This sermon was delivered at Wartburg Theological Seminary, on Monday May 10th, 2015. The final year students have been preaching this semester from the previous Sunday New Testament text, for their Monday Chapel preaching. As part of the sermon, just prior to giving the sermon, the song, They’ll Know We are Christians by Our Love was played and I interrupted the song about 3/4 the way through the first verse.
I forgot to turn on the microphone on my video camera, so there is no audio or video available.
Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 10, 2015
Selected Text for Chapel service was
1 John 5:1-6
If you did not recognize that song, it was They’ll Know We are Christians by Our Love. Where do I even begin to tell you all that is so so so wrong with this song. It is self righteous, lacking faith, points not to love revealed in Christ but in ourselves. It would even have us believe that if you do things, and there is a problem all by its self, do things out of love, then you are Christian or worse yet, only Christians can love. By the way, I also looked at a re-make of this song by Jars of Clay. It was even worse. It has the same lyrics but also they turned the song into being non-inclusive as well.
Over the last few weeks, we have heard much scripture that has love contained in it. It is not a cop-out to say that we cannot truly understand Love in relation to God’s love for us, God as Love and thus we also cannot truly love God. Without that understanding, we also cannot truly express love in any way that is satisfactory for God, either in God or any of God’s creation. This means that when we say we love our spouse, boyfriend/girlfriend, even that love cannot be truly understood or fully expressed except through the love of God.
No my friends, it is not a cop-out, it is simply the reality of living in ambiguity and being comfortable with it. This does not mean we give up trying to understand. We are learning to be theologians. Yes, we are learning always.
It does not matter if this is your first year learning to be a Theologian, or you are in your 46th year of teaching here. The day we think we know it all, is the day our knowledge has become an idol and we are the furthest away from love than the day we first began our learning about God.
Love is conceptual, in that love can only be truly be understood in the context of faith towards God in Christ Jesus and God’s love towards us. Faith towards God does not even work with out first faith coming to us. Instead of us coming to faith, Luther would say that faith comes to us from hearing the word so that we are convinced that God is speaking to us both inwardly and spiritually through the word.[1]
Maybe in our best of human understanding, we can only understand a fraction of what love is. Maybe the best we can say is that despite not liking someone, like your own child sometimes or another person, that you still see him or her as a child of God. Maybe one can see love in not lashing out at your spouse or significant other, friends, whoever, when they do things that cause you to not like them and you restrain yourself despite what you might be thinking of at the time of doing to them. I think that might be the case sometimes for my wife, when I do the things I do.
I am going to read you the verse 1 again but in a less conventional format but one I think gets the meaning across better than our NRSV translation. Yes, believe it or not, and some of you will be shocked, but this is from a rough translation from the Greek. It goes like this;
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ, by God has been fathered and everyone who loves the one, who fathers, loves also the fathered by God.
When we start here, with this premise, through faith, we see others as children of God, we can begin to flow through the rest of the text because it is faith that grounds us in the love of God, which we cannot truly understand except in faith.
I want to take us a little further in the Greek, once again. I believe this is very important because of the impact of these words mean not for just when they were said but because they apply today as well. When we hear in verse one, has been born, this is not a single event that has only the effectiveness at that moment of the faith realization but this carries on today. The Greek word is written in the perfect tense; thereby we are told that this time of being born, although having been in the past, sometime in our life, carries on today.
Even further with the perfect tense, is also applied to child in the last word of the first verse. Verse 1b says and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. That means not just once in the past but it is part of the present state of affairs. (Zerwick, Biblical Greek, 96)
Faith and love is intrinsically tied together. Faith comes in the Love by God and the Love of God, comes in faith and those born of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, come from the God, who loves. Jungel, a German theologian, who I have to say, has begun to re-wire my brain in my thinking of theology, says “…faith is trust in the fact that the loving God is also love itself.”
That still leaves us with trying understand love. In Verse 3, it says “For the love of God is this…” The use of Love here specifically speaks of agape love when referring to the love of God towards others. Where in verse 1 and 2, the love expressed in the Greek is not agape but a love that is a love out of pure concern and high regard for the other. God loves us differently, in a purer sense of love than we can love God or God’s children. That does not let us off the hook in how we see others, we still see them in light of loving God and as God’s children.
I don’t know if that has cleared the mud up at all but let me attempt to clear it up some more. Karl Barth, which I hope almost all of you know who he is, says in his book, The Epistle To The Romans, page 495 “…Love is always the disclosing of the One in the other, in this and that and every other.” When he speaks of the One, he specifically has capitalized One, in order to speak as to the understanding of the Triune God being referenced to, as the One.
First years, Thursday is your final for Systematic Theology. I am sure some might even being thinking, “I would love for this semester to be over now and Systematics to be done.” Friday, you will no longer have that Systematic class. Now the bad news, well, not really but all of our realties, because of our faith, because of the love of God, we not just the first years but all of us, will continually be emerged in systematic theology. You will be continually formed to think theologically. Because of this, you cannot help but to look at the words of our text today, differently. Differently than you did before you started seminary.
Through faith, you can see love differently than you ever did before. Through love and faith, you can convey the love of God in new and exciting ways that are relevant for today and beyond. From Romans, it says; 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.[2]
Finally sisters and brothers, let me leave you with this as you depart not only from the chapel today but as we depart to scatter and again later to gather as church, know that “…the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.[3]
[1] Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 50.
[2] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Ro 8:38–39.
[3] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Php 4:7.