Sermon — April 18, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” (1 John 3:2)
Human beings are remarkable among animals for having an extremely long period of childhood. It’s not only that infants are born unable to walk or talk or feed themselves, unlike so many mammals that spring up immediately onto four somewhat-wobbly legs and walk around. It’s that human children spend years, decades even, in a completely unproductive state, growing and learning and exploring their surroundings, before we can sustain our lives ourselves.
I was listening to an interview this morning with a researcher named Alison Gopnik. She’s a psychologist and a philosopher at UC Berkeley; her work has ranged from child development to parenting to artificial intelligence. She points out that childhood is a fantastic example of the trade-off between what computer scientists call the trade-off between “exploring” and “exploiting”—the longer the childhood, the longer the period of fruitless and unproductive exploration, the more powerful a base of knowledge and intelligence and skill the adults can “exploit” to provide for themselves and their society. Children’s role is not to work or produce or achieve; it’s to play, and to grow, and to learn. And that play and that growth and that learning involves more than a little failure, more than a few spilled spoonfuls of mac and cheese to be cleaned up later, more than a couple of bruised foreheads and scraped knees. But the longer that period of play and imagination, the longer that period of uniquely-childlike openness and wonder and awe, the more resilient and adaptable the adult.
“See what kind of love the Father has given us,” John writes, “that we may be called children of God.” (1 John 3:1) People sometimes throw the phrase “Children of God” around if they’re trying to say “human beings” while sounding extra-spiritual, or if they’re trying to make the ethical point every person is a child of God, and should be treated with dignity. And this is true. But there’s much more in this phrase, “children of God.”
For one thing, it’s not vague at all. We are not the children of a generic God, a universal-but-impersonal life force that suffuses all things and endows them with an inalienable dignity. Our God is a personal god, a specific god; our God is as Peter puts it in our first reading, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” (Acts 3:13) the god who walked among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the god who suffered and died and rose again and ate a piece of broiled fish—not baked, or poached, or stewed. (Luke 24:42) We are not “the children of divinity” any more than our children are “the children of parenthood.” “We are God’s children now,” and our God is not an abstract Being but a specific and personal god, a God in relationship with whom we always exist.
But more than that, when we say that we’re “children of God,” we aren’t simply saying that God loves us (which God does) or that God cares for us (which God does). We’re saying that we are incomplete, immature, not yet grown into the full stature of the human beings we are meant to be; that we, in some sense, not just child-like but childish. But we’re also saying that God sees us as we see children—that God expects us to be imperfect, and incomplete, and loves us all the same. In fact, God’s parental love is more perfect than ours, and so we can say that God sees and relates to us as we aspire to see and relate to children, at our best: sometimes exasperated, sometimes confused, but always patient and loving, delighting in our constant growth and change.
So “we are God’s children now,” imperfect and immature as we may be. But what will we be when we grow up? The question every child loves to ask. But “what we will be,” of course, “has not yet been revealed.” (1 John 3:2) I love the dynamic in this verse between the present and the future. We are already now God’s spiritual children; but we are not yet grown into spiritual adulthood. We are already now loved by God, and while we may love God deeply, we don’t love God as equals. We are already now beautiful in our imperfection, but that beauty is sometimes the beauty of a child, which is to say, a beautiful mess: the beauty of a pound of glitter dumped onto the floor (or sometimes on your sibling’s bed) in all its irritating iridescence.
And the most beautiful part of this—in fact, I think the grace in this—is that it’s as true for the wisest and most mature of us as it is for the youngest. The second and third letters of John identify their author simply as “the elder,” (3 John 1) and while scholars debate precisely who this elder was and whether it’s quite the same John as the Gospel of John or the First Letter of John or the Revelation to John, without a doubt the one who writes these words is advanced in faith; a leader in the church; a wise, mature, spiritually-experienced follower of Christ. And when he writes to us, to all who read this letter, whether in an ancient church or a modern one, he writes, “Beloved, we are God’s children now.” Not you, but we, we all, apostles and elders and new converts and newborns alike, are children of God. Beside the wisdom of God even the wisest among us are like proud toddlers rocking their newborn siblings for the first time, while dad desperately hovers within arm’s reach. This wise elder John, in writing his letter, knows that in God’s eyes, we are all still children. Even the most patient parents are just children learning to raise a child for the first time. Even the wisest elders are just children learning to grow old for the first time. Even the most faithful spouses are just children learning to love for the first time.
And what a gift, to know we’re all God’s children now. What a gift to know that God sees us through God’s loving parental eyes. What a gift to know that our deepest failures and our greatest successes alike are like child’s play before the God who sees all things and knows all things.
But of course, that’s not the end of the story, because like all children, we are growing up. We may dream of growing up to be firefighters like Everett, or pirates like Peg-Leg Greg—my authentic pirate name—but of course, “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” (To be fair, Everett may just be a firefighter.) We live our lives traveling one day at a time into an uncertain future, a future in which the things we will become has not yet been revealed. And there are really two kinds of future here. One is the future of our own lives; we don’t yet know how we will change and grow in the weeks and months and years ahead. But the other is the future in what theologians call an “eschatological” sense, in other words on God’s time, in the new heavens and the new earth that God has promised to establish at the end of time. It has not yet been revealed what our ultimately reality will be, what we will be when God makes all things new, what we will see when we see God face to face. Except that it has been revealed, because “we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2) We will be like Christ, and we have seen him as he is. Jesus is, in a sense, what we will be when we grow up; his compassion, his humility, his faithful, patient love, are the shape our lives are built to grow into, the firefighter’s uniform we yearn one day to don.
So we are God’s children now. And we’re growing up into the full stature of the love of God revealed to us in Christ. But how do we get there? What’s the “growing food,” as Murray’s preschool teachers say, that feeds us on our way?
There are, I think, two things: to play and to pray.
To play is to indulge our imaginations, to engage in that kind of openness, that kind of wonder and awe, that characterizes the small child. To look at our own patterns of behavior, and our own ways of life, and our own social world, and say: “Why, though?” We adults play in different ways from children. We read fiction and history and expand our minds with the thoughts of other worlds. We march and protest and imagine a world that works differently from our own. Perhaps most importantly, we sit on the floor or log onto a family Zoom and let our children teach us what it is to be human, what it is to be “God’s children now.” To play is to put down our ideas about the way we are and the way the world is and to imagine a world that one day could be, a world that God is slowly bringing about.
To pray is, ultimately, to live in that last phrase, “for we will see him as he is.” To pray is to see Christ as he is, to encounter the living God, again and again, in meditation and in worship and in service to the poor, and the sick, and the imprisoned, (Matt. 25:31-46) and to children. (Mark 9:37)
There was a metaphor that was common among ancient Christian authors, and which I’ve always loved. It is as though God is a fire, and we are iron pokers. If we are sitting by the fireside, detached from God, we really have very little to do with one another. We are cold iron; God is hot fire. But if we abide in God, if we are thrust into the fire, we grow hot. We take on some of the characteristics of fire. In a sense, we become fire, or at least fire-like. And so it is, they said, with our souls. We become like God because we see God, and the vision of God transforms our very eyes, transforms the way we see each other and ourselves.
And so we turn again and again to God. We turn to God to pray in moments of peace or frustration or grief, and we draw near to God. We turn to God in worship and in song, and rest in God’s presence there. We seek God in the faces of the least and the lost, and pray that we may find him walking there. We play and imagine and exult in the joy of being a child of God. And slowly, slowly, our iron hearts come closer to the warmth of God’s love. And slowly, slowly, we children of God grow up into the godlike love that is laid out for us.
It’s a funny thing, this “growing up into God.” We don’t always know where we are going. We don’t always even know it’s going on. We sometimes think that we’re the masters of our own fate, that we’re grown up already, fully formed, that we deserve all the praise for our successes and bear all the blame for our failures. But every one of us is still now a child of God. Every one of us is still somewhere on a long life’s slow transformation. And every one of us guided by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, as we grow slowly into our truest selves—which is to say, the versions of ourselves that are most shaped like Christ.
For “beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)