“Some Things Bear Repeating” (1 John 2:7-14)

Last month Karen and I went on a road trip. It took us a little over 4400 kilometers in all, and along the way we enjoyed some wonderful scenery: the picturesque former mill town of Almonte just outside Ottawa, the quiet lakeside village of Haliburton, the thundering roar of Niagara Falls, the serene Thousand Islands, and the tree-covered slopes of New York’s Adirondacks and Vermont’s Green Mountains.

However, stunning though much of the scenery was along the way, none of that was the main intention of our trip. No, our real purpose was to spend time with relatives and friends from the past fifty or more years. And one of the highlights along the way was to worship with the church I had served more than forty years ago, back in the early 1980s. It was a delight to see faces and reminisce with worshippers we had not been with for decades. Admittedly there were those among us who had put on a little weight and others who had lost a little hair (and some of us both!). And the grey-bearded gentleman who read the Scripture had barely reached his teen years when we had last seen him. And there they were, continuing faithfully today.

Being with these people again was a living reminder that as believers and followers of Jesus Christ we are in it for the long haul. Jesus talked about the life of discipleship in terms of abiding in him, or as one rendering of the New Testament puts it, making ourselves at home with him.[1] And for his own part Jesus has promised that he will be with us to the end of the world. And that is what forms much of the background behind the First Letter of John, from which we have been reading over the past few weeks.

John is writing as a long-term pastor and he is writing looking back on his own even longer-term walk of discipleship with Jesus. We can’t be entirely sure, but the likelihood is that John was just a young teenager when with his brother James he left his fishing net behind in his father’s boat and heeded Jesus’ call to “Come, follow me.” Three years later he would be the only one of Jesus’ male disciples to be found standing by the cross. And the third morning after that he would be the first to peer inside the empty tomb and look with amazement on Jesus’ disused grave cloths lying discarded in a heap.

Now, as we read from the first of his three letters, the scene moves a thousand kilometers north, from Jerusalem to Ephesus, near the coast of what is modern-day Turkey. We learn from Irenaeus, who lived a generation later, that John ministered there until some point in the reign of the emperor Trajan.

Now Trajan ruled from 98 to 117 ad. So it is now approaching seventy years after the events in the gospel and John is nearing the end of a long and fruitful ministry. We don’t know much more about him, except for one little story that somehow managed to survive through the generations and was recounted three centuries or so later by Jerome, the translator of the Bible into Latin. It runs like this:

The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, ‘Little children, love one another.’ The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, ‘Teacher, why do you always say this?’ He replied with a line worthy of John: ‘Because it is the Lord's commandment and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.’[2]

A word to all

Accurate or not, that little anecdote is certainly consistent with that we read in 1 John chapter 2 this morning. There we find John using his authority both as one who knew Jesus personally and as their long-term pastor to gently lay down the law with his congregation.

It was not as though he was coming up with anything new, says John. Indeed the commandment he was leaving with them was as old as Scripture itself, going right back to Moses. And it is this: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18)

Of course John had been present when Jesus cited it as one of the two great commandments (Matthew 22:37-40). But then John had been there again when Jesus upped the ante, when he raised the command to love to a whole new level. It was on the night before he was to give up his life for them on the cross that Jesus said to his followers, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35)

What Jesus was challenging his disciples to, and what John was reminding his congregation of, was that the love to which Jesus calls us, the love that is to characterize the church, is not just a warm, fuzzy feeling. It is the love of which the apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13: a love that is patient and kind; a love that does not envy or boast, that is not arrogant or rude; a love that does not insist on its own way; a love that is not irritable or resentful—a love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

You don’t have to think of it for long to realize that the Bible sets the bar pretty high for us! Yet all too often our love falls so far short of that. Sometimes it can be cool and formal at best. It’s great that we’ve adopted the practice of sharing the peace as a part of our worship, and that there are those who take the time and effort to make sure Sunday by Sunday that there is an opportunity for fellowship over a cup of coffee after the service. These are concrete expressions of the love that binds us together. And I know that that is just the tip of the iceberg, that both formally in our home groups and informally in other ways, again and again the love of Jesus is being demonstrated visibly and tangibly in our midst.

And that love is something we can never allow ourselves to take for granted. On the contrary, we need to treasure it and encourage it and to make every effort to ensure that it flourishes and deepens and grows. For it is fragile and it can all come tumbling down like a house of cards—sometimes over what are seemingly the tiniest of issues. And that is exactly what seems to have been happening in John’s congregation.

There is a part of me that is tempted to think that John addresses his readers as “children” because that was the way they were behaving. There were members who claimed to be living in the light of God’s love, yet within their hearts they were harbouring dark thoughts of bitterness and resentment towards their fellow believers. John does not reveal to us what the controversy was that sparked this state of affairs. Sometimes church squabbles can be triggered by the most insignificant of differences. Perhaps it was over the new colour of paint for the sanctuary. Or whether decaf should be served at coffee hour.

But then again there was a much deeper and more noble reason for John to call his congregation children. (By the way, he does it no fewer than thirteen times in the five chapters of this short letter.) His addressing them as such was not to demean or belittle them in any way. Rather, it was an expression of his deep and abiding affection for them, because spiritually they were his children. They had come to know God’s forgiveness through John’s proclamation of Christ and his blood shed on the cross. They had come into a personal relationship with him as their loving Father through John’s wise counsel. They had been born again, they had been nurtured and trained and helped to mature in their faith through John’s ministry.

A word to seniors

Yet although they had all of this in common, something was dividing them. And the fault line seems to have lain been between the older and the younger members of the congregation. So it is that John has two words of counsel for the “fathers”—for the senior members of the congregation and then another two for their juniors.

Speaking as a senior, I’m willing to admit that I can become set in my ways. It’s easy to slip into the habit of thinking that things were better the way they used to be, to long for the good old days. Yet that is a dangerous trap to fall into. Indeed, if we consider it for any length of time, we will likely come to the realization in most cases that the good old days weren’t really all that good after all, just different. And besides, it can be a dangerous thing to dwell in the past. Because in doing so, we stand a very good chance of missing the opportunities of the present.

One of the valuable lessons that I’m grateful I learned in the early days of my ministry was that there were women and men in the congregation whose perspectives and opinions I could value because they were able to take the long view of things. (Or as John puts it, they “know him who is from the beginning”.) They had lived through the high times and weathered the storms. They had seen fads that came and quickly faded away like the flowers of spring. But they also had the wisdom to recognize when God the Holy Spirit was leading us in new directions, to embark on new adventures—and perhaps to discard some of the things that had become hollow traditions, sometimes even impediments to the gospel.

I used to think of them privately as the wise old owls. And I don’t know what I, or we as a congregation, would have done without them. I continue to be humbled by their long-term commitment and service to Jesus and his church. And again and again I have found myself grateful both for their time-tested wisdom and also for their willingness to give the younger members of the congregation the rope and the freedom to try out new ideas, new approaches, and on some occasions to ward off disaster with some wise words of caution—and all without a hint of judgement or a critical spirit. How much we have to gain when we learn to listen with respect to the senior members of our congregation!

A word to the young

John’s words aren’t for the seniors only, however. He also has something to share with the younger members of the church. And by the way, John is not talking about the youth group here (although they too have important roles to play). The word John uses refers to those somewhere in the twenty-five- to forty-year-old bracket. These are people in the prime of life—people who are newly married, starting families, early in their careers.

It is all too easy for those important and significant commitments (commitments which I want to affirm are God-given) to mushroom and to consume all our time and resources, to the point where we have little energy left for anything else. (I don’t deny that embarking on a career and raising a family are hard work and take a lot of juggling!) Yet, as I have been grateful for the “wise old owls” I am also thankful to God for giving to me and to the churches where I have served those younger people who were willing to devote a significant portion of their time, their energy and their creativity to contribute and to follow through on fresh ideas and new directions given to them by the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes I find myself wondering why Jesus ever thought up the idea of the church. It can be so messy and complicated! Yet I thank God that over the years he has given me the opportunity to see that there is a riches when people from all different backgrounds and experiences, young and old, rich and poor, out of their common love for Jesus and energized by the Holy Spirit are committed to working together in the service of God’s kingdom.

My prayer is that we may be that kind of church. And indeed in many ways we are already that kind of church. We have old and young, students and retirees, young families and grandparents, single, married and widowed, ancestral Nova Scotians and newcomers from nearly a dozen different nations—all the ingredients for a powerful multi-generational, multinational witness here in Halifax. And so the question lies before us: Are we willing to lay aside our own agendas and follow God’s agenda—to use this wonderful variety he has given us, not to serve our own needs but to shine the light of Jesus into an increasingly dark and needy world?

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[1]     The Message, John 15:7

[2]     Commentary on Galatians, 6:10

“By this we know…” (1 John 3:16-24)

Have you ever noticed that the one point in the gospel story where you might have thought it was easiest for the disciples to believe is where they showed the greatest doubt? There Jesus was, standing right in front of them, and yet they had to struggle to believe. When Jesus entered the upper room that first Easter evening, he had to ask them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” (Luke 24:38) When they met him in Galilee (presumably some time later), Matthew tells us that even though they worshiped him, there were still some who doubted (Matthew 28:17).

It seems to me, based on passages like this and on my own experience, that doubt is almost invariably the companion of faith. Who among us has not experienced doubt at least occasionally or perhaps on a daily or even hourly basis? I came across a quote about doubt this past week from the Buddha, which runs thus: “There is nothing more dreadful than the habit of doubt… It is a poison that disintegrates friendships and breaks up pleasant relations. It is a thorn that irritates and hurts; it is a sword that kills.” On a contrary note, the astronomer Galileo claimed that doubt is “the father of discovery”. And twentieth-century psychologist Rollo May once wrote, “The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it's not without doubt but in spite of doubt.” What are we to think, what are we to say, then, about doubt?

In this morning’s Epistle reading we find John writing to people who were struggling with doubts. In their case these seeds of doubt had been sown in their minds by false teachers in the church. One of those teachers was a man named Cerinthus, who lived in Asia Minor around the same time as John. Claiming to be promoting the true faith, Cerinthus taught that Jesus was just an ordinary human being, different from others only in greater wisdom and righteousness, that the Christ descended upon him at his baptism and departed from him before his crucifixion, and that it was only Jesus the man who suffered, died and rose again. All of this teaching was couched in Jewish piety and gilded with the sophistication of Greek philosophy. So, particularly for those who were new to the Christian faith or were not able to recognize heresy, these teachings could be hugely attractive. The result was that there were many people whose faith had been kind of knocked off balance, who weren’t sure what they ought to believe—and it was to such people that John addressed his letter.

In many ways we live in a similar time today. (Perhaps it has always been the case.) You have only to walk through the religious section of Barnes and Noble to see a proliferation of books proclaiming the health, wealth and prosperity “gospel”, questioning the reliability of the Bible, denying the resurrection of Jesus, or promoting the Gospel of Thomas and other alternative early “Christianities”. In the midst of this confusing mélange of ideas, John boldly claims that there are things that we can know.

Before we go any further, though, we need to recognize that when John uses the word “know”, he is not speaking in the sense of knowing as we might a mathematical formula. It is not like saying the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. We could put statements like that in the category of head knowledge. No, what John is writing about is heart knowledge—and more often than not, when the Bible uses the word “know”, it is referring to that kind of knowledge: personal knowledge, relational knowledge, experience. This is what the Bible means when it tells us that Adam knew his wife Eve; or when in John’s gospel we read that Jesus knew what was in a person; or when Jesus prays on behalf of his followers that “they may know you, the one true God…” It is in this relational sense that three times in this morning’s epistle passage John declares, “By this we know… By this we know… By this we know…”

God’s Love (16-18)

The first thing that John writes to assure his readers about is God’s love. There are many today who would question that love. This past week much of the world observed the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, when 1.5 million people were subjected to wholesale government-initiated slaughter. That atrocity became the model for Hitler’s annihilation of more than 6 million people in the Holocaust. Since then there have been the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and the massacres in Rwanda, which claimed more than a million more lives—not to mention the unspeakable horrors to which our own Karen people have been subjected in Burma. This past week many of us have been horrified by the images on our computer and TV screens of thirty Ethiopian Christians being led to a brutal death by beheading. In the midst of all of this there are many who legitimately ask, “How can you believe in a God of love?”

For the people to whom John was writing events such as these were not something that they read about in history books or saw on a TV screen. They were immediate realities. The Pax Romana under which they lived had always meted out its own rough form of justice. But now, under the emperor Domitian, who insisted on being honored as “Lord and God”, Christians became the focus of an insatiable cruelty. Many were beaten, imprisoned, tortured and put to death. Even John himself would become a victim. As an old man he was spared the sentence of death and instead exiled from his home in Ephesus to the island of Patmos off the Turkish coast. In the midst of this, with relatives and friends and fellow believers being dragged off to torture and execution, it would have been natural for some to find their faith in God’s love being shaken if not altogether shattered.

In the midst of this, John points us to the cross of Jesus. He writes, “By this we know [God’s] love, that he laid down his life for us.” In these few words John tells us that God’s love is far more than a theoretical concept. It is real. It is tangible. It comes to us not merely as a theological principle but as an actual event. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” said Jesus to his disciples at the last supper (John 15:13). And this is exactly what God has done through the cross. This is the measure of his love. “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1b).

God’s Forgiveness (19-23)

A second concern that hung heavy on the hearts of some was the question of God’s forgiveness. Forty years of pastoral experience have left me convinced that one of the core issues of life that all of us face is forgiveness—not only learning to forgive others for the wrongs they have done to us, but also receiving forgiveness for the wrongs we have done to them.

One of God’s little jokes on us was to give us the power to remember the past and leave us no power to undo it. We have all sometimes been willing to trade almost anything for a magic sponge to wipe just a few moments off the tables of time. But whatever the mind can make of the future, it cannot silence a syllable of the past. There is no delete key for reality… If we could only choose to forget the cruelest moments, we could, as time goes on, free ourselves from their pain. But the wrong sticks like a nettle in our memory.

So wrote ethicist Lewis Smedes in the introduction to his book The Art of Forgiving. Forgiving others can be a challenge, especially when a relationship has been betrayed or a wrong has been committed that cannot be undone. Yet we encounter an even greater challenge very often when comes to forgiving ourselves—forgiving ourselves for our less-than-loving attitudes towards other people, for the thoughtless words that sliced into another person’s heart, and for the thousand secret sins about which nobody knows but only ourselves. We are tortured by our own consciences.

If that is the case with you, then John has good news. “By this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” Did you hear those words? God is greater than our hearts. Even when we cannot forgive ourselves, God can. Even when we think forgiveness is impossible, God still forgives us. Even though God knows everything there is to know about us, he forgives us nevertheless. Once again we go back to the cross and to Jesus’ words, “Father, forgive them…” (Luke 23:34) and know that they were spoken not only for those who crucified him, but for us as well. As John wrote in the opening chapter of his letter, and as we will hear once again before we kneel in penitence in a few moments’ time, “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

God’s Presence (24)

We can know God’s love. We can know God’s forgiveness. Thirdly, John says, we can know God’s presence. “By this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.” I think there is a tendency, particularly in our generation, to think of the presence of the Holy Spirit as a kind of emotional rush. In a few weeks’ time we will be celebrating Pentecost. We will remember the mighty rushing wind, those flames of fire that alighted on the disciples, and the miraculous ability to communicate in languages that had never been on their lips before—and we will think that is how the Holy Spirit works. But that is only one picture that the New Testament gives us of the Holy Spirit. How about the one who silently works within us the conviction that Jesus is Lord? How about the one who brings about that wonderful harvest of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control?

For John in this morning’s passage the test of the Holy Spirit’s presence is obedience. “All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us…” The test of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives is not, “Have I had this or that particular experience?” but, “Am I living in obedience to Jesus Christ?”

If my own experience is anything to judge by, obedience is not something that is easily measured. I suppose we can look at standards like the Ten Commandments or Paul’s list of the fruit of the Spirit. There are also various Rules of Life that we can choose to follow and they can be very helpful. Yet as much as we try to measure ourselves, those measures will always be subjective. Depending on our disposition, some of us will be easier and some of us harder on ourselves. I believe in the end that if we are really to get the true measure of ourselves, it will be as we live in community—as we hold ourselves accountable to our brothers and sisters and to Christ in them.

This morning, as we take the bread into our hands and the cup to our lips, may they be tangible reminders of what we have read in this passage. Through them may we know God’s love, mediated to us on the cross. May we know God’s forgiveness and cleansing through Jesus’ blood. And may we know God’s presence, enabling us in company with our brothers and sisters to live in obedience to him.