The Epistle Lesson                                                                     1 John 3:1-7

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.

Sermon Text

 The business of the Church, in all lo and places, regardless of context, is to repair the broken things of the world. This redemptive mission undergirds every part of our work. The problem with redemption, however, is that it is hard. It is hard to make the world better and it is hard to make ourselves better and because of this we settle for a hundred thousand lesser missions than this. Redemption is a work that only God can achieve and that we are privileged to partake in, but the work that we begin is much more manageable, and much easier to control.

Look at the way we address most problems in life, reactively rather than proactively. The potholes in our streets could be addressed if we funded regular upkeep of our infrastructure instead of hasty repairs when the road is already damaged. Health can be improved by taking measures as simple as taking vitamins and keeping up on vaccination, and yet most preventive medicine is not covered by most insurances. Finances are more secure when savings are put away, but oftentimes the demands of life make it hard to put much at all away, especially as prices have soured across the last decade or so. Our hope to fix things, even mundane things, is stopped by hundreds of confounding factors we face at any given moment.

Yet, God calls us to restore this world to something like what it was in Eden. There is to be a growth in trust where we have given ourselves to doubt. There is to be a mutual love and care where there is currently apathy and forgetfulness. There is to be a better world in the place of the one that is currently suffering under the reign of sin and death. We are to be people who want to see the world change for the better and who want to change our own lives to be better at contributing to that goal.

Faith is not meant to be an oppressive thing, Christ is clear again and again that what he offers us is a much better alternative than what the world is offering. This does not mean, however, that the life of faith does not have its own hardships. It is hard to grow, it is hard to do what is right, and it is hard to face the fact that we are all of us in need of change. The simple fact is, as we draw nearer to God we should experience a contradictory emotional swell. On one hand we should enjoy the joy that comes from knowing God and feeling the joy of salvation, the freedom it brings. On the other hand we should become more and more aware of our own failings, of the way our carelessness hurts others. There is a need to grieve even as we rejoice, because we take part in the brokenness of the world unless we live perfectly.

The idea of perfection is scary, but it is the goal we have to chase after. As John says in our Epistle reading, if we live fully in Christ than we ought not to sin. The person who does what is right is righteous, but the one who does wrong is lawless – without God’s instruction. There is no room in John’s presentation to imagine that this warning is only for perpetual sinners or especially profound wrongdoing. John wants us to see every sin that we commit for what it is, a wedge that gets between us and God. If we see sin as this, as something that keeps us from God, and we see God as the source of life and joy and happiness itself, then we should be upset that we choose sin again and again and again.

The more I grow in faith, the more I am sure that I am a deplorable person. There are things that I cannot seem to escape that I just go back to again and again, like a dog to its own vomit. The good things I do, for me, are swallowed up in the wickedness I participate in. The hateful thoughts, the judging eyes, and all manner of other corruption is not unique to those who make a habit of it. We are all guilty of sinning, all prone to erring in a way we should not. We all, if we are honest, are not living the life we should be – not even close most of the time. There is a need for us to be holy, and that need is apparent in the fact that the world is so sad so often, so bleak and violent and miserable.

1 John offers a contradictory path throughout its pages. While it is so clear again and again that we are sinful and that our participation in sin means that we cannot call ourselves righteous, the mourning of our failings is not meant to make us lock up. It is not meant to be something that we hate ourselves for. It is not even something that the scripture seems to linger on. Instead, John gives us a way out of the mess. Firstly in saying that those who do sin, all of us, can depend that Christ is faithful to forgive us. Praise God! That we can seek forgiveness from God and those we hurt and know that we can receive it from one source at least.

The second reiteration, again and again, across all of the Johennine Epistles, is so simple. “People of God, we are sinners, but thank God we are redeemed in Christ. The same Christ who gives us a new commandment, which is not new but has with us from the beginning.” That commandment, can anyone guess what it is? That we love one another. The secret out of sin is not self-loathing, it is self-love. Love enough to grow out of the things that hurt us and those around us. The secret out of sin is not hatred of others, but a love that promises to grow alongside each other. We are all in this together, and unless we all can search our hearts and accept our part in the mess around us, it will never be healed.

The Church suffers when we see Sin as something that is either wiped away with a simple prayer or that is mostly other people’s problems. On the one hand, we forget that we are called to grow closer to Christ’s perfection every day. On the other, we pretend that we are righteous in a way no one else is. In reality, we are all stuck in the mud. We all need to help to lift each other out of it.

I think one of the problems we have had in the Church is that for the past hundred years we have been caught up in culture wars, rather than wars against the Sin that we all know lives within us. We fought in the 20s against Evolution, in the thirties against socialism, in the fifties against communism, in the sixties against civil rights, in the seventies against rock and roll, in the eighties against Dungeons and Dragons, in the nineties against rap, in the oughts against gays, and now against trans people. Always a target moving from one person to the other to the other, but never a moment of introspection for ourselves.

What would have happened, if all that energy then and now that went into interrogating other people’s business and chasing after the supposed enemies that someone told us we had, we all just tried to be holier? What if we aspired to live like Christ did? To feed the hungry, to care for the sick, to push back when others try to exclude people from the table. One may say, “Ah, but I saw sin in what those people I was yelling at were doing!” Be that as it may, John’s instruction was to be better at loving each other, to repent earnestly of your own sins, and to grow in holiness that way. Sin is real, people of God, but the fact it only ever exists in “that person over there,” should probably tell us we do not care much about sin and our salvation from it, but do care a great deal about looking and sounding like we have nothing to do with it.

There is one thing that John describes as being “Anti-Christ,” in all of this book. Yes, it is possible to be lawless as a person, but only one thing is antithetical to the work of the Church, says the Epistle. That one thing? Denying Christ’s bodily life, death, and resurrection. This is why I believe that all Christians can come to terms, if we accept those three things. If we accept Christ came and lived among us perfectly, then we have an image to aspire to. If Christ died for our sins, then we have a reason to hope that we too can overcome sin and death. If Christ rose again, then there is a life everlasting and an advocate who will hear my prayers and hold my hand as I take the long narrow road to perfection in Paradise.

People of God, do you believe God can redeem you? Then repent today, not tomorrow. Repent for your own sins, not your neighbors, and seek to grow in love, which is the essence of all the Law and the prophets. The work of the Church is redemption, and we must take part in it and be recipients of it. – Amen.