What We Will Be (1
John 3:1-3, 11-24)
Rob Tennant,
HillSong Church, Chapel Hill, NC
Sunday, August 17,
2014
How great is the human need for
love? How far do we reach?
·
Holocaust
survivors separated from family members search for years until the reunion
happens; they won’t let go of love.
·
Children
given up for adoption seek out their birth parents. They want to know that even though they were
given up, it was done for love.
·
Online
matchmaking is a multimillion dollar industry that profits from lonely folks
looking for love.
“See what love the Father has given us
that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are” (3:1).
It is as if we who know Christ are in on a
secret – the greatest secret! It is so
great that when we share it, some who hear simply cannot believe it. Either they cannot believe it is true, or
they cannot believe it is great. So they
reject Christ, or more likely, they reject us, the messengers. Deep down, every person who ignores the
invitation of God or turns away from Jesus is a person who needs love. Every human needs the love only God can
provide, and God does provide.
“See what love the Father has given us
that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are” (3:1). God’s heart is a heart of love for us.
Immediately after the elder, the narrator
in 1st John, declares that we who are in Christ are children of God,
he then says, “What we will be has not yet been revealed.” What we
will be has not yet been revealed.
He’s already said we are God’s children and throughout the essay he says
we will live forever in God’s presence.
What will that be like? It seems
he is not completely clear on this nor is he all that worried about the things
he does not know.
Take that phrase, what we will be has not yet been revealed, and put it to the world
today – to people specifically and humanity in general. Now, imagine life with Christ, and imagine
life apart from Christ. What will we
be? What will “we” who are of HillSong
become? What will “we” Americans within
our American society be? What will “we”
Americans be in relation to peoples and nations? What will “we” humans become?
Remember, there is nothing we need more
than love and specifically the love God gives in creating us and redeeming us
through the cross of Jesus. Apart from
love the picture is dreadful.
A police officer in St. Louis shot dead
unarmed, 18-year-old Michael Brown. A
young life with so much ahead, so much living to do, was cut tragically
short. An unarmed black teen was killed
by a white police officer – AGAIN! Now
that police officer has to live with it.
Michael’s family has to live with it.
His friend, the witness, has to live with. The continued riots suggest that America is
not living with it well. That this whole
story is one we’ve seen before many times is testimony to the devastation of a
world apart from God. It keeps
happening; apart from God’s love, evil reigns.
The comic genius Robin Williams took his
own life and his daughter had to take down her social media accounts. She not only grieved the loss of her dad in
the most awful of deaths; she became a target of trolls whose depravity led
them to try to add psychological torture to her pain.
We read 1st John 3:11 and then
3:23 & 24 - “This is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we
should love one another”.
“And this is his commandment that we
should believe in the name of God’s Son Jesus Christ and love one another just as
He commanded” (1 John 3:23).”
“By his Spirit we know he abides with
us” (v.24).
We Christ followers see the world around
us. We who are in Chapel Hill, NC hear
the cries of anguish all the way from Ferguson, MO; all the way from Northern
Iraq where people seem destined to suffer.
We see the world and we hold up 1st John as an
alternative. We do not have to succumb
to the bad news all around. We have
another story to tell, a story of love. At
the center of the story we have been given is an invitation to the love and to the
life of God.
You and I are invited to live with God, to
live in God, and to live with God in us – God as we know God in Jesus Christ. These New Testament works, the Gospel of John
and 1st John, show us what God is like. God is associated with love of one’s brother
in the church. In the context of the
entire New Testament and especially Luke’s Gospel, this love of other
Christians is extended to love of neighbor.
Jesus is asked who is my neighbor? Jesus answers with a story; the neighbor is the
person who needs us. The neighbor is in
need and we stop to help and then we are neighbors. Love from God; love of fellow
Christ-follower; love of all people; it turns out that love describes God and as
Heather said quite accurately two weeks ago God defines what love is. We look to God’s story to see how to live in
love.
This is where our hearts needs to stay
this morning – in that place where we know that God invites us into life and
into love. God does that, he loves
us.
Can we?
Can we become love – conduits of God’s love as it flows into the veins
of a humanity that is crying out in pain?
What will we become?
Think on what keeps you awake at
night. Your child who is now away from
home? Maybe your father had a heart
attack at 55. Now you are North of 50
and not in great shape. What fears cause
you to choose left instead of right? Is
life so harried and hurried we fear we will never be able to stop and rest? Is life so set and stuck we fear that this is
it, nothing new and exciting will ever come again? What are your real fears? Surely what bothers your neighbors is nothing
to you and what unsettles you seems silly to them. But fear is one way sin becomes an enemy that
would rob us of the life of love God has for us.
I am pretty sure Michael Brown and Robin
Williams never met. Both mattered
equally to God. He loved each enough
that he sent his Son for them. To each
man, sinful fear gave rise to hate and hate brought a tragic ending. In Iraq and Syria, fear and hatred conspire
to create chaos, to destroy the world.
First John 3:15 is so plain – “all who
hate a brother or sister are murderers and we know that murderers do not have
life abiding in them.”
What human being or group of humans or
category of humans awakens the hate in us?
Here hate is as bad murder.
Note that 1st John was written
before the events of Michael’s Brown’s death and Robin William’s suicide. First John was written before there was such
a thing as Isis. First John was written
before there was such a thing as Islam. When
the elder put pen to paper under the Holy Spirit’s inspiration and wrote about
the life to which we are invited, life in God’s love, he touched on themes that
speak today. He appealed an ancient
story that sounds eerily familiar.
“We must not be like Cain who was from the
evil one and murdered his brother” (3:12).
One human killing another? Where
have we heard that before?
First John says Cain did this because he
deeds were evil. What does that mean? For more detail we turn to Genesis 4 where we
see that God rejected Cain’s offering and accepted Abel’s. Genesis does not elaborate on why Abel was
accepted while Cain was not. Genesis
focuses attention upon Cain’s angry response.
God warns Cain about the bursting anger inside of him. That anger takes over, and after he kills
Abel, Cain is paralyzed by fear. What
fears paralyze us? What fears have
unmade us? What fears lead to the demolition
of human community?
God said, “Well, Cain, I am sorry, but
you’re on your own now, you filthy murderer.”
No, God did not say that. Genesis
tells us the Lord put a mark of protection upon Cain (4:15). Even after we give into it and do the hideous
things fear leads us to do, God still loves us, protects us, and invites us to
turn away from sin and back to Him, to His love.
Who do you hate? I remember a week or so ago reading of the
way ISIS works and feeling hatred for them.
They had the Yazidis pinned down on the mountain, starving and
dehydrated. Rescue came in the form of
U.S. warplanes and Kurdish evacuation helicopters. Isis was content to thoroughly annihilate an
entire people group, the Yazidis. Yes, I
was reading from the safety of a vacation house on a secluded lake, a safe
distance, but still, deep inside, hate burned in me toward ISIS.
How does God feel about ISIS?
I think God hates them too – a radical,
violent, singularly minded group bent on killing all who oppose them. Yes, I believe God hates ISIS.
However, God doesn’t see only ISIS.
God also sees individual Syrian and Iraqi
Sunnis, men who are poor, without hope of education, and very, very young, many
younger than Michael Brown. If they grew
up in Chapel Hill, they’d be in the marching band at Chapel Hill High. They’d attend the youth group at HillSong
Church. But they didn’t grow up here.
Where they grew up, all they have heard
since they started walking and talking is “America put the Shia in power and
now we are dirt poor.” The parents they
love as much as we love our parents have taught them that life is cheap, that
America is Satan along with the Shia who run Iraq, and their best hope is to die as martyrs in a Jihad type of war.
I am here in church telling you our hope
is that we are invited into God’s love. In
Christ, we are children of God. This is
the message we give our kids. Those kids
who become soldiers in ISIS who I want to hate have been told their hope is to
kill Americans and Shia and anyone else who does not practice Islam the way
they do. Is it any wonder we go on
mission trips and they have fired killing shots by the time they learned to
shave?
What will we become?
This is the message we have heard from the
beginning, that we should love one another.
And this is his commandment that we
should believe in the name of God’s Son Jesus Christ and love one another just
as He commanded.
By his Spirit we know he abides with us.
Because of who God is we become people
filled with God, that is, filled with the Holy Spirit. This filling explodes into stories of love –
us in the world, helping people, forgiving when we are hurt and wronged, and
building communities in Chapel Hill, in Carrboro, in Dominican Republic and
South Africa and Ethiopia. We cannot
stop ISIS or senseless shootings or suicides or other tragedies. We don’t have the power.
God does have the power and the
intention of stopping it all in God’s timing which we have to trust is better
than ours. We don’t have in us the power
to fix all the world’s problems. But we
do have the love to try as hard as we can to fix as much as we can. We do have story – the story that says we are
already children of God because of God’s love.
And we will be something more than we are now. In resurrection live forever, celebrate
unending joy, and discover the depths of love we cannot fathom until then. What will be become? That is to be seen.
For now, we offer an alternate
story. We tell the world what God is
like. First John’s greatest contribution
in this story is to show that God is love and everyone who will receive Jesus
is invited into the love of God. This
truth is bigger than all the bad news that can be so depressing. The bigger truth is we have lasting joy that
explodes forth from God’s church and by the power of God’s Holy Spirit this joy
fills the earth.
See what love the Father has given the
world that we should be called children of God; and in Christ that is what we
are”
AMEN
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