The Definition
A sermon
delivered by Rev. Peter T. Atkinson
February 15,
2015
at Gordonsville
Presbyterian Church, Gordonsville, Virginia
John 3: 11-16
Numbers 21: 1-9
Today's Anthem: "God So Loved the World" arr. David A. Zabriskie
Let us pray,
Help us to see despite our eyes
Help us to think outside of our minds
Help us to be more than our lives
For your eyes show the way
Your
mind knows the truth
Your
being is the life.
Amen.
11 “Very
truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen;
yet you do not receive our testimony. 12 If I have told you about
earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about
heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one
who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And just as Moses
lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15
that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16 “For God
so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in
him may not perish but may have eternal life. [1]
When I was at Christchurch School, and in many
ways it is similar at Blue Ridge, the culmination of the Chapel Life of the
school was the Lessons and Carols service. Both schools unapologetically go all
out to celebrate the beauty of the traditions surrounding Christmas, with
candles and anthems and hymns and readings, but one thing that will always
resonate in my mind and that I will remember was that, the last reading of the
Lessons and Carols service is always John 1, "in the beginning was the
word. . . " etc., and it was always marked in the bulletin as "The
Meaning of Christmas" that "the word becoming flesh and dwelling among"
us is what Christmas is all about. It was really cool at Christchurch because,
like Blue Ridge, it was an international school, with many different nations
and cultures represented. Each year, or at least one year that stands out in my
memory, John 1, was read in all of the languages represented at the school. So
it was like Korean, Chinese, German, Moldovan, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, and
some more. You got to hear the words as they reach each corner of the globe,
the beautiful truth resonating to every tongue. It had the feel of Pentecost
where everyone got to hear in their own language. It was so meaningful to me,
that DeAnna and I when putting together a similar service in Hampton decided to
have John 1 read in English, Latin, German, and Greek. It was interesting to
hear the sounds of the familiar cadences coming through in language so different
from our own. Neither school had the same traditions surrounding Easter, maybe
because many of the boys go home over that weekend, maybe because the
Resurrection at Easter is much less Politically Correct than the more tame
Christmas Secularization, but there was never a great service commemorating
Easter, but if there was you can bet that this passage, John
3:16 would parallel that John 1, that for many John 3:16 is the "meaning
of Easter," and mainly because of the second half of the phrase. . . so that
we can have "eternal life." The stone rolls away and we get to have
eternal life. In our heaven first, results based, us centered, religious
tendency, we often skip the "God so loved," and focus right on the
"eternal life." You can see it all over the place in Pop
Christianity. . . the church signs, the T-Shirts, the bumper stickers, the News
Debate, and the God loving part falls to
the wayside. . . so I want to take a break from that, not because I want to
downplay it, or act like it doesn't exist,
or challenge it in any way, but because the foundation, the chief
cornerstone, is on the otherside, the God side, the Christ side, the Loving
side. . .
Because
Love is such an important part of what is going on here. The word love is found in some form in the Bible over
four hundred times, including often the attribute referring to God constantly
in the Old Testament as steadfast love, the what Jesus calls Greatest
Commandment, of Loving God and Loving our neighbor, even going so far as in one
of John's epistles, 1 John, that God, in fact, is Love. . . so love has much
importance in the Biblical Story and in our faith as it is derived from that
Biblical Story, but often we have difficulty in describing exactly what love
is. I think most of you know, by now, from my mentioning a few times in my
sermons and in my graduation speech at Blue Ridge a few years ago, that I begin
my classes each year with a lesson on trying to define love. And that process
is challenging because their definitions always begin with the idea of feeling
and emotion, which certainly no one can deny is part of it, but leaves us
lacking, because attached to that feeling is action, there needs to be action
in love.
Sometimes
we can look at opposites to give us a clue about what a word or an idea means.
Like if you want to know what up is you can compare it to down, or as Grover so indelibly taught my
generation in our younger days, that if you want to know about far, just think
about near. . .Near. . . . . . and far.
But looking at the opposites of love like hate, falls short because hate
as an opposite for love is so short sighted. There is so much more to love than
just the mirror image of hate, because hate is just a feeling of antipathy,
where as love is so much more than just sympathy. It includes it, but like all
infinite things, the things that come from God, it just cannot be encased in so
narrow an idea. In my lesson I get my students thinking poetically about
metaphor and figurative language because I want them to see that poetry is the
only thing that can work to define the infinite without confining it too much,
because metaphor allows for interpretation and shared experience. And
experience is important to the equation because experience plays such an
important role in our own process of discernment with regards to truth, and one
of the many things that make us completely unique and different from one
another is our experience, no two lives are completely alike. But infinite
definition is not the same thing as relative truth. . . though we cannot limit
wholesale, there is a definite truth we can point to and learn from. And these
are what we really talk about when we say we are defining words like love. Because
though all of our experiences are different, we do share certain experience in
common, and one of those happens to be how we relate to God in our own lives
and how the characters of the Biblical story interact with God in the Biblical
narrative, for all are one. We can share those experiences and learn from each
other and from what others have shared in the past and grow closer to God.
So
experience and metaphor all play into it. . . A metaphor that the Bible gives
us is "God is Love", (actually from one of the epistles attributed to
John our Gospel writer) and the experience we can look at is the Biblical
manifestations of God acting. . . and then we can think about how this fits
within a Biblical idea of love, and then by comparing it with our own
experience we can get a really good concept of what love is. First you have God
with his steadfast love, not abandoning his people Israel, setting them free
from bondage, teaching them about righteous and sustaining laws for living in
community together. You have that God coming into the world proclaiming and
teaching more about what righteousness and living in community are about,
holding up as the most important part of it, this idea of loving God and Loving
neighbor. . . so the relational idea grows and includes both ways, with each
other and with God. But if we are really thinking about love we would have to
look at everything that God does.
And
then it would stand to reason foundationally speaking that love is about making
life, redeeming life, an sustaining life. And life is made when love sets free,
because God sets us free. . . free to be, free to will, free from slavery in
Egypt, free to even enslave ourselves through our own freedom. Free to choose
chains again and again. . . but then God remains. . . and will set us free
again. . . so this steadfast conception of God and love is important as well.
There is the sense of the unconditional side of love. It doesn't necessarily
mean that there isn't right and wrong, or preference, but that those do not
work to limit love ever. You could say that love gives second chances, (we think
of characters like Jacob, and David and others), that love desires for justice
(we think of the prophets being sent by God to speak the truth to power), but love
also knows mercy (we see Jonah's interaction with Nineveh), that Love seeks us
out where we are, following always right behind us (and hence we see God's
interaction with Jonah). We could see love offering protection, (like he does
for Daniel in the Lion's den), or
strength to stand and risk (like he does for Esther). We can see love leading (like
God does the people through wilderness). We can see all of these things. . . we
can seek to emulate all of these things. We can love by protecting, and
leading, and seeking people where they are, being there when they turn around
to us. We can love by risking, and desiring for justice, and giving mercy. We
can love by setting people free having the hope and faith that they will do
what is beneficial to themselves and to others, even if they may not. We can do
all of those things by loving, and I would guess that many of us do on a
regular basis, we try to, we try to be that good life giving type of person,
but there is more to the metaphor, there is more to the experience, and
therefore there is more to the definition of love because God takes further.
And
that is where John 3:16 really comes in. . . because it seems to say that Love
also includes sacrifice, giving up a piece of you, something completely unique
to you, as intimate and close as a child, a son, and as a child, a likeness, in
God's case the totality of self. . . for our doctrine states, like God, same as
God, even in John's Gospel, the Word was God and the Word was with God. . . and
now this son, this only son, the text goes out of the way, is being sent to the
world to save it, giving all who come to believe, eternal life. It is the mark
of a sacrifice, a total sacrifice, to pain, to gruesome persecution, to
beatings, to crucifixion, and to becoming a symbol of human sin and cruelty,
hanging on that cross for the world to look at and take notice, that they may
come to believe. He connects it to the snake being raised up in the desert,
which we heard about in the story that Erick read. . . the people looked at the
snake, they saw the snake, the snake that had been poisonous, that had wrecked so
many, that had caused such devastation, the people looked at it risen up on
high, and they would then live. . . . just by looking at the snake, risen high,
high above them on a post and they would live. What an interesting thing to see
and compare Jesus' sacrifice to. . . that by merely looking the people could
see and live. . . how interesting that it is in just beholding, believing,
believing what though, a complete sacrifice in love, we see that, we believe in
that. . . and then in that we are given eternal life. . . just seeing love
gives life, but what are we looking at, a symbol of perfect love, a definition
that encaptures what love is completely, the
complete sacrifice of self for the other, and the intense feeling that
would make that sacrifice possible.
Why
do we not go to that definition of love first? Because it's so hard. It is so
hard to think about love as a perfect sacrifice, because we are always looking
out for ourselves and our interests. And love has many imposters. . . one of
them is manipulation, where you go through all of the appearance of love, but
in the end it is about you, and in that
case it sucks life rather than giving life. I'm sure you have seen it, felt it,
and done it. Another of love's imposters is loving the whole world just to feel
good for yourself. Fighting for nameless justice. . . fighting for impersonal
ideals. . . fighting for vague seemingly selfless impulses that underneath are
all about us. Man is it hard. . . but this sacrificing element is what
separates love. . . it dies to the self. . . but one of the most important
aspects then is valuing yourself enough
to give it. You have to know how valuable you are, how worth while you are, how
great you are, how much of a child of God you are, how held up in faith you
are. . . because through faith we know that love is worth it. We know that
giving up yourself completely is such a powerful idea, such a noble thing, and
upon seeing Christ's perfect example. . . we know that life abounds in such
thoughts of love.
We
can know this, but it is still hard to sacrifice, to love completely, to give
up of self without holding back, without fearing. . . how are we to live up to such a commandment
as to love God and neighbor, when the definition is complete sacrifice? I'm not
sure, but now we can flip the metaphor around. Rather than looking at love,
let's look at God for a moment. One of the things that John has been teaching
us so far in his gospel is that we shouldn't put God in a box, but rather
understand God's completely free and infinite aspects. . . but that we always
have that tendency to limit God, knowing that tendency we can still experience
God where ever we are because God limited
himself in the human form of Jesus, so that we could come to know more
clearly about that limitless aspect. . . . we can know love in the same way,
through loving in any way, with a mind to the complete sacrifice, knowing that
is what love really is, we can learn love through the little, just thinking of
others is a step. . . and a seed, just like a notion, consciousness, a mustard
seed of faith is enough to move a mountain. . . a little shred of love points
us in the right direction. This I believe is why we confess week to week. We
know that we do not love completely, or have not found the situation right for
that complete sacrifice. . . we openly confess that, just as Jesus does in the
Garden of Gethsemene. . . we resist because we are coming to know the value of
that sacrifice. . . and the act of confession reminds us that Love requires
more than we have so far given, but we also acknowledge that through practicing
love we grow closer. Remember it is not the temple that is the problem but how
we see the temple. It needs to point us to God, rather than encapsulate God.
Our small acts of love, show love to the world, make a witness of love to the
world, but there is always more we can do and be and give. . . we haven't loved
completely yet, we still have more to give, we are never and can never be done
until there is no more left of us to give. . . therefore may God in his love
for us keep us humble, remembering that we have not yet begun to love entirely,
for there is more of ourselves that we have yet to give . . but in that
humility we are fee to love where ever on the spectrum of love we are. . . and
in doing so, even in the small we spread life.
Amen.
Benediction:
So
often I write my sermons on Saturday nights, but this one I wrote Friday
afternoon, and one of the reasons I wait until Saturday night is that I will
rethink and rework again and again anything that I wrote earlier anyway. This
sermon was no exception. I continued to tinker with the ending of this because
what I was saying was that the standard for loving is complete sacrifice. .
.how can you say that without devaluing the process of getting to that point?
How do you remain focused on the size, the end, the amazing scope of love,
without ignoring the fact that it is hard to get there. . . I think a good
metaphor for it is writing. As a teacher of writing I am always fighting
against what my students have been taught before about writing and how binding
those definitions usually are. Things like, paragraphs have to have 5-7
sentences, or a thesis should be always the last sentence of an introduction. These
artificial requirements don't produce quality writing, and as training wheels they
have to at some point come off. . . but I run into the issue all the time that these
artificial requirements are important to the development of the writer, and that
not everyone can just write with out any step by step progression. So there needs
to be instruction, you need to have the "training wheels" but there needs
to be a point where those come off, that the training is pointing beyond itself
to real ownership and freedom. It is helpful to think about love, and our relationship
to God in the same way. . . and Jesus coming to us in our own form is a great manifestation
of this truth, humbling himself, limiting himself, to take on a human form to teach
us beyond himself, through himself to understand the infinite nature of love and
God. . . . so take that as another metaphor, use love's training wheels, but do
not lose sight of what Love truly is. . . and go from this place loving. Amen.
[1]The
Holy Bible : New Revised Standard Version. 1989 (Jn 3:11-16). Nashville:
Thomas Nelson Publishers.
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