Monthly Archives: April 2012

We only know it will be love: A sermon on 1 John 3:1-7

Posted by on April 23, 2012 7 comments

Brothers and sisters, here is the amazing thing that we have to deal with, that is so hard for us to understand. That is even harder for the world to understand. The thing that trips us up, the thing we cannot catch up with, that we cannot ever grasp is how great, how singular, how unprecedented, how utterly surprising and evernew is the love that God the Father has given to us in Jesus Christ. Through his act of love, uninterrupted, untainted, unqualified love, God has made us, in him, to be God’s own children, God’s own family. Make no mistake about it, brothers and sisters, that is what we are. And we are that, only in, through, and by God’s radical act of love in Jesus Christ, the Nazarene, the one we crucified, the one that the Father raised up, and who came back to us again speaking peace to us. The thing we cannot catch up with, that we can never grasp, never fully understand, is that somehow, through some miracle, God has made us part of God’s own life. We are God’s children! That is what we are!

And that, brothers and sisters, is why the world is confused by us, why they do not understand us when we speak about the Gospel. They don’t recognize us because they did not recognize Jesus, the one who has made us what we now are. Brothers and sisters, this is the miracle, that we are God’s children now. And yet, there is so much about this that eludes us. It is so weighty, so much greater than we can know and comprehend, indeed we cannot understand it. What this all means, what it will be, how it will be revealed, how we will live forever in God, what God’s victory shall look like, and what the world made new will be, brothers and sisters, these things we do not know. We cannot possess them, catch hold of them, grasp them, explain them, and hand them out to others as if they were goods and services. All of this is too wonderful for us.

There is only one thing we can dare to say we know. We know that when Jesus is apocalypsed, when he is revealed, manifested, when his transfiguring kingdom breaks forth in its ultimate fullness, when all this comes to pass we know this: that we will be like him. We will see him as he truly is. We will see, with unveiled faces, the fullness of the singular, radical, uninterrupted, and evernew Love that Jesus is. And then, brothers and sisters, on that day, we will be like that. We will finally shed all that remains of our blindness and our self-deception, and we will see the Love, the so-great Love of God that Father that is Jesus. And when we see it, we will be transformed. We will be like that. We will be loosed from all our hidden shadows and darknesses and be transformed. We will live, without reserve in that one great Love.

This is our hope, brothers and sisters. And every one of us who hope in this find ourselves working. We work, we struggle, we cry out, we yearn together to be made single-mindedly devoted to this Love. We strive to unify our divided hearts so that we might love without interruption, just as Jesus loves without interruption. We work for this, we encourage one another in this, we pray for one another in this, we weep with one another when we fail in this, and we keep on going together in this. We search, we pray, we yearn, we work, we study, we listen—all so that we may grow up into the Love that Jesus is.

And when we sin, when anyone sins, we shy away from this undivided Love. We cease to let it be the one true thing, our one true “law”. We seek to be unmoored from single-minded devotion. We long to divide things up once again into secret spheres where we can rule our own lives. When sin we are guilty of the worst sort of anarchy, an irrational refusal to have our lives transformed in the glory of the single-minded, uninterrupted Love of God that is Jesus. Sin is the refusal of this Love. It is the refusal to make this Love our one and only “law”. Sin is lovelessness.

And you know that this is why Jesus came to us brothers and sisters! This is why Christ apocalyptically came on the scene: To take this lovelessness away! In him there is no hint of lovelessness, but only the Father’s uninterrupted act of Love, the love that brings life out of death, new creation out of the present evil age, hope out of despair, praise out of sorrow, shouts of joy out of cries of grief. This is the Love that Jesus is. There is no lovelessnes in Jesus, no hidden shadow, no dark side. He came for one reason only, to destroy lovelessness wherever it exists in this world.

This is why, brothers and sisters, that no one who has been made part of God’s family through this Love continues to live in lovelessness. Those who keep on embracing power, control, domination, fear, and death, they haven’t understood this Love. They haven’t seen it yet. They haven’t tasted and known it yet. And when you, my brothers and sisters, when we fall back into lovelessness, we forget, we cease to live as what we are: God’s children. We pull ourselves back from the Love that God is and stumble backwards into the darkness that Jesus came to take away. When we are living in the Love that Jesus is, there is no room left for lovelessness.

So brothers and sisters, don’t let anyone make you believe the lie. The lie that one can be righteous, be moral, have integrity, be worthy  without living totally by Love. Everyone who lives out this Love is living in righteousness. There is no other ground, there are no other standards. To be righteous is to live the Love that is Jesus. There is no other righteousness, no other virtue, no other integrity, no other morality, no other standard by which we can assess ourselves. The only righteousness that God honors, that God creates, that God shares is the righteousness of self-abandoning Love. The only righteousness is the righteousness of crucifixion and resurrection. This is the only place we can live, this is the only hope we can stand on, this is the only life worth giving ourselves to.

Some truths to embrace:

  • The world does not know Jesus. To the extent that they know us, that we make sense to the world, to its way of running, we are not living as what we are, the children of God.
  • Our only hope, the only thing we have, is that who Jesus is will be our future. We know nothing else, we must seek for nothing else.
  • When we really hope for the Love that is Jesus, we find ourselves working together to love better. When we really hope, we really work, and we can’t imagine not doing it.
  • Sin is refusing to allow Love, the Love that is Jesus, to be our one and only law, our one and only rule, our one and only criterion for life and hope.
  • It is more important to refuse to be deceived than to figure out everything that we should do, or how to answer every question. The radical “No” of God to all forms of lovelessness must always be before our eyes. Only when we let God’s “No” to lovelessness reign can we hear God’s resounding “Yes” of uninterrupted Love.
  • The definition of Love is Crucifixion and Resurrection.

 

Freedom from innocence: A Sermon on 1 John 1:1-2:2

Posted by on April 15, 2012 5 comments

Brothers and sisters, let me tell you what I am doing in speaking to you today. Let me tell you what exactly I am trying to declare and proclaim to you. I’m here to tell you about that which is eternal, that which is ultimate, that which is greater than any and every created thing. I’m here to proclaim to you the things of first importance, that which we heard, and saw firsthand in Jesus, the Word of God who made us alive. Jesus was revealed to us, brothers and sisters, revealed right here, among us, he came to us and made us alive when we were dead. We all have seen this, and we all are bound and determined to talk about it, to make it known. We saw the mystery: the very life of God, the eternal life of the Living Father, this was apocalypsed to us in the Crucified and Resurrected Jesus. When Jesus came, we saw and experienced the eternal life of God. That is who Jesus was. That is what we saw, that is what we can never stop speaking about.

And why do we keep talking about this? What is it about this Life that has come to us as Jesus that makes us continue to declare it over and over again? Brothers and sisters, we keep on talking about this because if brings us together! When we share this Gospel, this message of Life abundant, we share in it together, in its trials and tasks, its joys and sorrows, its callings and blessings. When we declare this truth, the truth that in Jesus God made us alive when we were dead, when we affirm this together and live it out together, brothers and sisters, we are bound together in unity, in love, in fellowship. And this isn’t just something for us, some sort of enjoyable group friendship that we enter into, no. When we declare the Gospel together, when we live the Gospel together, we are drawn into unity with the Father, and with Jesus. This is no mere human friendship we get to enjoy, no, when we speak the Gospel, when we live the Gospel, God’s very own self, God’s very own life comes to us, abides with us, endures with us, and sustains us.

That is why we’re talking about this yet again, so that we can fully and completely enter into the joy of life in God!

So here is the message for you again. Hear it and believe it once again, brothers and sisters. This is the truth we must speak and the truth we must live:

The truth is that there is no dark side of God. God is nothing but light, nothing but unfettered, undistorted, abundant love. There is no shadow, no underside, nothing behind the curtain. God is pure and undivided light. So then, brothers and sisters if we claim to be living the life that God in Jesus has given us, the life that is pure light, pure love, pure self-giving, if we claim to be living that life and yet harbor hidden darkness, we make ourselves liars. When we carve out little spaces in our life that we order and control by methods other than self-giving love, we deceive ourselves. When we claim to be God’s people, the people of the truth, a people of forgiveness and love, and yet build up spaces in our life together that are run by the powers of control, dominance, self-assertion, fear, and self-protection, brothers and sisters when we do this we lie. When we do this we stop living the Gospel and fall back again into sin and death.

However, when we give up our grasp on these spaces, when we let go of those corners of our life run by power rather than love, then brothers and sisters we enter into the very life of God. When we release those secret places and powers to which we cling so tightly we are delivered, by God’s unbreakable love, into life together, a new life, a life cleansed of all sin, all guilt, all slavery. When our hands open and our idols are allowed to fall to the ground, then brothers and sisters the blood of Jesus, the blood we spilled, it becomes a cleansing flood of mercy, grace, and love. A flood in which we are swept away together, immersed in new life, ever again for the first time.

The worst possible thing we can do brothers and sisters is pretend we are innocent. When we try to establish ourselves, to give reasons, to re-narrate and explain our sins away, brothers and sisters when we do this we deceive ourselves. When we do this we hang on to those secret spaces, we cling to those hand holds that keep us from being washed away in the flood of Christ’s love and grace. We shut out the truth when we try to establish our innocence. The quest for innocence, the quest for defending our own virtue, that is the quest for falsehood and sorrow. When we strive to be innocent, we lock the truth of the Gospel out of our lives.

The alternative is simple, painfully difficult, but simple in its beauty and freedom: we must begin, not with explanation, with rationalization, with self-defense, but with confession. The answer to the problem of our sin, and its ability to poison our life in the Gospel is not to establish ourselves in virtue, not to strive for a justifiable innocence, but to confess. When we confess our sins we are drawn back into the truth. The truth that God is the one who is faithful, who is righteous, just as we saw in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. God is righteous and not us. God is faithful and not us. When we confess our sins our hands open and our idols are finally thrown away. The Faithful One, the Righteous One, the Crucified and Resurrected One, this One comes to us, and forgives us, cleanses us, and throws us into life together and service in this broken world.

Whenever we search for innocence, whenever we defend ourselves morally, whenever we try to establish ourselves in virtue, we deny the Gospel itself. When we do that we call Jesus a liar. We shut our eyes to the cross, and turn our faces away from the resurrection.

Now brothers and sisters, understand that I am saying all of this so that we will be encouraged and empowered to stop sinning. But never forget that when we do fall, when we scramble to piece together our idols, when we furiously rush to carve out secret spaces of control and power in our lives, when we fall back into these forms of death, remember that Jesus, the Nazarene, the Crucifed and Resurrected one, he advocates for us in the presence of the Father. When we turn our backs on him, he continues to pour out his life of pure, uninterrupted love on us. Remember brothers and sisters that he is the Righteous and Faithful one and that he poured out his life to the fullest to bring us to God, to cleans us from our sins, and to deliver us from the slavery of death. He did this, brothers and sisters, not just for us. No! Not for us alone, but for this whole broken idolatrous, wretched world. This is who our Lord is, the One who will not turn his back of any of the dark corners of this world of rebellion, death, and slavery. Jesus has made himself life for all the world.

And brothers and sisters, this, this is the Good News. That we are saved, not by our innocence but by the faithful and unbroken love of the God we meet in the cross and resurrection. The God who is nothing but light, nothing but love. The God in whom there is no darkness. Let us turn once again to this God, let us cease striving for innocence, and confess our sins. Let us, once again enter into freedom, light, and life by the blood of the One who was Crucified, the one who was Raised, the One who Lives and will not be without us.

C.S. Lewis Essay Prize at Notre Dame

Posted by on April 9, 2012 Comments Off

For those who are interested, the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame has set up a new prize for popular essays dealing with problem of evil in relation to modern thought. The Lewis Essay Prize has been established to provide up to 10 awards of $3,000 each for essays published in popular venues that present the state of the art or make new progress on the topics funded through the Problem of Evil in Modern and Contemporary Thought project during the 2010-2013 academic years.

Essays must be at least 1,000 words in length and must be published in a popular, non-academic publication with a circulation of at least 12,000. Publications can be religious in orientation (e.g., Christianity Today, First Things, Christian Century) or secular (e.g., Harper’s, Times Literary Supplement, The National Review, The Atlantic). Selected online publications will also be considered (e.g. Slate.com). Essayists are encouraged to consult with the Center’s director to determine the suitability of a proposed venue for prize eligibility. Entries must be accepted for publication between July 1, 2010, and June 30, 2013.

Hard copies of entries should be sent to:
C.S. Lewis Essay Prize
c/o Michael Rea, Director
Center for Philosophy of Religion
University of Notre Dame
418 Malloy Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556

Questions about the application process can also be sent to philreligion-at-nd.edu. More information is available online at the C.S. Essay Lewis Prize website.

Switch to our mobile site