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.

Sermon — April 25, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

I have a great idea for a new course of study for some Christian college to offer one day. I call it “The Jesus MBA”: practical advice for the faithful businessperson taken entirely from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Now, Jesus is not exactly the most traditional business thinker. He’s on firm ground when the case studies are coming from the building trades, where he and Joseph spent most of their lives working. Build your house’s foundation on rock, he says, not sand, or it’s going to wash away when a storm comes; (Matt. 7:24-27) and the entrepreneurs among us can fill in the details about, I don’t know, the importance of raising start-up capital or something. It gets a little sketchier when we get into his cases about agriculture or animal husbandry. Jesus suggests that you should leave behind ninety-nine sheep to go after one that you’ve lost; (Luke 15:4) I think most people would discourage you from risking your whole inventory to find one stray delivery. But with today’s gospel, Jesus’ business advice starts to get downright bizarre.

“I am the Good Shepherd,” he says. “The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” (John 10:11) Jesus isn’t talking about a modern farm. A flock of sheep would’ve spent much of their time grazing out in the wilderness. The shepherd was there not only herd and keep track of the sheep, but also—and maybe primarily—to protect them, from lions and wolves and other, less-honest shepherds. In today’s gospel, Jesus makes an interesting observation about employees and owners and their relative incentives. The “hired hand,” he says, “sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away…because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.” (John 10:12-13) But the good shepherd, who owns the sheep, is ready to give his life to protect his investment. So, never delegate to an employee what you could do yourself. Pay in company stock, not in cash, so everyone has some skin in the game. And never forget that your business is more important than anything else—even life itself.

I’ll admit that “The Jesus MBA” will not be the best business degree in the world.

Of course, I’m joking. Jesus isn’t trying to teach his disciples about business. They know all they need to know about building, or fishing, or shepherding already. In fact, in most cases he’s taking common sense and turning it upside down, because he’s trying to teach them who he is and what he’s going to do and how he wants them to love—and it’s almost never what they’d expect.

“I am the Good Shepherd,” Jesus says. “The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” (John 10:11) “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down…I have authority to lay it down and I have authority to pick it up again.” (John 10:18) “In this we know love,” the first letter of John explains, “that he laid down his life for us—and we also ought to lay down our lives for one another.” (1 John 3:16)

When we hear this on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, we hear it with our “Easter ears” on. We know the story already, and so we understand at least a part of the meaning in a way that the confused disciples at this stage of the gospel do not. The Good Shepherd will lay down his life, and he will pick it up again; he will die, and he will rise again, and it will be the embodiment of what he means by love. Jesus dies to set us free from death.

But this isn’t the only way that you can “lay down your life” for another person. We see this in our reading from the First Letter of John almost right away. When John says that “we ought to lay down our lives for one another,” he’s not talking about death. “When a person has the world’s goods,” he says—this means, more literally, “When a person has all that they need to live on”—“and sees another in need, and doesn’t help—How will God’s love abide in them?” (1 John 3:17) To “lay down your life” doesn’t necessarily mean to give up your life. It means to set aside your own interests and to prioritize the interests of another, to lay down your consuming self-concern, for a moment, to help another; and then, like Jesus, to take your life up again.

There’s a phrase we translate “and yet refuses help.” (1 John 3:17) The original text of the letter reads, “whoever a person sees a brother in need and closes off his σπλάγχνα (splagkhna) from him.” Σπλάγχνα (splagkhna) being, in this case, the delightfully-onomatopoetic Greek word for “guts.” It’s a metaphor for “compassion.” The compassionate person who sees another person in pain feels it in their own guts. When we refuse to help—when we shut off our compassion—we set up a barrier between ourselves and them. We prevent them from entering into our hearts, and close them off instead.

But if offer that help, if we extend that compassion, if we lay down our own lives and concerns so that we can have room to attend to theirs, it’s as if they become a part of us. We begin to relate to them not as the hired hand relates to the sheep, who he does not own, whom he’s merely paid a daily wage to protect, but as the shepherd whose flock they are, who’s willing to lay down his very life for his sheep because, in a strange way, they are his life; they are a part of who he is.

Jesus is not interesting in teaching us how to be better hired hands, or even how to be a better boss. The same logic prevails. He’s teaching us that to love someone means to be in solidarity with them: to protect them and care for them as if they were our own, and not part of some other flock. Like the rest of the case studies that make up “The Jesus MBA,” this saying about the Good Shepherd isn’t about business; it’s not about how to become a more productive or profitable shepherd. It’s a lesson about love. And it’s the lesson that love ultimately means solidarity.

In ordinary times, this idea of love as solidarity would be compelling. How much better is a marriage, or a friendship, when we see ourselves as partners in solidarity with one another, than it is when act like Cold War superpowers, protecting our interests and our spheres of influence as we stare across the Iron Curtain? Of course, love means that we lay down parts of our lives for one another, as long as it’s mutual.

But in extraordinary times, solidarity becomes even more important.

I think of the children and young adults who’ve been asked to lay down the best parts of their lives on behalf of their more-vulnerable grandparents and neighbors, who gave up playdates and proms and first semesters at college to stop a virus that, statistically speaking, isn’t nearly as bad for them. That’s love. I think of the handwritten notes posted on the walls of my apartment building all spring, with a half-dozen variations on the theme: “I’m young and healthy and willing to buy groceries for you,” with a name, and a phone number. That’s solidarity. I think of the volunteers who’ve poured hours of their time into booking vaccine appointments, of the friends who’ve called one another to check in, of all the million different ways in which people have laid down their own lives to care for one another this year.

I think as well of the tremendous blossoming of racial solidarity this year. It’s ironic that a phrase like “Black Lives Matter” has become a divisive one. It’s an expression of solidarity. It goes without saying that in our society, white people’s lives matter, and “blue lives” matter. But for white people in particular to say that “Black lives matter” is in part to say, “Black lives matter to me.” It is to open the protective armor that shields us from another community’s pain and say that what we belong to one another, that we are part of one another, that what affects one of us affects us all; that none of us can be free until all of us are free.

We dip our toes, today, into the next “new normal.” And as the months go on, we’ll face a series of choices. Do we return to the transactional individualism of the hired hand, who keeps his own interests at the center, who flees and saves himself when things get hard? Or do we continue to lay down our lives for one another, to extend our compassion to one another, to align ourselves in solidarity with one another in love?

I don’t know—I genuinely don’t know—what the next few months will bring, what changes we will carry out of this year into the future. But I do know that “we know love by this: that he laid down his life for us— and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” (1 John 3:16)

So “let us love,” John writes, “not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” (1 John 3:18) Let us love, not as hired hands, but as good shepherds. And let us always remember, when our solidarity fails, and we feel the guilt of not quite having loved, that above all else, Christ is in solidarity with us, “and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts.” (1 John 3:19) Amen.

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)