Loving God, there are times when we forget about your love for us, and we become anxious and afraid.  Keep us always rooted and grounded in you and in the knowledge of your love, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

            Do you feel as though you have heard this somewhere before?  “Love one another.”  “Love God.” “Since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another” (1 Jn. 4:11).  You’ve heard this before, right?  Maybe even last week?  Yet, if you read the entire first letter of John, you will notice that this commandment to love is repeated over and over again.  How come?... Why would John repeatedly tell the Christian community to love one another?....  Obviously, he believed that they should be loving one another, but they weren’t.

         The writer of this letter has an assumption.  He assumes that those who have had “a living encounter with the love of God incarnate in Jesus” will respond by acting with that same love toward others (Spill the Beans, Issue 27).  This is his assumption, and yet he is seeing people who claim to believe in Jesus acting with pride and contempt and self-righteousness. And so he continues to remind them of God’s generous and self-giving love for us that has been made known through Jesus Christ.

         One of the benefits of these letters that we have in the New Testament is that we get to see what was going on and what the issues were right from the beginning in the life of the church.  Throughout the first century, we hear calls from Paul and from John to remember the love of God that is ours in Christ Jesus – called to remember, because people were being less than loving.

         In the case of First John, some had left the church because they had different beliefs about Jesus. There were people who were teaching that the Christ (or Messiah) was a spirit, and not a human being, and that Jesus’ death on the cross had nothing to do with sin.  There were people who believed that anything to do with the flesh, or the body, was bad, and thus they taught that the Son of God could not possibly have been born in the flesh.  However, the Apostle John always maintains that “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (Jn. 1:14).  In 1 John we read: “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” (4:2).

         To our ears, this probably sounds like a pretty odd measuring stick for the truth.  Do you believe that Jesus Christ came in the flesh, or not?... However, to John, this was what mattered above all else, and those who had left the community and who did not believe this were referred to as “antichrists” (1 Jn. 2:18-19).  The thing is that God’s love for us is witnessed most profoundly in the birth, life and death of Jesus, who is fully human and fully divine.  The fact that God dared to come and live among us, and to share in our joys and sorrows, and to exhibit self-giving love even to the point of death, is at the very heart of the gospel.  This is how much God loves us.

         Having then experienced the love of God in Christ Jesus, wouldn’t you think that we would then treat others with that same kind of love?... But it doesn’t always happen, right? We might actually manage to love and serve God, but other people? – That’s a whole other story!  You see, other people are sinful, whereas God is not.  Other people can hurt you, or belittle you, or even outdo you in how holy they seem to be.  Yet, God’s call to us remains the same – to abide in God and to love.

         The thing about the passage that we heard from 1 John today is that it is directed at a specific group of people – those who believe in Jesus Christ.  When we read “let us love one another” (1 Jn. 4:7), John is speaking to those in the church – in the community of faith.  It is among believers that there had been a lack of love, and not out there in the community in general.

         Unfortunately, we could probably make a pretty long list of things that people have experienced in the church that are not in the least bit loving.  Some have experienced judgement rather than love.  Some have gotten tired of the “right-fighting.”  Some have always been treated like outsiders, and just never felt like they belonged.  The church has been and always will be populated by sinful human beings.

         However, at the same time, the Spirit of Jesus has never ceased to be an active, living presence in the body of Christ.  God’s Holy Spirit continues to be at work within us and in our midst, reminding us of the depth of God’s love for each one of us and of the power of God to renew us in the love of Jesus.  We are frail and fallible human beings, but that has never stopped God in God’s ability to use any one of us to share the love of Jesus.  We only have to look at all of the frail and fallible human beings that God has used throughout history in order to further God’s reign in this world.

         And so today, I invite you to let some of the words from 1 John sink deep into your souls.  “In this is love, not that we loved God but that [God] loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins…. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.  God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them” (1 Jn. 4:10, 16). We are God’s beloved children, brothers and sisters of Jesus, who gave himself in love.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.

Pentecost 8 (NL summer)                                                  1 John 4:7-21

July 15, 2018

St. Luke’s Zion Lutheran Church

Pastor Lynne Hutchison

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