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July 29, 2010--1 John 4:2-3

By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.  And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming; and now it is already in the world.

It really is all about Jesus. Like we've said from the beginning of our time with this book, 1 John is really all about being people who take Jesus seriously, and who take seriously what Jesus shows us about God.  It all comes back to Jesus.

And in particular here, John insists that we understand that Jesus, the very Word and Son of God, really came and lived amoung us in the flesh.  God really did crash into our lives in a new way by being present in Jesus, and that means we really do get to know what God is like by learning the stories of Jesus.  Against all the other mystery religions and cults and philosophies of the first century, the early Christians insisted that God wasn't too distant to relate to us in the physical, flesh-and-blood life of a human being, and a rather ordinary-looking human being at that, from a backwater province of conquered people on the eastern fringe of the Roman Empire.  The philosophers and other mystics were convinced that any deity worth his salt wouldn't--indeed, couldn't--associate with the likes of finite, fragile, physical beings, but had to stay more or less in the ethereal realm of spirits and souls and other invisible thigns.  They could conceive of a savior coming to teach us new ideas, new modes of contemplation or mystical truth, but no divine savior from God could actually be one of us.  That just seemed preposterous.

And like I say, against all of that, John here insists that Jesus, the Savior and the Son of God, really did come among us as one of us, not just a vision or an idea or an apparition.  Ideas cannot bleed, some people are fond of saying.  And usually that is meant as a compliment to ideas, a testament to how an idea can endure even when generations of actual people rise and fall.  Christians would agree that ideas cannot bleed, but we do not necessarily see that as a sign of the superiority of ideas to people.  Because an idea cannot be hurt, cannot suffer, cannot give its life for anyone, it also means that an idea cannot love.  And as far as Christians are concerned, the world's only hope for being rescued from its own brokenness is for God to love the world and redeem it, not for God to bombard us with a new idea to try and get us to think our way into heaven.  Jesus is the sign for us that God is not just interested in giving us new ideas to contemplate, but indeed is willing to be hurt for us and for our sake--even at our own hands. 

For John, this is the lynchpin of our faith--either we worship a God who is not afraid to come so close as to enter our human lives as one of us, who is unafraid to be entwined in the turns and tangles of human history, who is unfraid to hurt for us and to bleed for us, or we are stuck only with an idea of a distant God who may have helpful suggestions to offer us, but who can only appear to come close without ever being touchable.  And as John tells us here, if we give up on the idea that Jesus really came among us in the flesh, we've missed the whole point of the faith, and the good part of the Good News, which is all about a God who will not stay off where it is safe in a distant heaven or in the safety of the realm of theory and ideas.

The take-home point for us today then, is this:  ideas can't bleed.  We Christians are fooling ourselves if we think what we have to share with the world is just a new idea for ethics or morality, or a set of timeless principles.  Ideas can change the world, but they cannot redeem the world, because an idea cannot love or sacrifice itself.  Only a Person can do that.  Our message to the world, and to our neighbors and friends around us, then, is not "Hey, listen to this new idea we have about God!" but "Come meet the living God for yourself, the God who loves the world enough to suffer for it in the person of Jesus."  Our calling is to help people to know this Jesus.

O God of genuine love, let us know your love more and more fully today, so that we can share it with others beyond the sterility of ideas and theories.

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July 28, 2010--1 John 4:1

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world.

It's fashionable in our day to say, "I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious..."  But that, of course, is a sentence so vague it's almost meaningless. 

It's meant to be a positive-sounding way of saying that a person likes to pick and choose from a smattering of religious traditions or philosophical ideas while keeping them all hazy and fuzzy enough that none of them are very firmly held or believed.  In a day when dogma is out of fashion, being "spiritual" is a way of saying, "I like the idea that there is something mysterious in the universe, or beyond the universe, but I don't like any particular way of saying who or what that Mystery is."  And in a day when living within a community that holds one accountable and gathers intentionally and, yes, in an organized way is viewed as old-fashioned, too, being "spiritual" is an attempt to think about God without having to be anybody's disciple.  There is no way of life, no community or continuity, no authority beyond oneself--just an individualized vague sense of "something more."

We could have a whole separate conversation about how we have gotten ourselves to a day when it is possible to be "spiritual" as opposed to being "religious." And in all fairness, we could mention that there are lots of excesses of organized religion that can lead people to react against any and all formal beliefs, teachings, or disciplines that smack of certainty.  And to go one step further, we could note that at least the crowd that says, "I'm spiritual" has learned that the failures of religion or religious people do not necessarily mean that somehow God has failed.  At least the "spiritual" person is willing to allow that God could well be real--but just impossible to pin down in the categories of any particular faith.  That doesn't make for an easy conversation with classic Christians, who believe not only that we really can say some definite things about God, but that we meet God, of all places, in the strange particularity of an ugly Roman cross in 1st century Palestine.  But at least we can have a conversation with folks who are willing to admit there is some kind of "Mystery" out there, even if they can only think about it in the most mysterious terms. And at least people who say they are "spiritual" are by and large trying to avoid the arrogance of pharisaical folks who are convinced they know everything about God.  The whole "I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious" movement is at least an attempt to be intellectually humble. We've got to at least admit that much.

But on the other hand, the whole idea of being "spiritual" without being "religious" may really be less about theological humility and more a product of an all-you-can-eat-buffet culture like ours.  Look around us and you'll see signs and billboards and countless other messages all catering to our desire to have servings of everything and never having to choose to stick with any one thing for very long, if ever.  Nobody can stop me from getting the fried chicken wings, macaroni and cheese, taco salad, and baked ziti all on one plate at once--to get my money's worth, of course--at the local buffet restaurant.  And so, we conclude, no one can tell me to pick a consistent, coherent way of believing or living.  And since most of us have no ethical or spiritual problems with going to an all-you-can-eat buffet, we buy into the logic of the analogy that faith is the same way, and that no one can stop us from filling our theological plate with heaping helpings of everything all at once.  We have no need to pick a single, sensible portion to put into our stomachs--why would we need any coherent substance to put into our souls, right? 

The more I think about it, the more it seems like it should be no surprise that a culture of all-you-can-eat restaurants and made-to-order customized gas station sandwiches produces people who say the same about their faith.  They don't want to sample several options and then choose one entree--they want full-size servings of everything!  It is our right, after all, isn't it?  Follow that train of thought just a little ways down the track, and we can argue that it's part of the American way of life to mash a heaping helping of everything, whether food under a heat lamp at the local chain buffet or thoughts about God, into a single plate or a single heart.

But John, our letter writer, won't buy it.  Not any of it.  I think he sees through the screen of false humility in front of the whole "I'm spiritual but not religious" business, because John lived in a smorgasbord culture, too, where you took a smattering of this and a smattering of that and try to build a faith out of it.  John knows that in the end, if the food is really well prepared, it ruins it to mash it all together onto one plate and one meal.  John knows that any real conversation about God is going to involve a whole community of people who share in the experience with us and who will give structure to our lives and our thinking.  John knows that just being interested in "spiritual things" is not a guarantee by any means that we are in communion or connection with the real living God, a God who chose to be involved in the very particular lives of the people of Israel, and who chose to be present in the even more particular life of the man Jesus of Nazareth.

So John calls us to be discerning, to "test the spirits" that we listen to, and not merely to fill our plates with heaping helpings of everything available to us, just because it's there.  John reminds us that Christians are not just interested in trying out "the next new thing" to come along--we are captivated by a particular God revealed in Jesus, and in his way of life.  And rather than each of us cobbling together our own indidividualized personal spiritual menus, the followers of Jesus have learned that we do this "testing of the spirits" best together in community, leaning on the witness of those who have gone before us and those who are with us, which helps keep in check my desire to load my spiritual plate with everything.

Today, let's be honest--you don't get very often get high quality food at the all-you-can-eat-buffet: you just get a lot of it.  But rather than just stuffing ourselves with junk food--whether nutritionally or spiritually speaking--today, we are dared to discern what is truly good, and to hold on to that.  And we are dared to trust that there will be enough to go around for all.

Lord Jesus, give us the wisdom today to hold fast to what is good, and to let go of the impulse to have more of everything simply because it is available to us.  Teach us to trust that you will be enough for us, indeed, more than enough.

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July 27, 2010--1 John 3:23-24

And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he commanded us.  All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.

Being loved, and loving someone back, has a way of changing you.  For one, it often affects your geography--it affects where you choose to spend your time because of the one (or ones) with whom you want to spend your time.  To put it more plainly, being loved and loving someone back makes you want to be in physical proximity with the other person.  Friends make plans to have coffee together--not in two separate locations, but in the same place at the same time--because they genuinely enjoy with in one another's company.  A doe-eyed young couple decides they would rather be with one another than anyone else, and as they promise to be faithful to one another, they come to live in the same place and create a home for the two of them.  Parents go out of their way to spend time with their children, not merely to put food on the table and disappear for the rest of the evening--because they love their kids.  It's so basic, so fundamental, that it seems silly almost to even have to say it, but just for the sake of clarity, let's be sure it's said:  loving and being loved tends bring people together into one place for more and more of the time, not necessarily with something in particular to do together other than just being together. 

The compact but powerful word that John uses for that idea of "being-together-with-the-beloved" is abide.  To be loved by God, and for that love to kindle our love for God in response, is to be drawn closer into the presence of God--which is to say, we abide in God.  And as John points out, too, for us Christians, that means we are connected to, and drawn close to, the fullness of God:  all three Persons whom we know as Father, Son, and Spirit.  To love God the Father will necessarily bring us into relationship with Jesus, and with the Spirit, John says.  In other words, we will abide with God in all of who God is.  Love just has a way of doing that--we allow those we love in to know more and more of us, more deeply and more truly, because we learn to be vulnerable in their presence and know it is safe there.  So it is, John says, with us and God.  As we are pulled closer in abiding in God, there is no "part" of God that is kept at arm's lenghth from us.  It's not that we get to know Jesus, but the Spirit keeps his guard up, refusing to let us in because he's afraid of getting hurt.  The whole fullness of God is opened up to us, and vice versa.  The more we are drawn further into awareness of God's presence all the time, the more we consciously surrender ourselves and open our lives up to this God.  Love just does that to us--we want to be more and more fully present to the One who has loved us.  And so we not only consciously choose to spend more time intentionally in the presence of God (we even might say "it is our duty and delight," or "it is indeed right and salutary" for us to do this...), but we come more and more to let our guard down with this God.  Surely God knows all the facts there are about us already, but as we abide more and more fully in God, we quit resisting and come to bring all of who we are to God intentionally.  That, after all, is what prayer really is--bringing as much of myself as possible to God, knowing that God already "knows" what I am about to share anyway, but that I am now doing it with my guard down and my hands open.  So anyway, just as we could say with families, spouses, and dear friends, we can say about us and God--love leads us into each other's presence, so that we abide with one another.

But then a second thing happens because of love--we are not just brought near to the ones we love, we are changed by them.  We pick up the habits of the ones we love.  We learn to speak like them, and their mannerisms and quirks rub off on us.  Some of their favorite expressions or words find themselves peppered into our daily speech.  And as we learn to live with someone we love, we also learn to live like them as well.  In the household, for example, the whole family learns to use the same brand of tissues and toothpaste.  You develop patterns for meals together and where the groceries are kept.  In a friendship, you develop a shorthand of your own--common experiences and inside jokes--that affect the way you speak to others, too.  And beyond that, we are changed, over time, into wanting for the other person the things that they want.  We come to wish for their happiness, and so it affects our will, as well.  We come to do the kinds of things our beloved wants us to do--if not all the time, at least increasingly--simply because we love them, and without concern for what it will "get" us. You've seen it in your own life, I'm sure. 

Well, John sees that happening for us as we abide in God, too.  We are changed by abiding in God.  We learn the habits of being like Jesus.  We find his way of loving others becomes ours.  We find the Spirit's way of enfolding and encouraging becomes our own way.  We find that we want to do what will bring joy to the Father, not in order to get something from God, but simply because we love God and we want to be a part of bringing God joy.  This is why John makes the connection between abiding in God and obeying his commandments.  You want to know who is "abiding" in God?  Well, take a look at people who seem to have the marks of being around this God--people who have found the way of Jesus and the presence of the Spirit rubbing off on them.  You've seen people like this--people who, it seemed, have picked up the very habits and mannerisms of Christ, and who have brought you closer to God, too, so that you, too, could abide more deeply in God's presence and be changed by the encounter.

That's the kind of life John envisions for us--other beloved saints bring us closer to God, so that in God's presence, we will be made into Christ's likeness too, more and more, and then in turn, we become the kind of people whose lives draw others to abide in God's presence.  Truth be told, it's an ever-moving, back-and-forth motion, where you help me to know God, and in turn I do the same for you, over and over again in our lives together in community, as the Spirit keeps working on the both of us through each other.

I don't know about you, but I find that kind of life utterly compelling, and I want to be a part of it as much as possible.  This is the life we are offered today, we who have been loved by the living God and are invited to abide in God's presence, even on an ordinary Tuesday.

Lord God, let your love draw us in, so that we will delight in doing your will and love what you command, and in turn be changed by your abiding presence.

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July 26, 2010--1 John 3:21-22

Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.

These verses are either making huge promises that don't seem to fit with our experience (do we always receive from God whatever we ask?), or there is some sorting out to do in these verses to make sure we know what it is John is really saying--and what any of it means for us on an ordinary Monday morning.

Given that countless young girls in history who prayed for ponies, assuming that prayer to God was like sitting on Santa's lap, did not receive any ponies at all, and given that each of us has lived through periods where we were not given what we asked for in our prayers, we are left with choosing whether to beleive John is deluding himself or promising something other than a pony for everyone who wishes for one.  It seems hard to believe that John really thinks that every Christian will always get whatever it is he or she prays for--if that were the case, one wonders why he hasn't wished away the false teachers who peeved him so much back in Chapter 2.  If it were just a matter of praying hard enough for it to get whatever you ask for, John would have had his solution to those "antichrist" false teachers right there.

Okay, so apparently John isn't claiming that we will always get whatever we ask for without any qualification.  But he has to mean something when he says "we receive from him whatever we ask."  What is John trying to say?  And what does the rest of that sentence have to do with it:  "...because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him"?  Here we could get ourselves into another sticky place, if we read John the wrong way.  It could sound like John is describing a transaction between us and God, as though we can buy wishes off of the Almighty with enough rule-following.  It could sound like John is saying, "When we obey God's rules enough, God rewards us by giving us something we've been praying for."  That, of course, makes it sound like following the commandments and praying for things are two halves of a cosmic "I'll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine" sort of arrangement.  And I guess I have to say to that possibility, first, that doesn't sound very much like the God we meet in the Bible.  And second, to be completely honest for a moment, if John had found some sort of back-door-deal with God where following rules can be traded in for future purchases from our prayer wish-lists, why don't we get the details on what the exchange rate is here?  Why doesn't John tell us, "For every three commandments kept today, you can have one prayer request granted," or "For every day you resist coveting your neighbor's car, you accrue 1% toward the purchase of that car in prayer points"?  Whatever the numbers might be, why doesn't John tell us what the going rate is between us and God, so we can work out a nice arrangement of good-behavior-in-exchange-for-answered-prayers?

"Because it doesn't work that way!" we want to shout back.  "Because you can't earn answered prayers by keeping a certain number of commandments!"  Once we see it in starkly crude terms like that, we realize this can't be what John is saying here.  John can't be imagining that we can purchase answers to our prayers with a sufficient amount of rule-keeping.  The God of the Scriptures doesn't appear to be an accountant that way, and for that matter, it seems to reduce God's commandments into tools for getting what we want, rather than seeing God's direction and will for our life as inherently good boundaries for giving us the best possible life.  And again, the writers of the Scriptures don't seem to think about God's commandments as just means to getting our wished for ends.  They teach us to see God's commandments as something worth keeping in and of themselves, because of who God is.

So we need another way to make sense of John's sentence, "We receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him."  If it's not about rewards (answered prayers) for good behavior (keeping the commandments), what is John saying?  Is it possible that we've been looking at this whole situation backward?  Instead of imagining God sitting up in heaven and promising to give us whatever we want, provided we keep a certain number of rules for a certain amount of time, is it possible that what we want might change, the more we let our lives be aligned with God's will and commandments?  In other words, is it possible that we are the ones who change and are changed by living in faithful obedience to God?  Instead of God saying to himself, "Oh, now he's kept his five commandments for the day.  I have to divert my plans and now I'll have to answer his prayer and make him win the lottery,"  what if it's our plans and wills that are diverted, the more we are steered into the will of God?

Saint Augustine used to say, "Love God, and then do what you will."  And his point was not that if you love God, he'll let you get away with murder.  But rather his point was that the more fully and deeply we love God, the more our other desires and loves will be changed, and we will become the kind of people who will what God wills.  We will find that our prayers change, too, the more we live within the way of life God has drawn out for us.  We may stop praying for ponies and winning lottery tickets, and instead we learn to pray, as Jesus taught us, for daily bread and for forgiveness--for manna and mercy, you could say.  We find that our prayers come to align more and more fully with the values of the Kingdom of God, so that the more and more we are shaped by keeping the commandments, the more our prayers come to align with what God wills for us.

This seems to be closer to what John has in mind here--there is a connection between our receiving what we ask for on the one hand, and our living within the spaciousness of God's commandments on the other, not in terms of rewards, but because of our how desires themselves are changed the more and more we let the commandments shape us.  The more we live by the commandment to love neighbor, stranger, and enemy, the more we will find our prayer lives shaped in line with that commandment.  We will pray for others and for their needs.  We will pray for God's will to be done.  We will pray for God's Reign to come over us more and more fully.  And more and more fully, God will answer such a prayer.

Today, let us take Augustine's advice:  let us love God, and see how that shapes what we will, what we desire, what we do, and what we pray for.

Lord God, kindle our love for you, teach us to walk in your ways, and shape our wills into the image of your own good will.  This we ask in the name of the One who gave us the new commandment to love as he had loved, Jesus Christ our Lord.