That's Life (1 John 3:16-24)

The American Heritage Dictionary says that privilege is “a special advantage, immunity, permission or right…granted to or enjoyed by an individual” or individuals; while a benefit is “something that promotes or enhances well-being” of the whole.

In other words, a privilege is something special….and a benefit promotes the well-being of everyone.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, knew this distinction well and noticed that many Christians were getting confused between the two. While being the grace that God offers is the potential benefit for everyone, Wesley noticed that people were resting only in that benefit and not moving forward into the privilege – the special right of that grace-filled offer – which is Christian discipleship.For Wesley, the offer of grace - what we call justification - provided a comparative change, while the life-long relationship found in being a disciple of Christ – the privilege – offers real change. In coming to Christ, we accept what God does for us - In living out our discipleship, we experience what God does in us.

Christians that were members of the church in its infancy, almost 1900 years ago, were struggling with a problem that was eerily similar to the problem that John Wesley addressed with members of the Christian church only a few hundred years ago. There was a struggle to realize the complexity between connecting the personally experienced grace-filled love of God and the need to live out that love in Christian discipleship.

The Christian community of First John struggled to live out its faith and call to Christian discipleship over and against the world that surrounded them. It is largely thought that this community was directly influenced by John’s gospel so heavily that it relied on those particular writings as the guide to its faith and actions – realizing that Jesus Christ was the self-identified revealer of God’s love, and that in his own teachings, Jesus commanded those who followed him to believe in him and that they were to reveal God’s love by loving others.

The times for these new Christians were difficult ones. They lived in an era of political upheaval and revolt. Dealing with multiple changes in leadership and a constant flow of outsiders from non-Roman empire areas settling in and creating new and hybrid life-customs, these Christians struggled with remembering which direction was up – there was a lot of change with many new voices offering their own interpretations on how to live life.

As we read from First John, we can see that there apparently was confusion about how one should live out their faith – there was a struggle to manage both the spiritual life and the secular life. This Christian community was finding it very hard to do the two things that it should have known how to do very well: (1) believe in Jesus Christ as God’s son and (2) love one another.

Recalling the Gospel of John rendition of Christ’s sacrifice, First John 3:16 reminds the Christian community of the importance of Jesus’ command to love one another. First John emphasizes that the communal love for one another is placed in relationship to God’s redemptive love that is shown through Christ’s act of sacrifice on the cross for all of humanity. First John also helps the Christian community to recognize the relationship – the connection – between Christ’s love for humanity and the Christian’s responsibility to love one another – where Christ loved humanity to the very point of death, the writer of First John is reminding the Christian community that the unconditional love for one another would also suggest love to the point of death.

This love is hard. It’s hard to understand. It’s hard to envision. It’s hard to actually do. But there is a concreteness – an earthiness – to this love – this love that First John urges the Christian community to embrace – this love that Jesus Christ unveils as God’s love for humanity. This love suggests more than the laying-down of one’s life for another. This love pushes us, the disciple – the follower – of Jesus Christ to focus on the ultimate generosity of giving to others what they might need in order to survive. This love of self-sacrifice – of laying one’s life down – must include, First John writes, the consideration and well-being and the needs of others. We know this because we saw it modeled by Jesus Christ on the cross.

And, you know, it shouldn’t be necessary to argue that this engagement of loving one another in the way the God loves humanity includes engagement with a world in need – in a world with all its complexities – political, social or otherwise. But strangely enough the writer of First John feels the need to actually say it – because there are Christians who didn’t make the connection – there were Christians who didn’t get it.

John Wesley saw Christians who didn’t get it, too. And if we looked around – maybe at ourselves or even in our churches today, if not the world – we would still see Christians who don’t make the connection – Christians who still don’t get it.

“We should love one another.” It seems obvious. That is the right Christian thing to do. But we live in a world where resentments, anger, grudges, and violence dominates. Look around – listen to the news - daily we hear stories of people not being loved – people are killed, raped, divorced, bullied, terrorized, and abused. And it happens to everyone regardless if you are at home, or in your office, or at school – regardless if you’re Christian or not. People are not getting along with each other. People are living with hatred, which the Bible equates as murder in their hearts. It seems like our world is overrun with this disconnection of what it means to love God with everything that we have and are and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

In his book, The New Being (1955), Paul Tillich writes about the kind of love that the Christian community is to embody and live out to the rest of the world. Tillich writes that,

Love overcomes separation…Love is the infinite which is given to the finite. Therefore…we love the love that is in them…which is far more than their love or our love. Death is given no power over love. Love is stronger.

We must come to a recognition that the love that we are to have for one another – the love that is displayed by Christ on the cross – is more powerful than anything that would try and stand against it. More than any other concept, love expresses the abiding nature of the God we worship.

I was talking with one of my former students from a past ministry setting the other day who describes herself as spiritual but not religious – the hallmark tagline of today’s post-modern, mainline church-goer. And as we were talking we discussed the “problems” that she was having with the church – that is was full of hypocrites, that people talked a big story but never followed up on their words, that people said that they valued certain things but did the opposite when it came to supporting their “cause,” that people only seemed to care when it directly involved them. Unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised to hear these things. I wasn’t surprised because she was, in part, right. I say “in part” because there are those of us in the church that have lost our sense of faith-filled direction.

This doesn’t mean that we are less Christian or that we don’t love God any less – it just means that we have reached a moment – an opportunity - where we can begin to focus on what our lives as Christian people really looks like.

To live as Christian people means that our spiritual lives are not separate from the lives that we live outside of Sundays or Wednesday nights – they are lives that are joined together, with other Christians, to show the love of God to the world. The Christian life is one that realizes that the power – the ability – to love is not a self-generated one; rather, the Christian’s life of love is empowered and made possible by God’s Spirit that goes before us into each new day so that we might find the opportunities to not only hear of God’s love, but that we might truthfully enact that love to a world that so desperately needs to understand and experience what God’s love is like.

The Chrisitan life – your life – doesn’t end here at the conclusion of worship to be wrapped up and kept all neat and clean until we meet again next Sunday morning at 10:50. Your life of loving as God loves must continue past these pews and go into the places that you work, and into the places where you learn, and into the places that you teach, and into the places where your families are.

As we continue to grow and be formed as disciples of Jesus the Christ, may it be done in such a way that we are inspired to live out God’s mission of love and healing to a broken world – to all of those in whom we enter into a relationship with – realizing that all that we say and do and are was not left here this morning, but will be taken with us - as Christ’s Body - into the world that God so desperately loves.

Amen.