1 John 4:7-21
6th
Sunday of Easter
Mother's Day
Mother's Day
Elizabeth M. Deibert
13 May 2012
13 May 2012
Last week we the branches, were
challenged to be fruitful, by abiding in the vine, Christ. What does being fruitful look like? Loving as Christ loves. Today’s lessonfrom the 1st
Letter from the Johannine community continues this theme of Christ’s love. Written about a decade after the Gospel of
John, probably around the year 100, it calls us to demonstrate authentic
faithfulness to Christ through love. God
is defined as love, and that the two cannot be separated. You cannot have God without love, or love
without God. Jesus Christ shows us what
it means to be completely secured in love.
By His Spirit living in us, we too are secured by love and empowered to
love.
Some preachers today will focus on the sacrificial
love of mothers and how grateful we should be to them and inspired by them to
love one another. In those sermons,
motherhood will be placed on a pedestal to admire. And indeed many mothers, including mine, deserve
great praise. Equally many mothers who
did their best under difficult circumstances, failed their children miserably
in some big moments because they did not have the emotional, mental, or
spiritual resources they needed to do the job.
This text reminds us that it is God’s love which inspires us to nurture
one another in love.
Prayer
1
John 4:7-21
Beloved, let us love
one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and
knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is
love. 9 God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his
only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In
this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be
the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us
so much, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen
God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
13 By this we know that we abide in
him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we
have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the
world. 15 God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of
God, and they abide in God. 16 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. 17 Love has been perfected among us in this:
that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we
in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts
out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached
perfection in love. 19 We love because he first loved us. 20
Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are
liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen,
cannot love God whom they have not seen. 21 The commandment we have
from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. (NRSV)
You are here today because somebody loved you
and that love inspired you to draw near to the One who loves you best and to
worship. Some of you have had radical,
transformative encounters with the living Christ, like the Apostle Paul, but
others have come to understand God is love through people who were good
expressions of God's love. Verse 12
says, 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God
lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By perfected, we don't mean flawless, but completed, reaching its full purpose and goal .
John
is saying: God starts it all. Being loved enables us to love not just by
offering an inspiring example, but because love frees us from the things that
would otherwise block us from loving, including guilt and fear. This is why,
whenever the author speaks of the commandment to love one another, he nearly
always brings it back to God first loving us. That love is enabling, the more
we let it reach us and set us free.
(William Loader, textweek.com)
“We never get beyond God's love
for us in Christ and how that is lived out in love for one another. We are
always drawn back to that central, and centering, claim. We know God's love,
first and foremost, in the Son; and we know God's love because we have
witnessed it in love for one another. This text may serve as a reminder that we
never grow beyond our need to hear again the gospel of God's love in Christ.” (Brian Peterson, workingpreacher.org)
Much of the anger that erupts
within the church under the banner of loving God and defending God's truth
often seems to grow instead from love of self and of the power that comes from
winning the argument, even at the expense of the church's unity in love. The
gospel of God's love for us in the Son sets us free from such loveless and
fearful pursuits. John will not allow
the sacrifice of love for the sake of truth (as though they could be
separated), and continually brings us back to the only place where we can learn
how to love faithfully: the prior love of God for us in the sending of the Son.
“The opposite of love is not hate
but fear,” William Sloane Coffin once said, as he
preached on this passage. If God is
exclusively understood as the God of power, or demand, or even justice, then we
approach God with fear — both in this life and in the life to come.
But if understood first as the God
of love, perfect love, then we approach God with confidence. God's love is
perfect and our love is perfected because we trust in God's love. "We love
because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).
(David Bartlett, workingpreacher.org)
In every human relationship, even the most loving
relationships, there is an element of fear.
We fear abandonment. We fear
rejection. We fear possessiveness. We fear intimacy. We fear failure. We fear sacrifice. We fear being known. Love is threatening because it requires so
much of us – both the one who loves and the one who is loved. “Loving can cost a lot but not loving always
costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an
emptiness that robs the joy from life.”
(Merle Shan)
Perfect love casts out fear, for
fear has to do with punishment. At
Faith and Film on Friday night at Peace, we viewed Kings Speech, which is the story of the transformative power of
love, more than the power of speech therapy.
What the character Lionel Logue understood about stammerers which proved
so helpful to King George th 6th is thta the stammering is rooted in fear more than in the mechanics of speech. Lionel gave him the love of friendship, and through that was able to do
what no expert could do: help him overcome the fear of making his voice
heard. This act of love changed the course of
history, as do all acts of true love.
Theologian Paul Tillich said "The first duty of love is to
listen." To Tillich’s duty of love
to listen, I would add that the flip-side of listening is asking good
questions. Keep the conversation alive
by a deeper engagement of the other – not by mouthing off about yourself. St. Augustine said, “God loves each of us as if there were only
one of us. To invite others to share
their stories, and then to really listen with attentiveness, asking meaningful questions
is an act of love.
It is no
small matter that these fifteen verses have 27 references to agape, the Greek
word for love. Agape
is love because of what it does, not because of how it feels. God so “loved” (agape) that He gave
His Son. It did not feel good to God to do that, but it was the loving thing to
do. Christ so loved (agape) that he gave his life. A mother who loves a
sick baby will stay up all night long caring for it, which is not something she
wants to do, but is a true act of agape love.
The
point is that agape
love is not simply an impulse generated from feelings. Rather, agape
love is an exercise of the will, a deliberate choice. This is why God can
command us to love our enemies (Matt. 5:44; Exod. 23:1-5). He is not commanding
us to “have a good feeling” for our enemies, but to act in a loving way toward
them. Agape
love is related to obedience and commitment, and not necessarily feeling and
emotion. “Loving” someone is to obey God on another’s behalf, seeking his or
her long-term blessing and profit. C. S. Lewis once said, “Christian Love, either towards God or towards
[humanity], is an affair of the will.
We will
never understand the fullness of love unless we start with God. And when we start with God we start with the
understanding that God is love, not that God loves, but that God is love. God loves “might stand alongside other
statements, such as ‘God creates,’ ‘God rules,’ ‘God judges’; that is to say,
it means that love is one of God's activities.
But to say ‘God is love’ implies that all God's activity is loving activity. If God creates, God creates in love; if God
rules, God rules in love; if god judges, God judges in love. All that God does is the expression of God's
nature, which is — to love. The
theological consequences of this principle are far-reaching.” (CH Dodd)
Mother
Teresa, who proved she really knew God by the way she loved the unlovely said,
“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” She said, “We can do no great things; only
small things with great love.” She also
said, “Love until it hurts. Real love is always painful and hurts: then it is
real and pure.” Martin Luther King, Jr., who knew he could not talk about the
love of God without being willing to love those who mistreated him said,
“Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes
it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”
"Following
Christ has nothing to do with success as the world sees success. It has to do
with love." According to writer Madeleine L’Engle. Soren
Kierkegaard said, “When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world
- no matter how imperfect - becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of
opportunities for love.”
Oh, what a world we might have if fear were
overtaken by love, if all who claim to love God began to prove it by their
fearless love of other people. It can
begin right here, Peace. It can begin
with a commitment on our part to be fearless lovers of the all people, who are
not concerned for our own well-being out of a fearful protection of self, but
who trust God enough to love bravely, to really love like Jesus loved. We cannot do it, but God can do it through
us. Because God is love, and when God
lives in us, God’s love is perfected in us.
May God’s love reign in our
hearts and in our lives everyday in every way as we stand and sing…
