April 28, 2024 “Who is Going to Think? We? Or Someone else, FOR US?” 1 John 4: 7-21
Rev. Peter Hofstra
If
you want theology brothers and sisters, our Response of Faith is full of it
this morning. How do we think about our faith? How do we think about our Jesus? The Westminster Confession of Faith is a
classical expression of the theology of the Presbyterian Church. So is it going to have all the staying power
of an upper level textbook from any particular scientific discipline and
effectively glaze over our eyes and tuck our hearts back into bed for a
nap? Chemistry and physics had that
effect on me in an earlier time in my life.
So
we believe that it is God’s pleasure, in God’s eternal purpose not only to
choose Jesus but also to ordain him. Hey
Mary, you are following in Jesus’ footsteps this morning, pretty cool eh? All you who are elders and deacons, can I
have a show of hands please? Again, in
the footsteps of Jesus. It pleased God to
ordain Jesus into eight different jobs, as mediator, prophet, priest, king, head,
Savior, heir, and judge. Mary, you get
only one. And, this is a big And, God
has given Jesus a chosen people (which we hope/believe/know includes the likes
of us). And we shall, in the fullness of
time, have 5 things happen to us, we will be redeemed, called, justified,
sanctified, and glorified.
Can
I get an amen?
If
we go to our Bible passage today, I think it is verse 10 that ties most
profoundly back to what the Westminster Divines (yes, that is what history calls
them, they did not come up with this name for themselves), the diverse bunch of
theologians who wrote the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Westminster
Shorter Catechism, which not only implies but compliments the Westminster Longer
Catechism, all of which was actually passed as law by the English Parliament,
at least until the Restoration of the monarchy, when everything done by the
Parliament was summarily undone.
Oh,
verse 10, in this is love, not
that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning
sacrifice for our sins. Atoning sacrifice,
that is the big throw back theological idea.
Westminster
is a big name in the Presbyterian fandom.
Last church I served had a Westminster Auditorium. Our sister church down in Berkely Heights is
the Westminster Presbyterian Church. Before
I went to Princeton to be ordained, I studied at Westminster Theological
Seminary in Philadelphia. If I were to
ask you to consider where that name comes from, the most obvious connection
might be Westminster Abbey, over in London.
What I only came to understand later in life is that the entire Parliament
building in London is the Palace of Westminster.
Being
steeped in this stuff like a tea bag left to soak for too long, I always had a
picture in my mind of the Westminster parts of our Book of Confession being
written in a place like this, guys in the wigs hunkered down in pews, scattered
in small groups across the Sanctuary. It
is a bit mind blowing, at least to me, that the foundational theological
documents of the Presbyterian Church were written in the halls of power of one
of the greatest nations on earth, at that time, to become the law o the land. A vague comparison might be to think about
our Denomination’s constitutional document, the Book of Order, being written in
the capital building and being passed by the House of Representatives and the
Senate.
That
is what theology can grow into. We see
it today. God thought penetrates the
American political system. It can be
implicit, members of the government who believe in Jesus and use the values of
their faith to make decisions about the nation.
It can be almost obscenely explicit, “God says do this, or we are going
to be punished!!” Remember Hurricane
Katrina wiping out New Orleans? Remember
Superstorm Sandy smacking New York City?
Leaders declared, in Jesus name’, that was punishment.
And
there are voices out there right now telling us what we should do and believe
because of what those voices claim in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, waving
their Bibles and scaring me. Christian
Nationalism, a blending of American patriotism with a patina of faith. A Gospel of Prosperity, a means of thinking
that God blesses those who are faithful by how much stuff they get.
It
is so big and so pervasive and so overwhelming, there is no escaping it. No escaping theology. So how often do we push it away in
frustration, shut it off like we are shutting off the news that has nothing but
bad things to report, maybe desiring to curl up in a ball and shut out the
world, just so we can get a little alone time with our Lord. That is, if we haven’t been so disgruntled or
jaded or jaundiced that we’ve pressed out our Lord Jesus out to the margins as
well.
So
this is where we are today. At the
junction of our thoughts and our love for our neighbors. That makes our passage in John ideal for theology. I count the word ‘love’ 26 times in verses 7
through 21. Bible-philes? I would love-pun intended-to be proven wrong
in that count.
Theology
begins with one simple premise, biblical in origin (which is good) in our
passage this morning. John tells us at
the end of verse eight. This is the bumper
sticker we need. “God is love”. Everything else, all our theology, must derive
from that one truth. When John tells us
God is love, it develops a theological statement.
Whoever
does not love does not know God, for God is love. Not to know love is not to know God. So everything not done in love is NOT done in
God. How about that as a first level
test of somebody’s motivations?
If
you read the blog posts this week, you will have seen that in the High Middle
Ages, when knowledge was being organized into the first round of ‘sciences’,
branches of knowledge, theology was the queen of the sciences. If theology derives from the truth that God
is love, all the other sciences derived from theology.
In
our faith rubric, theology occurs in the human capacity for thinking, where it
crosses with Jesus’ command to love neighbor.
It is an applied science, applying the love of God to neighbor. Maybe this will help, at the risk of
betraying yet another layer of geekiness in your pastor. Consider physics.
“Pure”
physics will establish the scientific basis for the capacity to warp time and
space and effectively travel faster than light.
Applied physics will be building the warp engine to go where no one has
gone before.
Theology
is how we think about God, who is love, ipso facto…sorry, trying to sound sciency…it
is how we think about love, so how love is shared and applied to a world in need. Our contemplative verse is a theological statement,
a statement based on thinking about our God.
Let’s love one another because love is from God. We are born of God and we know God if we love.
What
else do we know from John? God is love ipso
facto, sorry, therefore God sent Jesus as our Savior. God loves us so that God abides in us and we
in him, by the gift of the Holy Spirit.
We can be bold on the day of Judgement because God’s love has brought
forgiveness to us. Love casts out fear,
because what did we fear? Punishment. But that does not exist any longer, because
of, right, love.
Now
comes application. Cannot love God if we
hate our brother and sister. Because how
can we love the God we cannot see if we do not love the siblings we do see? These are the thoughts that John shares with
us, the structures of how to be Christian, of understanding what we believe. They lead to how we apply our faith, in what
we say to our neighbors, our…evangelism, and what we do for our neighbors. As a congregation, that is our missions.
So
that’s where we are. God is love. God loved us so much that God gave us God’s
only begotten son. He died for us and
rose for us. How are we supposed to
think about that? That’s verse 10, the one
the Westminster divines would love. Jesus
is an atoning sacrifice. A what now? This is how forgiveness was structured in the
First Testament. A person sinned, they
confessed, and they atoned, they paid reparations for breaking God’s law. It was done in the form of an animal
sacrifice. A life for a life, since the
wages of sin is death. Think of it as
one of Jesus’ parables, it was tailored to the thinking of the first generation
of Jewish believers in Christ Jesus.
This
is thinking about God, trying to place the actions of the divine into a human
context. God does things in a way to try
and penetrate the fog that is human perception.
Why were there two trees of note in the Garden of Eden? The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,
which the first couple messed up on…don’t eat this. And the Tree of Life, which, if they ate of
it, would give eternal life. So tree number
1 is sin and tree number 2 is life, is love, is…Jesus! And what Jesus did! Ohhhh.
Or
one of my favorites, the Trinity. God is
one and God is Three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Islam has one God, just Allah, and a
prophet. This tripling down is nonsense
to them. Judaism has God, at best, Jesus
and the Spirit are the biggest retcon’s in history. We Christians just rewrote the history back to
Genesis. Or, or, God was giving creation
a predestined bit of side eye. How do I
get through to these people? Trinitarian
formula (because theology likes to talk sciency sometimes).
So
God is love, cool. All powerful, that’s
pretty straight forward. Creator deity, pretty
common across all religious experiences.
Creation is Good, product of a loving God. But so big and distant. Kind of abstract. So lets get up and personal. Step across the divide from being the Creator
into the Creation, come as a guy. Call
him Jesus. Celebrate with gifts, so,
Christmas. But we humans have this huge ego
capacity to recreate God in our own image, check out the art work around Jesus. He’s very white in a lot of the publicity
pieces. Wanda Sykes dropped a comment
about this being Malibu Jesus, I will never be able to look at those pieces the
same way again. Probably for the
best. But I digress. Jesus, human, and God, so in a one to one
relationship with me, and, because of the divine part, with everybody
else. It’s the God-part that allows him
to answer all our prayers and know all our hearts.
But
then the Holy Spirit…well, John gives us a leg up on that. God is not just out there, God is not just a guy
whose here, God is in here. God abides
in us and we abide in God. So, back to
our first truth, God is love. Love is
over all and through all, love is up close and relational, love is in my
heart. Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Time for the human to go, huh.
So
you know those eight jobs that Jesus was given and those five things that
happen to us as laid out by the Westminster theologians? All of those are derived from, work to help
us understand, are Scripturally provided divine wonder put in human terms.
Here
is why I believe it is so important that we are well-versed in the bible and
what we think about our God. Because of
the people of faith who will skip past the ‘God is love’ part when they speak
in the name of Jesus. Let’s beat down on
homosexuals and all “those” people who claim the LGBTQ alphabet legally,
morally, socially, emotionally, and physically because the Bible condemns
them. NO. They are God’s children and there is nothing
they can do that will make them NOT God’s children. And love does not beat down, in any shape or
form. I happen to believe that when my
mom took the wooden spoon to my backside, because “The Bible says so”, she was
turned into an abuser in the name of Jesus.
I love my child so much that I need to hit them? What?
Or
this gospel of prosperity, God will bless me with material goods because that
is how I interpret the Bible. NO. That means the poorer you are, the farther
you are from God? You know the secondary
homeless crisis in this country? The primary
crisis is that there are people in the richest nation in the world who do not
have home. The secondary crisis is
everything done to sideline them, push them out of sight and out of mind. There is a direct correlation to policies
pushing on that abuse to the theological understanding that they are poor and
therefore unblessed.
Do
I want to start on race relations? An
entire theological history based on the privileged theological interpretation
that makes skin pigment into the defining characteristic of who and how God
loves us? Our thinking about God, about
God who is love, based on melanin?
In
all of this, we are doing theology, thinking about God. And it affects how we treat our
neighbors. Even ignoring God, showing up
on Sunday but leaving Jesus behind the rest of the week? That is as reflective on our intentions about
God’s love as everything else we do.
Why
did God’s love manifest as Jesus dying for our sins? Why did God manifest as a victim, for
us? I would suggest that, in part, it is
so that every person who has been victimized by ‘Good Christian theology’ can
still find the love of God and a Savior in Christ Jesus, who was victimized
with them. Theology is complicated? Yes, it can be. But its foundation is so simple. God is love.
The bible is built upon that foundation to explain it to us sinful
humans. Two thousand years of Christian
theology, a whole book of Confessions, our Westminster divines, our mission
statement, our core values, all of that is our heartfelt, ongoing, ever-failing
but ever-forgiven process of living into that truth. To put in another, far more succinct way, Beloved, let us love one another, because love is
from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment