I John 3: 1 See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 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. 3 And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
To get at that first question in the outline, Why did John write the words we have just heard today? I present the following story with apologies to all you Sherlock Holmes fans:
Dr. John Watson entered the living room of the home on Baker Street in London, that he shared with his brilliant and illustrious friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, there to find Sherlock seated in a chair by the fireside, reading a Bible.
“I didn’t know you were a religious man,” said Dr. Watson.
“I’m not,” replied Holmes. “But I always enjoy sorting through clues at the scene of a crime.”
Watson stood in stunned silence for a moment before saying, “Odd, but I’ve never thought of I John as any sort of crime scene. More like an inspiring meditation about love, faith, eternal life and virtue. Yet I confess that as John’s exhortations, like ‘Beloved, let us love one another,’ and ‘whoever hates his brother does not know God,’ and about overcoming the world and having faith, pile up, the more I start to feel like I’m adrift on a sea of pious platitudes and vague religious generalities, each one surging up randomly like waves in the ocean, but with no direction nor destination for guidance. I start out reading First John inspired, and arrive at the last chapter tired.”
“That, my Dear Watson” said Sherlock Holmes, “is because you did not look beneath the surface of the waves for the sharks and sea monsters.”
“Now you’ve lost me; now I’m really adrift,” replied Dr. Watson.
Sherlock said, “To continue your nautical metaphor, let’s say that you were sailing at sea and came across an oil slick, some life rafts with people in them, and various other pieces of furniture and flotsam bobbing about. What would you think had happened?”
“Why, that there had been a shipwreck,” replied Dr. Watson.
“Precisely,” said Mr. Holmes. “And I John is the scene of a church wreck. John’s audience are the survivors of a church that has been torpedoed by false teachers. All those ‘pious platitudes and vague religious generalities,’ as you call them, are actually John’s bandages for their spiritual wounds, and antidotes to the theological poisons they’ve been made to drink.”
“How did you see all that in John’s letter?” Dr. Watson asked.
“Very elementary, my dear Watson. In chapter 2, we read about ‘those people who left us, but were not of us.’ I take it from that that there’s been a big rupture and some people have left. From everything else that John says in this letter, we can logically conclude that it was over teachings that were contrary to what John says.”
“Like what?” Watson asked.
“John writes repeatedly about virtue and not persisting willfully in sin. So I take it that the people who left were pretty loose and licentious, by contrast. But from all the times that John talks about confessing our sins and not claiming to be sinless, I take it they also claimed to be just that, sinless. Then take the times that John writes about Jesus Christ having come in the flesh. Shall we not deduce that they taught that Jesus had not come in the flesh? We know from church history that some people taught that Jesus was just a sort of disembodied projection from heaven, untouched and disconnected from our flesh-and-blood reality. If you believe that, then you should also believe that it doesn’t really matter what we do with our bodies. So, sin away all you like, because we are sin-less.”
“That’s monstrous!” replied Dr. Watson. “And ludicrous!”
“That’s not all,” Holmes said. “From all the times that John reminds his disciples to love each other, and that love and virtue are the true signs of God and of eternal life, I take it that these self-appointed leaders and teachers were also quite hateful, hostile and spiteful toward anyone who disagreed with them. God help you if you so much as looked at them with any doubt or suspicion. Whenever John calls his friends, ‘Beloved’ and urges them to love each other, and assures them of God’s love, it’s because those false teachers left their poor disciples feeling quite discouraged, divided, confused and condemned. ”
“How did they get away with that?” Watson asked.
“Well, from all the times that John uses the words ‘to know’ and ‘knowledge,’ I suspect that the false teachers did too. If history is any guide, they probably claimed to know some special, secret, occult knowledge that lifted them up beyond the realm of good and evil and moral accountability, and therefore, above and beyond any criticism or correction from others.”
“What an odd combination of beliefs,” Watson said.
“Not all that odd, really,” Holmes replied. “Every generation has its version of that. But for all the times that John says that they overcame the world or the devil through their faith, I take it to mean that he’s writing to the few wounded and exhausted survivors who kept the faith until the church-busters finished up and moved on, probably to colonize and dominate other churches.”
After a brief pause, Holmes went on to say, “And though I’m not a religious man, myself, it’s why I’m glad you Christians have the Bible. It’s a source of authority independent of yourselves, to which all of you are held accountable, leaders and teachers, as well as followers and students. If it seems harsh or hard to follow at times, any attempt to discard it could actually lead to a lack of accountability and more authoritarianism, even to abuse, like what John’s friends suffered, but without recourse to any other authority. I’m especially glad that it requires you to love people the way Jesus did, even nonbelievers like me.”
That little story is my attempt to answer the first question in the sermon outline: Why did John write these words? Most likely to help and heal the survivors of spiritual abuse of the kind I had Sherlock Holmes describe. I can’t prove that 100 %, but it makes the most sense of the letter and today’s passage. If so, I John becomes more than just a collection of inspired and inspiring thoughts. It also becomes a sterling piece of pastoral care for survivors of spiritual abuse, as well as a beautifully crafted rebuttal of the kinds of abuse they had suffered.
Such spiritual battering and bruising is not just a First Century thing. A lot of us who came to Anabaptism through the works of John Howard Yoder are now having sleepless nights. But our distress is nothing compared to what his actual victims still suffer. Such abuse has wounded the relationships of many people with God and the church, as well as with themselves. But to some degree, I suspect that we all can identify with having our sense of worth before God, self and others beaten down, just from life itself, whether from bullying or rejection, whether from some catastrophe or injustice. Or if ever we got that scary diagnosis from the doctor? Or if someone we loved did? When there was a rupture and a cut-off in the family? Or whenever we face or feel something about ourselves that we’re afraid to let others know? Or what about our own mortality, and the limits that death sets to not only our time on earth, but to our sense of worth? Such sufferings and losses often leave us struggling with doubt, fear and shame, wondering whether we are truly loved by God, or are even lovable.
If so, we might be interested in the medication that John has for the readers of his first letter. I call it our “resurrection identity remedy.” Which brings us to the second question: What is the good news of healing and comfort in this passage? Or, How does John seek to heal and comfort his bruised, broken and beloved friends?
First, he does so by reminding us of our true identity, an identity based in God, rather than all the false identities that the world, the flesh and the devil are always pushing on us. Ever since the serpent said to Eve, “You can be like God, knowing good from evil,” we are prey to offers of false identities from every other snake in the grass, ready-made like complete dress suits. These ready-made identities are appealing at first glance. They promise to make us look smart enough, or slim enough, or young enough or successful and powerful and polished enough, so that we’ll be loved enough. And loveable enough. They’re sewn from what we do, how well we do it, what we want, and what we own. They’re also advertised in contrast over and against other people, so that we think we look better in contrast to them. Like if we identify ourselves most as conservatives as opposed to those liberals, or as progressives in contrast to those reactionaries, as Republican or Democrat, American, foreign born, or immigrant, by our family’s heritage or history, by our denomination, by our income bracket or our social class, by our sexual desires or even our gender, especially in contrast with their alleged opposite. “At least we’re better than them!” we might think. Each of these identities so-called has some element of truth and even of giftedness. But they can also become idols that distract us from God, each other and our real selves.
Like any bad suit of cheap clothes, they finally turn out to be synthetic, stifling, constricting and incomplete. Once we show weakness, or failure, once they don’t look so good on us anymore, we become the targets of the same kinds of bullying, breaks and bruises that John’s friends suffered. Then we’re left feeling about ourselves like something the cat dragged in. Then, to deflect the fear and the pain, we may treat others that way, too.
The true identity that Dr. John points to begins with the words, “See what love the Father has lavished upon us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” Which means that all the other ways in which the world ranks and evaluates us are beneath us. Children of the most high God? Adopted family of the Maker, Master and king of the universe? Does that not make us also royalty? And heirs of all that is God has? God’s Beloved? That’s the same name and identity which he spoke to Jesus at his baptism, and on the mount of Transfiguration! The next time we feel like dirt, or someone would treat us like dirt, let’s do some spiritual self-defense and say, “No; I’m a royal child of the Creator of heaven and earth, loved so much that whenever God looks at me, he sees Jesus.”
John repeats that title for good measure, and the word, “Beloved.” “Beloved, NOW are we the children of God.” Beloved by God, of course, but also beloved of John himself. In fact, John uses the word “Beloved” to address his friends so many times in this letter, that it’s like a steady drumbeat to drown out the drumbeat of shame and condemnation that his audience must have suffered.
But because the world is so persistent in its efforts to define us, Dr. John prescribes a spiritual antibiotic against the infection of worldly value judgments when he adds, “The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” So, if Christ “came to his own, and his own did not receive him,” and if “The light came into this world, and the world did not comprehend it,” why then should we look to that same world to tell us who we are and what we’re worth? Let’s not allow others to enslave us with offers of approval nor threats of rejection. Society’s values and those of God are so different, that, when it comes to questions of our worth and identity, we’re not even on the same page.
And when such an identity is still hard to believe, remember that still more about us waits to be seen, as John says in verse 2: “What we will be has not yet been revealed.” What God is making of us, God alone knows the entirety. But “What we do know is this,” John says. “[W]hen he is revealed,[that is, Christ] we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” The return and the revealing of the Risen Christ to all the world will also be the revealing of our true, eternal resurrection selves.
That makes of Jesus not only the supreme revelation of who God is to us, it makes of Jesus the clearest revelation of who we are to God. Jesus is God’s supreme disclosure of how God sees us and treasures us, as his Beloved, and what God is making of us. Our identity is no longer based on what we want, but on what God wants for us. We are not defined in God’s eyes by what we do or have done, or by what has been done to us, but by what God himself has done for us through Jesus. That makes the first Resurrection Easter Sunday appearance of the Risen Jesus not only a foretaste of our true and eternal destiny, but of our true and eternal identity. We not only share a resurrection destiny with Christ, we share a resurrection identity with him.
Now of course it’s still a struggle to trust God and to believe the outrageously gracious things that God declares about us. As we age and enter our last years of this life, society says things like, we’re “wasting away” and “losing the bloom of youth.” But can’t we say instead that our eternal and beloved selves are emerging and unfolding through the surrendering of our youth and our years? That makes all of us works in progress, baffling, mysterious, complicated and confusing even to ourselves, let alone each other. I thought of this when someone reminded me this week of a song, one that neither of us had sung for 40 years, by the Gaither Trio, called “Something Beautiful.” The refrain goes:
“Something beautiful, something good
All my confusion, he understood.
And all I had to offer him, was brokenness and strife.
But he made something beautiful of my life.”
How confidently we used to sing that song 40 years ago, especially the words, “But he made something beautiful of my life.” Past tense, as though our transformation was a “one and done” event. On a Tuesday, most likely. And compared to what I had been into, or was on the verge of getting into, yes, God indeed made a big, beautiful difference in my life.
But this week I was all the more struck by the words, “Confusion… brokenness and strife.” Those never seem to go away entirely. Yet they are the very things with which Jesus is making something beautiful of our lives, and not the powerful and popular things that the world says are most important about us, like our income, education, achievements, titles, power and productivity.
If I could change anything about that song, it would be to sing, “He’s making something beautiful of my life,” present tense, and future. And he’ll keep making something beautiful of our lives all the way up until our resurrection and the day of Christ’s return and revealing to the world. In the meantime, of course we struggle to find ways to understand and to deal with the confusion, brokenness and strife of this awkward, confusing stage we are in, between the truth that, “NOW are we the children of God,” and another truth, “What we will be has not yet been revealed.”
We’re like one of my 7-year-old students, when I was a grade school teacher in the 1980’s. One day in the school cafeteria I saw Cathi, her name, a second grader, hitting her forehead with an apple.
Thunk! Thunk!
“Cathi, what are you doing?” I asked, horrified.
She didn’t say anything; she just smiled a broad, open grin at me to reveal that she had no baby teeth on the front of her upper gum, and at least one was missing from the lower jaw. No wonder she couldn’t just bite into that apple! To cope with having lost her baby teeth and awaiting new adult ones, she was making apple sauce! On her forehead!
“No! Don’t do that to your beautiful face and your developing brain! Thunk it on the table. Or we’ll get you some apple sauce!”
But as we live through brokenness, strife and confusion of the now and the not-yet of our resurrection identity, aren’t we often like little seven year-old Cathi, trying many strange, sometimes even self-defeating ways to deal with the tension and the contradictions of this life between now and not-yet, until we figure one thing out, only to go on to the next challenge?
Which brings me to the last question: What are the costs and challenges of living with our still-emerging resurrection identity? One is the need for patience and humility. Can we be patient with God, ourselves and each other as we work through the confusion and complexities of life between the now and the not-yet of our God-beloved resurrection identity? Can we extend some patience and trust toward God and each other as we share our partial pieces of insight and experience about the difficulties and dilemmas we face? Can we honor the ways in which our eternal resurrection identities, and those of others, are still only emerging through our limited experiences of God and of life? Even while we acknowledge that they are not complete? I hope we can do that tonight for each other in our congregational conversation about sexuality.
A second cost or challenge is: when push comes to shove, and the world tries to entice us or demand of us loyalties or identities different from our resurrection identity, will we resist and stay true to what God says about us? Will we insist on our beloved resurrection identity even if it means saying to the Evil One, the Accuser of the Brethren, “Be gone, for it is written…!” Even if it means saying to the world and to our selves, “Let God be true and everyone else a liar?” Are we willing to take the heat and pay the price for the gospel truth about ourselves and others? That’s what John means when he says, “Whoever has this hope within stays pure, even as he [Christ] is pure.” Those words echo the refrain of God in the law of Moses: “Be holy as I am holy,” and so John brings us back to his concern for truth, virtue and integrity. Not to perfection, because, again, we’re all works in progress. Rather, he’s calling us to be devoted, singly and wholly to God, and to the persons God declares us to be.
John’s vision of our emerging, beloved, resurrection identities affects not only how we look at ourselves and each other, but at the whole world. Can we shoulder the responsibility and pay the price of that? That was the choice that a Roman soldier in the army of Emperor Marcus Aurelius faced, late in the 2nd Century. Aurelius and his army were on campaign against the Barbarians, so-called. On the day before battle, this soldier came to the emperor and asked, “How about we seek a parlay with the enemy and find a way to address each other’s grievances and come to some sort of peace?”
“Why do you think we should do that?” asked the emperor.
“Because I’m a Christian now,” said the soldier, “and therefore the Barbarians’ lives are as dear to God and myself as are mine and yours.”
“You crazy Christians,” the emperor chuckled. Figuring that he had nothing to lose by releasing a soldier who had reservations about killing, the emperor then said, “Go to the Barbarian camp with my blessing and see what happens.”
The soldier never returned and no peace parlay ever happened. Maybe the Barbarians killed him, or more likely, they made him a slave. Maybe he was even one of the Christian captives whose testimony helped numerous tribes and clans become Christian in the first few centuries AD. But his story demonstrates the difference that our emerging resurrection identity makes here and now, and the cost of insisting on it. In Christ then, seeing is not just believing. Seeing is becoming.
For the next few minutes I’d like us to reflect on the following two questions that today’s reading inspires in me:
- What fears and falsehoods have I accepted about myself and about others?
- What difference does my identity, as God’s Beloved, and a partner in Christ’s resurrection glory, make in my life and relationships?
I close with what I think would be Jesus’ prayer on our behalf: “Father, May your Beloved children, whom I am not ashamed to call my brothers and sisters, come to know you more and more, and your love for them, as I know you and your love for me, the Beloved. As they grow to see themselves through your eyes, may their true selves emerge all the more from the bondage of all the false selves and the false loves that the world, the flesh and the devil would foist upon them. May each step of life, the losses as well as the joys, even aging and dying, be not a defeat for them, but a further disclosure of their eternal selves, until that moment at the threshold of eternity, when they see my resurrected self, and their own, and so know themselves and each other, even as you know them.”