Keep us in the fellowship of your love, O God. Amen.
Ask my kids and they’ll tell you that if you really want to push my parenting buttons, do what I’ve told you not to do, or don’t do what I did tell you to do. To be clear, my unrealistic and selfish need for obedience is something I work on both in therapy and spiritual direction, and I pray that I’m making some progress. What makes obedience such a bad thing to expect out of other people, whether they be children or adults, is that the expectations that we put on other people do not enable them to meet the expectations, rather they are burdens. Nor should we assume that our standards be normative for others. In reality, the standards we have for ourselves are rarely reasonable or healthy, so why should we impose those on others and expect their obedience? It’s no wonder that obedience has become such a negative word in our culture.
And
while it is a good thing that we are slowly moving away from patriarchal and
paternalistic views of authority and obedience, it leaves us in a conundrum when
we hear in First John, “For the love of God is this, that we obey his
commandments.” When we reject the idea of obedience altogether, we undermine
what it means to be a person of faith.
Obedience to God is
different than obedience to a person because when God gives us a command, the
command itself gives us what need to do it. As we heard in John, Jesus commands
us to love after having first loved us and demonstrating this love in Jesus. It’s
something like when a young child buys a Christmas present for their parents –
the parent takes them to the store, helps them carry the item to the cash
register, then pays for their own gift, and helps the child to wrap it and put
it under the tree. That’s not, at all, to take away the love that the child is
showing, but that gift of love is made possible by the parent’s initial act of
love. God’s love enables us to love.
It is as St. Augustine
put it, “Give me what you command and command what you will.” God loves us and
commands us to love, for God is love and love is the will of God. This is what
makes obedience to God not only possible, but the only way to experience true joys
and flourishing. It is as if we are fish who are placed into water and are
commanded to swim. We are given all that we need to succeed. Sure, we could try
to float or crawl instead, but that wouldn’t get us nearly as far. Obedience to
God’s love is what enables us to have faith, a faith that is described by First
John as believing, beloving, and belonging.
No matter what the
dictionary tells you, belief is not about our thoughts or ideas. Belief is not
about agreeing with a particular set of doctrines. No, belief, Biblically speaking,
is about relationship. To believe in God is to be in relationship with God –
which is marked by prayer, by service, by generosity, and by hopefulness. This
is what Jesus is saying when he tells us to “abide in my love.”
As we have the joy of
celebrating Baptism today, this is what we are celebrating. It’s not that Brayden
and Kristopher are necessarily agreeing to the correctness of everything in the
Prayer Book’s Catechism, nor are they becoming the recipients of God’s love because
God has loved them from the beginning of time. No, what we are publicly and
Sacramentally declaring is they now abide in the fellowship of Christ’s body.
They are heirs of the promises of God and are servants who are commissioned and
empowered to be obedient to the mission of love. Their relationship with the
Triune God is being deepened and we pray that their belief grows deeper and
wider.
Throughout the Sundays of
Eastertide, the sermons have all been focusing on this letter of First John,
and we’ve heard that a relationship with God is only possible through a relationship
with others. This is the second part of faith – beloving. We are loved and we participate
in this love by loving others. It is what Jesus commands of us and what First
John encourages – that we love our brothers and sisters. But if you’ve ever
spent any time around people, you know how much of a challenge this can be. The
comic strip Peanuts once put it so well when Linus said “I love humankind, it’s
people that I can’t stand.” Indeed, we are hard to be around and complicated
when it comes to relationships.
Yet, this is the clear
commandment of God throughout Scripture and history – that we are to love God
by loving others. The author of a book called “Friendship: The Heart of Being
Human,” traces the arc of friendship throughout the Bible. He says that Genesis
tells us that were created for companionship and friendship with each other. Creation
shows us that to be human is to be friends. But the trust between us has been
eroded by our selfishness, fear, and greed. The result is that we have fragile
and fractured relationships. Jesus, particularly through his Crucifixion and Resurrection,
reestablishes the possibility of true and abiding friendship. We were designed for
friendship, for beloved community, which is what makes Jesus’ statement that we
are his friends so profound and powerful.
In a wonderful passage
that has been made so very popular because of its inclusion at most weddings,
St. Paul declares that love is the only thing that matters. It does not matter
how eloquent we are, how good-looking we are, how smart we are, how rich we
are, how powerful we are, because if we do not love then we amount to nothing.
And love is as Jesus describes it – laying down our life for others. Love is sacrificial
action for the good of another. Love is giving our time, our energy, our
attention, our resources, and our preferences for the sake of another. It’s why
St. Paul wrote that love is patient and kind and is not envious, boastful,
arrogant, or rude. Even compared to faith and hope, St. Paul declares that love
is the greatest of all. As First John declares, love is what gives us victory.
Giving ourselves to one another, being obedient to and following the example of
Jesus who gave himself up for us is what it means to love.
Belief is about our
relationship with God which comes through loving others. And the result of this
is our belonging to God through one another. It’s interesting that for as much
as love is mentioned, is love not often defined. There’s sort of an assumption
that we all know what it means to love, and what it means to not love. Yes, the
example of the cross is the greatest example of love and the Resurrection is the
greatest demonstration of the power of love, but how to live in beloved
community is sort of left for us to figure out.
One way to understand
what it means to love is to focus on what we belong to, and this is an important
concern in both First John and the Gospel according to John. Who do you belong
to? Who sets your standards? Who do you trust? The way our Scriptures present it,
we can either belong to God or to the world, with the world being a signifier of
the powers and cultural forces that are opposed to the loving will of God.
The truth of the matter
is that none of us belong to ourselves. As the Anglican priest and poet John
Donne put it, “No person is an island.” We are all influenced by culture, bound
by our personality, and swayed by our impulses. We can choose to belong to
capitalism and give our lives to résumé building, career trajectory, and
account growth. We can choose to belong to ourselves and always put ourselves
first, to always choose what is comfortable, and to run away anytime we are
challenged. We can belong to partisanship and tribalism and reduce everything down
to an us versus them mentality where we are willing to win at all costs, even
at the cost of our character and deepest values. I’m sure you can think of many
other things that ensnare and trap us.
The alternative is to
belong to God. Paradoxically, the only way to have true freedom is through obedient
love. As the prayer attributed to St. Francis teaches us as it prays, “Grant
that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as
to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it
is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to
eternal life.” In recognizing that we belong to God and give ourselves in love,
we move with the grain of the universe, with the grain of love. Jesus tells us that
in seeking first the kingdom of God, all these things will be given to us as
well. Everything worth having is a gift, and gifts can only be received if our
hands are open and empty. If we’re trying to grasp onto things, we’ll never be
able to belong to God but will be shackled to the life-draining and soul-crushing
ways of the world.
Belonging to the God of
love is how we have victory over the world. In the letter, we heard “Whatever
is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the
world, our faith.” Elsewhere in John, Jesus says “I have said this to you so
that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take
courage; I have conquered the world.” We have to trust Jesus when he says this.
When it comes to our faith, we can’t be backseat drivers. Either we trust Jesus,
trust that love is enough, trust that all shall be well, or we take things into
our own hands. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my salvation, my identity,
my purpose, or my destination to be in my own hands. I want to belong to God’s
love.
Again, Baptism is the
declaration that we belong to God, and because we belong to God, we should expect
to be used by God for the purposes of love. Looking to Jesus, we have a pattern
and example for such belonging. We will forgive, we will feed, heal, raise up,
liberate, and lay down. This is what it means to belong and be obedient.
And this is also what evangelism
is about, which has been something we’ve been focusing on in Easter. Evangelism
is more about showing than it is telling. We are evangelists when we do as the Baptismal
Covenant forms us – to be people of prayer, to be people who seek forgiveness,
to be people who serve, to be people to strive for justice and peace, to be
people who respect the dignity of all people.
Beloved, there is much in
the world that needs to be conquered and overcome – greed, warfare, and racism
being some of the most significant issues facing us. The world needs us, the Body
of Christ, to show the way forward. The world needs us to show the Good News.
What would our
relationships look like if we trusted that Jesus has overcome the world? Trusted
that we belong to God? That the cross shows us the grain of the universe? That
Resurrection is possible? That greatest way is that of love? May our God of
love answer these questions through our lives and make our joy complete.
