SCRIPTURE: 1 John 3:16-24
TEXT: 18Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. THEME: Emulate the Love Jesus has for us. INTRODUCTION The revelation, Jesus bring of God and relationships is one of love and forgiveness, is for all people, all cultures, all races, all relationships, and all of us. Christianity has been filtered through Western culture, which has a practice of deconstructing and categorizing things into little compartments of understanding. Sometimes when they do this, they assume they understand it all and then organize it, legalize its practices, prescribing definitions and then regulating it. They tell us who has faith and who does not. Or who are theologically sound and who are heretics. They divide us into camps that fight with each other and within each other. I’m not bringing this up because of the conflict in Shogun between the Catholic Portuguese and the Protestant Londoners, but because I spoke with a few ‘nones’ this week. Nones, identified as ‘with no religious affiliation’, or ‘none of the above’ or ‘spiritual but not religious.’ These young adults would describe their childhood spiritual background in the church, but chose not to identify with any church today. When I asked them why not, they said it was because of all of the rules and of how the people within the church were not nice. Not to mention the divorces in their family, or what they did in church was different from what they did in their real lives. This is exactly what the author of 1 John is addressing in the life of this first century congregation. SCRIPTURE Jesus living among us is a foretaste of God’s great desire is to dwell among us. Jesus’ great love for us is not deterred, even when violently threatened. The phrase I picked up during Lent, came from a Sermon Brainwave commentary by Ira Brent Driggers on Mark 8, “Jesus is unflinching in his insistence that the divine mission to welcome and reconcile sinners overrides the stigma of associating with them.” “Unflinching in his insistence that the divine mission to alleviate human suffering overrides any application of religious tradition that might impede it.” A love for us that inevitably elicits antagonism and violent antagonism from those invested in “legalistic’ Judaism or Roman imperialism. It seems that this 1st century congregation became more concern about their ‘holiness’ than their ‘hunger for the holy’. The author of 1 John reminds them of the saving act is of God loving us. This is not the end, but the beginning of our dynamic life with God. So as those who are just starting out on this life with God through Jesus, as adopted children…emulate the love Jesus has for you in changed and transformed behavior towards others. Taking this out of legalism, it simply means to allow yourselves to be loved by Jesus and in turn be loving towards others. Stop accounting debts with graces, there is more grace than we will ever need. Love does not condemn. Being loved is transformative, It comes out in how we speak to others, it is innate in the things that we do, it is intrinsic in our actions, it makes someone feel valued, respected, appreciated, and cared for. Love is its own reward. APPLICATION How is our love unflinchingly insistent to relieve human suffering? Because you belong to this church we have 4 big hitters of how our love is unflinchingly insistent to relieve human suffering. This congregation, our Preschool, affordable housing on the Mission Grounds and our Food Pantry. For any parent, finding good child care is difficult. Not every setting is accredited, or has a religious base. Capable staff and clean facility. We take a lot of the worry and anxiety away from parents in providing this child care. Our Food Pantry has become church. There is community built with those who serve and those who receive. There is community between those who shop, pick up food, stock shelves, do the distribution and talk with those who are waiting in line. There are organizational skills, the body of Christ with spiritual gifts being used and opportunities for prayer. This congregation is laid back but caring. Welcoming and friendly. Diverse theologically, culturally, and any other way you want to slice it. But we all have a love for Christ and it is in the essence of how we want to treat each other. We are not perfect, but don’t say that we are. And when we make mistakes, we own up to it and do what we can to reconcile it. You don’t have to be perfect, just open to forgiveness and to do better. We are always striving to be better even though we know that good is good enough. There is lots of grace here. The building of Affordable Housing rental units on the mission ground property we own has taken over 20 years. Many ups and downs, disappointments, and trials. Promises kept and unkept. We now have a developer; the County is asking for more units and the congregation has given the Council approval to negotiate the sale of the property. As we considered the stewardship of that gift of land, the parable of the Good Samaritan came up. We asked who the Fallen Traveler in the story might be in our community. We came up with Young Adults who cannot afford to live and raise their families on Maui. We saw ourselves as the inn keeper in the parable with Affordable Rental Units. Pandemic, Fire, Insurance, Climate Change, the Price of Paradise have all contributed to our decision to sell the property so we can use our resources in Ministry and not property management. Before my face-to-face meeting with the Appraiser, who was commissioned to come up with an assessment to counter the offer the Developer EAH, our attorney wanted to speak with me. She said that the highest and best use price of the property might be more than what our Developer EAH could afford. I said that when we started this project, we were to build it without our money and break even, so we would follow the sources of money. We realized that we didn’t have the expertise to build this on our own and we had to partner with people in the community, government, construction, etc. in order to do this. The funding we were initially looking at made us realize that we would be giving up this property for perpetuity, as a gift to our neighbors. We became okay with this. So now with the Appraiser’s Assessment we have a figure to ask for more but not to prevent this development from happening. I said to our attorney, we have an amazing congregation who are not doing this to get rich but for us to do what we believed God wanted us to do as stewards of this property. We are living our faith. This will be a monument of our love for our neighbors. CONCLUSION When I heard that the church of these ‘young adult nones’ was not something they wanted to be a part of, it made me sad, but I understood why. They were Christian who were making sure they were making their way into heaven by being legalistic, judgmental, caught up in form, hypercritical, condescending, condemning and mean. Ironically, the church of my childhood was something I wanted to be a part of. They worked hard together to accomplish wonderful things. They included us in the work they did, as well as participated in the things like the Sunday School picnic to Barking Sands. They appreciated each other. They were generous, humorous, and looked out for each other. They were genuine about their faith, living honest lives. I remember when there was a fire at the Buddhist temple in the valley, they went to help clean up and even gave money for their rebuild. There are 5 people that I know of who went to seminary from this church besides myself. Just doing stuff because I told you so is not faith, but wresting with doubt, asking questions, exploring why we are doing the things we are doing and being willing to try something in a way we have never done before, is faith. Trust in God, love each other and love your neighbors. Love by what we do to the glory of Christ.
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SCRIPTURE: 1 John 1:1—2:2
TEXT: 3we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 4We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. THEME: Our joy is in fellowship with God. INTRODUCTION I believe in the Word of God, but its truth is not always found in a literal reading of its words. We have to take into consideration the language, the setting, the culture, the mental health, the needs and desires of the author as they embed some of these things into the text knowingly and unknowingly. For example, the author of 1 John loves the church so much and wants to help them to make it into the realm of God upon Christ’s return. But the return is taking longer than anyone anticipated and some have fallen back to old habits. The encouragement of this passage is to be sinless until Christ’s return, but we have to be careful because we don’t want to move away from the graciousness of Christ’s love and see this encouragement as work that we need to do to merit our place in Christ’s realm. It’s about our relationship with God and not how ‘good’ we are. SCRIPTURE God loves to dwell with us. From the time of creation God intimately get hands dirty in holy soil and breathes life from God’s lungs into ours. God dwells in the Garden with Adam and Eve. God journeys with Abraham and Sarah, God is with their family members in Egypt, and through the Exodus and into the Wilderness for 40 years. God is seen with them through the Davidic monarchy, and comes to dwell among us in the incarnation through Jesus. Now through the Spirit, God continues to dwell inside and among us, as we wait for Christ’s return. 1 John begins with what we know. “In the beginning,” just like the first book of the Bible and connects us through the beginning passage of Gospel of John to this writing. God has always been discoverable though what we hear, see, feel, experience and through what God reveals to us. We know God from our experience, from the experience of others and from the faith of those who are with us now as well as those who have come before us. It is all about Fellowship. Fellowship with God, Fellowship with Jesus, Fellowship with others and fellowship that brings completeness and joy. That is what the 7th day is for, a Sabbath rest to have time to fellowship together. To preserve this fellowship, the admonition is for us to stay away from sin. To understand sin in this context, is to see it as the things that we do that ‘wounds’ to our fellowship with God, wounds our fellowship with others and wounds our ourselves. APPLICATION We are human being, good and evil, but not sinless. For us to be sinless, is an impossible expectation. That puts so much pressure on our being good. The better questions is, “How can we live an authentic life as Christian (or in fellowship with God and others)? Relationships that bring joy are the measure of our lives as Christians as verse 4 suggests. Taking our cue from creation, relationships don’t have to be ‘perfect,’ but we have to work at them to make them ‘good.’ We don’t have to like everyone, we just need to have manners, be honest, don’t do anyone harm and desire the very best for them in Christ Jesus. We can pray for them and let God write parts of their story. When we run into conflict, we can take responsibility for how we contributed to that situation. When things go sideways, we can Admit our part that cause things to go that way and ask for forgiveness. Then we can change our behavior so we don’t end up in that situation again. Sometimes it is better to error on the side of generosity, to be gracious even if it is inconvenient, and to be willing to listen because we don’t know everything. When we understand why someone did what they did, we can be empathetic and maybe even part of the healing. Then we are more apt to be Forgiving, tolerate and patient. And clearly as authentic Christians in fellowship with Christ, Don’t hold grudges or plot revenge. Don’t talk stink behind someone’s back. And say what you mean instead of trying to be funny. These are sins that wound fellowship. We can stand up for those who are not able to advocate for themselves. We can stand in solidarity with those who are marginalized. We can speak up for what is right with our vote. We can forgive the hurt others have caused us trusting our future to God. On Five Dollar Friday, I was pushing a full cart of groceries headed for a short checkout line. My wife blazed a trail for me to follow and secured a spot in line just before a shopper with her cart. As I followed, even though we got our place in the cue, I let the other shopper go ahead of me. An act of grace on our part. Selflessness instead of selfishness. Avoiding the judging scowl. It may have taken us a little long to check out, but with no regrets, no guilt and with joy. CONCLUSION Do no harm, be mindful of others, sacrifice to be a blessing, practice gratitude, people are more important than things, relationships take a lot of work. Take responsibility for how we have contributed to a situation. Be honest, ask for forgiveness, be willing to forgive the hurt others have caused you, tell the truth. learn to communicate better with each other, learn better relationship skills. Use manners. See the humanity in each other. Respect with dignity, remembering we are made in the image of God. We need to take care our ourselves so we can bring our best selves to others. Be in fellowship with others and have joy. At Easter we had people show up that we haven’t seen in person for a while. Easter service is different from the bustle of Christmas. We stayed at the door and talked, chatted, caught up, shared about the kids. Fellowshipped. Joy. We did the same thing at the Easter Brunch in Dodge Hall. I got to speak with visitors who were touring the island as faith moved them to worship on Easter during their vacation. Joy. I sat with someone at Easter Fun day that I haven’t been able to sit a chat with, we talked about religious backgrounds, the church and theology (my favorite topic). Joy. Just having an interest in others who come to Church. Sibling in the family of God. We have Christ in common. Our love of God binds us together. We can have fellowship and joy. |
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April 2024
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