Psalm 136:1-9, 23-26 | 1 John 4:13-19 | Hebrews 12:29
Jeremy Richards
Our theme for 2021 is simply “Love.” Well, specifically it’s “Re: Love,” which looks better written than it sounds spoken. This theme is broken down into 4 parts, each lasting 3 months, all accompanied by “re” words, because in the suggestions we received from all of you about what you wanted us to focus on in 2021, “re” words kept being used. Remembering, reimagining, renewing…. The prefix “re” is interesting because in a way it breaks down time. “Re” words invite us to revisit what is old, and to reevaluate its application for today as we look forward to tomorrow. I’m reminded of Jesus teaching, “…every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
We do this all the time in our everyday lives without thinking about it: reevaluating and adapting what we’ve known in the past as we try to make sense of the present and prepare for the future – bringing together both the old and the new. But for the next year we’re going to be intentional about this process. We’re going to focus in on reimagining the love of God, restoring the love of self, redeeming the love of enemies, and reconnecting to the love of neighbor. Because love is one of those things that’s always being revisited, renewed, relived, reexamined. Love never looks quite the same. For every unique context, every unique relationship, love takes a different shape. It shifts and adapts. It resists formulation.
I’m reminded of one the most important things I read as a young man, not even a year out of high school. I was reading a book by Donald Miller because when I graduated Donald Miller was all the rage amongst somewhat edgy evangelicals. His most famous book was Blue Like Jazz, but the one that struck me most was the follow-up, Searching for God Knows What. I don’t have the book anymore, and I don’t remember much of it, but I remember him telling a story about teaching a class of some kind, and – if I remember right – he first asks the students how someone becomes a Christian, and they give the standard, formulaic response, something like: confess that you’re a sinner, believe in Jesus, invite him into your life, and promise to follow him, or something like that. Then, Donald Miller asks them, “How do you fall in love?” And no one says anything because there is no formula to falling in love. It can’t be reduced to bullet points. It’s experiential. It’s lived.
Then Donald Miller says, and this is the line that struck me, “Maybe becoming a Christian is more like falling in love than baking cookies” (or something like that). It blew my mind because it was somehow both obvious and revolutionary. It articulated something I already knew deep down was true, something I had actually experienced in my life at different times as a young person – I had encountered God in various ways in various contexts – and yet I hadn’t fully grasped. When I read those words, something in me said, “Yes!”
I’ve spent the last year and a half at the Living School studying the Christian mystics, and one of my teachers, Jim Finley, says that mystics are those people that tell us that our deepest longing for God, this hope that we have but we don’t know if we can trust – the hope that the unknowable is in some way knowable, that relationship, communion, even union with the Divine is possible – the mystics assure us that this hope is, indeed, true and attainable. And they live lives that prove it. And when they speak, even though they speak of that which is unspeakable – of the mystical, that which can’t be explained but can only be experienced – the way that they speak of their experience resonates within us and even invokes in us, at least to some small degree, the very experience they’re talking about. And when we hear them we know that they know what they’re talking about.
But I’m not a mystic, and I don’t have the words to invoke in you the experience of God. And for this reason, it may sound surprising, but this first sub-theme, “Reimagining the Love of God,” is the most difficult to preach on, even more difficult than “Redeeming Love of Enemy” (at least I think so, I haven’t actually planned that series yet). Because if Donald Miller was right, if our relationship with God is just that, a relationship, if being a Christian is “more like falling in love than baking cookies,” then there’s no formula I can give you. There’s no way to tell you how to experience the love of God.
And yet, at the same time, that’s kinda my job, isn’t it? It’s what we come to church for. The Baptist pastor and professor Walter Rauschenbusch said, “It is the first article of religious belief that there is a living God. It is the first act of religious life to realize God and come into contact with God.”[i] This seems at once both obvious and true, and also extremely unbelievable and even controversial. The idea that one can “come into contact” with the living God is often met with skepticism, even among regular church folk. Going to church, singing worship songs, hearing the Bible read, and listening to a sermon that has some good application, that’s all very safe and predictable. It’s probably, truthfully, what most people expect from church. Maybe they get a little emotional boost during a meaningful song or a poetic moment in the sermon, but that’s about it. The expectation is probably, mostly, to get some combination of spiritual encouragement and ethical direction. We want to be inspired by the stories of the Bible and we want guidance about what kind of people we should be and how we should act as we go through life. And those things are good. But they’re hardly an intimate experience with the One Hebrews says is a “consuming fire.”
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers is a collection of short, poignant stories about and teachings by the men and women who, in the 4th century, left civilization behind in order to journey into the desert to seek God above all else. In one story, Abba Lot goes to Abba Joseph and says, “Abba, as far as I can, I keep a moderate rule, with a little fasting, and prayer, and meditation, and quiet: and as far as I can I try to cleanse my heart of evil thoughts. What else should I do?” Then Abba Joseph “stood up and spread out his hands to heaven, and his fingers shone like ten flames of fire, and he said, ‘If you will, you can become all flame.’”[ii]
Walter Rauschenbusch says, “Holiness is goodness on fire.”[iii]
Is this possible? Is it actually possible to be set ablaze by the living God? Is it possible for our goodness not to simply be our goodness, but to bring our lives into such contact with God, or should we say, to let God consume us in such a way, that we become engulfed in the Spirit of God to such an extent that in our interactions with others, and with creation, the other feels the very heat of God’s loving presence emanating from us?
If you’re like me, something in you says “Yes.” Or, at the very least, it hopes for “yes,” it longs for “yes.” But another part of us says “no.” Part of us holds back and says, “Let’s be serious. Let’s be realistic.” Part of us says it’s unreasonable, it’s superstitious. But I think really there’s something else that keeps us from believing that the love of God can be really and truly experienced. It hides behind reason and intellect, saying we’re just being realistic. But the real reason we can’t accept, can’t risk, the idea that God can be experienced is fear.
We’re afraid that if we actually make such an attempt, if we actually open ourselves up to some kind of experience with God, if we put ourselves out there, God might not deliver, and then where will we be?
What happens if and when we get stood up by God? So long as we study scripture at arm’s length, so long as our prayers stay on the surface, so long as we speak of God in the second person and not the first person, so long as our Christian convictions are really only ethical commitments, our faith is safe. There’s no risk.
But if we say that faith is more, if we actually reach out for some kind of experience, we’re putting it all on the line. Because if God doesn’t come through, if God doesn’t show up, maybe there’s no God. Maybe it’s all a sham. God will never disappoint us if we never expect anything from God. And that certainly seems safer. But then, again, God becomes a formula or an idealogy or a doctrinal confession, but not a living Spirit. God is not love.
I’ve met so many people, from agnostics who have a very small, narrow view of God, to everyday church folks, to PhDs in theology with intricate systematic theologies, and everyone in between, who are equally afraid to open themselves to the possibility of a living God. Easier to say that if God exists God is a clockmaker who set the world in motion then stepped back to let it run its course. Easier to speak of God in abstract theories. Or, if you go the fundamentalist route, easier to reduce belief to any number of mandatory doctrinal principles. It’s not about God it’s about confessing the virgin birth or a 7-day creation account or the full divinity of Christ. You can say, “Yes, I believe all those things,” without any experience at all. There’s no living God necessary.
But knowing God is what it’s all about. In a rather troubling teaching from Jesus, he says that there are some who will seek to enter the kingdom of heaven and they’ll say, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast our demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?” And he will respond, “I never knew you…”
The God of Christian scriptures, the one revealed in Jesus Christ, is a God who knows us, as David shared in his sermon so beautifully last week, and one who desires to be known. The God of the Bible is undeniably relational. God is constantly entering into the lives of everyday people: speaking to them, calling them, saving them. If we want a God of formulas we must look somewhere else. There is no such God in scripture. If we want a God who sits unmoved and unaffected in some far off heaven, we must look somewhere else. The God of scripture enters people’s lives and changes them forever. The God of scripture, our reading from 1 John this morning says, is love. And love is nothing if not relational. It is impossible to love something you don’t know. It’s impossible to love something you never interact with. We cannot say that God is love if God cannot be experienced.
If God is love then God is first and foremost, before anything else, before being sovereign, before being the Creator, before being the Almighty or the Righteous or the Holy, God is relational. Richard Rohr says, “God is relationship itself.” Our Psalm this morning says that love is responsible for everything that God does. Whatever God has done in the world, whatever God has done in our lives, can be followed up with the refrain “…for God’s steadfast love endures forever.”
There are a myriad of ways that the New Testament describes our relation to God, but one of the most common, if not the most common, is language about a mutual indwelling. Paul likes the phrase “in Christ.” He speaks of how we live in Christ, and how Christ also lives in us. John likes the word “abide.” It’s used 40 times in the Gospel of John alone, and 24 times in the short letter of 1 John, from which our reading this morning comes. “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit,” 1 John 4:13 says.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit…” then a few verses later, he says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love” (John 15:4-5, 9).
This leads to a practical question, one we’re going to spend the next 3 Sundays trying to answer: “How?” How do we abide in Christ? How do we experience the love of God? While I just got done saying that the experience of God can’t be reduced to a formula, can’t be manufactured, we’re going to spend the next 3 Sundays looking at some practical ways to open ourselves up to the experience of God. It isn’t so much about making something happen as it is about positioning ourselves in such a way that we’re open to receive.
To help with my back, I’ve started doing these exercises called Romwod, which is, like, the worst name for anything ever, but it’s been super helpful. It’s kind of like yoga. Each session is 20-25 minutes long, but over the course of the time you only do a few stretches, but you do each one for a long time, usually 2 minutes but sometimes longer, and almost all of the stretches are passive, meaning you don’t push into them at all. You just relax. The leader often says to “soften.” You get in the position, and then you…rest. You focus on your breathing. You let gravity and your body to their thing. And it’s been amazing for my back.
That’s kind of what we’re after in the rest of this sermon series. We aren’t going to push. We aren’t going to make anything happen. I’m not going to tell you how to wrestle God into any kind of experience. Instead, we’re going to look at how we can position ourselves in such a way that growth and experience might happen. Our guide for this how-to will be 3 of Jesus’ teachings from Matthew 6 and 7.
I’m excited, because I think it’s the first time I can really try to relay to all of you some of what I’ve learned at the Living School in a direct way. Of course, my time at the Living School has had an immense influence on my ministry for the last year and a half, but it’s mainly been indirect. I haven’t taken much of what I’ve learned and taught it to you. But for this sermon series I think I’m going to be able to share some specifics about what I’ve learned over the last year and a half.
At the same time, I want to be very clear that I’m not saying that I’ve got a handle on all of this. 1.5 years in a program doesn’t make me an expert. I haven’t yet become “all flame” to quote Abba Joseph. But I hope that some of the lessons I’ve learned that have helped me in my own relationship with God can also help you as individuals and us as a congregation as we begin to reimagine the love of God in our own lives.
And if this seems a bit scary or uncomfortable to you, don’t worry. Because what we’re seeking is the very antidote to our fear. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear,” 1 John says.
I can’t think of a better line to end on.
Amen.
[i] Dennis L. Johnson, To Live in God: Daily Reflections with Walter Rauschenbusch, 4.
[ii] The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, Penguin Classics, 131.
[iii] Dennis L. Johnson, To Live in God: Daily Reflections with Walter Rauschenbusch, 2.