EASTER III: A SENSE OF WHOSE WE ARE

1 JOHN 4:7-21

MAY 21, 2000

THOMAS H. YORTY – WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

A sense of whose you are. Years ago, the summer after my first year of college I was lucky to get one of the coveted jobs for college students in a Pittsburgh steel mill. My brother-in-law’s father got me the job. He was a 35-year veteran of J&L Steel. A big, cigar-chomping, no-nonsense, hard-hatted foreman. Al Bell. Our bosses for the summer were the regular laborers through the year. They were called "pushers" because they pushed us hard, real hard. These guys loved having college kids to do the dirty work. They were tough, mean, unsympathetic. Hard driving. Earl the Pearl, Stevie Wonder, Big Frank. I can still picture them.

The first thing they asked shrewdly was, "who got you your job." The answers varied. "My aunt who works in purchasing; my sister who is Mr. So and So’s secretary; my grandfather whose friend is the manager of sales" and so on. When the question came to me and I said Al Bell, a look of terror raced across the faces of the two pushers who stood before me. "You mean Al Bell the foreman?" they asked respectfully. "Yes, Mr. Bell, he’s worked here for a long time," I said. The word quickly got out. I was Al Bell’s appointee. The waters parted. The red carpet rolled out. "Treat the kid nice, real nice," they said. For a couple of days I wondered if we had the same Al Bell. The Al Bell I knew was the grandfather of my nieces with whom I had seen him play on the living room floor. He was the faithful husband who doted over his wife. He was the guy who always asked me how my baseball team was doing and what my batting average was. Sweet, bubbly, always smiling. But at the plant he was feared. I belonged to Al Bell that summer.

We are talking these weeks of Easter about our new life in the Risen Christ. Gaining a sense in post-Easter – as Marcus Borg might say – not just about the Risen Christ but also about who we are as a Resurrection people. Today I want us to think not so much about who we are but whose we are.

When John wrote his letter to the embattled church most people had good reason to be asking whose are we? By this time, the church, Christians, had been around long enough to have become a thorn in the side of just about everyone. Jewish communities from which they came started drawing the line, rejecting the new Christian worship and rituals. The Roman government which tried to take an enlightened laissez-faire approach at first was increasingly annoyed. The era of martyrdom began. Crucifixions. Lions. Catacombs ensued. Pagans and heretics tried their best to high-jack Christian doctrine and as many members as possible. Beneath and between the lines of John’s letter is a seething crisis. A controversy of identity.

So John’s letter is a compass in the storm. Rejected on every front. State, synagogue, culture, their own families. John gives the early Christians clear direction to navigate their identity quandary. A pathway for negotiating the theological shoals of a hostile world. "Little children, you are from God," he says. "For the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world….let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. God is love….in this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent his Son for us…. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them." 27 times in this short passage John uses the word love in direct association with and by way of defining who God is and whose, therefore, we are. The marketplace of religious ideas is no less prolific or competitive today. The Wall St. Journal recently published an article entitled, "Redefining God." "Across the country, the faithful are redefining God," the article says.

 

"Dissatisfied with conventional images of an authoritarian or paternalistic deity, people are embracing quirky, individualistic conceptions of God to suit their own spiritual needs," says the story. I am not saying that old authoritarian and paternalistic iimages of God do not need revamping. Many of the images the story in the Journal offers are nature images. I have no problem with them as metaphors for God.

 

But in John’s time, much like our own, there were lots of definitions and ideas about God swirling around. So what John introduces to the flux of debate about God is not an image or metaphor at all. What he offers is the simple, radical act of God’s initiative to love us. What is so revolutionary about John’s answer to the Christian identity crisis is this: we know God not as a distant memory of the human race; or as an intellectual theory; or as the name for all that happens that we cannot name. We know God, says John, by being in a personal relationship with God. The word John uses for this is love. Like the tango, it takes two. Love, says John, is not only at the core of God, it is the core of God. Love is an experience not a doctrine. God loves us first. Knowing love we are compelled to love God and one another. That’s how love works.

We are talking today about God and love. About gaining a sense of whose we are. A very wise preaching professor once said, "never use the word love in a sermon unless the word is used in the biblical story on which you are preaching." Love is an overused word. We run the risk of turning every sentence with love in it into a meaningless cliche. You could say the same thing about the word God. So revered in Jewish faith is God’s name that speaking it is prohibited. But in popular culture the word is everywhere. Once eyebrows were raised if you said God in anything but a worshipful way – today the word is used like a spare tire to lift flat conversation. God and love. Gaining a sense of whose we are. Maybe for starters, we would do well to join our Quaker brothers and sisters, and just be silent.

Barbara Brown Taylor says the challenge in these days of wall to wall words, call-in talk shows, online chat rooms, headlines and sound bites that dumb down and take sides, the challenge is to hear those words God and love again anew. Some of us might feel like the John Updike character – a Presbyterian minister in Patterson, NJ in 1910 – who loses his faith then takes to selling encyclopedias. Huge repositories of words and information he tries to believe in. Until one day about to close on a deal, his spiel collapses and he tells his prospective customer the last thing she and her children want is all that information. "All that information," he says worthy of any modern seeker, "it breaks your heart at the end, because it leaves you as alone and bewildered as you were not knowing anything."

The spiritual hunger of our time is not for more intellectual understanding of the Creator – another theory or a new mantra – it is for a personal relationship with God. Part of our problem seeing or admitting this is that one wing of the church has made personal religion distasteful for another wing of the church. Just as that offended wing has made intellectual inquiry distasteful for the folks who advocate personal religion. Another reason is frankly sometimes we don’t want a relationship with God. We want a magician. We want a genie in a bottle who will take away our pain or difficulty. But the faith that sustained the early church through rejection and martyrdom was faith in John’s claim that God is love. No longer did those early Christians regard themselves as belonging to Ceasar. They now knew they were held in the strong embrace of the love of God.

One preacher puts it this way. I do not believe God moves in thunderstorms or speaks in accents of natural disasters. I do not believe God interferes in the often tragic course of the world’s activity; I do not believe God is a great puppeteer who somehow pulls the strings for good or bad, depending upon his temper or ours. Rather, I believe God has made the world and loves it so much that he has given himself into our hands and thus made his work our opportunity. God has chosen not to act in the form of phenomena. God has chosen now to act in the form of men and women who know him and love God and serve God. By God’s love for us in Jesus Christ we become in ourselves, in our own persons, in our daily work – acts of God. Evidence, living proof that the God who acted in the lives of the prophets, the martyrs, and the saints still acts in the likes and the lives of us.

It is fitting today – time and talent Sunday and a day on which we commission another class of care givers – that we acknowledge whose we are. We are not simply the objects of a benevolent, wrathful or indifferent God; pieces of furniture to be arranged at will, rather we are, all of us, commissioned by the coming of God in Christ to be the action and activity of God in the world. For through us, through our patience, our labor, our love in a world easily content without God, God will be made known and served.

That is whose we are. You can’t really talk about God without also talking about your relationship with God. Because the personal relationship is the beginning of a whole new way of life. One of the great joys I had that summer in the steel mill was telling the regular guys, the Earl the Pearls and Stevie Wonders and Big Franks of the rolling mill that Al Bell was not such a bad guy after-all. Serious yes. Focused for sure. But tender too.

I spoke from experience. That’s the Al Bell I was in relationship with. That, it seems to me, is our great commission. Telling others whose we are by sharing with them something of the limitless love and care of God we have experienced. There are skeptics to be sure. Sometimes as hardened and unapproachable as grizzled steel workers. But part of the fun of using your time and talent and being a care giver is figuring out how to get the message across, then watching disbelief melt away.

So for followers of the Risen Christ, knowing whose we are – held in the arms of God’s love – always means our becoming the arms of God, around some vexing issue or some hurting people whom God does love.

Amen.