Action
1 John 3:16-24
Click here to view the full sermon video for April 25, 2021, entitled "Action."
For churches who structure their worship according to the rhythms of the liturgical year and the prescribed readings of the Revised Common Lectionary, the Fourth Sunday of Easter has become known as Good Shepherd Sunday. There’s a lot to unpack in that sentence. For one, church is just word that points to a particular community of faith gathered by Jesus to be the continuation of his body on Earth. Meaning, that church- that’s you and me and everyone who gathers in Jesus’ name- is in some sense the resurrected body of Christ. That’s a whole lot to take in. But not all churches constitute themselves in the same way. Some are what’s called high church, with smells and bells, and a fair amount of ritual and pageantry. At the other end of the scale you have the low church traditions that tend to be pretty distrustful of all that folderol you find in the high church. Just give them Jesus and good old-fashioned tent revival. And those are just couple of poles, with wide spectrum in between. Along the way, several different traditions adopted and continue the practice of celebrating seasons over the course of a calendar year that mark and rehearse the story that we share. The anticipation of Christ’s coming that leads to his birth and the Epiphany, or revelation of God’s presence with us and among us. The journey Jesus makes to the end of his life in Jerusalem where he’ll be executed on one of the many crosses used by Imperial Rome to keep their version of the peace. The miraculous victory over death represented by Jesus’ resurrection and the season the Risen Christ spent with his first disciples. And finally, the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, sent to move us out into the world with the good news about the Reign of God that is at hand to put this broken world right. That is the story that comes to us from scripture, from the writings by people of faith about their experience of how God’s love saved them in very particular ways. Saved them from despair, saved them from oppression, saved them from injustice, but most of all saved them from themselves. To hear the breadth of that story as it is told through Law, Prophets, Gospels, letters and more, a three-year cycle of readings was created to inform our worship. Otherwise known as the lectionary. Like I said, a single sentence can leave us with a lot to unpack if we’re not familiar with the terminology being used.
But then again, a single word can leave us with plenty to unpack, if it’s the right word. Like I said, in certain corners of the Christian church, this Sunday is known as Good Shepherd Sunday. Every year on this particular Sunday, the Psalm of the day is the familiar 23rd Psalm that begins, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Psalm 23 has the twin benefit of being relatively short, so easy to memorize, as well as chock full of comforting imagery of God as Shepherd; the one who can be counted on to lead us to verdant places of rest and stillness that restore the essential part of who we are, the one who sets us on the right path and never forsakes us no matter how dark things get. The notion of God as our shepherd evokes a keen sense of protection against hostile threats and promises abundance overflowing; a shepherd whose goodness comes after us, whose mercy rescues us, making a home for us where we will always belong. All of that from a single word: shepherd.
And then Jesus takes that word and ups the ante by declaring to those who would follow him, “I am the Good Shepherd.” Not just any old shepherd mind you. Not a hired hand that might or might not stick around when a wolf shows up. No, a good shepherd, the kind who would go so far as to lay down his life if that’s what it took to save his sheep; the kind that names them and knows each and every one. I was listening to a story this week about a man who raised sheep only to have some of them go missing when he brought them to the county fair to show them. He suspected a thief, and even had a hunch who it might be. He knew where the culprit lived, a few counties over. Their fair was held a few weeks later, so he showed up and sure enough there were his sheep. Now wait a minute, you might say. How did he know they were his sheep? Don’t all sheep look pretty much the same? The answer is, no. A good shepherd knows his, or her own.
Which brings us to the word at the center of this section of the letter John has written to the church: love. If ever there was a word to unpack, it is love. Poets rhapsodize about it. Crooners sing about it. Advertisers use it to sell anything from candy to cars to Coca-Cola. At the center of the movie Moulin Rouge is a young Bohemian named, ironically enough, Christian, who has traveled to Paris with romantic ideas of love. As he is trying to woo the courtesan with whom he has become enamored, he sings a medley of various pop songs about love. Love is a many splendored thing. Love lifts us up where we belong. All you need is love. I was made for loving you, baby, you were made for loving me. In the name of love. Don’t leave me this way, I can’t survive without your sweet love. And of course, I will always love you. But that isn’t the kind of love that John is talking about. Greek culture famously had four distinct understandings of love. The first is eros, the romantic erotic kind of love that people sing about on rooftops. Then there is storge which is the kind of familial affection that binds together households and communities. Philos is the kind that lends itself to words like “philosophy,” the love of knowledge, or Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. It is friendship, the family that you choose because of the camaraderie you share with one another. And finally, there is agape, which is what John is talking about. This kind of love isn’t something that you unpack so much as you experience. It is what makes Jesus more than your average, or even above average run-of-the-mill shepherd. We know love, John explains, when someone lays down their life for ours like Jesus. Not just in the overly literal way of the cross, which is certainly powerful, but in all the cruciform ways that someone lays down their ego, lays down their agenda, lays down their expectations, lays down their need to be declared the winner. It’s tricky though. Because there is love that renounces itself for the good of another, and then there is the act that belongs to what Father Richard Rohr calls “the myth of heroic sacrifice,” which has less to do with love and more to do seeking admiration, moral superiority and control. As Rohr puts it, both suicide bombers and co-dependents are sacrificial (Rohr 22). It is manipulation, resentment and guilt disguised as love. The whole point of sacrifice is to offer something up on the altar to appease, or curry favor with the one for whom the sacrifice is intended. That is not love, it’s just a poorly veiled attempt at control, and it certainly isn’t the Gospel, it isn’t good in the way that Jesus the Good Shepherd is good. It’s what the apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians about love. “If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” That’s because the kind of love that John is talking about, the kind of love that Jesus embodies, the kind of love that saves us in the end has nothing to do with what we get out of it, what we have to gain from it. It is about what we have to lose for the sake of something bigger and more consequential than ourselves, and our own satisfaction.
This kind of love saves us precisely because it really isn’t about what we say, and it certainly isn’t about how we feel, which is most of what passes for love these days: flowery words and our own heart’s desire. It’s about truth and action. The myth of heroic sacrifice skips out on truth and satisfies itself with action and then wonders why it isn’t celebrated more or appreciated more. The truth in that equation is that a love that lays down its life must surrender all its illusions of control and moral superiority if it is ever going to abide with God. It must give itself over to the goodness and mercy of the shepherd who never stops coming for us and everyone else too. As Fred Rogers used to say, “love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.” (Rogers)
A love like that doesn’t just save us, a love like that would save the whole world, and set us free.