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Sermons at St. John’s Presbyterian Church Pure Unbounded Love St. John’s Presbyterian Church 2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705 Telephone 510-845-6830 Fax 510-845-6837 office@stjohns.presbychurch.net http://www.stjohns.presbychurch.net Scripture
Readings: Deuteronomy 10:12-22, I Corinthians 13, I John
4:7-17, Ephesians 3: 14-19 You
may be feeling a little gypped that you didn’t get advent readings today. I apologize, but I just love these passages
on love. Love is the theme this fourth
Sunday of Advent. Love breaks forth
into the world in the person of Jesus Christ. I
have been doing a lot of reading on the historical context of Christ’s
birth. It seems to me that Jesus the
grown man, and our New Testament authors were trying to help us understand just
what constitutes divinity. What exactly
makes a god? What is God made of? The Caesars were declared gods, and demanded
that people and nations worship them, because they had power. In first century Mediterranean, divinity was
defined primarily by the power: the power to concur, the power to dominate, the
power to manipulate. Yet
even as the Caesars had great power, their use of power was common, ordinary
and brutal, altogether shallow and of this world. They slaughtered and crucified. They murdered their own family
members. If this kind of power is our divine hope, then we are altogether
lost. Paul
gets this in a profound way, and begins to organize thoughts about Jesus and
God into writing. Paul writes first,
before the Gospel writers. Or we could
take it a step further and say that Jesus lived and loved and died and was
risen and then we get this birth. As people met this Jesus and were transformed
and renewed by his love, they then began to ask questions like, “Where did he
come from?” Matthew
and Luke then give us birth narratives to help us out, but John takes us way
back to the beginning of time and finds the essence of Jesus, the Word, as the
creative force, the Logos, the Sophia or wisdom and spirit of God. He is not
just a god among gods, a god come lately, but is united and connected to the
One creator of the universe: “In the beginning was the Word, and the word was
with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” And
then, later, “The Word Became flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One
and the Only who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Why?
Why did this creative spirit become flesh?
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that
whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” For God so
loved the world. Now
what does it mean to believe in him? I
will tell you what it is not. Believing
in Jesus is not an intellectual exercise or something that is satisfied with a
verbal testimony. It is not knowledge
of prophecy. Believing in Jesus is to
know that you are loved and that you were made for loving. “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved
you. Now remain in my love…I have told you this so that my joy may be in you
and that your joy may be complete. My
command is this: love each other as I
have loved you.” In I
John we get a beautiful continuance of this line of thought: 7] Beloved, let us love one
another: for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. In our confession of Jesus as God, we need not proclaim
that he was the only one who loved, or that the world didn’t know love before
him. As we have seen, before love was
expressed so beautifully through his bodily person, the essence of life and God
was still love. We see this in the
Hebrew Scriptures. I
was surprised in my word study to find how often in the Hebrew Scripture the
word love is used in the context of God’s feelings toward His people. Over and
over we hear God’s love endures forever.
There
is much in this life we cannot count on. We may find ourselves enslaved and
oppressed by men who declare themselves gods.
It is uncertain whether businesses will be friendly if we don’t want
their product, or just if it hurts the bottom line. We may be uncertain about whether our government is more
concerned about killing terrorists overseas than rescuing its own citizens from
a flood. We do not know if Iran will
get a nuclear weapon and use it against us, or whether we can do enough soon
enough to ease the effects of global warming.
We may not know where our next meal will come from. We may not know where all our family members
are. We may not know whether our
husband or children will be alive tomorrow. We may be unsure about the state of
our own health. On
Friday I took poinsettias to Virginian Kelch, Margo Wonder and Mary Rarick in
Alameda. They each mentioned that folks
from the church had sent them Christmas cards.
Mary said, I just got a card from …oh, I can’t remember her name ... she
recently lost her husband. So I
thought I would help her by naming ladies who have lost their husband over the
last couple of years. Ann Arndt! I said.
No. How about Francis
Hamblin? No. Gail Peterson? No. Annabelle Graves. No. Mary Finley? No.
Helen Dole? Oh Al died, I am
sorry to hear that. Ardyce Worth? Yes, that’s it. I
was struck in my attempt at all the loss, and I thought how these women would
feel a spot missing in their lives, especially, perhaps this Christmas. As I was driving home I realized I had only
just begun to remember those women who have lost husbands: We could also lift up Mary Rarick herself. And Virginia has a wonderful picture of her
life partner on her dresser; he is looking a lot like a young Elvis or James
Dean. And Margo too frequently speaks
of the four men in her life, her three boys and her husband. Maybe you have heard the story too. He came home from UCLA to marry her and she
said no, go back and finish school and then I will marry you. There
is Kathryn Oberlander and Margaret Emmington, Loraine Night and Donna Eddie,
Helen Betts and Arline Erb, Mary Burt and Janice Wells, Mary Williams and Ellen
Noller have all lost their life partners.
Bob McConnell lost his wife. Of
course we experience more than just the loss of our husband or wife. Ellen lost her daughter to a plane crash,
Don Rising lost Peggy and the Lees lost Casey, and Karla lost her mother. We could go on and on I suppose, and mention
everyone in this room, touching those places of loss, those moments and events
where we are all too aware of the finitude and uncertainty of life. Tamara
and Zilose lost their sister earlier this year to malaria. And then this week their mother had a
massive stroke and died on Tuesday.
They fly back to Africa today.
When someone dies in their country, people gather about the house and
bring food. The church choir gathers in
the home and they sing hymns and play drums all night long, until the sun comes
up. In
the midst of all the uncertainties of life, in the midst of the loss, and the
finitude, the Bible tells us we can be certain of one thing. One thing is eternal: God’s love endures forever. By no means is divine love held and offered
exclusively in the person of Jesus, but he was one with the source and showed
us the way, the only way, the way of the one true God, the way of love. The love we share with those we love and
those we lose is God’s love, the same love that brought life into existence,
the same love that was born in a barn in a small obscure country two thousand
years ago, the same love that was crucified, died and rose like the sun to
shine throughout the world. To
confess that Jesus is God is to say that God is love, that God’s love, divine
love came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ. But not only that; it is to say that the
sacrificial love demonstrated and lived in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the
love that is shared unconditionally with all, is eternal. It overcomes and outlasts the powerful and
brutal, the sin and evil, even our own sin and evil, even our own death. It doesn’t start with us and it doesn’t end
with us, but love is the most divine, most essential human element. I
don’t know about heaven, about the pearly gates and all that. As rational, liberal scientific folk we
sometimes act as if church is just a club of do-gooders, folks who work to
bring heaven to earth. Certainly that
is our job, to love and love big in this life.
But it is also to have faith and hope that the love we feel and express
in this life, in our relationships, in sacrificial giving, in our finite time
and place, is a foretaste of the love of God that connects us to one another
beyond space and time. God’s love
endures forever. If I
shed a tear it is not out of sadness so much as from the awe and wonder at the
power and beauty of this God of love, at this mysterious voice within. Despite my feeble attempt to live well and
affect the world, it still rises up, wells up from somewhere deep within and
says in a still small voice, "I love you." From
where does it come? We cannot capture it if we try. From where does it come?
From a well deep within, up from the graves of family and friends, from
the faithful who have gone before, crashing forth like the waves of the sea,
singing from the mountain tops, flying in on wings like eagles, down from
beyond edges of the universe, back from the end of time, impossibly, from the
womb of a virgin girl, I love you. I love you.
I am love, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first
and the last.Love never fails. Power
and wealth will come to an end.
Prophecies, they will cease.
Tongues, they will be silenced.
Knowledge, it will pass away.
Love never ends. Eph. 4:14 For this reason I bow my
knees before the Father, |