The Community of the Beloved - 1 John 2:3-11 - June 17 Sermon
I’m going to start by asking you to use your memory. Think for a moment of yourself when you first began to follow Jesus. Think about what you were like.
Think about how you acted, how you spent your time, and maybe even of how you were known by others, your reputation in your community, in your family. Try to put that into a snapshot in your mind.
And now think of who you are today. And consider the changes.
An article on Christianity.com talked about James and John; the John who wrote the letter we are studying toda. It says this:
“Now, you don’t get a nickname like Sons of Thunder for no reason [Mark 3:16–17]. But that is how Jesus’ disciples, James and John, were known.
“They were rough-hewn guys—amazing, colorful characters. They would not back away from a confrontation. In fact, they might even have looked forward to one.
They could be very aggressive. And they also could be very insensitive.
“On one occasion, when the people in a village of Samaria were not responsive to the message of Jesus, it was James and John who wanted to call down fire from heaven on them (see Luke 9:54).
“When Jesus spoke of His own impending death, about how he would be betrayed and then handed over to the Gentiles to be mocked, spit upon, scourged, and ultimately killed, James and John blurted out,
“Teacher, we want You to do for us whatever we ask. . . . Grant us that we may sit, one on Your right hand and the other on Your left, in Your glory” (Mark 10:35, 37 NKJV).
“Was that a good time to bring this up? It would be like saying, “Really? Could I have your car?” to someone who just found out they had one week to live.
These guys just said what they thought. And they were just like us: hopelessly human and remarkably unremarkable.
“But God transformed them. And at the end of their lives, these men, who were known when young as Sons of Thunder, became known for something else.
James was the first apostle to be martyred. And John became known as the apostle of love. He was the author of the Gospel of John as well as the epistles of 1, 2, and 3 John.
“God made James and John into different people than they were before—and He can do the same for us”.
https://www.christianity.com/jesus/life-of-jesus/disciples/transforming-the-sons-of-thunder.html
We are continuing today in our series on the letter of 1 John.
The Apostle John is called the disciple whom Jesus loved, and as we have seen there is a big difference between John when he first appears in the gospels to John years later when he was a mature follower of Jesus.
There is a huge difference, in fact. The difference is that he has learned to love.
And he didn’t learn to love in a vacuum. On his own. In a desert. Disconnected from others. Sorting it all through in his head.
He learned to love as part of the church; he learned to love in the church as he rubbed shoulders with other Jesus-followers, as he engaged in service.
As he was going through his own personal struggles, as he was learning to see himself as part of a community formed by God, loved by God, beloved by God. His community of the Beloved.
And so it’s to the writings of the former ‘Son of Thunder’, transformed into “the apostle of love” that we turn again today to consider what it means for us as the church to be the community of the beloved.
This is a large topic that we will likely spend more time on in the future as a church, but for today we’ll consider The Community of the Beloved is at the least two things:
? A Community of Forgiveness (as we learn to know, be and do)
? A Community of Grace (as we grow in what is always a deep, slow process)
The Community of the Beloved is a Community of Forgiveness
So as we start to look at today’s passage, we see that John says that knowing God, truly knowing God, is keeping God’s commands.
This can both make a lot of sense and at the same time create a lot of tension in us. Why might that be?
It makes sense because I think we know or feel that loving God should be more than sentimental. Loving God is not the same as me saying “I love God, and I do whatever I darn well please”.
We sense the built-in contradiction to that way of thinking, and some of us who have been around a while have known folks like that.
Might not use those words, but their lives kind of say the same thing.
And we know that they don’t usually last too long as followers of Jesus. The reason is pretty simple. No one loves God and then does whatever they please.
No more than a husband or wife can say: “I love my spouse, and I do whatever I please”. No.
That love between a husband and wife is a covenant love, and that love has boundaries that exist to preserve the integrity of that relationship. That covenental love creates ties that bind.
So loving God does mean that our actions align with His will. He is God, after all, and we are not. A follower of Jesus will never say: “I love God and, also, I do whatever I please”.
At the very least it makes sense that God being God gets to call the shots, gets to say what is good and right, and by the same token He gets to say what is not good and not right.
So John makes sense, right. Not all that hard to understand. But what he says also creates tension, if I’m honest. If we’re honest.
I think the Psalms are helpful here. Psalm 119 in particular says this:
1 Blessed are those whose ways are blameless,
who walk according to the law of the Lord.
2 Blessed are those who keep his statutes
and seek him with all their heart—
3 they do no wrong
but follow his ways.
4 You have laid down precepts
that are to be fully obeyed.
5 Oh, that my ways were steadfast
in obeying your decrees!
6 Then I would not be put to shame
when I consider all your commands.
7 I will praise you with an upright heart
as I learn your righteous laws.
8 I will obey your decrees;
do not utterly forsake me.
Do you spot the tension? The psalmist writes what we perhaps feel. We understand that it’s best to walk in the ways of God, to be blameless, to keep His word, to not do wrong.
We get that and can agree pretty easily more than likely. We sort of like ourselves more when we keep His Word..
But the psalmist also laments, to paraphrase, ‘O that MY ways were steadfast in obeying your decrees.
Then I’d be done with shame at my failure to do so. I’d be able to stop worrying that my slowness to get it together might leave me forsaken’.
So how do we reconcile or live with this tension. This tension that exists in all authentic church communities, communities of the Beloved world-wide?
This tension of knowing that loving God means obeying God, but also that we’re pretty inconsistent at loving God. We’re not steadfast in obeying, like the psalmist says.
How do we, as a church, work with this reality? This is a very important question.
Some of you have experienced the type of church where you feel a lot of pressure to conform, to get it together before really having it together, to have issues sorted out before you’ve really had time to make that journey with Jesus to sort out our issues.
You’ve felt judged and maybe excluded when you let your humanity show.
You might have done a lot of growing, a lot of changing on the inside, and there's ample evidence for that growth in the way your life and lifestyle have changed.
But there’s something you’re still working on, and there’s pressure to do things that you’re in all honesty not sure you’re ready to do, likely for all kinds of reasons.
The problem, of course, when there’s that pressure and that climate of judgment is that we have really 2 options. Fit in or leave.
The first is to do our best to fit in by learning how to wear a mask that hides our struggle, that hides our pain, that makes us look far more put together than we really are.
The problem with masks is that they’re masks. They are not really us. They are a projection of what we perhaps want to become or that we feel the pressure to become.
One of the expressions of this can be a big focus on ‘dressing in our Sunday best’. We put our limited energies into looking good rather than actually being good.
The other problem with masks is that they’re a lot of work to maintain. I’ll be honest with you. I have limited energy, the more so as I get older.
So I think, “Why spend my limited energy on trying to maintain something that isn’t real?”. I’d rather put that energy into to the journey.
An honest journey with Jesus that doesn’t put much energy at all into how I appear to you or you or anyone, and instead puts my energy into learning to become like Jesus in my attitudes, my behaviour and my character”.
So in a church setting where we find pressure to get it together externally, our choices are to do just that and try to look the perfect picture of a Christian... or to leave.
And I’m thinking that more than one of us has left a church because, among other reasons, we just weren’t willing to succumb to pressure to look good on the outside.
We know that’s more about making others comfortable than it is to do with being in the journey of following Jesus.
But if the Community of the Beloved doesn’t pressure you to conform on the outside, what’s left? Well the best thing is left. The Holy Spirit can change you from the inside out as you, as the Psalmist says, “seek Him with all your heart”.
What do we do to contribute to a community like this? We be something. We be a community of forgiveness.
The community of the beloved is a community of forgiveness. We have been the recipients of the forgiveness of all our sins. Because our sins are forgiven we are able to enjoy a rich relationship with God, able to
“Approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need”. Hebrews 4:16
“Hang on. Does this mean we can’t go around judging people?”, someone might ask (probably not, really). Yes, it means that. ‘But what do I do with my impulse to judge?!”, someone else might ask.
And I’d admire that person’s honesty, because most of us, if we reflect at all on our behaviour and inner struggles, know that part of what’s broken in us, that God is slowing healing, is the very human tendency to go super easy on ourselves and at the same time be all judgy of other people.
Maybe we’ve learned to keep our judgement to ourselves because we know that when we sound all judgy we come off sounding like a tool.
[Point finger - what am I doing as I point my finger at someone else’s failings? I have 5 digits. 1 is pointing at the person, 3 are pointing back at me, and 1 is pointing at God]
So the impulse to judge is often still in us. What are we to do?
It’s simple. Judge. (Pause) But judge yourself.
See, Jesus knows all about our tendency to judge others harshly and go relatively easy, or absurdly easy on ourselves:
Matthew 7:1 “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. 3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
So to be the Community of the Beloved, we must be a community of forgiveness.
And to show that Jesus is very serious about this being a core part of who we are, we have plenty of examples of God urging us toward this. The Lord’s Prayer itself does this.
What does it say?
“Forgive us our trespasses (or sins) .as we forgive those who trespass against us”. And then just after Jesus says this, to clarify what He means in case we’re left scratching our heads, he says: “14 For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins”. Matthew 6
So the Community of the Beloved IS a community of Forgiveness. It must be. We must be. I must be.
And part of how we live this out is that we learn to live out the fruit of the spirit with each other. What are the fruit of the Spirit? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
So self-control, a big issue for a lot of us, is a fruit of the Spirit. It is a work of the Spirit of God in us.
It’s a deep inner work that God does to bring about transformation in us, to make us more and more like His son Jesus. Likewise faithfulness is a fruit of the Spirit, and so on.
Again, these are the fruit of the Spirit. Not the fruit of being harangued about our behaviours, our lifestyle, our imperfect efforts to live the life of a Christ follower. Not the fruit of conforming to other people’s opinions.
So loving God means obeying God. (vv 4-5)
For this to be real and lasting, given the changing that many of us need to do to be like Jesus, we need to recognize that this is a slow process that must be driven by loving God, led by the Spirit of God working in us from the inside out to produce the fruit of the Spirit.
It does not come best by conforming to norms of behaviour around us, not by finely tuning our masks so that everyone thinks we’re something that we’re not.
The Community of the Beloved is a community of forgiveness. And because it is a community of forgiveness it is also something else:
The Community of the Beloved is a Community of Grace.
When I was a young Christian I was still doing some crazy, stupid stuff. My church leaders knew about this. What did they do?
I expected them to turf me from the church or put me into some kind of remedial holiness course.
What did they do? The leaders asked me if I was still planning to do crazy, stupid stuff or I had truly repented of my actions, my sins. In tears, I confessed and repented of my actions. That’s all they wanted to know.
They wanted to know if I was sincere and so, very much like Jesus in John 8, they asked me about any accusers, if others knew about my actions. Then they said go and sin no more. That was it.
And you know what? That grace, the unearned, unmerited favour that I received from my church, motivated me to stop the crazy stuff I was doing. It stopped dead. Because of grace.
We are a Community of the Beloved. That community is all of us here in this space, this sanctuary. And together this community is a part of the Trinity. The Community is the Trinity plus Us.
What about the Beloved. The beloved is Jesus, because we belong to Jesus. And the beloved is us. You and me, all of us, together on the journey with Jesus.
We are learning together how to live our lives in God, How to live lives of surrender to him and blessing to others, and we have the mandate as The Community of the Beloved to invite others to follow Jesus, that many more might become a part of the beloved community.
Can you say with me: “I am a follower of Jesus and I am a member of the Beloved Community”.
May we live this. May we learn to forgive and be forgiven. May God’s Grace be powerfully at work in us.
May we encourage one another to be our authentic selves and at the same time together seek the Lord, and truly seek to be like Jesus in our attitudes, behaviours and character.
