"Jesus Loves Me, This I know"
All we need to know about God is that He loves us.
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, April 20, 2003
Text: 1 John 4:7-21
The funeral reception was coming to an end in the Flora McCrea Eaton Auditorium when, from across the room, a young woman worked her way through the exiting crowd towards me. It was very obvious that she was distressed. She was crying, her eyes were puffy, and the mascara was running down her red cheeks.
When she got to me I inquired if she was a member of the deceased's family. She informed me that she hadn't even met the deceased, but was simply a friend of one of the family members. I wondered why she was so distressed and emotional. She told me that she hadn't been in a church for 10 years and when a passage of Scripture was read it brought back many thoughts and feelings. She described what was read as, "You know, that thing about God being a shepherd and oil and valleys and mountains." The 23rd Psalm. Then she looked me in the eye and said: "You know, Reverend Stirling, why this moved me so much? I had forgotten what God is like."
My friends, there are many people who have forgotten what God is like. In the clamour of wars, in the wonder and majesty of the world, in good and evil, in right and in wrong, we sometimes forget what God is like. When people use the name of God to justify violence, insurrection and oppression - they've forgotten what God is like. When people believe that God turns a blind eye to sin and that anything goes - they've forgotten what God is like. When one hears about inhumanity and the clash of cultures and civilizations - we've forgotten what God is like. When we look at pending disasters and health crises (which seem to come on a regular basis) and we are terrified - we've forgotten what God is like. That is why our passage from 1 John, an epistle written to second-century Christians about God, is so important - it reminds us what God is like.
In this letter, the writer is trying to get the Christians to go back to Christian essentials, to the very core and foundation of the faith. He does so in a world where there were many competing views of God, many different theologies, many different philosophies and ideas about what God is like and John brings us back to a renewed definition of what God is like. He defines God in the simplest and the most profound terms in the whole of the Bible. He says and repeats throughout his book: "God is love." But for John, the love of God is not a nice idea, a concept or a platonic philosophy; it is something that he believes has been revealed in the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For those early Christians were only concerned with one thing: bearing witness to what they had seen. And on the basis of what they had seen, they were passing it along to the next generation, in order that they not forget what God is like.
This morning we are going to see what God is like through the eyes of the writer of 1 John. In this powerful passage there is much that transforms and renews the way we look at God, the world right now and the world to come, for John places it so clearly before us.
He shows us two things: First, that this love has been manifested. He put it so clearly, "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, [and the key words] so that we might live through Him."
For the early Christians the love of God was based on what they had witnessed. When the women went to the tomb and found that the stone had been rolled away and that it was empty, they knew that the love of God they had seen and the life and witness of Jesus Christ had now been vindicated, proven once and for all by an empty tomb and a risen Christ. From the third century on, once the Apostle's Creed and then the Nicene Creed had been written, there was this constant declaration - the foundation of the faith of all Christians is that Christ was crucified, dead and buried, but on the third day He rose. It was that central belief that caused them to believe that they too had life. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was not an event frozen in time, it was the manifestation of the love and the power of God in the empty tomb, that we might live through Him. When Jesus said to His disciples that He would draw all people unto Him when He was lifted up, He was saying to them that what they witnessed in the empty tomb was the reason for their life.
There is a true story told (and having lived in Nova Scotia, I can see this happening) of an insurance company on the 17th floor of a waterfront building in Halifax. The manager decided that the numbers for the sales reps were significantly depleted and something had to be done. He gathered all the sales personnel and managers together and gave them the pitch. He said: "You have to sell more policies!"
They all went away with a renewed vigour. As one of them was sitting in his office, gazing out across the water to Dartmouth, he saw the window washers coming up on a scaffold. They stopped outside his window and he thought to himself: "This is a good idea." He wrote a sign and stuck it on the window: "If any of you would like a life, term, or disability policy, please contact me."
The window-washers wrote him a little note back: "If you want to sell a policy, come out here and do it in person!"
He did! And he sold $500,000 worth of life insurance!
Jesus of Nazareth has gone out onto that scaffold with us, with all our sin and danger and death, and He has given us a life insurance policy. He didn't do it from a distance, He did it in person. He didn't do it out of vengeance, He did it out of grace. He didn't do it out of desperation, He did it out of love. The only difference between the insurance company's policy and Jesus of Nazareth's is: We don't have to pay anything - He's already paid the premiums.
Because of this, when Jesus said to His disciples, "Where I am, you will be also - where I am going, I will draw you to me," He was saying that the love of God is being manifested in His own death and resurrection, that we might have life. That we might, as John said, live through Him.
One of the most beautiful ways that manifestation is demonstrated in fiction is in C.S. Lewis' great series: "The Chronicles of Narnia." If any of you have read the series, you know that the very last book is titled, "The Last Battle." In it there is a conflict between two Aslans: a true Aslan and a false Aslan. Narnia needs to find out which one is true, for the true Aslan in the story comes across as not only the lion king, but also as the Christ. On the very last page, when Lucy and her family and friends have finally discovered that it is Aslan the lion who is the true and authentic saviour, Aslan - the Christ - explains what has happened. This is what Lewis wrote:
Aslan turned to them and said: "You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be." Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often." "No fear of that," said Aslan. "Have you not guessed?" Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them. "There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are - as you used to call it in the Shadowlands - dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning." And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them.
That is the power of Aslan. That is the power of the risen Christ. It is a new morning and for those Christians, they believed that the new morning and new life had dawned when that tomb was found empty.
But it was not only manifested - this love - it was something that from that moment on they knew must be demonstrated. John writes: "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God." And Tom Wright, the great Oxford scholar of the New Testament, in a recent passage on the Resurrection says that the Church of Jesus Christ at Easter often forgets something.
On the one hand, some ministers talk about the resurrection of the dead, heaven and eternal life - and so they should, as I have just done. On the other hand, there are others who debate all the inner workings of the resurrection, whether it really happened, and they bore people to death with all their arguments. But Wright says there is one thing that is often forgotten: That the resurrection of Jesus Christ transformed the lives of those who first witnessed it. From that moment on everything changed, including the way that they lived. That is why John, in writing this great epistle, states over and over again that we who believe and confess that Jesus is raised from the dead are the ones who abide with God. My friends, you can't abide with God and with Christ, if Christ is dead. But because Christ now lives, this is a new world, a new reality. We now, as John says, live through Him.
W.H. Auden put it beautifully: "In the desert of the heart, let the healing fountain start; in the prison of our days, teach free men how to praise."
As a result of this great gift of the resurrection we need to learn, first and foremost how to praise. How to live each and every day as if it is the new morning of the resurrection, because we abide in Christ and Christ is alive and abides in us, and there is now no death within us if we believe. Because of Jesus Christ we have life and we have it right now. One of the things (with all the misery in the world and all the sadness) that we so often lose is the ability to praise, the ability to thank God each and every day - living in the presence of the loving God. How wonderful it is to have this life! How free it is to be able to praise in this life, in the assurance of the life that is still to come!
We Christians need to learn again, every Easter, to praise. But our praising often sounds hollow if it doesn't lead to compassion. John put it so beautifully, and I repeat it once again: "Beloved, if God so loved us, we must love one another." If we believe in the power of the risen Christ, it is that very love that should imbue our hearts, souls and minds. That compassion should be the sign of Christ's living presence in the world.
Not long ago I heard a story about a man recalling events from his childhood. His mother asked him: "What is the most important part of the body?"
He answered: "Well, surely it is our eyes. Without our eyes we cannot see."
She said: "No, dear, that's not it, because some people are blind."
Years later she again asked him: "What is the most important part of the body?"
He replied: "The ears, because with our ears we hear."
She said: "No, dear, not the ears, because some people are deaf."
He went on over the years being asked and listing the parts of the body that he thought were the most important until the day when he buried his grandfather. That day, for the first time in his life, he saw his father cry. He saw his mother cry, he saw his grandfather's friends cry, and he cried. And so, this time he asked his mother: "Mother, what is the most important part of the body?"
She said: "You mean to tell me that you don't know?"
He said: "No. I don't know."
She said: "The most important part of your body is your shoulder. Because your shoulder is what you can offer to anyone who cries."
The Church of Jesus Christ is to be God's shoulder, in a world that often feels the power of death, that often feels like it's dying, in its sin and sorrow and inhumanity. As children of the living Christ we offer our shoulders, a place for people to cry, a place of comfort, a place of compassion, a place of hope. You see, that woman I spoke to at the funeral reception had forgotten what God is like. She had forgotten that God has a shoulder - and a shoulder waiting for her in her tears.
My friends, I don't know much, but Jesus loves me, this I know. Easter confirms it. It's really all any of us need to know to know God. Alleluia, Christ is risen. Praise be the Lord, the love of God is victorious. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.