Love One Another - Sermon for CATM - May 27, 2007
A selection of Scriptures:
John 13:34-35 “A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.5 By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
"This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another". 1 John 3:11 "And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us".
1 John 3:23 "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God". 1 John 4:7 "Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another". 1 John 4:11 "No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us". 1 John 4:12
A 15 year old boy, Jordan Manners. A student of the arts. Just had his birthday. Gunned down in a Toronto high school in Downsview this past Wednesday.
A Sri Lankan family’s uninsured bungalow is firebombed in an ethnic conflict that has erupted between new migrants to Toronto and those who have been here longer.
A roadside bomb explodes and kills Matthew McCully, a Canadian soldier on foot patrol this past Thursday in a volatile district of southern Afghanistan. What do these events tell us about our world? What kind of commentary do they provide for us to understand the kind of world we live in? It’s messed up? Yes. It’s scarey? Yes. There’s a lot of hurt in this world? Yes. But also,
They suggest a profound need for healing. Hurting is all around us, folks. I don’t need to tell you that. We all know of stories of parents who are absent form their children’s lives. We have heard about children being abused, women being abused. We know of stories of betrayal. Pain.
Deep wounds require deep healing. Emotional scars need something or they can cause us to shrivel up. To not trust. Anyone. Ever again. Advise about “Getting on with our lives”, and just “getting over it” just doesn’t cut it. We may have tried to bury the pain. Only to realize that pain can’t be ignored. Undealt-with hurt will unavoidably impact our lives. We will find it hard to trust. Hard to make new friends.
Hopefully we don’t need to go to church for too long or read our Bibles for too long before we realize that God, on top of being our Creator and Redeemer, is a healing God. He is not content to let our wounds fester. He is not content to allow anything to close us down. Quite the opposite.
John 10:10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. NIV
10b: I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of. Mess 10b: My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life. NLT God’s purpose in coming to this broken earth is to give us: “My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life. NLT
Life to the full. More and better life. Rich and satisfying life. Awesome!
“Well, that’s fine” you might say, “but you don’t know my pain. You don’t know what I’ve been through. This ideal picture, this terrible contrast between the life I know and the life I could have! It’s really not particularly helpful. You do not know my pain!!!”.
And if those were your thoughts, You’d be right. Absolutely right. But someone who knows you and who loves you and who has the power to heal you DOES know your pain. Listen:
In a powerful prophetic passage about Jesus, written 700 years before His birth, Isaiah wrote some interesting words: Is 53:4a Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows.
Some 800 years give or take later the writer of Hebrews says this of Jesus: Heb 4:15a "We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality". (The Message).
Not out of. touch with my reality. The writer of Hebrews continues: Heb 4:15b “He’s been through weakness and testing, experienced it all “—all but the sin”. Mess.
And so...if pain and suffering and loss are part of the personal experience of God Himself; if within the Holy Trinity there is a comprehension of my deepest despair, a personal knowing of all that I have been through and how it still impacts me today, AND a desire to heal me of this terrible burden of pain, then...
There used to be a very big and “important” doctrine about God in the church. The technical name for this doctrine was “God’s Impassibility”. This “doctrine” (always be careful when people start throwing around the word “doctrine”) This doctrine said that God was not affected by human suffering. He was not moved or changed as a result of your pain, my pain. A famous hymn that the 16th century reformer Martin Luther wrote was called “The Solid Rock”. It’s all about God’s strength in the midst of all of life’s challenges. And it says something important about God. He is strong. He is our anchor in the midst of all that life throws at us.
It also says something very inaccurate about God. It’s not too hard to figure out. GOD IS NOT A ROCK. Rocks don’t have feelings, they couldn’t care less about anything.
This doctrine was thought up because humans don’t want to believe that God is impacted by the experiences of our life. Do you remember Maryellen’s message a few weeks ago when she spoke about Jesus standing over Jerusalem (show PPT pic of Hen and chicks [Url: http://members.surfeu.at/veitschegger/Henne.JPG ] and expressing in emotional language his grief over Israel. Or how Jesus wept at Lazarus’ grave side, not for Lazarus who He was soon to raise from the dead, but for Lazarus’ sisters who were overcome with grief and loss.
These are pictures of God in Christ that show us that God is impacted by our pain. He is not altered by pain the way grief alters us and can shut us down. But He is moved. And he is moved to act. How has God acted on our behalf?
We know that he came into the world to show us the very character and personality of God. That he came to suffer and die for our sins. And we spend a lot of time, as we should, reflecting on all that this means. How we are forgiven. How we are the focus of God’s love. How we are free in Jesus Christ to really live because of what Jesus did for us on the cross. We will never, as a church, tire of proclaiming God’s saving acts in Jesus Christ. But there is one act of God, one thing that he did...for us, for our healing, that we can sometimes sort of overlook.
“But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy”. 1 Peter 2:9 NIV
Simply put, He brought us together. He made you and I part of a people who belong to God. How does God heal us? We know it is by the stripes of Jesus, the wounds of Jesus, the suffering of Jesus.
“But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed”. Is 53:5 NIV
It was love for you and for me that caused Jesus to willingly lay down his life so that we might be healed. When we believe in Jesus, when we take it personally that Jesus died the kind of death He died, He brings us into a community...of healing. A community where the love that we have for one another becomes for us a healing love. The call of Holy Scripture for us to love one another that we have heard repeatedly in today’s readings, is the call to enter into a giving and receiving relationship with this healing community.
Isaiah 58 is an important scripture in the life of the mission, and one that for many of us provides a deep basis for being a faith community that spends 90% of its energies in outreach. In a nutshell, God says in Isaiah 58 that when we reach out in love, we receive the healing that God intends for us.
“Free those who are wrongly imprisoned; lighten the burden of those who work for you. Let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people.7 Share your food with the hungry, and give shelter to the homeless. Give clothes to those who need them, and do not hide from relatives who need your help 8 “Then your salvation will come like the dawn, and your wounds will quickly heal”. Is 58:6-8 NLT
There is some wonderful give and take here. When we are on the receiving end of love from one another, we find acceptance and embrace and something that both makes up for some of the painful experiences in our lives, and something that makes it somehow safer to work through our issues honestly and with a confidence that since we are loved we can do anything.
But in the act of loving others, we also find that our wounds heal. As we gradually shift away from a self-centred way of living to an others-centred way of living, our focus shifts from our pain and our own neediness, to the needs and hurts of others. And this is part of how we become free. You see, God doesn’t always take away all our pain. Anyone who says He does is lying. Why doesn’t He take it all away? Why doesn’t he just eliminate the effects of the suffering we have experienced. It’s because suffering forms us. And suffering unites us.
“If one part suffers, every part suffers with it”. 1 Cor 12:26a NIV
Have you ever asked yourself, “What good has come from all the pain I’ve been through?” or have you ever wondered about what we sometimes call our “wasted years”? What use is any of that to us now. Why not just do our level best to forget it all and just bury the pain and move forward.
We sing a song called “Open the Eyes of My Heart Lord”. [Put words up on screen, sing 1st few lines]. One of the many beautiful things God does for us is to show us what life is like for others. He gives us the ability to empathize with others, to know their pain, to feel their pain. That empathy creates bridges. Bridges to relationship with another.
And for most of us, our strongest empathy is for those who are going through the pain we have gone through ourselves. I can’t tell you how many single moms who have wisely fled abusive marriages or relationships, and have gained some distance from those hurtful relationships, who have told me about the passion or strong desire they have to help other single moms in similar situations. How they can actually tell when a woman is in an abusive relationship. They can see it in their eyes. They can hear it in their voices.
Or women or men who have a background of heavy drug use who have found freedom in Jesus Christ and who now are completely focussed on helping others who are as they were.
What good can come from the suffering you have experienced? It uniquely qualifies you to encourage another. God brings us to faith in him or renews our faith in him, he takes our pain and our sadness and our suffering, and he uses it to heal other lives. Because we are drawn to those who’s pain we know. And we build friendships. And we find healing as we grow to love another.
And for those who feel no one understands, or no one has ever taken the time to get to know me and learn to care about me. That is another unique opportunity. Be the friend you’ve always wanted to have. Love the stranger who walks in the doors of this mission the exact way that you wished you had been loved. Reach out to the quiet, shy, reserved person that you used to be. And even in doing that, when you make a friend in this way, you open greater possibilities of experiencing healing in your own life.
1 John 4:7 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 1 John 4:11 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. 1 John 4:12 NIV
God’s love is made complete in us when it has produced in us true love for one another. Or to put it another way, God’s love for us is incomplete until is has birthed love for one another in us.
Open up a newspaper on go to any news web site and you will see the profound need for healing that exists in our world. Think about your own life. Your own experiences over the past few years and you will see your own need for healing. Your healing is divinely connect to the healing love you share with one another, with your neighbour.
The call to love one another is one the most profound calls that God gives us. Jesus’ life was focussed on others. That’s why He was the most whole person who has ever lived. That’s part of why He was the only perfect human ever. Fully human. Fully committed to loving others even if it cost Him His life. And of course, it did.
Jesus said “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. John 15:13. And then he laid down his life for you and for me. And he said to his disciples as He says to me today and to you today:“My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. John 15:12 NIV
Let’s pray. God, your love is amazing. We sang that today and we need to keep singing about your love because it is our spiritual bread and butter. And how amazing is it that you call each of us here today to be a part of your healing community, your church. Would you take our doubts, would you take the limitations to our love that we all feel so deeply and transform them into the simple choice to just truly love one another.
Grow in us a deeper affection for one another, a deeper trust, a greater trustworthiness, that we might shine as Your lights in a terribly damaged world, the same world you lived and died to redeem to yourself. This we pray in the strong name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to Whom be honour and praise and glory, forever and ever. Amen.
