1. Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word on this 5th Sunday of Easter is taken from 1 John 4:1-11, it’s entitled, “Greater Love,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. The Great Lakes, the Great Plains, the Great Salt Flats of Utah, the Great Wall of China. What a superlative is the word “Great!” Not only when it’s applied to sites and places and events, but especially when it’s applied to people and nations: Alexander the Great, Peter the Great, Gregory the Great, Catherine the Great, the Greatest Generation, Great Britain, and what about the phrase “Make America Great Again!” It’s a word that elevates its object in the mind of the hearer and sets the “Lakes” or the “Plains” or the “Wall of China” or Alexander, Gregory, Peter, Catherine, Britain, or America heads above all others . . . greater than others.
3. Our text today identifies the one who is truly greater than all others, and it assures us that “he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). God‘s love for the world in Christ is greater than all that oppose Him. That’s an assurance we need in this world of competing belief systems, values, and ideologies—the “spirits of the age” we might call them—appealing to us and to our children, wanting to claim us as their own.
4. Spirits of the age competing for God’s little children appear very great. Those spirits are what St. John is talking about in our text for today when he says, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit.” Don’t make the mistake of de-personalizing the word spirit here, thinking it simply refers to some disembodied belief system, value, ideology. There’s no such thing. Whether it’s religion, values, or philosophy of some sort, each “spirit of the age”: Is embodied in and controls the minds and hearts of all who are not connected by faith to the Vine, Jesus Christ, as we heard in today’s Gospel (Jn 15:4–5). The spirit of the age entices those who, like the Ethiopian in today’s First Reading, are baptismally connected to Christ but daily live in cultures not connected to him, where we are all too easily lured by the “spirits” of the culture to sever our lifeline to Christ.
5. For those who were the initial recipients of this letter of the apostle John, the “spirit of the age” (around AD 80) was that of the Greco-Roman culture that enveloped their lives in the metropolitan city of Ephesus. The city: Daily engaging John’s “little children” (1 John 2:1, 12, 18, 28; 3:7, 18; 4:4; 5:21), the “children of God” (1 John 3:1, 2, 10), his “beloved” (1 John 3:21; 4:1, 11). Ephesus boasted its famed status as the most beautiful and diverse city by the sea. With great works of art and statues attracting tens of thousands of tourists. The city of Ephesus had unbridled sexuality expressed openly in religious cult practices and public theater and arts. It prided itself on religious diversity, including “mystery religions” mimicked by the secret societies and cults of our day.
6. The city of Ephesus daily challenged the faith of John’s “little children” to such an extent that he is moved by the Spirit through his paternal concern to: John warns them concerning these “spirits” that would lead them astray. He wants to equip them to “test” these “spirits” to see if they were of Christ or anti-Christ. John wants to keep connected with them as they engage this spiritual warfare, even as would any Christian parent today whose son or daughter leaves home to study or work in New York, Chicago, or San Francisco.
7. John invites his hearers and us as Christians to test and see: Are those “spirits” all that great? Test and see: “Do not believe every spirit” (1 John 4:1). How “open” have you been to the “spirits of the age?” For example: The spirit of compromise rather than that of confession in the presence of those who would see Jesus Christ as one of the many faces of God, or less than God. The spirit of “relativism,” which says, “Truth is relative. Who can know it?” This is an old spirit. Pontius Pilate asked, “What is truth?” when Jesus who is “the way, and the truth, and the life” was standing right before him. The spirit of immorality or, worse yet, amorality, which says “there are no absolutes. No right or wrong.” The spirit of “accommodation,” which is intolerant of your right to call something or someone wrong. The spirit of intimidation, which counts it more important to be politically correct than biblically correct.
8. The Apostle John says test and see: “Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error” (1 John 4:5–6). St. John says “the spirits” are discernable. How? “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already” (1 John 4:2–3). You see, “It’s still all about Jesus!” as it was for Martin Luther and is for us, five hundred years later.
9. So, we see that the one who is in us is greater than the one who is in the world. Jesus is greater than . . . The spirits of every age (1 John 4:4). The spirit that minimizes or denies human sinfulness (1 John 1:8). Greater: Christ dies for it! The spirit of antichrist at work in the world (1 John 4:3). Our sin of giving way to those spirits in thought, word, deed (1 John 4:10; 2:1–2). Our heart when it condemns us (1 John 3:19–20). All that would seek to “overcome” us (1 John 4:4; Rom 8:36–37). Christ’s dying and rising overcomes!
10. And if we confess Christ, God abides in us (1 John 4:15): Through Baptism into Christ as the Ethiopian eunuch received Christ (Acts 8). Through the Lord’s Supper where Christ’s crucified body and blood sustain us, the same Word of life John says the apostles had “seen with our eyes” and “touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1).
11. Jesus Christ in us, that is, the Spirit, without whom we can do nothing, keeps giving through us as: We love one another (1 John 4:7, 11). We bear witness and confess Christ to one another and beyond (1 John 4:14–15). We cast out all fear (1 John 4:17–18) of the world and he who is in it, knowing that “he who is in [us] is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).
12. The 2016 movie entitled Hacksaw Ridge carries quite a punch. Hacksaw Ridge is based on the true story of one Desmond Doss, an American soldier in World War II who—due to his religious convictions—refused to bear arms of any kind. Though repeatedly harassed by other soldiers and officers and even charged and tried for insubordination because he refused to carry a rifle, he willingly went to one of the bloodiest battle arenas in the Pacific theater, the Battle of Okinawa, where the 77th Division was tasked with climbing the face of an enemy-controlled cliff called Hacksaw Ridge.
13. Amidst a massive Japanese counterattack on the troops, unarmed medic Desmond Doss bravely risked his life to carry a wounded soldier to the cliff’s edge, rappel him down by rope, and return seventy-five times to save seventy-four more men. The last time, he was himself wounded by a grenade blast and lowered down the cliff. The battle was won. Wounded, he returned home to the U.S. where not long afterward he received the Medal of Honor from President Harry S. Truman. He died in 2006 at the age of 87.
14. “Greater love has no one than this,” St. John writes, “that someone lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). In the midst of carnage and death, the soldiers on Hacksaw Ridge saw such love. Greater than this love, though, is the love of our Brother and Lord Jesus Christ, who not only suffered for, but on the cross died the deaths deserved by, the sins of the billions and billions of earth’s souls for whom he had come to die (1 Jn 4:10). Greater than . . . any love you’ve ever known is the love for you of Jesus Christ. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment