall. She noticed two things: (1) it feels great to do something to help those who have so little; and (2) it feels confusing to see the difference between their heart and our heart. “They have so little and they’re so happy,” she said, “and we’re so unhappy and have so much.” Deanna’s heart, to use the language of 1 John, condemns her with the comparison.
Now, I get very careful, at this point, because I don’t believe we have done the work of faith by making ourselves do something in order to make the feeling of shame go away. Indeed, we notice that, for Deanna, doing something came first, and then her heart felt its troubling sting. The sting seems to be that we who have so much are still unhappy, not that others are happy with less. There is more sadness than shame. Deanna has learned that there is a kind of happiness which she has been neglecting, and her way of life that is rich in the world’s goods seems to be growing sadness in its place. What shall she do? What shall any of us do?
The author of 1 John teaches that lesson from Jesus which keeps surprising us, no matter how often we keep learning it. You don’t soothe the sting of unhappiness by trying to be happier. You can make up your mind to look happy to others, which fails to fool all of the people all of the time. You can’t buy something that will make you happy, even if “retail therapy” may leave you giddy for a day. You can’t be happy by dulling the pain, though you can drink, smoke and otherwise ingest substances to dull your unhappiness.
No, the surprising truth that Jesus proved with his life—and the author of 1 John commends with such vigor—is that we grow more happy the more we love. “Let us love,” our spiritual teachers tell us, “and by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us.” Only the reassured heart can be happy.
Through love “in truth and action” we discover that we have emerged from truth into joy, and our stinging hearts are reassured. This is not what I’ve always been taught. Sincere Christian people have usually taught me that I have to embrace a certain “truth” (some doctrinal formula); then I will be happy about my salvation, then I will know how to love. The author of 1 John puts it just the other way. First, love in truth and action, he says; then your heart will be reassured; finally, you will see that you have gotten there from the truth of who God is for you and what God made you for.
Another thing happens in our hearts. We become “bold before God.” That’s a little hard for me to imagine. I’d have a hard time being bold even before the president. One day, I stood before President Richard Nixon—I took his ticket to see 1776 when I worked at the Music Center in Los Angeles—and afterward I thought of a dozen ways I wished I’d been bold before him. But I wasn’t bold before the president, and I think a lot more of God than I do the president.
So I don’t know what it would be like to feel bold before God. But I think I get the idea. Through loving action, the sting of the unfulfilled life has been soothed and we see more clearly the truth of the love of Christ we come from. Then we lose the fear of self-consciousness before God and release ourselves from condemnation and shame.
Whatever we do next can only look like boldness, even before God.
Tomorrow, we will celebrate for the eighth time the memory of Albert Merritt. Talk about bold before God. That son of slaves, whose livelihood as a sanitarium porter never supplied him much in the way of worldly goods, felt as if he all the same had sufficient worldly goods to give them away in love through truth and action for the boys in the poor north end of town. Thus becoming bold before God, it was no effort for that African-American man to grow bold before a wealthier white community, where some churches would let the boys of his Stay Out of Trouble Club in their pews, but not him who was laying down his life for his young brothers.
I wonder if my own heart will ever feel as reassured to me as Albert Merritt’s must have felt to him, so I could feel as bold before God. Well, actually, I have my days. Don’t you?
The thing is, we all do have our days. We know there are children on our streets in need of care and structure and opportunity. We know there are refugee families in the camps of Sudan whose rations just had to be cut again for lack of funds. We know there are villages in Nicaragua and Mexico in need of sturdy walls, solid floors, and safe water. And we know God’s love does not abide in us as long as there is a brother or sister in need and yet we refuse help. So we send money to some of these places, and in ones and twos and sixes and eights we go into some of these places to love in truth and action.
Our hearts had been stinging with what 1 John says is condemnation, but what I would call the deep, sad loneliness of people whose worldly goods have obscured their spiritual joy. Our hearts that had been feeling that sting, now having acted in love, are reassured. We notice better the beauty of the green pastures, and the still waters more fully refresh us. The dark valleys are still dark, but we are more aware of and strengthened by the presence of that wounded shepherd we worship who walks in the dark with us. Our soul restored and our heart thus reassured, we become sure of ourselves and bold before God.
This is how love abides in us. Love sees the longing and loss, the hunger and suffering, the fear and the sorrow in the world, and it points us to the next place to be. Love shows us what to do there and where the truth comes from that has given us hope to supply the world’s need and repair its brokenness. Love reassures our hearts and makes us bold before God, as much because we have surrendered ourselves to love as because we have done something good.
Love has become our teacher. Love has taught us who we are and what we’re here for, and in so doing has taught us where our truth comes from and what this God is like who empowers us with such bold love. When we enact love in truth, we learn from love, our teacher, about our heart. We are more fully nourished in the green of the meadows and grow more deeply still by the still waters, and with our hearts reassured, it restores our soul.
We sit at the table prepared for us, more bold, now, in the presence our enemies, having grown in boldness before God. We trail goodness and mercy behind us like confetti in a victory parade, and it is hard to tell whether goodness and mercy are actually following us or if they’re the residue of life as love has taught us to live it. The world may not yet be righteous and perfect. The world may not be at peace in the way our messiah will bring us peace, but we have made peace through the power of love—here and there, now then—where there was not peace before. That is a miracle of faith, and we know love by this. Amen.
posted by J. Christy Wareham at
3:21 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home