Readings: Luke
24:36b-48, 1 John 3:1-7
Let us pray: O God, we pray that
through your Spirit we may hear your word and encounter within it, the great
width and length and height and depth of the love of Christ for us and in
us. Amen.
At first glance the passage we heard read this morning from 1 John is
challenging and somewhat contradictory.
What do you do with, this statement, for instance: “No one who abides in him sins; no one who
sins has either seen him or known him.”
It seems a bald provocative statement of right living to which few of us
could possibly connect and against which all of us would experience failure. It
also seems totally in contrast to the embracing concept that we are God’s children,
loved and cared for and welcomed as we are.
“Beloved, we are God’s children now.”
What can we do with the tension between a total intolerance of any sin
and a recognition of the grace of Jesus Christ that allows sinners to be the
children of God? Various people have
tried to find ways to explain this uncompromising statement on sin – asking if
for instance we can make sense of it by imagining it is about habitual sinning
versus the occasional lapse – but somehow achieving an 80% pass mark doesn’t
quite fit with a God who wants us to strive for a transformed life in
Christ. Or is the other way to suggest
that it is only when we are not sinning that we are in relationship with God –
ie stepping in and out of abiding in Christ.
That too is against all we understand of a God from whom nothing, not
even death, can separate us.
So what do we do with this passage?
Well here is the thought I would like to explore – are we or can we
become a people for whom sinning is increasingly an unreal option? Can we make
more real the connection between who Christ is and who we need to be? And if so how might we do that, how might we
live into the future promise that when Christ appears, we shall be like him?
Now in case that word sin is causing us any difficulty, can I define sin
as that which does not come from love, that which does not have its origin in
God? There is a much bigger discussion
to come on sin at another time but for today let’s sit with that.
So basically what the author of 1 John is saying, I believe, is that we
are to see living as the children of God as being a holistic, fully
transformational change to our lives, not just a piecemeal picking up of some
useful, pragmatic and seemingly fair rules for life. It’s the difference between intellectually
knowing that you should not verbally abuse someone and caring deeply of the
hurt you might cause them. It’s about
the love flowing in every aspect of our lives because we have looked on the
face of God in encountering the risen Christ, and we want to become what we
have looked upon. In this sense the
claim that no-one who abides in Christ can sin begins to make a little more
sense, be more reachable for us because it suggests, not that we are going to
cease all sinful behaviour but that we are going to always measure what we do,
say and be always in this love and that makes it much harder for us,
increasingly, to carry out unlovely actions in our lives.
An illustration: over the last week we have had here in the church hall
about 20 odd children attending a volunteer Otago holiday programme. They were loud and lively and had a great
time. But there were a few that found it
fun to escape the activities from time to time and take refuge in the
Minister’s office. Minister of Magic
they dubbed me. And in one of the
conversations several around 13 year old girls started talking about the latest
happenings in Shortland St. I made a
face, it seems, because they asked me why I didn’t like the programme. Because it’s a challengeable reality I said –
except I probably said: “life’s not like that’.
And then they said but, Minister of Magic, it gives all kinds of, I
think it was ‘life instruction’ for us.
They meant that it had moral teachings I think. And they started reeling them off:
You shouldn’t steal $25,000 to build a charity clinic cause you will get
caught.
You shouldn’t lie to get people out of your flat – it doesn’t work
Don’t get pregnant – you might not be able to get the father to admit it
A somewhat twisted and limited understanding both of what is right
living and why! Without the underpinning
rationale of love and care for each other informing these girls’ concepts of
right and wrong, they are always going to be struggling to get the difference
between what we have called sinning and what we know as living in the new
creation that is the risen Christ. I
hope that when they are ready to acknowledge the failings of Shortland St as
the source of right living, that they might think to ask a person of faith if
they have an answer!
At the annual meeting of Synod that I attended for the first time this
weekend, we were also challenged to live into this vision of a church that had
looked on the face of God and wanted to become what it had looked upon. To find answers to the question: what kind of
church is God calling us to be in Christ and by the power of the Spirit? How do
we distinguish in the church those rules for Christian living that are anchored
pretty much in social and historical understandings of right and wrong and can
easily be conduits for abuse and exploitation, and, on the other hand, those
understandings of church that are based in the love of Jesus made know in
scripture and through the Spirit. If we
can live in the second, then maybe we can become a church for whom living
without love is an increasingly unreal option?
We didn’t come up with any particular model of how church will look in
2020 in Aotearoa New Zealand – that was the challenge of the new Moderator –
but there were inspiring words from Graham Redding as he summed up the
discussion – do we, he said, have the heart to allow ourselves to re-evangelised
by the gospel, to hold to what it means to live as a transformed body of Christ
as church, through our worship, our mission and our love for one another, to
live simply, prayerfully, grace-fully, hope-fully, joy-fully and generously.
Maybe in this church that has looked on the face of God in the life and
death of the risen Christ, maybe in this church there will be no sin – for we
have become what we have looked upon and can envisage no other life. That is Christ’s prayer for us, his beloved
people. Amen.
Margaret Garland
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