Easter
3 2015 (Year B)
Father Adam Trambley
April 19, 2015 St.John’s Sharon
This morning’s passage from First John is an incredible
declaration. See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called
children of God; and that is what we are.
John just lays it out for us, without any of the prerequisites,
restrictions, or theological footnotes we might expect from such a profound
statement. So often we think of
Scripture as a series of conditional promises designed to keep us all
well-behaved, instead of the working-out of God’s unfathomable love and
effective salvation for the world. Certainly this first letter of John talks
about sin and purity, and we’ll look at some of that later, but we can’t really
explain what we should do until we understand who we are. And who we are is first and foremost children
of God.
We may be many other things, as well – Episcopalians,
Americans, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, retirees, working folk, college
graduates, white people, black people, Asian people, Hispanic people, Native
American people, Irish, Italian, Welsh, Polish-Americans, smart people, clumsy
people, good people, the right people, the family black sheep, alcoholics,
ex-cons, Rotarians, the treasurer of the PTA, cancer survivors, people with
mental illness, people with dementia, people who can’t walk steadily anymore, good
cooks, bad cooks, green thumbs, black thumbs, Steelers Fans, Browns Fans,
Pirates Fans, Indians Fans, bald people, beautiful people, thin people,
not-as-thin-as-we-used-to-be people, nerds, geeks, goths, emo’s, jocks, queen
bees, wanna-bes, steampunks, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, people who
hate politics or people who are just the way we are and you’all can just deal
with it. Whatever qualities we use to
group ourselves with others or whatever thoughts we have about ourselves
running through our heads, they are all secondary to the over-arching group
that God puts us into and the way that God thinks about us. To God, we are children of God, and we call
ourselves that because God has shown us great love and created us as his
children. It really is just that simple. Being children of God means that we are loved
unconditionally by God as we are. There
is nothing we can do to make God love us any more – we are already loved as
fully as possible by the source of all the love in the universe. There is also nothing we can do to make God
love us any less, because if God’s love depended on how we acted, then we
wouldn’t be talking about our heavenly Father’s love for his children. Being God’s children also means that we are
destined to receive an inheritance of eternal life filled with joy and every
good thing, because our Father can give us such unfathomable good things and he
wants to.
The next line of the reading deals with one fundamental
problem to the first statement, namely, that we don’t really believe. We don’t see ourselves first and foremost as
God’s children, living in the midst of an unshakeable love from the most
powerful being in the cosmos. Mostly we
don’t see ourselves this way because nobody else does either. John writes: The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. The world didn’t accept Jesus and his love
for it, so the world can’t understand the love God has for us or the love of
God that we are trying to live out and witness. Since the world doesn’t accept Jesus, it tears
us apart, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, but either way
we can forget who we are as children of God.
Some of the world that does not want to recognize us as
children of God is actively hostile. We
have a multi-billion dollar advertising industry dedicated to telling us that
we are not lovable without their product.
Really, how could God or anyone else love someone with age spots, or a
receding hair line, or bad breath, or no plastic surgery, or dorky clothes, or
an old car, or, horror of horrors, who drank Pepsi instead of Coke or Miller
Lite instead of Budweiser. When we spend
hours a day seeing surgically altered and computer enhanced people telling us
how happier, prettier and sexier we’d be if only we took their self-interested
advice, most of us can start to believe the lie that we are not unconditionally
lovable.
But the real difficulties for us usually stem from people
who really do love us as best they can, and who have tried to know God, but
just couldn’t do it fully -- meaning they are human. Too often we have internalized early messages
from parents or other authority figures who did tell us that, in effect, we
weren’t fully loved or entirely good enough, unless we did or didn’t do
something. Usually, folks didn’t mean
it, and they may not have even actually said it, but somehow that is what we
ended up believing. Maybe we picked up
their fear about any number of bad consequences that could happen if we played
in traffic, or got too close to the stove, or climbed the tree, or didn’t save
our money, or didn’t study for the test, or whatever it was. Our brains didn’t understand the dangers they
saw. We only understood what felt like a
limitation on love, and we need to let go of those limitations to believe we
are children of God. Or maybe something
happened that we didn’t understand but assumed was our fault, and internalized
the shame and guilt from a family divorce, or an accident, or an illness. Again, we have a hard time believing we are
God’s children if we are responsible for tragic occurrences we really had no
control over. Or maybe someone just
inadvertently overlooked something important to us or said something that
struck us to the core in ways that made us believe we weren’t loved, or we felt
like a burden during difficult times, or maybe we were around people who really
weren’t all that loving. In any of those
situations, the full power and love of Jesus Christ wasn’t recognized by people
who didn’t know themselves as children of God and couldn’t help us feel like
children of God either. To really
believe we are children of God, part of the work for us today is to recognize
where in our hearts we doubt it, and ask God to help our unbelief and heal those
parts of our lives as they are brought to light .
This belief that we are children of God would be enough great
good news, but John doesn’t stop there.
He says, 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. Just when we are finally coming to understand
the depth of what it means to be children of God, John goes even deeper. We are God’s children now, but in the future,
what we are is going to be even better.
We are God’s children now, but in the future, we are going to be like
Jesus. We are God’s children now, but in
the future, we are going to be beloved children of God in a perfected,
resurrected body like Jesus has, be citizens of the eternal Kingdom of God, and
live more fully that we can even imagine today.
The gospel descriptions of the post-resurrected Jesus give us some
glimpse of what this life is like – moving where we want to go, having
fellowship with our friends, eating and drinking, understanding the purposes of
God and living completely into them. We
don’t have a lot of details, but when we see Jesus at the end, we will become
like him. Our inheritance as children of
God is nothing less than to join fully in the resurrected life of Jesus.
Since the hope of our inheritance is nothing less than a
resurrected life like Jesus, we purify ourselves, just as he is pure. We are not dabbling in a life destined for
the trash bins or to be recycled for some future reincarnation. We will be like him, and we want to see him
as he is. Unless we’d rather stay locked
in, looking at our sources of sin.
Unless we’d rather look at whatever fleeting pride, pleasure and passing
fancy captivate us more than the beauty of Jesus. Unless we’d rather run from the love of our
heavenly Father and spend our eternal lives seeking something somewhere else.
But better for us to purify ourselves by doing our best to
love and serve him now as a way to prepare ourselves to be blissfully by Jesus
forever. Sure, sometimes we mess up, and
look away – we’re still human, even if human children of God. But Jesus loved us enough to die for us, so
he will forgive us if we turn back to him. If we’ve gotten so turned around
that we can’t find him, we can call out and our Good Shepherd will come find
his lost sheep. Jesus loves us. Our heavenly Father loves us. We are called children of God, and that is
what we are. What we will be, we don’t know yet, but we know that we are God’s
children now. Cherish it. Celebrate it.
Never let anyone or anything make you forget it.
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