Remembering the Past...
        Planning the Future

    Park Christian Church
                                                                    (Disciples of Christ)

 Sunday, May 3, 2009

Scripture:         1 John 3:16-24

Sermon:           “Tangible Love”

            When the French refer to the town outside of Paris where King Louis XIV used to live and rule, it is called Versailles (vair sigh).  When the locals around Lexington, Kentucky refer to a town on its outskirts by the same name, it is called Versailles (ver sails).  It’s funny how language works.

            But, there in Versailles (KY) you’ll find an odd little occurrence.  Just across the street from the high school is the Versailles Church of Christ.  And less than two blocks away in the other direction is the Camden Avenue Church of Christ.

            You can’t have a potluck dinner at one of ‘em without being able to smell it at the other.  And these are basically the same church, you know.  It just makes you wonder what might have happened to get some of them so riled up and mad at the others to walk out and start their own church.

            But, you’ll see that every now and then.  One church is sitting on one corner.  And another church just like it is sitting on the other.  Somewhere along the way folks started arguing about something and they just split up.  It could be something about the things people believe.  It could be something about the color of the paint chosen for the fellowship hall.  But, you’ve got these folks that decided they couldn’t be one church together.

            By the way, the folks that founded our Christian movement came from an old Scottish Presbyterian background.  They came from a church called the Old Light Anti-Burgher Seceder Presbyterian Church.  And you can bet that they had a bone to pick with those who went to the New Light Presbyterian Church.  And they had a bone to pick with the Pro-Burgher Presbyterian Church, since they were as I said Anti-Burgher.  And they had a bone to pick with the non seceding Presbyterian types.  Each little bit of the name of their church, Old Light Anti-Burgher Seceder Presbyterian contains a bit of the history of the squabbles they’d had over the years.

            Now, just try to squeeze all of that onto the jerseys of the church softball team.

            So, the folks that founded the movement we have our heritage in were pretty well fed up with all of those fights and just wanted to start over again and let there be some disagreement over non-essential things.  And that’s what they did.

            We’ve only split twice in two hundred years.

            I guess we’re in good company, though.  Seems that folks in church have been struggling to keep it together since the very beginning.  And that is the situation that our scripture lesson this morning comes from.  This church here has split apart.  One group went this way.  The other group went that way.  Maybe they were just a couple of blocks away.  But, the first letter of John is written to a broken, split church.  In the second chapter it says, “They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us.  But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us.”

            I don’t know exactly what they were fighting about.  One scholar suggested it was about how they understood the nature of Jesus Christ.  Was he fully human?  Or was he really just a divine being that looked like he was human?

            Now, whatever it was they chose to get bent out of shape about, listen to what the writer of this letter says is truly the most important matter to consider.  Let’s read chapter 3, verses 16 through 24 together.  You can turn to it easily on page   of the New Testament in the pew Bible.  This is the word of the Lord…

            We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.  How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

            Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.  And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will treasure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.  Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.

            And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.  All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them.  And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.

            How does God’s love abide in anybody who has all of these resources all around them but won’t lift a finger to help out somebody else in need?

            Did you hear that part of the scripture?

            That’s some biting criticism isn’t it?

            How can you say that you’re a person of faith if you don’t use your gifts, your resources, your abundance to address the real needs of people?

            Boy, that cuts right to the chase.

            And he went on.  He said, “Let us love.  Let us love.  Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”  Not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

            In a few weeks school will be out of session for the summer.  And that means that children and young people all over will be taking some time away to go to church camp.  And I’d like to give a little plug to church camp.  It is probably the most significantly shaping spiritual experience that many young people have.  If you are young, or if you have young people in your life, you should encourage them to go for a week.

            I was once recruited to be a camp director for Primary Camp, which is for 1^st and 2^nd graders.  And something incredible happened one day at that camp.  There were a dozen or so children there.  And we’d have story time every day using one of the foundational stories of the Bible.  One day it was Noah.  One day it was David and Goliath.  But, one day it was the story of the creation of the world.

            And we’d have the kids play with different things that were part of the story.  We wanted them to remember these stories for a long time.  We even had a couple of goats for the Noah story.  But, when it came to God creating the universe, all we had was ourselves.

            I asked the children to come up with different sounds for the things being created.  Whenever that thing was mentioned in the story, the children would make that sound.  They patted their knees, you know, to make the sound of rain whenever water was mentioned.  And they’d say “ding” like a light coming on whenever God had something to do with light.  Mention animals and we had a kind of free-for-all assortment of grunts, and oinks, and barks, and moos.

            But, when we started to tell the story, we’d left out something.  It begins, you know, with a wind from God sweeping over the face of the waters.  And when I read that part of the story, this little girl said, “Wait!  Don’t you know what that sounds like?”

            Well, it was wind.  So, I thought they’d make a swooshing sound.  But, she said, “No!  It sounds like this…”  And she cupped her hands over her mouth and whispered in a way that everyone could hear it.  From her lips came these words:  I love you.

            So, the sound of a wind from God sweeping over the waters at the very beginning of all creation was “I love you.”

            Kind of remarkable isn’t it?  This child understood what most of us never fully comprehend.  Everything depends upon the love of God.  It was the very first sound, according to her, that graced the formless void of the universe.

            Now, doesn’t that sound almost too sweet to be true?

            There was a Methodist minister once that had a son.  Back in the 1800s this preacher’s kid, a rather brilliant scientist, came to the conclusion that all living things were the descendants of other living things that could all trace their beginnings back to a very simple organism millions of years ago.  Charles Darwin had taken the act of preacher’s kid to a whole new level.

            In fact, Mr. Darwin was so aware of just how controversial this kind of thinking would be to most folks that he refused to publish his thoughts.  On one hand this sort of science didn’t square with the teachings of the churches.  Evolution, you know.  We’re still not entirely comfortable with it, right?  But, he saw in his own theory, which he believed deeply, the possibility for misunderstanding.  For if evolutionary theory was true, that we existed primarily because of a process of adaptation and survival of the fittest, we might begin to act accordingly.

            Now, I think Charles Darwin was probably wiser than folks in the church have wanted to say.  In fact his theory of evolution did become the basis for a sinister view of the world calling itself Social Darwinism.  And that is basically a way of viewing and being in the world that sees competition and domination as the natural order.  Charles Darwin himself was not a Social Darwinist, mind you.

            I say all of this because we do seem to live in a world where self-promotion and self-fulfillment and self-preservation are the cornerstones for how we behave.  We just use different words for it.  “It’s a dog eat dog world.”  “You have to take care of number one.”  And then there was the popular bumper sticker in the 1980s…The one who dies with the most toys wins.

            What appears to be the natural order of things does not square at all with the idea that it was God’s self-giving love that formed the whole of creation.  That’s not at all about evolution, you know.  It is about how we understand the ways in which we are to live.

            It doesn’t square with what that little girl said…I love you.  And it doesn’t square with the cross of Jesus Christ.  First John says, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.”

            If we profess that Jesus is the Christ, we profess something so completely and radically different than the world itself has taught us.  It is self-giving love that is underneath everything.  Compare that to self-satisfying survival.  And you’ll find that faith in Christ is calling us to a little revolution against the world.

            In November of 2005 the flood waters in New Orleans had finally drained out of the city.  I had the opportunity to go down there with some friends at my last church.  We were on a mission to tear out mold-infested, rotting walls from homes that had been basically destroyed.  It was dirty, dirty work.

            And we were in a place called Lakeview on the north side of New Orleans.  The flood waters had reached about seven feet high there and nothing was left untouched.  We went to houses where folks didn’t have flood insurance and couldn’t afford a contractor to do the work.

            Now, one afternoon, I took a break for lunch on the front stoop of a house where we were working.  The woman that owned the house had come down from her refuge in Baton Rouge and she sat next to me.  Her eyes were blank and she’d been blind for years.  She said, “Do you hear that?”

            I said, “What do you mean?  I hear people working.  And I hear people grunting.”

            She said, “No.  Listen.  Do you hear those footsteps?”

            All I could hear was the beat of hammers.  She said, “I hear the footsteps of God walking through the Garden of Eden at the very foundation of the world.”

            And she said, “Listen.  Listen close.  Do you hear that?”

            Now, all I heard was the beating of a hammer.  Bang.  Bang.  Bang.  Whoever was hammering had this three-bang pattern going.  Bang.  Bang.  Bang.  Bang.  Bang.  Bang.

            She said, “You listen to that.  I hear God saying ‘I…Love…You…I…Love…You…’  That God’s got a tangible love don’t He?”

            What does your love sound like?

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)