Sermon — May 9, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Many of the debates within Christianity in the last few decades have come down to one fundamental disagreement: whether Christianity is, ultimately, an inclusive or exclusive religion. Some forms of Christianity are basically exclusive. Take, for example, the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, the two largest Christian denominations in America, are exclusive in both sense. On the one hand, they believe that Christianity is an exclusive path to God: there’s no salvation outside the Church, or outside faith in Jesus. On the other, they’re exclusive in the sense that they exclude people in same-sex relationships from membership in good standing; they exclude women from ordination and most leadership positions; there have even been calls, not just from cranks on the Internet but from bishops, to exclude liberal Catholics like John Kerry or Joe Biden from communion because of some of their political views.

Ironically, on the other end of the political spectrum, many liberals also see Christianity as a religion of exclusion, and simply they simply leave the Church entirely. But there are also many who believe in an inclusive God and turn to more inclusive Christian traditions: The Episcopal Church or the United Church of Christ or whichever it may be. This is not to say that every member of our churches is or should be politically liberal. But it’s simply a fact that in some of the most visible ways, particularly with regards to gender and sexuality, the Episcopal Church is inclusive where others are exclusive. And while we sometimes take these differences for granted, they’re worth thinking about; it’s not obvious why we should disagree. Worshiping the same God, reading the same Bible, relying on the same Holy Spirit to get through our days, we nevertheless end up having diametrically-opposed views on some pretty fundamental questions.

This morning’s readings are a pretty good starting place for this kind of conversation. One of the main themes of the Book of Acts, for example, is the expansion of the Christian movement to include not only the small group of Jewish disciples we know from the Gospels, and not only a growing number of Jews who join them after Jesus’ death, but Gentiles, non-Jews, people from all the nations of the world. In this morning’s reading from Acts, Peter’s speaking in front of a mixed group. In response to a divine vision, he’s gathered together a group of other Jewish followers of Jesus and gone to visit a Roman centurion named Cornelius, a man who’s intrigued by the God of Israel but not himself a Jew. Halfway through Peter’s speech, inspiration strikes; the Holy Spirit begins to spread among the crowd. The Jewish Christians are astounded: is it possible that these Gentiles have received the Holy Spirit? (Acts 10:45) And it’s actually kind of surprising that they’re surprised.

Look, after all, at our psalm! Psalm 98 celebrates precisely the fact that the God of Israel is going to break out beyond the boundaries of the people of Israel. “He remembers his mercy and faithfulness,” yes, “to the house of Israel.” (Psalm 98:4) But now “he has openly shown his righteousness in the sight of the nations,” (98:3) until “all the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God.” (98:4) God is coming to judge the whole world “with righteousness,” and all the peoples of the world “with equity.” (98:10) The whole psalm is a story of the way in which the God of Israel, the God of one small people in one small corner of the world will become a God for all peoples. We find this theme throughout the Old Testament, from God’s promises to Abraham in Genesis that by his offspring all the nations of the world will be blessed (Gen. 22:18) to the prophecy of Isaiah that the house of God will become “a house of prayer for all peoples.” (56:7) If Peter’s companions had been reading their Bibles, they shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the God of Israel would one day become the God of the Gentiles as well.

In a sense, then, the story in Acts is a microcosm of our own struggles over inclusion and exclusion in our much-later church. On one side, you have the preconceptions of the other Jewish Christians who are with Peter: Jesus is the Messiah, the long-awaited leader of the Jewish people, and their savior; but his movement doesn’t include people who are not Jews. On the other side, you have Peter and indeed the Holy Spirit, offering a more inclusive vision of the faith: that Jesus is the savior of all people, that the Holy Spirit will be “poured out even on the Gentiles.” (Acts 10:45)

But that’s not exactly what’s going on. The story of Psalm 98 and Acts 10 is not exactly a story of embracing religious pluralism. It’s the story of the god of one people “winning for himself the victory.” (Psalm 98:2) Likewise in today’s epistle. John writes that “whatever is born of God conquers the world”! (1 John 5:4) “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ,” John writes, “has been born of God.” (1 John 5:1) But what about those who don’t? Suddenly this story of an inclusive God welcoming all the peoples of the world into one fold starts to sound like an exclusive imposing his rule on all the peoples of the world by right of conquest and casting non-believers out of the family of God. You can see how different people could read this and see either an inclusive or an exclusive kind of God.

So we have to go another level deeper. If this God is not just one God among many local gods, but the one God—then what does that mean for people of other faiths?

“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ, has been born of God,” John writes. (1 John 5:1) On one level, this is a radical statement of inclusion. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Messiah has been born of God; Jew or Gentile, gay or straight, transgender or cisgender, male or female or whoever they may be. But it can sound exclusive. We live in the twenty-first century in a cosmopolitan city. Not everyone does believe in Christ. You may notice, though, that John doesn’t go on to say, “and those who don’t believe that Jesus is the Christ have not been born of God.” In fact, this is one of the oldest and simplest logical fallacies. “People who believe in Christ are born of God” doesn’t mean that “people who don’t believe in Christ aren’t born of God,” any more than “people who live in Charlestown live in Boston” means that “people who don’t live in Charlestown don’t live in Boston.” We’re not the only neighborhood in town.

So at least within our own community, the Church is inclusive: whoever believes in Christ is part of the fold, no matter who they are. But that’s not all. In the Gospel, Jesus assures the disciples that “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love… ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’” (John 15:10, 12) This is and has always been Jesus’ central commandment to his disciples: love one another, as I have loved you, with self-giving humility. There are billions of people in the world who are not Christians but practice every day this kind of humble love. Jesus seems to say nothing other than that they abide in his love, whether they think they’re abiding in him or not.

Of course, it’s harder for most of us to accept that other Christians abide in Christ’s love. There’s an old joke that inclusive Christians welcome everyone except exclusive Christians. 

I think self-righteousness is one of the great human flaws. We love to think we know who’s in and who is out—and by the way, we almost always think we’re in. We give ourselves credit for being right and blame the people who we think are wrong. This applies to family life as much as spiritual life, but at least in our world, it seems to infect politics the most. (And before you doubt that this is true, consider this CNN headline from the fall: “Americans hate political opponents more than they love their own party, study finds.”)

It strikes me, though, as I listen to today’s readings, how little we have to do with it. While Peter is still speaking, the Holy Spirit falls upon them. (Acts 10:44) When he retells the story a few days later, he admits that it as “while I was just starting to speak” that the Holy Spirit comes. (11:15) It’s not about what he says, but what God does. “You didn’t choose me,” Jesus says, “I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit.” (John 15:16)

God did not need to become the God of the whole earth. God did not need to come and teach us the way of love. God could have stayed an ordinary God, with a single ordinary chosen people. But God chose to include us in the scope of God’s love. God choose to include us—and the Catholic Church, and millions of loving non-Christians, and, yes, the Southern Baptist Convention—in God’s own family, and God chose to give us Jesus’ many commandments, “so that” we “may love one another.” (John 15:17) We did not choose God, and we cannot choose whom God loves. All we can do is join in the spirit of the psalmist and “shout with joy before the King, the Lord,” because God chose to love us with this kind of love; the love that calls us friends and not servants; the love whose commandments are not burdensome, but the source of life and love.

Amen.

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.