|
1 John 1:1-2:2 CEB We announce to you what existed from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have seen and our hands handled, about the word of life. The life was revealed, and we have seen, and we testify and announce to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us. What we have seen and heard, we also announce it to you so that you can have fellowship with us. Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy can be complete. This is the message that we have heard from him and announce to you: “God is light and there is no darkness in him at all.” If we claim, “We have fellowship with him,” and live in the darkness, we are lying and do not act truthfully. But if we live in the light in the same way as he is in the light, we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from every sin. If we claim, “We don’t have any sin,” we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:8 CEB) But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from everything we’ve done wrong. If we claim, “We have never sinned,” we make him a liar and his word is not in us. My little children, I’m writing these things to you so that you don’t sin. But if you do sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one. He is God’s way of dealing with our sins, not only ours but the sins of the whole world. Being in the church is a bit like being in AA, or I should say, it should be more like AA. After all, there should be no more shame attached to saying, “I am an alcoholic” than saying, “I am a sinner.” Both express a reality, that there is something deep within me, woven into the very fabric of my being, that I cannot fix! Normally, we disapprove of this kind of talk, after all, asking people to admit that there is something wrong about them, especially something they cannot control or fix, well isn’t that just “rationale for shame or self-loathing”?[1] Except, 1 John says, “If we claim, ‘We don’t have any sin,’ we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” The truth is that we are all broken and all have fallen short, so confessing what is sinful, what misses the mark in our lives, should never be a cause of shame, but a shout of liberation! Not just for some of us, but for all of us! Our whole journey toward a beloved community, of fellowship with one another and with our God, begins by realizing that we can declare the truth about ourselves because we are received with grace rather than judgment, and with forgiveness rather than punishment.
Now, declaring we are sinners is more than saying that each of us or any of us is a sinner because that is no more specific than declaring something like, “I love books.” After all, you might not love all books, so if you are really only into Westerns but someone hands you a Romance, you will balk at taking and reading that book because it is not really for you. The same with being a “sinner.” It is a word we throw around about ourselves and about others but it can have no more impact upon us than declaring the sky is blue or that the grass is green. On the other hand, we can use it as a kind of weapon to strike our neighbor. That’s no good either! For instance, you do not go into AA and point the finger at your neighbor and say, “You there, you are an alcoholic!” What good does that do? If you have entered that space, it is because you are ready to declare a deep reality about yourself, and you feel safe doing it because the others there are no strangers to your reality or the pain that has come along with denying it. The same should be true of the church because to say, “I am a sinner,” is the ability to name what is going wrong within our own hearts, minds, and souls. In 1 John, we are told to “confess our sins,” plural, as “a reminder that [ours should not be] just an abstract confession of sinfulness but the acknowledgment of specific acts in mind.” It is being able to declare with great specificity where we are not okay. I should be able to say something like, “Hi! I am Rev. Paul Grossman, and I am a sinner. I have lost patience with my wife and child, not always showing as much compassion as I should. I take things too personally, letting my pride fool me into thinking things are too much about me. I have avoided conflicts to keep the peace rather than trying to build true peace. I have not always been as warm and welcoming as I would like because my social anxieties hold me back.” Now, how does it feel to hear me say all of these things? Now, maybe, you are sitting there thinking, “I knew there was something wrong with him!”, or are you thinking, “Oh, I thought it was just me! I’m glad I’m not the only one.”? Imagine if this is how all of our church services looked, broken people confessing their brokenness, no judgment just grace. There's freedom to it! It is a freedom so foreign to today, but at the same time, I would say 1 John is an epistle for our times. We are a church divided– fraught and fractured– over a variety of issues and given the climate of our country, you could almost say our religious life is a reflection of our cultural one. As author David Zahl puts it, “People from different backgrounds and ideologies have never had a harder time talking to— or listening to—one another, and the result is a fraying social fabric that infects our day-to-day with the worst kind of tribalism.”[2] In this kind of environment, you can’t hardly be honest about your own sins, let alone be vulnerable with others. If you do, that’s just about tantamount to saying everything you believe in and belong to is wrong as well, and so you cannot say you are wrong in front of the opposition! The author of 1 John writes this epistle because within his own community, a group has left over theological disagreements, and what is worse is that this group is trying to win over the rest of the community to their way of thinking.[3] They have become the enemy! They deny the humanity of Christ, and they also claim that in Christ it is now impossible to be guilty of sin. What is worse, this group “did not see spiritual value in concrete acts of care, such as using their material means to help their needy sisters and brothers.”[4] Our author turns his attention to his community because chances are good that he cannot even begin to get the opposition to listen, but he can impact one group, and that is his own community. He can encourage them by reminding them about who God is and what their fellowship should look like. It is starting here that change can happen, and by the grace of God, if that change flourishes here, who knows where it will stop! 1 John starts by describing the divine by saying, “God is light,” but what does that mean? Does that mean our deity is like some bright bulb in heaven that we can hardly look at without being blinded? In 1 John 2:9, the author declares “The one who claims to be in the light while hating a brother or sister is in the darkness even now,” and in the next verse explains that the person “loving a brother and a sister stays in the light” (1 John 2:9-10 CEB). Later, the author will famously state that “God is love” (1 John 4:8 CEB). To love your brother or sister is to stay in the light, and God is both light and love. God is light, and we are told in this opening passage to “live in the light” or as the NRSV puts it, “walk in the light.” Living and walking in the light is how “we have fellowship with each other.” In other words, we can “walk in the light only when we walk with others whom we can love and with whom we can learn of God.”[5] This passage does not describe what God looks like, it describes God’s relationship with us, one of love, which in turn becomes a kind of light that illuminates the kinds of relationships we should have with one another. Now, maybe this all still seems confusing, so let me put things another way. What did God have to do to finally get through to us? God thundered from mountaintops and performed mighty miracles in the presence of thousands! God gave people the Torah and spoke through the prophets, constantly reminding everyone about who God is and what God is about. None of these worked, at least not fully enough of God! People were still estranged! People still thought that they were alone in their struggles and solely responsible for their victories. God had to clothe the Godhead in flesh to convince us of divine love through a cross and a grave, to prove to us that God wants us as we truly are. Yes, we are sinful, but God reached out through Jesus to grab hold of us! The trouble with how we have been living is that we have been trapped in lonely darkness, sure that we were the only ones hurting and broken! We look around ourselves at our neighbors and we wonder at the fact that they seem to have it all together while all we can seem to do is mess up again and again. We are sure that we are the only ones who struggle with these thoughts and feelings. We are sure that no one else goes through this. If we ever spoke any of it out loud, someone would see just how ugly we are, so we hide it all away, denying the truth of who we are. Wouldn’t it be easier to say that we can’t be sinful than to admit where we are broken? It’s gotten so bad that we cannot even admit when mistakes have been made, it brings us too close to the truth about ourselves and our sins, so instead we will deny that they were ever sins altogether! We hide everything away in places that we hope no one will ever see or find, and so we remain trapped, lost in sin’s awful night. Except, God is light and love, and God won’t let us waste away in darkness. The truth is that no matter what has happened in our lives, no matter what is hiding in the nooks and crannies of our hearts and minds, we are not alone. Isn’t that the power of the AA meeting? To meet and know others like you. To find in them compassion instead of judgment. That’s what God has done for us through Jesus Christ, God showed up as one of us to declare right in our faces I see you and I love you, so you are not alone. God knows we need to be reminded of this time and time again or else we will lapse back into our old habits! We need to learn the freedom of confessing the truth about ourselves before one another and to receive these truths with love and light! Then and only then we can start to build a beloved fellowship where all sins are received and loved away! Amen. [1] David Zahl, Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others (and Yourself) (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2022), 21. [2] Ibid., 20. [3] Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves, and Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1979), 94. [4] David Rensberger, Abingdon New Testament Commentaries: 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, ed. Victor Paul Furnish (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 25. [5] Ibid., 53.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
|