Sermon: Lessons in Love

 1 John 3:16-24
Lessons in Love
James Sledge                                                                            April 21, 2024 

You’ve likely heard this before, but there are several words in Greek, the original language of the New Testament, that get translated into English as “love.” There is filos (fi/los) which speaks of affection and is the root for Philadelphia which refers to brotherly love. Then there is eros (e/rws) which refers to passionate love and is the root of our word erotic. Finally there is agapé (aga/ph) which might best be defined as Christ-like love. When Fred Rogers said that love was an active verb like struggle, he was thinking about this sort of love, as was the Apostle Paul when he wrote Love is patient; love is kind…

In English, you have to use context to tell what sort of love is being talked about, but I do think that the eros sort of love is the favorite. This is the love they make movies about and write poetry about, the true love that conquers all. There is an intensity about this love that is powerful, that would make people go to great lengths for the sake of their heart’s desire, but this love doesn’t show up much in the Bible.

Most often the word translated love in the Bible refers to the agapé sort. There is nothing terribly romantic about this sort of love. I think of the love of a parent that gets up with a sick child at 3:00 in the morning, the love that endures a child’s ire and disgust because it is willing to say “no” and discipline children so they will grow up to be responsible adults. Shakespeare didn’t write sonnets about the love that dutifully attends a child’s sporting events, the love that struggles and saves to help pay for a child’s college education.

This kind of love doesn’t only show up in parents. I’ve seen grandparents lovingly raising their grandchildren due to inability or unwillingness of the parents. You can see it when an older sibling takes loving care of a younger sibling. You can find such love in many places, but for the moment, I’m going to focus on parental love. I realize that some people did not have loving parents, but I hope you had someone who loved you with the love that I’m talking about.

Many of us learned a lot about love from parents or people who know how to love like them. Much of what we learn in society is about looking out for yourself, winning, doing whatever it takes to get ahead of the other guy. But the love associated with parents stands as a counter lesson, a reminder that true life is impossible when there is no self-giving, no caring about others more than self. For many of us, our ability truly to love another is a gift from a mother or father or someone who knew how to love like one.

Learning how to love sounds a little strange when you think about romantic love, the love of poetry and Hollywood love stories. This kind of love is a feeling. You simply experience it. It can’t be taught or learned. It feels wonderful when it’s there and it hurts when it’s gone. You can learn things to help romance last, to help create an environment that is conducive to it, but no one can really teach you to be in love.

Not so with parental love. I suppose a certain amount of it may be inborn or instinctive, but primarily it is learned. It is observed in and taught by the love we were given by a mother, a grandparent, a father, or someone else who knew how to love us in this special way. We know what this sort of love is because it was given to us. And for those people who never experienced such love, life can be difficult. They often struggle truly to give or receive love.

Our reading from 1 John talks about love that is learned. John is the writer who says “God is love,” who repeatedly calls us to love one another. And in our reading this morning he tells us that someone has taught us what this love looks like and showed us how to give that love to others. We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us.

We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us. There’s an awful lot being said in these few words. If we know love by Christ’s dying for us, then we must not know love without it. There’s something deficient in our knowledge of love. If we haven’t learned love from Jesus, then we don’t quite understand it. If we have not experienced the love of the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, we are like those unfortunate adults who never experienced parental love from someone. We cannot live a full and complete life because we lack the basic knowledge, experience, and training. It’s that simple, that straightforward. If we have not experienced God’s love for us in Jesus, we don’t fully know or understand love.

Experiencing the depth of God’s love for us in Jesus is an incredible thing. God loves us so much that death, even death on a cross is not too much to bear. But of course, the point of experiencing God’s love for us in Jesus is not simply so we can enjoy it. It is wonderful to feel such love, to know we are loved in this way. But just as a parent’s love is not simply for our own benefit, but teaches us and gives us an example of how to love, so the love we see in Jesus also teaches us and gives us an example. We have been taught love by Jesus so that we can love like Jesus.

We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 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? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. 

When we truly experience Jesus’ love, when his love dwells in us, it changes the way we live. When we know Jesus’ kind of love, love is no longer a feeling or a desire. It is a way of life, a way of giving ourselves for others; it is action—something parents know all about.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a human tendency to receive love and not fully appreciate it. It is a common experience for children not to realize the depth of their parent’s love until they get older. It is easy to take love for granted, and so we need lessons in love. We need to learn love from parents and people like them, but we also need to learn how to appreciate love. We need to learn how to respond to that love.

The same is true with God’s love in Jesus. It is easy to take God’s love for granted. I’ve heard people say things like, “God has to love me. It’s his job.” Such people have not learned the love lesson our scripture seeks to teach, the need to love in return.

Many of you are probably familiar with the wonderful writer Anne Lamott. In one of her books she talks about making her then teenage son go to church even though he hated church. She writes,

Then why do I make him go? Because I want him to. We live in bewildering times, and a little spiritual guidance never killed anyone. I think it’s a fair compromise that every other week he has to come to the place that has been the tap for me: I want him to see the people who loved me when I felt most unlovable, who have loved him since I first told them I was pregnant, even though he might not want to be with them. I want him to see their faces. He gets the most valuable things I know through osmosis.

Also, he has no job, no car, no income. He needs to stay in my good graces.

While he lives at my house, he has to do things my way. And there are worse things for kids than to have to spend time with people who love God. Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don’t get to meet people who love God back. Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.”^[1]

Learning to love back is hard, but it may also be the most important part of being alive. Jesus came, in part, to show us the true shape of human life, and that love loved God and loved neighbor even when it cost him his life. When that fact really sinks in, how can we not want to love God back?

Our scripture is talking about exactly that. When we realize the depth of God’s love in Jesus, it changes us. And so John can write, 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? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. 

The great rabbi, the teacher par excellence, has given us the ultimate lesson in love. He has showed us how much God loves us, no matter what wayward children we might be, and he has shown us what it looks like to love. How is Jesus calling you to love today? Who is Jesus calling you to love today? How will you love God back?

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[1] Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 195-196.

Sermon: Resurrection Shaped Community

 Acts 4:32-35
Resurrection Shaped Community
James Sledge                                                                                     April 7, 2024 

That couldn’t actually happen, could it? Would people ever willingly pool all their possessions so that no one went without? Could it happen here? I once heard a sermon at a presbytery meeting where the preacher said that it never really happened. His proof didn’t come from any scriptural or historical research. His proof was that his presbytery work had taken him to a great many churches over the years, and it had never happened there.

Biblical scholars sometimes wonder if it were quite so wonderful as what we just heard in the book of Acts, and they point to Acts itself. Just a few verses after our passage, it tells of a couple who sold their property and claimed to give all the proceeds to the community but in fact held some of it back for themselves.

The biblical scholar’s answer to the question of whether the community described in Acts could have happened is a little less absolute than that preacher I heard years ago. It might have partly happened, but it wasn’t nearly so perfect as reported.

What do you think? Could it have happened, even partly? Could it happen now, even partly? Or does your experience with the human condition suggest even that would be impossible?

Let me ask you a completely different question. Do you believe in the resurrection? Perhaps that seems a strange question to ask on the second Sunday in Easter. Just last week we proclaimed, “Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!” Of course we believe in the resurrection. But is resurrection any less outlandish a claim than one about a community of radical sharing where everyone held everything in common and everyone had enough?

Imagine that you met someone who had never heard the first thing about Christianity. Imagine you told this person about the first Christian community where everyone shared things in common and people sold what they had so that everyone had plenty.

Then imagine that you gave this person a thumbnail sketch of the Jesus story. You explained that Jesus preached and taught and performed miracles and proclaimed that the kingdom of God was drawing near, a day when God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. But Jesus stirred up trouble. The Roman authorities didn’t appreciate talk about a new kingdom, and the religious leaders worried that Jesus was rocking the boat too much. And so the Romans arrested and executed Jesus after a sham trial. But to his followers’ amazement, Jesus did not stay buried. God raised him from the dead, and this risen Jesus appeared to many of those followers who then went on to found the Christian movement.

If this person you were talking to had never heard anything about Christian faith, which story would be harder to believe, one about a community of radical sharing and caring, or one where a revolutionary leader was executed but was then raised from the dead?

I have to think the sharing community would be a lot easier to swallow. Yet we don’t bat an eye when we say, “Christ is risen!” while doubting that a community like the one described in Acts could really happen, certainly not in our day. Does the community in Acts really seem that much more impossible, or have we simply heard the Easter story so often that we’ve become numb to how astonishing and impossible it is? Or have we, perhaps, never quite realized what resurrection means?

Sometimes I hear people talk about resurrection as though it were part of the natural order of things, bulbs emerging in spring or caterpillars turning into butterflies, death just a passage to something new. But that’s not what the Bible or Jesus mean by resurrection.

For Jesus and the Bible, resurrection belonged to the end of time. It was expected to be a one-time event at the end of the age, but then Jesus was raised from the dead, a resurrection of one. In the aftermath of that first Easter, Jesus’ followers had to rethink resurrection. Clearly it was not yet the end of the age. No one else who was dead had been raised. What did that mean?

Gradually, the Church came to understand that Jesus’ resurrection did indeed mark the end of an age, but the new age was still yet to come, a day the apostle Paul described this way. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we (referring to those alive at that time) will be changed.

In the meantime, the presence of the Holy Spirit allows people to experience the power of resurrection in the here and now. Joined to Christ, we become new creations who belong, not that old age, but to the new age to come. In essence, we live in a time between the times, and the shape of our lives reveals the age to which we most belong.

The story of that remarkable community in the book of Acts is a story about resurrection power. That power was the lifeblood of the community, transforming it so that it looked nothing like the world around it. Instead, it looked like the age to come, like God’s new day.

If I do not believe that the Acts community could really exist, that it is some sort of utopian pipe dream, what does that say about resurrection power? Does it say that no real newness is possible? Does it say that God can’t or won’t do anything to transform the world, to make it what it could be, what it should be?

No doubt you’ve seen news reports about the decline of the church, something we are not immune to here at the Meeting House. There are many reasons for this decline, but I fear that one of the bigger reasons is that the Church shows so little resurrection power. It does not exhibit new or different possibilities. It looks very much like the world, like the old age, not the one to come, and so any claims of newness in Christ ring hollow. Its liturgies and practices may be nurturing and comforting to those long accustomed to them, but often there is little to suggest any real hope of something wonderful and new.

But once a year, the world is fascinated by Easter. Once a year people who have no church affiliation or involvement make their way to Easter worship even though there is no Christmas-like, secular frenzy pumping up the season. There is simply Easter with its incredible, impossible claim that Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!

For one day the Church loudly proclaims that what no one thought possible is possible, that there is a power loose in the world stronger than death and corruption and emptiness. There is hope beyond what we humans can muster on our own.

And if that power and hope actually begin to live in us, we cannot help but look and act differently. Maybe we won’t match the radical nature of that community in Acts, but if resurrection power truly dwells in us, we cannot help being more generous, more compassionate, more loving, more committed to justice. We cannot help being different from the world around us. And when that happens the world can catch a glimpse of resurrection in us. It may even be tempted to believe that an impossible story is true.

Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Thanks be to God!

Sermon: As Good as Dead

 Mark 16:1-8
As Good as Dead
James Sledge                                                                                     March 31, 2024 

“Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!” The tomb is empty! Christ is alive! It is the day of resurrection! Tell all the good news. Easter is here, the biggest day on the Church calendar.

As a result, most of us know well the story of Easter morning. Jesus had been executed, dying late on Friday, which was just before the Sabbath day began at sundown. And so his burial was accomplished in a hurry. There was little time for putting spices and perfumes on his body as was the practice. It was almost Sabbath, when all work and unnecessary activity ceased. What a strange Sabbath it must have been for Jesus’ followers.

When the Sabbath ended on Saturday evening, some of the women who followed Jesus began thinking about what they could do to give Jesus a decent burial when it got light enough to go out. They bought some spices so that they could anoint his body. They wanted to do what little they could for him.

As soon as the sun was up on Sunday morning, they headed to the tomb with their spices. Now they would have their chance to properly mourn their loss, to properly prepare Jesus’ body, and to pay their last respects. As they went, they wondered how they would get into the tomb. (The stones that covered tombs were not the large boulders that we sometimes see in paintings. They were more like carved wheels, sometimes as tall as a person. They sat in a groove running along the face of the tomb, and workmen could roll them in it like a wheel. There was a depression in front of the entrance so that once the stone was in place, it took a great deal of effort to get it rolling.) The women had seen the tomb late on Friday, and they knew the stone was too large for them to move. But they were determined to do this last thing for Jesus. They didn’t know how they would get in, but they would.

To their surprise they arrived at the tomb and found the stone already rolled back. This was most fortunate but was also a little disturbing. Why was the tomb standing open? And when they stepped into the tomb they were startled and frightened to see a young, robed man sitting there, like he had been waiting for them. Perhaps he was an angel for he said, “Do not be alarmed.” That’s the sort of things angels always say when they encounter people in the Bible, though it doesn’t seem to have calmed the women all that much.

Then the man tells them the incredible news. “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” 

What wonderful, wonderful news. Jesus is risen! And we know how the story goes from here. The women run out to tell the others, to tell everyone, “He has been raised and we will see him in Galilee just as he said would happen.”

But our scripture reading says something quite different. So they went out and fled the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. As hard as it is to fathom, that is how Mark’s gospel ends.

It’s a terribly unsatisfying ending, which likely explains why the Bible contains a couple of endings added later. Many Bibles mark them with the imaginative titles, “The Shorter Ending of Mark” and “The Longer Ending of Mark.” Scholars of all stripes agree that these two endings don’t belong with the original gospel. The only debate is over whether Mark intended to end his gospel this way or the ending was somehow lost. It’s a debate that can’t really be settled. The only thing that can be said for sure is that in God’s providence, the gospel the Church received ends this way: So they went out and fled the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

In Mark’s gospel, there is no joy on Easter morning, no shouts of “He is risen!” only terror, shock, fear, and silence. Not all that surprising when you think about it. Centuries insulate us from the drama of that morning, the raw emotions of going to a friend’s grave and finding it open and empty, a strange man sitting there, saying your friend has been raised.

On top of that, we aren’t much worried about meeting our now risen friend. Jesus is not going to be there when we get back home. No chance he’ll say anything to us about our behavior or ask if we denied him. We’ve got Jesus safely confined to heaven, not running around loose where we might bump into him.

For many of us, Jesus might as well be dead. We’ve heard about him, learned stories about him, are perhaps impressed by some of his teachings, but he doesn’t really intrude into our daily lives. Jesus is no more alive to us than family, friends, and loved ones who’ve died. He’s gone to heaven, unseen by us. In a sense, he’s as good as dead.

I’ve lived my entire life in the Presbyterian Church. That’s less and less common, so I can’t assume that all of you know the stereotypes about Presbyterians, our obsession with doing things “decently and in order,” or of our nickname, “the frozen chosen.” Suffice to say that we have a long history as staid, buttoned-down, well-educated, neck up Christians.

That’s made us suspicious of things that seem overly spontaneous or enthusiastic. We’re uneasy with people doing crazy things because of the Holy Spirit, and we’ve made sure such things don’t happen in our congregations.

Some of our caution is appropriate. We do need to “test the spirits,” as the Apostle Paul wrote, to see which are from God. We do need to confirm that some fit of inspiration does indeed align with the God we meet in Jesus. But we’ve rarely stopped there.

The Holy Spirit didn’t really come up all that often in the churches where I grew up, and decently and in order was usually about maintaining control, making sure nothing happened that we couldn’t manage. No letting the Spirit hijack our worship or other church programs. No danger of bumping into the risen Jesus.

For the very first Christians, meeting the risen Christ was not restricted to those few who were around in the days following the resurrection. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the risen Christ continued to be present to the community of faith. The Apostle Paul goes so far as to say, “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.” For Paul and the other early Christians, there was new life in Christ because Christ dwelled in them through the Spirit. Christ was alive, not safely sequestered off in heaven for all eternity. He was present in the here and now, really and truly alive.

I wonder if Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was thinking of such things when she wrote,

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.^[1]

I think the women at the tomb understood this better than we do, and so they had the good sense to be a little frightened. If Jesus was alive, God had indeed stirred. This had never happened before. Resurrection is not reanimation. It is not going to heaven when you die. It is the raising of the dead at the end of time. If Jesus had truly been resurrected, then a new age was breaking in. Everything had changed. Of course the women experienced terror and fear. Life would never be the same again.

Christ is risen! Not he died and went to heaven, but he IS risen! IS. And in our baptisms we are joined to the risen Christ, and he dwells in us. Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! And the risen Christ calls us to follow him, to be his body in the world, so that the world may know that he lives.

Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Thanks be to God.

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[1] Dillard, Annie. Teaching a Stone to Talk: “Expeditions and Encounters,” (New York: HarperCollins, 2007) Kindle Edition p. 49.