sermon

What is the shape of Christian Love?


Me.

It’s all about ME.

For the last several weeks, in exploring 1 John, Duke has shared with us selections from contemporary music. Each song has expressed the feelings, needs and observations of today’s secular youth, but they all have one thing in common.

They are all about ME.

MY life is awful, I am so unhappy, no one loves ME, I am suffering and without hope….and on and on.

These may be valid sentiments, and valid emotions, but they are all about ME. All of these songs are written in the first person, about the first person. ME.

One of the things that I had hoped to cover this morning is the idea that Christian love does NOT have the shape of a “me”; it is shaped like an “us”.

So I tried to find a contemporary song that really captures that idea, one that speaks of the unity of the world and about the fact that we are ALL part of the problem and that we are ALL part of the solution.

And you know what? I couldn’t do it.

I recruited a gang of experts (and by experts I mean people 20 years younger than me) and THEY couldn’t do it! Oh people suggested anti-war songs, political commentary songs, songs about the ills of society; and while the spirit of social criticism is alive and well in modern music, the idea that we are all in this together is not.

Now perhaps my musical ‘experts’ aren’t actually such experts; but they were all stumped.

FINALLY, after vigorous discussion and lively debate we found something: hands up if you remember this:

(play clip of “We are the World” – first few verses plus chorus; perhaps to before fade-out?)

We are the World, We are the Children.

We had to go back to 1985 to find a pop song that spoke of US as a people – and by that I don’t necessarily mean Christians; I mean US as a world.

All of the songs that we have been hearing speak of a generation that feels completely cut off from one another, alone, disenfranchised, unwanted, alienated….unloved. I am sure there are many, many of us here that can relate to those feelings as well, be it on an occasional or ongoing basis. But the message we receive in today’s scripture talks about the antidote, the cure for the malaise that affects us all, the one thing that can truly solve all of the problems we have been hearing about these last few weeks, the one thing that can heal the hurts of world: LOVE.

We're all a part of God's great big family
And the truth You know love is all we need

If we simply love one another, no-one ever need be alone, unloved, unsupported, uncared for, lonely or without hope. If we simply love one another, believe it or not, it’ll all be ok.

And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. This is what John writes. Simple.

We know it – we’ve heard it millions of times in church, at home, at school, at work…in the clip of the song we just played: love one another. John himself says right at the start of this section this is the message you heard from the beginning:

This isn’t news. This message hasn’t changed. EVER.

As I began my journey into Christ and Christianity, naturally this was something that I was forced to think about. As a Christian, I was now “required” to love everyone as Christ did. And I will tell you I did an awful lot of thinking about what exactly that meant.

There are so many different expressions of love that we go through in our lives; we even go through several different variants during the day. There is the love we feel for our husbands or wives, the love we feel for our children and parents; the love we feel for our pets, our friends, the love we feel for God, the special love of a mother that we celebrate today…. Love is a huge, rich, complicated emotion.

As an exercise, I went online and looked up the definition of “love”. Just to see what others had to say on the subject. I found a website for an organization called the “Society of the Universal Living Christ”. Now I will admit I have no idea who they are, but they did have definition of love on their website.

They defined love as a Primary Principle and a prime virtue, is the feminine Mother aspect of God, nourishing and sustaining as the Substance of which everything is created. Love is the cohesive power of attraction throughout the universes. The 2nd Emanation, the Mother-God Principle contains all Feminine Aspects of God as Personality; it is the Blue Ray of Love or blue color of Principle as the Mother.

As I read this definition and turned it over in my mind, I couldn’t help thinking “huh?” Blue ray? Second emanation? Does Duke know about this????

But in all seriousness it did hammer home the point that “love”, as a discrete notion, is a dynamic and complicated one.

So what kind of love is Christian love? Well, first of all, it’s not the kind of love we feel for our partners: God isn’t expecting us to summon those rich and layered feelings that we reserve for our spouses each time we encounter another Christian. Nor is He expecting that we treat each fellow Christian as a parent or child, although there is a measure of that to it, I think. The emphasis is more on a brotherly (or sisterly) kind of love – indeed, in the original Greek, the word that is translated here as “children” or “brother” is the same word in the original text: adelphos, or “one who has come from the same womb”. There is an implicit plurality here – many who have come from the same place; there is a sense of the same origin, that we are united because we all come from the same parent.

Christian love is not a “me”, it’s a “we”. That is the shape that it takes.

“They will know we are Christians by our love.” It’s a hymn we’ve all sung before, but for many years each time I heard those words I wondered what that meant. HOW would anyone looking at us KNOW that we are Christians? If we weren’t sitting in a Church, or holding bibles, would anyone be able to look at us and KNOW that we are Christians simply by watching the way we treat each other?

Well, ideally, yes. And John shows us how to make that idea a reality.

First, John gives us commandments as to how we can demonstrate our love for one another: he says right off the top “don’t kill each other”. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a good start, yes? Not killing someone is a great way to show that you care about him or her.

12Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother's were righteous.

I had to read that one a few times because I had the sense that there was something WAY bigger going on here than just the story of Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel, as far as we know, out of jealousy, or feelings of inferiority brought about by the realization that Cain had failed where Abel had not. At some point in our lives we will all go through the feelings Cain did. We will all feel as though we got it wrong and the guy beside us got it right and we’ll probably get mad.

Bono once said – and is it just me or are you starting to feel like Bono is a member of this congregation?? – Bono once said that the difference between an Irishman and an American is that an American will walk by a huge, multi-million dollar mansion with its wrought iron fence and mile long driveway and say to himself “one day, I’M gonna be that guy”. An Irishman will walk past that same mansion and say to himself “one day I’m gonna get that son of a gun”.

John says “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?” Good question! John reminds us that charity, sharing and ministering to the poor are critical components of Christian love. We heard it earlier in ‘We are the World’

We are the world, we are the children We are the ones who make a brighter day so let's start giving

Giving is a basic expression of Christian love.

John continues: Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him

FF Bruce had this to say on the subject of this passage “If murder, the end product of hatred, proves that eternal life is absent, so does the root principle of hatred itself”. In simple English? “Don’t even go there, people”. Hatred spells the end of all love, all unity, all Christianity.

But there’s a danger in this passage here; and isn’t there always danger? The bible is a dangerous book! The danger is that we fall into the trap of trying to figure out how Christian we are and how Christian our neighbour is by using this section of scripture as a checklist:

Hmmm…joe hasn’t killed anyone….check
He believes in Jesus…check
Gives his money to the poor…..check
Oh, wait! Sorry – I know he hates Randolph because I heard him say that…sorry! Guess joe’s just not one of us!

Don’t laugh – there are people that do this!

Second, in contrast, John says keep it simple: let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

Being a Christian is not about what you say. It’s about what you do. SAYING you are a Christian no more makes you one than sitting in a garage makes you a Honda civic, or something to that effect.

Being a Christian is something you do each and every day by laying your life down for your fellow Christian as Jesus laid his life down for us. Now that “laying down your life” is talking simply about sacrifice, the little (and sometimes the huge) sacrifices we have to make for one another in order to make this “we” work: sacrificing some of our own “me” time to have lunch with someone that is lonely; sacrificing the money we’d have spent on a new pair of shoes or a shirt so that a neighbour’s kid can go to day camp; sacrificing the momentary gratification that a snarky comment might give us in favour of sparing a neighbour’s feelings, sacrificing some family time to volunteer for a project that benefits the whole community and so on and so on.

It’s those little sacrifices, mirrors of Christ’s enormous one, that make us the WE that we are.

Christians.

And third; they’re gonna hate us for it.

John makes that clear, he warns us – there will be no “wow, aren’t those Christians amazing?” each time we succeed in showing how we love to the world. There will be no “Christians are really fabulous people!” or “I wanna be a Christian because they’re spiffy!”

No as our reward, they well tell us “you can’t put up a picture of Jesus at your desk because you might offend someone else”.

They will tell us that we cannot teach our children in schools that God created the world.

They will tell us to that we can’t wish people a merry Christmas, or a happy Easter.

Look around you….look at the world around you, WATCH as Christianity – is trimmed back, stomped on, sneered at.

But that’s ok. We knew it was coming. We just have to keep on keeping on, as they say, loving one another, supporting one another; and in this way will “we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him” and in this way we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.

Because quite frankly, its up to us to hold tight to being an “us”, and not give into the temptation to be a “me” because its easier, less costly, more convenient, or in keeping with the state of the world around us.

And HOW do we keep that “we” shape to the love we share as Christians?

(perhaps replay this section so that the question is answered with the song itself?)


“We can't go on pretending day by day
That someone, somehow will soon make a change We're all a part of God's great big family And the truth You know love is all we need”