1 John 3:16-24
Presented May 3, 2009, by J.D. Kline
The Fourth Sunday of Easter
Our church’s Outreach and Growth Ministry Group recently took a look at the number of “hits” on our website in recent months, and discovered that the section of the website most visited—more than double any other section—was Community. It’s not surprising, really, that this would happen, for we live in a society literally starved for genuine community, parched by a lack of authentic interaction among neighbors. Quaker author Philip Gulley’s book entitled Porch Talk is based on the author’s observation that we have quit building homes with front porches. The author laments the loss of the significant conversations that occurred on many of those porches, not only within families, but also the valuable contact with neighbors who were passing by. Writes Philip Gulley,
This is the irony—we have more talk than ever before [these days], but too little communication; so many words, but so little meaning. “Bombardment” is the word that comes to mind—talk radio, 24-hour news, hundreds of television channels, and, God help us, gas pumps that spout the news along with fuel—coarse exchanges fraying the ties that bind….
I do not wish to romanticize the porch. Not all of the talk reached the level of Plato or Jefferson, but there was a luster to those talks, a certain glow and depth lacking in these days of e-mail and instant messaging. Perhaps it was the parenthesis of silence, the bracketing of conversation with reflection.
When my wife and I bought our home, we gave careful consideration to the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Little did we realize the most valuable real estate would be the two hundred square feet of our porch. On it, we have solved all of the world’s problems, evening after pleasant evening, arcing back and forth in our wicker swing, the twilight breeze bearing all our cares away.
Truth be told, it is easy to romanticize the past. And yet, who among us does not recognize the truth in Philip Gulley’s observations? Surely this critical element of meaningful communication has been all but lost in many areas of contemporary life, as we have created a climate in larger society that encourages going it alone in life. All too many live lives cut off from others, even their own family members. In a recent issue of Newsweek, in “The Last Word” column, Anna Quindlen laments the fact that parenting in our culture has become largely a solitary activity. Writes Quindlen, “It used to take a village to raise a child, but there isn’t a village anymore. Instead of extended family, there’s a playground where everyone pretends everything’s fine.”
One of the gifts the church can offer to a society starved for relationship is a deep and abiding sense of community, a place where we can receive support, encouragement, and challenge from one another. Of course, we have to acknowledge that even within the church, we may well lead isolated lives, too often choosing to keep relationships at a superficial level, becoming little more than a playground where we pretend everything’s fine when inside we are struggling with a loneliness deep in our souls, with anxiety and emptiness of spirit that fill us with a sense of angst, with pressures and life demands pulling us in myriad competing directions. One of Henri Nouwen’s earlier books is entitled Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. Nouwen writes of three polarities we hold in tension in life, polarities between loneliness and solitude, hostility and hospitality, illusion and prayer. While the experience of loneliness is common in the human condition, we live in a culture where that loneliness is heightened to a level many can no longer bear. We live in a world, says Nouwen, “in which a competitive individualism tries to reconcile itself with a culture that speaks about togetherness, unity and community as the ideals to strive for.” And we live in a culture marked all too often by a confusing contrast between fearful hostility, on the one hand, and the search for a hospitable place where life can indeed be lived without fear and where community can be found.
Thanks be to God, one of the strengths of our church family here at Highland Avenue is that we take seriously the call to provide this needed sense of togetherness and community, seeking to be a hospitable place, a place of refuge. In a recent session of our Wednesday morning Bible study, we talked about ways in which our church community functions as a stronghold in our lives—a community of grace offering relationships marked by compassion, acceptance, goodwill, and integrity. We seek to be a community willing to embrace the hard work of love.
Love is often portrayed in our time as little more than good feelings. But the Scriptures repeatedly remind us that love involves hard work. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests that it is well past time to rescue the apostle Paul’s love chapter, 1 Corinthians 13, from an almost exclusive hearing at weddings! You know the passage: love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; love is not irritable or resentful; love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends . . . . Faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:4-8, 13).
Brueggemann’s point is not that these inspiring words do not have relevance for marriage relationships, but that the apostle Paul wrote them to the fledgling church at Corinth, holding before them a lofty ideal for community life. Could it be said of that early Christian community in Corinth centuries ago—and can it be said of Highland Avenue—that we are a community of people who practice the hard work of love? Can it be said, Our church community at Highland Avenue practices patience in our relationships with one another, that we are kind to each other, that we seek to let go of envy and pride and arrogance and rudeness in our interactions one with the other? Can it be said that we are a people who do not insist on our own way, who are not resentful or irritable in our relationships with one another, who do not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoice in the right? Are we a community of people who seek to believe all things, bear all things, hope all things, endure all things?
This morning’s Scripture lesson from the first letter of John, chapter three, is yet another passage in the New Testament that bears witness to the primacy of love in the Christian faith. Tony Campolo, frequent critic of the church because of a profound desire for the church to live out its high calling, laments that many Christians are quite familiar with and can recite from memory the content of John 3:16, For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life, and yet they often miss the spirit of the companion text of similar chapter and verse in 1 John. We know love by this, writes John, that Jesus laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another (3:16). John then prods his readers, 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? (3:17). And after that challenging question, John exhorts, Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action (3:18). In other words, love is expressed in our actions. The high calling of the church is to embody the love and compassion, the mercy and grace, the peace and servanthood of Jesus. In The Message Eugene Peterson offers this paraphrase of John’s words,
If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God’s love? It disappears. And you made it disappear.
My dear children, let’s not just talk about love; let’s practice real love. This is the only way we’ll know we’re living truly, living in God’s reality.
The writer of 1 John challenges us to be in the business of meeting one another’s material needs, and particularly in this time of economic downturn the church does indeed need to grapple with how we put that into practice. But of equal importance is how we assist one another in the task of deepening our spiritual lives, living out our mission, embracing the call to be a place to deepen faith, proclaim peace, embrace community, welcome others, and serve out neighbor, in the compassionate spirit of Jesus.
This morning we are recognizing those within our community of faith who have accepted the call to teach, embracing opportunities to help children and youth, as well as adults, find their own connections with God, grapple with significant questions of faith, and consider their own response to the challenge to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. Teaching carries considerable opportunity to touch lives, to offer spiritual wisdom and guidance, to be a mentoring presence.
I’ve been reading Benediction sister Joan Chittister’s spiritual memoirs, which she entitles Called to Question. She writes honestly and forthrightly of her upbringing in the faith—both the blessings and the shortcomings. At one point she laments that the God the church presented to her to believe in “was too small a God to possibly be worth a life.” It’s a powerful indictment, one that prods us to consider the remarkable challenge before us as a church community, whether we are willing to risk proclaiming a God who does not easily fit into the little boxes of our own creation, a God who is ever in the business of tearing down walls of misunderstanding and suspicion, a God who invites us into ever-expanding circles of community, a God who will not rest satisfied with business as usual. Life, asserts Joan Chittister, is not about getting God. Life is about growing in God . . . . It is the presence of God that is for our taking. And once we take it, nothing else counts for much. Maybe that’s what the evangelist John meant when he said, You shall know the truth, and it shall set you free. Free from what? Free from fear, of course.
Free to embrace a God who is in the business of making all life new, a God who ever yearns that our hearts grow larger, our love more genuine, our spirits more receptive, our minds more open, our lives more compassionate and peace-filled. In another of her writings Chittister asserts, “Vision is not the ability to predict the future; it is a commitment to pursue possibility. Vision asks questions no one else even seems to know exist. Vision is the grace to evaluate the present and then to ask, Why not? of the future.”
Each of us is called to ask the kinds of questions far too many don’t even seem to know exist—questions about faithful living; questions that lead us to consider new possibilities for life; questions that prod us to embrace more fully the incredible compassion and grace of our God—grace that is far greater than anything we can imagine. And yet something critical is missing if we only ask these questions on our own. As the old saying reminds us, It takes a village. But I would amend that today to say, It takes a village—and much more. It takes a congregation—but a congregation whose teachers and leaders and members are willing to connect with persons beyond their midst who are prone to ask similar questions of faith and struggle. How do we put our love and faith into action? How do we become an open and compassionate community? How do we walk in the ways of peace? How do we put on the spirit of Jesus?
Sisters and brothers, let us continue to be a church that values community, that recognizes our need for one another, and that grapples with what it means to embrace the high calling of living as disciples of Jesus the Christ. Let us be a village—and so much more. Amen.