Sermon: Living as God's Children

 1 John 3:1-7
Living as God’s Children
James Sledge                                                                                      April 18, 2021

 In recent years, I have begun to wonder if the Church is any longer viable. I’m not talking about Falls Church Presbyterian in particular but about church in general. And I’m not talking about whether the institutional church can survive. I’m talking about whether the Church is in any way capable of living into its calling, of being what it is called to be by God.

A number of understandings lie behind my worries. I understand the Church to be the body of Christ, a community that is meant to show and be Christ in and for the world. It is to model the way of Jesus, in stark contrast to the typical ways of the world.

I understand the Church to be an alternative community that shapes and forms people in the way of Jesus, a way of love and self-giving that looks little like the individualistic consumerism of our age. It is to be an alternative community where people so experience the love of God that it transforms their lives.

I understand the Church to be a community that embodies the way of peace over violence, even when that is risky and costly. It is to be a community that would risk its own life in the cause of love and peace.

I understand the Church to be a community that embodies the life of God’s coming new day, a day when all divisions end, when the poor are lifted up as the rich and powerful are brought lower, a great leveling.

In short, I understand the Church to be a square peg in a world built for round ones, a community that holds fast to the way of Jesus even when that makes it hard, impossible perhaps, to fit in.

I also understand that the Church will live into its calling imperfectly because the ways of the world are familiar and comfortable and seductive. But it will keep being drawn back to its calling through the pull of God’s love and the guidance of the Spirit.

But I’m not at all sure these understandings describe church in 21^st century America. Rather than looking different from the world, church mirrors the world’s divisions. There are conservative churches and liberal churches, rich churches and poor churches, Black churches and white churches, contemporary churches and traditional churches, and on and on.

Churches are often more focused on giving religious consumers what they want than on shaping and forming people in the way of Jesus. They twist the faith so that it is perfectly compatible with a consumer society focused and money, success, and things.

Churches obsess about institutional survival and rarely risk anything that is truly costly. Almost non-existent is the church that would lose its life for the sake of the gospel.

Churches are perfectly willing to get in bed with the most unsavory characters to achieve status and power. For decades mainline churches such as the Presbyterians provided a religious veneer for America in exchange for society sending us folks on Sunday. More recently, conservative evangelicals have been willing to sell their souls for political power.

Sometimes it seems beyond incredible that God puts up with all this. Surely God could find other means to show the world the shape of life as it is intended to be lived. Surely there are other avenues to redeem the world, to finish what Jesus started.

But I don’t want to give the perception that this in an entirely new problem, that the church was pristine for the longest time but only recently went off the rails. There were problems from early on.

Problems with church prompted the first epistle of John, a small portion of which we heard this morning. Apparently, divisions had formed in John’s faith community. Some, likely members who had blended Christianity with Gnosticism, argued that only spiritual sins mattered. Gnostics had little use for the body, considering it a prison for the human spirit. From this they argued that bodily sins mattered not at all, only knowledge (gnosis) and belief.

1 John is written, in part, to counter this false teaching. For the writer, the Word became flesh. Flesh, the body, is neither prison nor evil. It is a part of God’s good creation, integral to being human, and those who say how you live in that body doesn’t matter are deceivers.

The writer insists that how we live, the way we use our bodies and lives matters a great deal for it is here that we live out our Christian identity. To embrace sin is to deny who we are. This is why 1 John speaks so starkly about sin, saying, No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. I’m pretty sure this refers to not embracing sin rather than never committing one. After all, it is 1 John that says, If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

The problem is not that people fail to live out their Christian identity perfectly. The problem comes when people see no need to live into that identity at all, that they merely need to believe the correct things. 1^st century Gnosticism is alive and well today.

For our letter writer, getting this right begins with understanding who we are. See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. “Children of God” here is not a synonym for being human. Rather it refers to being joined to Jesus and so adopted into the family of God. We become children of God because of God’s great love for us, and realizing that this is who we are has an impact on how we live, at least the letter writer hopes it does.

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Most of us a familiar with stories of self-fulfilling prophecies. Children living in poverty go to underfunded and under-resourced schools where there are often low expectations and little opportunity. In ways both obvious and subtle, these children are told that they don’t matter, that they can’t cut it, that they are stupid. But every now and then, someone shows them a different narrative with a different identity.

I once saw a news report where a rich benefactor paid for a chess expert to move to a small, poor, rural Mississippi town to start a chess club at the elementary school. Many thought it an impossible task. None of the children had ever even seen chess played other than on TV, but the teacher dove into his work. He began to teach them the basics. More importantly he began to teach them that they were smart, capable, and able to do what others thought impossible.

Those children bought into that new narrative, that new identity, and before long they were defeating chess clubs from bigger, city schools. They went to the state championships where their elementary age players dominated against high school students. Finally, they went to the national championships where the fifth graders placed eighth in the nation while the sixth graders were tenth. And they had only begun playing eighteen months earlier.

Like that chess teacher, the writer of 1 John offers up a different narrative, a different identity to his charges, his “little children,” as he calls them. He insists that there is something extraordinary about them. See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. This is not who they once were, but a new identity given them because of God’s great love for them. God’s love has transformed them.

God’s love has been poured out for you as well. It has been given to you, and so you are God’s children, members of God’s household. That is what you are. That is what we are. And if we could believe that, truly believe that, then perhaps we could live as though it were really true.