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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