Sermon — May 2, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
You can find the readings for the Fifth Sunday of Easter here.
There’s a paradox at the heart of this morning’s beautiful reading from the First Letter of John. “There is no fear in love,” John writes, “but perfect love casts out fear… whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.” (1 John 4:18) But any of us who have ever loved know that this is far from true. Fear and love are linked. The more I love, the more afraid I am that something bad will happen. I don’t fear losing my pen; I fear my child getting sick or getting hurt. The more we love something or someone, the more likely they are to keep us up at night, and it’s hard to understand the idea that whoever feels this fear “has not yet reached perfection in love.”
Alongside this tragic kind of fear, though, is another one. “Perfect love” may “cast out fear,” but we’re continually anxious that in fact we love imperfectly. Most parents worried that they’re bad parents, that they love their children with a less-than-perfect love, that they’re somehow making the wrong decisions or letting their kids down. Most professionals working in fields that they love are beset by “imposter syndrome,” by the sneaking suspicion that everyone else is doing their job well and they alone are the imperfect ones. A quick online search turns up articles on imposter syndrome in doctors, teachers, therapists, programmers, investment bankers, and baristas. Only people who love their craft can worry so much about imperfection in it. We hear that “perfect love casts out fear,” but we spend literally billions of dollars a year on prescription medications and cosmetic treatments and therapeutic sessions in the fear that we are imperfect lovers. (Please excuse the double entendre.)
This is the kind of fear that John means, I think, when he says that “perfect love casts out fear”: it’s not the fear of loss, it’s the fear of judgment. It’s not the fear of losing the person we love, but the fear of being found to love imperfectly. You might think, then, that if “perfect love casts out fear,” we simply need to become more perfect. “Let us love one another” more perfectly, the sermon might go. (4:7) Let us abide in God more deeply. (4:16) Let us never hate our brother or sister whom we have seen, let us love God whom we have not seen, (4:20) and God’s love will be perfected in us. (4:17) And then, when we reach that point of perfect love, we can finally live our lives free from fear, because our perfect love will finally have cast out our fear of imperfection.
I’m sorry to say—no, I’m glad to say—this is completely wrong.
John is, I think, primarily talking about the fear that we have of judgment, the fear of being imperfect in our love of God and especially of our neighbor. But when John writes that “perfect love casts out fear,” he’s not writing about our perfect love casting out our fears. He’s claiming that, by some mysterious mechanism, God’s perfect love casts out our fears about our imperfect loves.
“We love,” John writes, “because God first loved us.” (4:19) The story of our love always begins with God. It’s as though God’s love is a pitcher full of water, and we are buckets. As that stream of love pours down, some of it splashes back up toward God, and some of it fills up our souls, and some of it overflows and spills down into our neighbors’ buckets all around us. But whatever that love is, and wherever it flows, the stream begins with God.
God’s love is not an abstract kind of love. It’s not a stirring in the deep celestial heart of God. It’s not a word spoken through the prophets. It’s not a mystical encounter in the depths of human prayer. It’s a person. It’s Jesus. “In this,” John writes, “God’s love is revealed among us: that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us, and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (4:9-10) In this is love, in other words: that in response to all our fear, and all our pain, and all our brokenness, God didn’t simply write a love letter or a note of condolence from afar. God came to us, and walked with us. In Jesus’ life, and death, and resurrection, God offered Godself as a sacrifice for us. God came down and reunited us to God, without our doing anything at all.
“In this,” John writes, “love has been perfected among us.” (4:17) Namely in that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” (4:16) It’s not our love that needs to become more perfect. It’s God’s love, which has already been perfected in us, who abide in God. This abiding is not something that we need to do. It’s something who we are. It’s the “abiding” of a branch in the vine to which it is connected and from which it draws all its strength. (John 15:4)
So, it’s not our “perfect love” that casts out fear, as if we would not be afraid of judgment if only we could love more perfectly. It’s God’s love that “has been perfected among us,” and here’s the key, “so that we may have boldness on the day of judgment.” (1 John 4:17) This whole story of God’s love for us made flesh in Jesus, of God’s love perfected among us and abiding with us, comes about so that we can stand up in the face of judgment and have no fear, because our love is not on trial. Our love is not open to any human judgment. The only trial happened long ago on the cross, and the verdict came down from an empty tomb: we have been found innocent, imperfect as we are. And in the face of God’s eternal, perfect love, there is no human judgment that we need to fear.
And so we are free to love. We’re to love boldly, abundantly, not fearing that we are imperfect in our love but knowing that we’re imperfect and that, nevertheless, the perfect love of the God in whom we abide flows through us every day.
It probably won’t surprise you to hear that we spend a lot of time talking about early child development in my apartment, being, as we are, a priest, a social worker, and a very small child. Any psychologist could tell you that ideally, children’s early development is rooted in a strong and secure attachment to one or two loving, stable caregivers—often but not always parents. With a secure connection to this loving “home base,” the child can explore the world, venturing further and further away in the knowledge that they have a safe place to return. Even a human adult’s imperfect love is so powerful that it allows the child to learn to love, and to grow in love. And the same pattern continues throughout our lives: we thrive when we exist in relationship with a mentor, a friend, another person who loves us deeply and unconditionally, who can reassure us that despite all our fears, we are loved.
This is how it is for us with God. God’s not quite like a human friend, to be fair. Even those who are the most experienced in prayer can’t just call God up on the phone to hear her voice. But it is God’s love that shows us how to love, even if we don’t realize that’s what’s happening. It is the strength, and the security, and the stability of God’s unchanging and patient love that gives us the boldness to explore, to experiment, to try the best we can to love one another with boldness and sometimes to fail, knowing that God’s love abides in us and we abide in God.
It’s no accident that the first letter of John only ever addresses the audience in one of two ways: “Little children” and “Beloved.” “Beloved,” John writes, “let us love one another.” (4:7) “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love.” (4:11) John can only exhort us to love after he’s addressed us as “beloved,” as the ones who have been loved.
We love because we are beloved. We love because God first loved us. So when we judge ourselves, or others judge our love, when we worry that our imperfect love is not enough, may we remember that it’s really God’s perfect love acting in us. For “in this, love has been perfected among us, so that we may have boldness on the day of judgment.” (4:17) Amen.