Introduction
As a coach, what do you say when your team is down? When they are losing. When their confidence is shaken and they just can’t seem to catch a break? When none of the bounces seem to go their way. A negative narrative can soon gather steam and spiral until a team can’t focus on anything else. How do you rally them out of that slump? (sorry, Mark, and any other Edmonton Oilers fans, if this is touching an open wound, given their loss in the Stanley Cup finals this past week!)
As a coach you need a break in the play, between periods, or at half-time. Or just a time-out if you can get one during the run of play. Just an opportunity to huddle with the team, and try to turn things around. As a coach, what do you say?
- Do you reach for the familiar cliques? You have gotta want it more than them! You have to give 110%. You have to be able to find another gear. Outwork them. Outhustle them. Dig deep.
- Or do you do the good cop/bad cop routine where one coach screams and yells to shock the team into turning things around, and the other one is gentler and more encouraging.
- Or do you get out the white board and draw up a very specific play to try and give the players something to focus on, and to be clear about what is expected from each one of them.
- Or do you change something up: shuffle the lines, change the positions around, bring in some subs to try and shake things up and change the narrative.
- Do you pull aside a few players individually, to give them some pointers specific to their play, their position and role on the team, and hope that makes a difference?
- Or do you step back and turn it over to your team leaders, hoping they can inspire their peers?
- Do you opt for silence? Maybe uncomfortable silence. Step back and let them each go inward, and figure out what they need to do personally to turn things around.
- Do you go back to basics? Simplify things. This is not the time for a fancy, new play. Get your players to just do what they know how to do. Try to tap into that muscle memory that they have built up through all their practices. Don’t overthink things.
I have been in those situations often enough as a coach and probably tried all of the above.
As a coach, sometimes you find the magic to rally your team, and sometimes you just can’t seem to turn things around. You can’t shift attention and focus off the negative message track.
This scripture from 1 John that we heard this morning is a bit like a coach’s speech to the team during a time-out. It is addressed to a church that needs encouragement and hope for the way forward. It offers reassurance and inspiration. It is meant to cheer and strengthen a church in a difficult situation.
Context
1 John is part of a group of 3 letters that all belong together. 1, 2 and 3 John sound similar. They use identical sounding styles and language. And they sound quite similar to the gospel of John, all leading biblical scholars to deduce that they are most likely written by an elder named John, who is overseeing a network of house churches, made up mostly of Jewish people, probably around the city of Ephesus. From clues elsewhere in this letter, and in other writings attributed to John, we learn that there has been a recent crisis in this community, motivating John to write. It sounds like one group of people has broken off from the others.The ones who left are accused of no longer acknowledging Jesus as Israel’s Messiah or the Son of God, and of trying to stir up hostility among those who stayed. John, writes in response to this split, trying to do some damage control. The letters of John give us a window into this tension. It would seem that this is a church that is rattled and shaken. Probably people are also angry and hurt. It sounds like this is a church in need of some good coaching.
Let’s take a closer look at what is going on here. Second and third John are written as more traditional letters. They address this crisis head on and name names. There is some pretty strong, critical language. Harsh words are used and labels applied.
1 John is different. It is written as a poetic sermon. The teachings in it are not new. They come right out of Jesus’s teachings as they are recorded in the gospel of John. It is an effort to remind and persuade those who stayed to adhere to the truth, and to assure them that God is with them. It is written in a style that sticks to a few core ideas, and then amplifies them by circling around those ideas several times, each time from a bit of a different angle. That helps us understand why love keeps coming up in so many different ways in this text.
Exploring the Text: God is Love
After an overall introduction, the writer has 2 larger sections. In the first one the writer explores the idea that God is light. In the second large section, God is love. We read a big chunk of that second section. And thanks to our readers for their clear reading of this text. It all sounds so simple, so true and so clear: God is love. God first loved us so we ought to love one another. This section is full of love language! In fact, love comes up 27 times! If it was a piece of music it would be called Variations on the Theme of Love.
John describes God as the source of love. Love is an essential part of God’s character. God’s love was expressed in sending Jesus, therefore, we ought to love one another, because God loved us so much. The emphasis here is that God is a being of total, self-giving love as made known to us through Jesus. The apostles testify that when they encountered Jesus they discovered the God who loves them so deeply. To know Jesus is to know the God of creative, life-giving, other-centered love. When you realize that God so loves you, that God is crazy about you despite your flaws and failures, that love becomes the things that grounds your entire life. That kind of love has the power to transform and shape your entire life. God’s love provides the grounding and the necessity for Christians to love one another. God’s love becomes complete in us when we show love in action to others.
To encounter this kind of God does away with fear and angst. When that love gets a hold of you it opens up a life permeated with God’s own presence and life and love, that begins now carrying on into eternity. When we live in God’s love we have nothing to fear. God’s perfect love casts out our fear. We are safe in God’s love.
This is all beautiful, encouraging and inspiring language. Next to the 1 Corinthians 13 passage on love that we explored a couple of weeks ago, this is the most extensive exploration on love in the NT. This is like a coach reminding you about all that good muscle memory stuff. The things you already know and have learned. The basics that should ground you in everything you do.
But if we read all three of the letters associated with John we notice that some of the love language has an edge to it. At times this passage seems to be so inclusive. But then there is some “us and them” language: those who know God and those who don’t know God. Those who love and those who don’t (1 John 4:7-8). Elsewhere in 1 John it is even more direct, comparing true believers, as those who stayed, to deceivers and false teachers, describing those who left (1 John 2:26). Just before the passage that we read, the writer warned the true believers to stay away from that false or deceptive influence (1 John 4:1). Earlier in the writing there are categories like “righteous” and “sinner” used, accusing those who sin of belonging to the devil (3 John: 7-8). Even the labels “liars” and “antichrist” are used for those who left (see 1 John 2: 18-23; 4:3). This is strong language!
As we read and explored this text Daryl and I found ourselves a little uncomfortable with this insider/outsider, true/false tone. Now we recognize that we have a 21st century Canadian cultural bias. And we recognize that we are reading other people’s mail here, so we know we are getting some of the tension and messiness of church life. People have strong feelings. But we also noticed that we are only getting one side of the story. We don’t have the perspective of those who left. We don’t know how many people left. The strength of the language suggests a major conflict. What is going on here? A couple of things.
In the early decades and centuries of the church there was much to sort out. The letters gathered together in the New Testament are witness to the debates and struggles in those early churches, as Christianity spread beyond its Jewish roots into other lands and cultures. And I use the plural form of “church” deliberately. It was not one, cohesive stream despite all the calls for unity. There were many congregations and networks of churches scattered around the Mediterranean, each in their own unique cultural landscape. Some favoured the teachings of one leader over another. And of course there were debates and disputes about all kinds of things. Leadership. Slavery. Sexuality. The nature of Jesus. Role of women. Relationship to government. Relationship to the surrounding culture. How to celebrate the Lord’s supper. Role of the Jewish tradition in the new Jesus movement. What to do with money and resources. Many of these had the potential to be serious, polarizing divides.
In the network of churches near Ephesus, we are learning about this morning the debate was over the nature of Jesus. Was he divine or human or both? That is the debate that John is addressing. The ones who left had a hard time accepting that Jesus was human. They assumed that because of who Jesus was and what he did that he could not be human, material, physical like the rest of us–open to the very base and basic needs, desires of our human bodies. In their minds he could only be Spiritual, divine, above, beyond our humanness. And so in an effort to combat what John considered false, deceptive teachings he doubles down on affirming the humanity of Jesus and emphasizing the death of Jesus as a sacrificial self-giving act. He mentions it a couple of times.
So what we have here is the coach huddling with those who remain in the church, trying to keep them from leaving too. Trying to stabilize them, encourage them, inspire them to stay. Affirming and reassuring them that they indeed have the truth. So, is all this wonderful, inspiring, poetic exploration of the love of God really just insider language for those who stayed? And when it talks about “those who claim to love God must love their brother and sisters” (1 John 4:21) does it just mean their siblings in the church community that have stayed? Is it only about love for those who confess the true, orthodox, acceptable teachings about Jesus? If this is insider language, if this call to love is really just for those believers in the church who stayed then it becomes about loving those who think the same as you and love you back. If that is the case then it rings a little hollow and it falls short of what Jesus calls us to.
Looking in a Mirror
What do we do with a scripture like this? I think it helps to remember that scripture often serves as a mirror. We hold it up and we see ourselves. Our biases. Our motivations. We see our tensions, and our messiness as churches, and church bodies. We see our tendencies to divide rather than engage the other. Frankly, I am glad we have a biblical collection like this. The conflicts and the struggles and the missteps are not glossed over or shined up to make everything look good. Nothing to see here. Instead they give us a glimpse into the real life of the Jewish community that helped to form Jesus, and the personalities of the churches, plural, in the first century. And the scriptures give us a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror if we are willing to look.
So what do we see when we hold up 1 John as a mirror? What do we see reflected back?
I think we see an earnest effort to be right and to be good. I grew up with that…so did many of you. To have confidence that our expression of faith is true and we are virtuous. A longing for affirmation and reassurance that we are on the right track. Almost like we are lining up to get stickers for being good. But we also know that a desire to be right and good can lead to being dogmatic and self-righteous. When we are right it means that others are probably wrong or at least off track, so we find ways to defend, explain, justify our particular position and argue against other perspectives. We see ourselves as having standards and boundaries to uphold. And maybe then there is a tendency toward conformity within those boundaries.
This past week we had the funeral for Alice Brubacher. As Mark and I prepared for her funeral we felt like it was important to name a difficult time in Alice’s history. She had given permission years ago to talk about what was a hurtful time in her life and the life of our congregation. Her first marriage ended when her husband left abruptly, leaving her a single mother. Years later she would marry Walter Brubacher, a deacon–a leadership position we had here at SJMC in those days. Some people had concerns about a deacon marrying a divorced woman. That was at a time when the church was wrestling with its stance on divorce and remarriage. Harsh and hurtful things were said and done leaving ripples of pain in the aftermath.
Looking back on that situation now, we recognize that as a church community we stumbled and fumbled our response to Alice and Walter’s marriage. I think it is fair to say that this congregation has learned from those missteps–has learned to say, we are sorry for the harm done; has done some healing, and has learned to engage difficult conversations in a healthier way, especially as we went through the Being a Faithful Church process that eventually led to our current welcoming statement on LGBTQ+ inclusion. For that legacy of Walter and Alice’s life in this congregation we owe a debt of gratitude.
And so, at her funeral we felt like it was important to recognize that painful history, to apologize to the family for that hurtful time, and to express appreciation for what we have learned from that experience. It was well received by the family. We had a number of conversations afterward about it–people thanking us for that honesty.
This is not the first time that we have entered into funeral planning with a family, only to encounter some past pain in a family system caused by a negative experience with church. Sometimes coming to a funeral is the first time a family member will be back in the church after a painful experience earlier in their life. Sometimes it is around something like divorce, or a pregnancy outside of marriage, or sexual identity, or a family member serving in the military. And we bump into memories about the church community trying to be dogmatically and theologically right, and correct, but somehow prioritizing that over being loving. Rules mattered more than relationships. Is it so important to hold fast to some “truth” we deem essential, or can we err on the side of being open handed and open hearted? As one writer put it, “I know I am right, but I could be wrong”. Can we hold on to strong convictions, but do it gently, in an attitude of humility, knowing that there is always more to learn, more to experience, more to understand.
Another thing I see when we look at 1 John as a mirror is our inclination as humans to sort and categorize people. It helps to give us a sense of having control over something. In our evolutionary journey it helped us to be safe. Clustering with like-minded people who look and sound and think like us makes us feel comfortable. It means that others who don’t belong get left out. I am reminded about how quickly we like to apply labels: liberal elite, right wing conservative, woke, redneck, anti-vaxxer, elitist, feminist, misogynist, fake, virtue signaller. I see the risk, the ease with which we can slip from categories and labels–to stereotypes, to assumptions, to judgment and even to avoidance. Language that labels divides and makes enemies.
Right from the beginning of our existence, we as humans have desired to have the knowledge of good and evil. Our first sin in the Garden of Eden is to reach for the fruit and eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, wanting that power of deciding between good and evil, right and wrong, who is in and who is out, who is a sinner and who is saved, who is friend and who is enemy. Thankfully, Creator God knows we humans have no business wielding that kind of power. We have no business eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For when we do, we polarize, we judge, we create tension, hostility. We are not meant for that kind of power because we so often mess it up when we claim it.
John is truthful when addressing fear as the biggest obstacle or the opposite of love. So many of our divisions come from a place of fear. What we don’t know we fear. And what we fear we label and avoid. We are trained to be fearful of people who are different from us and and fearful of what those people might do to us. We can easily fall prey to this climate of fear and identify “those people” as the enemy.
During our Lent bible study series this spring, Akiie Ninomiya reminded us of the danger of labels, especially the label of “enemy”. We were looking at the story of The Good Samaritan. The person who stopped and offered compassionate care to the one who fell among thieves was a Samaritan. Most often the way we interpret this story is to understand the Samaritan as the outsider, the unlikely choice, the one we don’t expect to stop. This time we were encouraged to see the story in a bit of a different way. The Samaritan is actually the enemy. The one we are taught to dislike, distrust, even to hate. What if it is my enemy who stops to help me beside the road?
Akiie challenged us to reconsider our use of the label “enemy” in the first place. It is such a powerful word. For as soon as we have applied that label to a person, or a group, it is hard to see them in any other way. How do we decide who is our enemy? How do we determine what an enemy looks like? And what happens once we have decided who is our enemy? Is there any way back from that? Akiie wondered if we grab for that label of “enemy” too lightly and too freely, without thinking, and without considering the consequences. If we apply it too easily we risk putting labels on people that will stick. We risk making assumptions about others that are not fair, and are hard to undo. We begin to stereotype them, make assumptions about them, judge them, and avoid them, even hate them and consider doing them harm.
Invitation
What might be the invitation as we look into this mirror of 1 John? After looking in this mirror of 1 John, I can no longer so easily judge this network of churches. Perhaps we should not be so hard on them. We would probably do the same. This is a snapshot of the early church, of a leader trying to encourage its people in the face of a divisive, difficult split. They needed a “time out” to call the team into a huddle and encourage and strengthen–they were hurt and angry and out of sorts, nursing wounds and grudges, their confidence rattled. In their context, in the midst of being shaken and unsettled by this divide, they needed to reaffirm and reassure, and centre and focus around the core of God’s love and God’s love for them.
Maybe that is what the church needed. Sometimes that is what we need. Sometimes we need the reassurance of being with safe people. But if it becomes our default, where we hunker down with other like-minded people and avoid the challenges, and difficulties around us, we are selling the love of God too short. Is there room to call them and us to something even deeper?
I hope in time they were able to open up a bit, be more expansive, and welcoming again. I hope I can too.
God is love. God’s love is expansive. Not narrow. Not limited. It is not only for my group. And I am not in charge of who receives it. Can we simply stand on the foundation that God is love. Can we find 27 different ways to lead with love? For perfect love drives out fear.