More Than Words

 More Than Words

1 John 3:16-24[1]

We all know that loving God means loving people. And we all know that loving people means more than just loving our family and friends. It means loving even those who are difficult to love, even those who may push our comfort level, even those whom we may think of as “enemies.” And we all know that when the Bible teaches us to love like this, it’s not just talking about how you “feel.” It’s talking about how you live, what you do, and how you treat people. And it’s not just talking about “people” as an “idea,” it’s talking about the real, living and breathing people we come in contact with every day. If there’s one thing that’s true about loving other people, really loving all the people we come in contact with, it’s that it doesn’t come easily—for any of us!

I think part of the reason for this is that love is about giving. When you love another person, you give to them. You give them what they need when they need it. If they’re hungry, you feed them. If they’re lonely, you spend time with them. If they need help, you give it to them. You care for them when they cannot care for themselves. But more than any specific thing you may give to someone you love, you give yourself. That’s where it gets tricky, because the question is how much of yourself you can really give away. We all know that our example for loving others is Jesus, who gave his life for us all. And there have been many throughout the ages who have done just that: give up their lives for the sake of those they loved.

As much as I would agree with the fact that Jesus’ teachings about love were intended to prepare those who followed him for the possibility that they may be called on to give up even their lives for others, I would not say that’s what loving others always means for everyone. Sometimes we may be called to give up a great deal, perhaps even everything, perhaps even life itself for the sake of those we love. Sometimes, though, we’re called to love people over the course of a lifetime. We may give up a lot in order to do that, but the point is that we go on living our lives so that we can go on loving them day by day, year after year. I would say that’s probably the kind of life of love that most of us are called to practice.

The practice of loving other people as something that is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian is also a major theme in 1 John. The Elder John says it plainly earlier in the chapter from which our lesson for today is drawn: “This is the message you have heard from the beginning: We should love one another” (1 Jn 3:11, NLT). And in our lesson, he says, “We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters” (1 Jn 3:16, NLT). Again, we know well that there were many in that day who literally were called to give up their lives, especially to protect their brothers and sisters in the faith. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s in mind here. He goes on: “If someone has enough money to live well and sees a brother or sister in need but shows no compassion—how can God’s love be in that person? Dear children, let’s not merely say that we love each other; let us show the truth by our actions” (1 Jn 3:17-18, NLT).”

Here, the kind of love that the Elder John has in mind is about having the means to help someone in need and actually helping them. It’s about sharing what we have with people we know who are in need. For some of us, helping others like this is second nature. For others it may be more difficult. Beyond the basic challenge of whether or not we have a generous nature, the command that we are to love others by giving tangible goods or money to help them is another way in which loving others can be tricky. We have to use our best judgment to discern whether giving someone what they ask for actually helps them or whether it may hurt them. It’s not always easy to know for sure when we’ve crossed that line.

I’ve had some experience with that. Some of you may know that I have a tendency to be generous to a fault. When I was in college, I was the guy who picked up hitchhikers as I was driving the wide-open spaces of Texas. I’ve given more money out of my own pocket than I probably should have to people simply because they asked for it. And I know for sure that some of them were taking advantage of my generosity. I had a man whom I had helped on more than one occasion come back to me and apologize. He had been taking advantage of the fact that I was helping keep him housed to spend what money he had on his drinking habit. Was I helping him? Was I hurting him? That’s where it gets tricky.

I’d like to think that I’ve gotten more discerning about whom I help and how I will help them. I don’t have any problem buying someone a meal or filling their tank with gas. But I prefer to give money to organizations that help those in need rather than handing out cash to someone standing on a street corner. And yet, I must confess it’s hard for me to just “look the other way,” but I simply don’t feel comfortable potentially giving someone the means to continue destroying their own lives. I think the challenge for me is to make sure that I’m actually giving to those organizations and not just using that as an excuse not to share what I have with those who are in need.

The part of this that gets really tricky for all of us is that helping people who are in true need takes us outside our comfort zones. Many of the people who truly have needs we can help are those we ordinarily may not have much to do with, or perhaps they are those whom we intentionally avoid. But we cannot follow the command to love others without recognizing “the intrinsic claim of every person to be considered a person.”[2] That’s not so hard when everyone we meet looks like us, or talks like us. But we live in a great big world with a lot of very different people in it. We cannot simply love those who are like us. We can only truly love our neighbors when we can see “that every human face is the face of a neighbor.”[3] And Jesus calls us to love that neighbor. When we can get past all the superficial differences and see anyone in need as “one of us,” then we can love them in a way that goes beyond words.

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[1] © 2024 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 4/21/2024 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Paul Tillich, Love, Power and Justice, 60.

[3] Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society, 41: “For a compassionate [man] nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying. … This compassion pulls people away from the fearful clique into the large world where they can see that every human face is the face of a neighbor.”

We Shall Be Like Him

 We Shall Be Like Him

1 John 3:1-2[1]

I’ve mentioned before that one of the symptoms of the changes that are reshaping our society is that it’s hard to know whom you can trust. While I genuinely and wholeheartedly believe that there is plenty of goodness and beauty in our world if we have the eyes to see it, I also recognize that there is a lot of pain and fear as well. As much as it is true that we all have so much to be grateful for in this life, we also all have our share in the pain and brokenness of our world. Despite all appearances, especially in the beautiful family pictures on social media that make us think that everyone else has the perfect life, the reality is that life takes unexpected and unwelcome turns for us all. And when that happens, most of us find ourselves asking the question of God, “Why did this have to happen to me?”

Part of the problem is that we may look for our sense of safety from people who aren’t really able to provide it. Some of us may have felt betrayed by the person we love most in the world, whether a parent or child, a spouse or a friend. That kind of betrayal can leave us wondering if we can trust anyone or anything, even God! Some of us may have committed our lives to a career, even given our best years to it, only to find that the choices of others or circumstances beyond our control leave us empty-handed. Some of us have had our health go from something we took for granted to something that feels like it’s hanging by a thread. In these and many other ways, our experiences in life can leave us wondering if we can trust anyone or anything. Even God.

We come to faith drawn by the wonderful good news that God loves us and that Jesus lived and died and rose again to show us just how much that’s true. And in our best moments we know the peace and joy that promise holds for us, and we’re deeply grateful. But the way our lives may unfold has a way of taking a jolting turn at what can seem like the very worst possible time. Sometimes our faith is strong enough to carry us through. Sometimes, life’s sudden twists take all the supports out from under us. The shock of that jolt can leave us wondering where God is, or whether God loves us, or whether there even is a God at all. It shakes our faith to the core, and we may wonder if we can ever believe again.

I think our lesson from 1 John for today addresses this issue. The Elder John uses the resurrection of Jesus as a basis for reminding us that, no matter what may happen to us, God is always faithful. In a very real sense, that was also one of the main lessons of Jesus’ resurrection. Despite all appearances that his death somehow invalidated all that he said and did—as the crowds pointed out by shouting, “he saved others, let him save himself!”—the cross was not the end of Jesus’ faith in God and his life of faithful obedience to God. Death was not the final word for Jesus’ life and ministry. The final word was and is resurrection to new life. Part of the reason for that was to vindicate all that Jesus had said and done in his ministry. But part of the reason for the resurrection was to demonstrate definitively that God is always faithful. Always.

And so it is that our Scripture reading reminds us that our lives are all grounded firmly in the love of God, which has made us “children of God.” This is one of the themes of 1 John. God has not only demonstrated his love for us by what Jesus did, he also assures us of his love for us by the constant presence of his Spirit. In the face of any doubts we may harbor about whether or not we are truly beloved children of God, the Scripture emphasizes that we’re not just “called” God’s children, but that’s what we truly are. The basis for this confidence is the story of God’s love for the people of Israel in the Hebrew Bible. We may be used to thinking of it as a story of an angry God punishing a wayward people. But I think we would do better to see it as the story of a loving father who never gives up on his stubbornly defiant children. Through it all, God is always faithful to them. Always!

Our scripture lesson takes it a step further, however. As the author puts it, “we are already God’s children, but he has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is” (1 John 3:2, NLT) While there’s a lot going on in that statement, I would say that the point of it is to assure us that just as God demonstrated his faithfulness to Jesus by raising him from the dead, so the promise that we will share the resurrection life of Jesus is the promise that God will be faithful to us as well. Just as death was not God’s last word for Jesus, so it is for us as well. Neither will any of the pain or fear or disappointment or despair or emptiness we may have to deal with in our lives.

God’s last word for us is life. And God’s final act of faithfulness will be to bring us face-to-face with Jesus so that we see him “as he really is.” What’s more, the promise is that when we stand before the risen Lord Jesus, “we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is” (1 John 3:2, NLT)! I find it interesting that the Elder John says we don’t know exactly what that will look like. But the idea is that Jesus’ resurrection gives us at least a clue. In fact, another main theme of Easter is that very real nature of Jesus’ resurrection gives us something of an indication about what to expect about our future with God. As the Scripture says, we will be like Jesus. The promise of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is that we too will be resurrected to a new life, and when that happens, we will all be changed so that we are “like him.” And the point of it all is that God is always faithful. And he will continue to show us his faithfulness all the way to our eternal life in his loving presence.

Sometimes the way our lives unfold can make us question whether we can trust even God. The path gets dark and difficult, and we may wonder whether it will always be that way. But the promise of the resurrection is that God’s last word is never death, but life.[2] I like the way Henri Nouwen frames it: “Through the resurrection, God has said to Jesus, ‘You are indeed my beloved Son, and my love is everlasting,’ and to us God has said, ‘You are indeed my beloved children, and my love is everlasting.’”[3] That first Easter is a promise that we can trust God to be faithful to love us all the way through everything in this life until we are standing face-to-face with Jesus, when we shall be like him.

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[1] © 2024 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 4/14/2024 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman NE.

[2] Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 2.2:29: “God Himself in His freedom has decided that [man] shall stand, that he shall be saved and not lost, that he shall live and not die.”

[3] Henri J. M. Nouwen, God’s Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring, 100-101. He adds that “The resurrection is God’s way of revealing to us that nothing that belongs to God … will [ever] get lost … . The resurrection doesn’t answer any of our curious questions about life after death, … . But it does reveal to us that, indeed love is stronger than death.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer is known for saying something similar: the promise of final resurrection is the promise that “nothing is lost, that everything is taken up in Christ” and restored “as God originally intended for it to be.” Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 170

Why Should I Believe It?

Why Should I Believe It?

1 John 1:1-4[1]

We live in a time when skepticism is a virtue. The continual explosion of information technology and the almost exponential rise of new platforms to share information has, I think, played a role in this. Instead of making information easier to process, it’s much harder, if only because of the sheer volume of information that is available to anyone using a smartphone on any given day. You just can’t process it all. You can’t even scroll through it all! So instead of taking the time to ask whether the information we’re using is from a reliable source, or whether it results from sound research, or whether it even makes any sense, we just “browse” our so-called “news feeds” on various media for what holds our interest, or what reinforces our opinions, without taking the time to even think about the question, “Why should I believe this?”

This is actually not a “modern” problem. It’s a logical fallacy that’s been around for a long time. It’s called “Confirmation bias.” What that means is that people only pay attention to information that confirms what they already believe, and they dismiss as false whatever challenges it, simply because it challenges it. We’re not open to information that contradicts what we already believe. That’s not the only logical fallacy going around. There are a lot of them. Calling something “fake news” just because we don’t like it is a kind of logical fallacy that skirts the issue by simply attacking the source. In fact, it’s considered to be one of the weakest logical arguments. Ironically, some of those who complain the loudest about “fake news” are the ones who are out there pushing information that can be demonstrated as false based on actual facts.

But then part of the problem is that we don’t even agree on what constitutes facts. And that leads us deeper into this whole question by raising the issue of how we know what we know. There are some things we know based on intuition, like whether or not someone loves you. You just know “in your heart” that’s true. There are other things we know based on some kind of demonstration. Most of our scientific knowledge falls into that category. If someone can come up with an experiment that generates the same results every time, it’s considered to be fact. But then there is a lot of “knowledge” that falls somewhere in between, relying on a combination of objective facts and a subjective, more personal point of view. A lot of what we “know” falls into that category.

I think one of the reasons why faith can be so difficult is because it falls into that “in between” category of what we know. There are certain criteria that most faith traditions in the world rely on, but it’s a matter of how you balance them. One basis for faith is an accepted canon of Scriptures, or a collection of authoritative writings, like the Bible. That can be helpful, because an authoritative text is a fairly fixed source. But any text is always subject to interpretation. And there is plenty of evidence for the wide variety of interpretations of the Bible. Another basis for faith is the authority of a certain tradition of teaching. This takes faith and puts it into a practical framework that can help us translate what we believe into a way of living. But a tradition is a living thing, always developing in dialogue with changing times. Except, of course, when it doesn’t. We know people who belong to faith traditions that have not changed, perhaps for centuries. A final basis for faith is the authority of personal experience. It’s hard to dispute someone’s personal experience. But then personal experience can be (and has been) used to justify just about anything.

Because all these criteria for faith have their strengths and weaknesses, it’s important to find a balance that makes sense. I would say that a healthy approach to faith is going to combine all three: a sound use of Scripture, combined with a time-tested tradition of interpreting and putting into practice the truths of faith, combined with personal experience of the value of faith in our own lives. To some extent, my sermon today is a brief summation of what I taught for years in my biblical interpretation class at Seminary. You might wonder whether a sermon is the time and the place for going into that. But I also think that our Scripture lesson from 1 John for today raises the issue of why we believe.

During the season of Easter, we celebrate the message that that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and rose from the dead. But there are many these days who would ask the question why they should believe it. It speaks of things that most of us have never actually seen for ourselves. We weren’t there to see him die on the cross. We weren’t there when he appeared after his death and resurrection to his disciples. And even though our Scripture lessons throughout the Easter season give us their testimony of what they saw and experienced, many question whether we should accept it.

That’s also not a new problem. It was a challenge for the first generation of believers, as our Scripture lesson from 1 John shows us. The message of the Gospel included the claim that those who were with Jesus were eyewitnesses to his full humanity, to his very real suffering, and to his bodily resurrection. Our Scripture lesson puts it this way: “We declare to you … what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1). Jesus was the “word” they had heard with their own ears and seen with their own eyes and touched with their own hands. There’s a kind of dual reference going on here: it’s a claim that they heard Jesus teaching during the time of his ministry and they saw the amazing things he did. At the same time, however, it’s also a claim that their encounters with the risen Christ as eyewitnesses of his resurrection were very real.[2]

For some of us that’s enough to support our faith. The testimony of the original eyewitnesses in Scripture is enough to satisfy the question why I should believe Jesus is alive now. Of course, there have been all kinds of efforts to explain away what the disciples claimed about Jesus’ resurrection. But it’s one thing to say that they only thought they saw and heard him; it’s hard to explain away the claim that they actually touched the risen Christ.[3] Again, however, a balanced approach to faith must move beyond the testimony of the eyewitnesses in the Bible. And so it’s important for us to remember that we have our own very real encounters with the risen Christ in our lives. It may be hard for us to put them into words, but they are very real nevertheless. We may not be able to see him with our eyes, or hear him with our ears, or touch him with our hands, but that doesn’t make our encounters any less real. Perhaps more importantly, we can answer the question of why we should believe the story of Jesus because we are not standing alone before the witness of Scripture. There have been generations of believers who have embraced the Easter faith before us and who passed it on to us. That living tradition has not only taught us faith but also modeled it for us. In a sense we have “seen with our own eyes” the effect of faith in their lives.

From my perspective, the answer to the question “Why should I believe” that Jesus rose from the dead and lives among us now is going to be as individual as each person. For some of us, it’s enough that the “Bible tells me so.” “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” That’s enough. For others, “he lives within my heart” may be what convinces us. “You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart.” For still others, the fact that we continue the “ancient church’s story” of “the faith of our fathers” and mothers. Or perhaps even more importantly that “we walk with each other” and “we walk hand in hand” is the key to faith. For some of us, in an age in which many people get along just fine without giving second thought to God or faith or the risen Christ, we need all of it: the witness of the Bible, the experience of our own personal encounters with Christ, and the support of those who have gone before us and those who walk the path with us. We need all of that to maintain Easter faith.

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[1] © 2024 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 4/7/2024 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman NE.

[2] Cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Epistles of John, 174-75, where he says the primary effect of this text has been to secure the authority of eyewitness testimony for the Johannine writings. He insists that this still holds true even if the author of this letter was not John the Apostle but an unidentified leader of the Johannine community because the statement still reflects the reality of the manifestation of the word, but through the means of preserving the eyewitness testimony of the Beloved disciple to the life and ministry of Jesus (cf. similarly Jn. 20:29–31; 21:24–25).

[3] Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, Sun of Righteousness, Arise! God’s Future for Humanity and the Earth, 47-48: “The women and the disciples didn’t ‘see in their hearts’ or ‘with their spiritual eyes’. They didn’t have intuitions, while they were ‘caught up out of this world’, nor did they receive enlightenment in trances. The accounts tell us that it was with their normal five senses that they perceived the risen Christ.”

Beyond All Hope

 Beyond All Hope

John 20:1-18[1]

In the face of all our recent discussion about suffering, it may seem like faith in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead on that first Easter morning might have little relevance for our lives right here and right now. In comparison with the darkness we may have had to endure in this life, something that happened so long ago and so far away might simply not seem to make a real difference for us. Beyond that, when you look at the massive suffering and violence that seem to dominate the world in which we live, it’s all too easy to conclude that money and power have the last word in our world. These harsh realities can make faith seem at best quaint and at worst a delusion. The fact of the matter is that we live in a world where it’s not easy to truly embrace the faith that Jesus’ death and resurrection brings new life to us all.

I’m not so sure the original witnesses to the resurrection had an easier time with faith. Our Gospel lesson for today presents several different responses to the resurrection on that first Easter Sunday morning. Mary Magdalene seems to react initially with fear when she sees that the stone has been moved from the tomb. So she runs back and tells the Apostles. In response, Peter and John run to the tomb. John the beloved disciple is the first one to reach it, but he hesitates to enter, perhaps out of the Jewish concern for becoming “unclean” by contacting a dead body. Later, when he does enter, the Scripture says that he “saw and believed.” When Peter gets there, he sees the empty tomb, and examines the wrappings that had been used to prepare Jesus’ body for burial, but it seems he doesn’t understand what to make of all this. The Gospel reminds us that “they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (John 20:9).

Three people, witnessing the same event, with three different responses: fear, confusion, and faith. I think the first two responses pretty well explain themselves. When confronted with the empty tomb, I think it would have been only natural for those who had witnessed Jesus’ terrible death only days earlier to react with fear or confusion. It’s John’s faith that seems hard to explain. What was it about what he saw that enabled him to believe? After all, he saw the same thing Mary and Peter did. It could be that John did remember and understand that Jesus had said he would have to suffer and die, but afterward he would rise from the dead. Or maybe John was just one of those people for whom faith comes easily. Maybe the difference was in the way he was able to see what they had all witnessed.

When Mary returns, she is still overwhelmed with grief and fear. By some accounting it may have been only about 36 hours since Jesus had died. She meets Jesus, but she doesn’t recognize him. She mistakes him for a gardener and actually asks him if he’s taken the body somewhere. It’s only when Jesus calls her by name that she recognizes him and believes. It takes his voice, his initiative to reveal himself to her, for her to get past her grief and fear so that she could see in such a way that she could recognize that Jesus was alive and standing right in front of her. Once she was able to get past her own feelings and see clearly that Jesus truly was alive, she returns to the Apostles again and tells them she’s seen Jesus.

When I think of this story, I wonder how the Apostles reacted when Mary first told them she had seen Jesus. Did some of them think she was crazy, or simply hallucinating out of her extreme grief? Were some of them confused? Again, the Scripture states, they didn’t yet understand that Jesus would rise from the dead. I think it’s a pretty good bet that some of them doubted—seriously doubted—that what she was telling them could be true. As some of the disciples unknowingly told Jesus later that evening, “we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). The implication is that now that he is dead, that hope is gone. In the same place they reported that some of the Apostles had gone to the tomb to “see for themselves,” but they didn’t see Jesus (Luke 24:24). It would seem that there was a wide variety of responses to Mary’s story, but it doesn’t sound like faith was the primary one at first.

The plain truth is that faith is difficult for some of us. There are all kinds of reasons for that. Some of us simply cannot get past bad experiences we’ve had in church. Some of us may have a more questioning bent of mind, and we’re more prone to doubt than to believe. Others may simply find faith to be mostly irrelevant to the reality of life. When our experience in life has been mostly tragedy, suffering, hardship, rejection, and pain, faith can seem like just so many pretty words. They may mean something to others, but they don’t have any real significance for life as we have experienced it.

More than that, the whole way of thinking with which many people approach life in this world these days can make it difficult to believe that something that was so out of the ordinary, the idea that a man who was tortured to death and was buried in a tomb somehow came back to life, could truly make any difference for us at all. We’re taught to believe that what we can see and touch is what is real. While faith has been around for millennia, from the perspective that only what we can observe is real, it’s easy to think of faith as “wishful thinking” or perhaps just plain superstition.[2] Almost like the equivalent of believing in vampires and ghosts. While vampires and ghosts may make for some interesting entertainment, almost nobody seriously believes in them. Why should it be any different with Jesus?

I think what makes the difference is encountering Jesus, alive and present with us here and now. That’s what made the difference for most of the disciples on the first Easter. You and I aren’t going to be seeing him like we can see one another right now, the way the first disciples met Jesus. I’m talking about an experience where we know in our hearts that we have been sustained by a love that is beyond what our senses can perceive.[3] When we have an encounter like that, it changes the way we see things, whether we’re prone to believe or more prone to doubt. It enables us to believe that God is not limited to the way things normally work in our world. An encounter with the living Christ in our lives can enable us to see that that God already working to make all things new in hidden ways (and in some not so hidden ways) here and now among us. It enables us to embrace the good news of Jesus’ resurrection as a promise that points toward a future filled with hope and joy and life. Death is not the ultimate reality for us; life in and through the risen Jesus is the final word. Meeting the risen Christ for ourselves makes it possible for us to see our lives from a perspective of faith that goes beyond all the hopes that our normal everyday experiences may offer us.

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[1] © 2024 Alan Brehm.  A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 3/31/2024 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Cf. Shirley C. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, 182: “when we experience tragic suffering in our own lives and see so much tragic suffering in the world, we wonder whether all talk about a loving and just God is not in fact ... wishful thinking.”

[3] Cf. John Caputo, On Religion, 91, where he lays out the options: believing that the world of faith is what is “really real,” believing that faith is “unreal” in comparison with the observable forces at work in the world, and a third way, in which faith is directed toward the reality that is beyond what our senses perceive as real. He also says that (ibid., 125) in the face of the “specter of a heartless world of cosmic forces,” “Faith is faith that there is something that lifts us above the blind force of things, .... That there is something ... or someone ... who stands by us when we are up against the worst, who stands by others, the least among us.”