Mother's Day 2015

                                                           Easter 6 2015 (Year B)

                                     Acts 10:44-48;Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17

Father Adam Trambley

May 10, 2015 St.John’s Sharon

In this morning’s reading from the first letter of John, we hear a rather bizarre passage.  The Bible is full of things that make us go “hmm” at first, and we get one of them today.  After talking about loving the children of God and keeping his commandments and our faith conquering the world, we read:

This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood.  So just what is John trying to tell us here?

In John’s day, some people disagreed about just how much of Jesus’ life and death were actually part of his work as the Messiah and to what degree he was the Son of God.  Apparently some of them were arguing that the most important part of Jesus work was done at his baptism.  We don’t know precisely what they were thinking because nobody bothered to spend the time to copy what they wrote over and over again for the past two thousand years, but they may have believed that God left the human Jesus before he suffered and died, or they may have felt like once the incarnation happened that nothing more was necessary, or they may have believed any number of things that belittled the importance of Jesus’ passion and death.  They believed somehow that when Jesus showed up, the important work was done.  Such ideas continue to show up from time to time today.

John, however, didn’t agree with that line of thinking in his day, nor would he be sympathetic to it now.  John points back to Jesus death on the cross, and reaffirms that Jesus came by the water and the blood.  We remember the scene described in the Gospel of John when a soldier came to make sure that Jesus was dead and thrust his spear into Jesus’ side.  Water and blood flowed out of the wound, and Gospel writer says that he himself saw the blood and the water.  The blood and the water are important to John.

Why are the blood and the water important? Because the blood and the water flowing out of Jesus side are tangible signs of just how far Jesus was willing to go out of love for us.  The blood and the water show the lengths that Jesus suffered and sacrificed to bring us eternal life.  As the reading from John’s Gospel says this morning, No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  Jesus’ love for us was so great, that he laid down his life for us. 

I want to take a detour here to talk a bit about Mother’s Day.  Mother’s Day is an incredibly joyous day for many, and an incredibly hard day for others.  But what John says today about Jesus coming can also speak to mothering.  Just like Jesus’ saving work was not accomplished only by water, so, too, Christian mothering is not really about creating a child, but is truly brought to fulfillment in the love that really does lay down one’s life for a child, whatever their age or whatever the biological relationship between a mother and a child.

In many cases, the sacrificial love of mothers starts in the act of pregnancy and giving birth.  I myself cannot describe more than second hand the kinds of care and concern that many expectant mothers feel or the changes in behavior to ensure their unborn child’s safety.  The very act of giving birth is difficult today, and in years past the numbers of deaths during childbirth made delivering a baby one of the most loving and potentially self-sacrificial acts outside of Jesus’ passion.  Yet, delivering a baby is but the beginning of what really makes a mother, and in many ways it is not a prerequisite for being a mother.

Just like Jesus came in the water and the blood, motherhood really comes in its fullness as mothers die to themselves in countless ways out of love for their children.  I’m sure we can all think on times that our own mothers gave something of themselves that went beyond anything we deserved or could reasonably ask for.  My guess is that most of those times we didn’t even know it until much later.  Many of you who are mothers can also point to times when your children pulled a level of love out of you that you didn’t even know you had until that very moment, when you were able to put aside your own wants and needs in ways that surprised yourself, or when you let go of something that had been central to your self-definition or your life up until then but just wasn’t so important anymore.  Mothers, too, we know share the sufferings and griefs of their children, just like Jesus bore our sorrows and walked with us even into death and hell.  Mothers’ sacrifices are not salvific in the way Jesus’ atoning sacrifice is, but the love poured out in them is profound and their prayers are heard on high.

Of course, none of the profound love in action that defines true motherhood is limited to biological childbearing.  In fact, even the fiercest of natural affections pales before the power of Christian love enacted by carrying out Jesus’ commandment to care for his children.  In some cases, that love is all the more powerful when it comes from non-biological mothers.  Should anyone doubt the importance of these arrangements, Jesus himself created a non-biological family on the cross when he told his beloved disciple, likely John who wrote both the letter and the gospel we hear today, that Mary was now his mother and that John was now her son.   The real work of motherhood, the day-in, day-out almost unnoticed acts of love combined with the occasional incredibly difficult or extravagant actions, can be done by many people who are not biological mothers but who step in officially or unofficially to change children’s lives.  Some might be legally adoptive moms, but others are the women who step up consistently because a child of God needs a mother in some way, and they are willing to do the hard and Christ-like work of loving mothering. 

John tells us that we know God by loving the children of God.  In many ways, then, mothering is not only a commission to love someone who is dear to us, but also a path to God.  As we, whether mothers or fathers, grandmothers or grandfathers, aunts or uncles, brothers or sisters, or in whatever other role we might have, as we give of ourselves to care for one of God’s children, we will come to know God through the love that we share.  What we do for God’s children, we do for him, and loving God’s children is actually loving God.  Offering our lives for one of God’s children is offering our lives for God, and God honors those sacrifices.  As we love a child deeply, we will find the face of God in that child. 

So on Mother’s Day, we honor especially those who come not only with a Hallmark Card, but we honor those mothers, in whatever capacity, who came following Jesus and continually offering their lives for the  love for God’s children. 

The Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8:26-40)

                                                           Easter 5 2015 (Year B)

                                Acts 8:26-40;Psalm 22:24-30; 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8

Father Adam Trambley

May 3, 2015 St.John’s Sharon

In this morning’s reading from Acts, Philip has been preaching the gospel in a city of Samaria.  Philip, you might recall, was one of the first deacons.  The apostles commissioned the deacons to help ensure that the widows were got their meals on wheels on schedule, whether they spoke Aramaic or Greek.  Instead, the deacons we know about, Stephen and Philip, end up engaging the very practical and essential matters of evangelism.  We assume that everyone kept getting fed, but the deacons start doing a whole lot more

After successful ministry spreading the good news in Samaria, which is north of Jerusalem, an angel of the Lord tells Philip to take the road south of Jerusalem toward Gaza.  Philip has to walk back to Jerusalem and then keep heading southeast toward the Mediterranean coast through a wilderness area.  As he’s walking along in the middle of nowhere, he hears a chariot coming from behind him.  The chariot was probably something to see, both because it was foreign and because it was huge.  Philip didn’t see one of the Roman racing chariots we think of from the movies with one or two guys standing up and holding on.  This chariot was big enough for an important official to have a seat where he could read a scroll that was probably a couple of feet high, while another person drove and Philip still had room to jump in.  We’re talking the Hummer of chariots, probably with the state seal of Ethiopia on it, being pulled by at least two or three good sized horses decked out in whatever colorful accessories horses of high-status sported in those days.  Philip is probably starting to step back off the road to get a good look and to keep from being run over, when the Spirt tells him to “Go over to the chariot and join it.”

So Philip runs up beside the chariot.  Gratefully for Philip, the chariot had a long way to go before they got home to Ethiopia, so the horses were probably walking and not galloping.  Philip hears the Ethiopian reading from Isaiah and asks if he understands what he’s reading.  The Ethiopian says, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” and invites Philip in.  The scroll is open to one of the suffering servant passages and the eunuch asks who the passage is written about.  That question gives Philip the opening to tell the Ethiopian all about Jesus, beginning with the scripture open in front of them.

They come across some water, and the Ethiopian eunuch asks, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”  That question could be answered a number of ways, that we’ll come back to in a minute, but Philip’s answer is that nothing prevents it.  Philip and the Ethiopian go down into the water, the Ethiopian eunuch is baptized, and then the Spirt of the Lord snatches Philip up and drops him at Azotus, which is on the Mediterranean Coast north of Gaza, while the Ethiopian goes home rejoicing. Great story!

I want to unpack some aspects of this narrative that I think are important for us. 

The first is this question of the eunuch’s, “Look, here is water!  What is to prevent me from being baptized?”  Actually, any number of things might have prevented him.  Most importantly, he was a eunuch, and Deuteronomy 23 says that eunuchs will not be able to enter the assembly of the Lord.  Other Jewish groups, like the Essenes at Qumran, refused to allow eunuchs to join them.  On top of that, he was a foreigner.   We don’t know for sure if he was a gentile or an Ethiopian Jew, maybe a descendent of the Queen of Sheba who came to visit Solomon hundreds of years earlier.  Either way, he worked for the Candice, which was what they called the Queen in Ethiopia, so he probably participated in any number of official religious ceremonies.  We don’t know for sure, and Philip may not have known either.  On top of that, this guy, who was treasurer of Ethiopia, was probably not leaving his job to move to Jerusalem or Samaria where he could join the local church and bring his pledge in every week.  None of these issues matter to Philip – or maybe they did matter to Philip, but the Holy Spirit told him not to worry about them and baptize him anyway. 

Then, when Philip baptizes the eunuch, the Ethiopian is sent out on his own as a new Christian to live out the Christian life.  Here, I think, is where things get really interesting.  Philip is taken away by the Spirit and the Ethiopian has to respond to his baptism in his own way, in his own place, guided solely by God.  Scripture doesn’t tell us what he did, but church history does.  One of the earliest Christian churches is found in Ethiopia.  Ethiopian translations of scripture are some of the earliest translations that we have.  The Ethiopian church traces its foundation back to this eunuch baptized along the road by Philip.  We have no reason to doubt that this man of importance and learning, who sought God enough to drive a chariot hundreds of miles to Jerusalem and back while reading the scriptures along the way, and who was baptized by one of the first deacons, was exactly the type of person God would use to convert a nation to faith in his Son Jesus Christ. 

We should have the same trust in God’s Spirit to work through people that we baptize.  I work with a pastor who instructs everyone who he baptizes to tell the story of what God has done for them to as many people as they can in the next week.  Since the newly baptized usually have a lot of unbaptized friends, on the next Sunday some of them usually show up to be baptized, too.  That’s how churches grow.  Instead of ensuring people get the right theological understanding and doctrinal niceties before giving people permission to talk about their faith, we need to have everybody witnessing to the very straightforward story of what God has done in our lives to anyone who wants to hear it.  When the Ethiopian eunuch did that, a nation was converted.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the conversion of Ethiopia was prophesied in the Old Testament.  Isaiah 11:11 says that the Lord will reach out his hand to reclaim his people, and mentions Ethiopia (also known as Cush).  Zephaniah 3 mentions people calling on the name of the Lord from beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, and Psalm 68:32 says, “Let Ethiopia stretch out her hands to God.”  Noteworthy, too, is that Isaiah 56 says that foreigners and eunuchs who do what is pleasing to the Lord will have a place in his temple and a memorial better than sons and daughters.  So everything that began with today’s reading was spoken about hundreds of years earlier in scripture.

We might also take note that the Ethiopian eunuch is reading the scripture in his chariot even when doesn’t understand it and doesn’t have anyone to teach him.  We might think, “Why bother?”  But if he didn’t take the step of seeking God, he wouldn’t have found him.  If he didn’t do the hard work of trying to understand the scripture, he wouldn’t have been able to formulate the questions he needed to ask so that he could understand.  If he didn’t do all of his own work, he might not have been given Philip to lead him the rest of the way. 

So, too, we need to pick up the Bible and read it.  Sure, some parts are difficult and some parts are boring and some parts aren’t particularly pleasant.  Some parts even challenge what we think we know about God and the church and Christianity.  But if we prayerfully read and come up with questions, God will bring people beside us who can help offer answers.  You can call me anytime with a scripture question, and I’m happy to answer it if I can, or I’ll go find an answer.  But there are others around who God might just send to help, too.  The truly amazing thing might be how much we will understand and be encouraged if we just start reading. 

This story also serves as a reminder that we can use our travel time for God.   We can listen to scripture or hear inspiring music on the radio or on CDs.  We can read the Bible or say our prayers while someone else is driving, maybe even reading them out loud so that the driver can join us.  (Here I means prayers beyond the ones we say for safety when we get into the car with certain family members – and parents of 16 year olds know what I’m talking about.)  

Also noteworthy here is that the story goes nowhere if Philip isn’t willing to go anywhere and do anything to accomplish Jesus’ work.  An angel says leave this city and walk through the wilderness. Philip says OK.  The Spirit says run up to a chariot, which had to seem like a really bad idea, but Philip did it.  Philip baptizes a guy with a national treasury at his disposal, and before he can even say thank you, God picks Philip up and drops him somewhere else, and Philip walks up the coast and just starts proclaiming the good news wherever he is.  Are we willing to do that?  Do we trust God enough to drop everything and follow his lead?  Would we be willing to risk going way out of our comfort zone for the opportunity to share what God means to us with some random stranger in a way that could lead thousands of people to a new life?  The lesson of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch is that one divine appointment can have a ripple effect in countless lives, so we want to be open to every encounter God wants to give us anytime, anyplace, anywhere with anybody.

Finally, I want to mention how much hope there is for the church in all of the stories in this eighth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.  At the end of chapter seven, Stephen is stoned as the first martyr and a general persecution of the church begins in Jerusalem.  Everyone but the Apostles scatters to other places.  But that very scattering leads to the gospel being proclaimed from Jerusalem throughout Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth according to Jesus instructions.  Philip has to leave Jerusalem, so he goes to a city of Samaria and heals people and casts out demons and preaches the word of God and there is much rejoicing in that city.  Then he is instructed to go down this wilderness road and meets the Ethiopian eunuch and the good news spreads further. 

We are in a time when the church has some difficulties.  While the church in America is not facing persecution, we can look around and realize that things are not quite what they once were.  I have been working with a number of folks from throughout the Episcopal Church who actually believe that this is an opportunity for God to begin a new dynamic phase of growth and evangelism.  This group, called the Acts 8 Moment, is looking at how we proclaim resurrection in the Episcopal Church through prayer, evangelism, and effective communication and social media strategies.  Some of us were in Columbus last week to prepare for General Convention this summer, and drafted a number of resolutions, including a call to the church to refocus on the core components of Christian discipleship and a proposal for church planting and for existing church revitalization.  I’ll give you all more details as we dot the i’s and cross the t’s over the next month.

I also believe that we have a similar Acts 8 Moment here at St. John’s.  I truly believe that God has been laying groundwork for the coming season to use us for the revival and renewal of this community.  To do so, we might get scattered a bit, and have to follow the Spirit down some wilderness roads and approach dudes in some very strange chariots.  Nevertheless, if we are prayerful and faithful and willing, we will have incredible opportunities for fruitful ministry.  I don’t know the details, and almost all of it will come from you faithfully taking the next right step and not out of any brilliant plan from the priest.  But if we are willing to follow, God will lead us where he wants to use us. 

When they came up out of the water…the eunuch saw [Philip] no more, and went on his way rejoicing. May all whom God calls us to encounter, go on their way rejoicing because they know Jesus more deeply.     

The Good Shepherd Laying Down His Life For Us

                                                           Easter 4 2015 (Year B)

                                   Acts 4:5-12;Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

Father Adam Trambley

April 26, 2015 St.John’s Sharon

In this morning’s second reading, John writes, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.”   The two parts of this statement are important for us, and more than a little bit overwhelming.  After Lent and Easter, we know that Jesus laid down his life for us, but here John lays out one implication of Jesus’ activity for us: that we ought to lay down our lives for each other, as well.

This fourth Sunday of Easter is sometimes called Good Shepherd Sunday because Collect of the Day, which is the prayer we say at the beginning of the services, talks about Jesus as the Good Shepherd of God’s people, and some of the readings have a similar theme.  The twenty-third Psalm is one of the most familiar parts of scripture, and talks about the Lord as our shepherd, and Jesus appropriates that shepherd image to himself in our gospel.  Jesus describes the good shepherd in the same terms that John uses in his letter.  “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,” Jesus says.

For Jesus, the quality that distinguishes him as the good shepherd is precisely that he is willing to lay down his life for his sheep.  The hired hand doesn’t have that much love for the sheep.  If the wolf shows up, never mind a lion or a bear, the hired hand is out of there.  Let’s face it; sheep taste better to wolves than scrawny lads hired to guard the sheepfold.  When the hired hand runs away, the wolf will leave him alone and go after the sheep. But the Good Shepherd would rather die than let the wolf get his sheep because he loves his sheep and they are all special to him.  He knows them each by name and they recognize his voice. 

One way the Good Shepherd has laid down his life for his sheep is through Jesus’ passion and death.  Human beings through their own sin and disobedience decided to invite the wolf into the sheepfold.  God wants what is good for us, so when we disobey him, we are basically inviting the powers that want to destroy us to come in and have at it.  We could eat the green grass that Jesus has led us to, but instead we want to try chewing rocks.  We could lie down beside the still waters, but we want to play hide and seek by where the wolves are sleeping.  We could follow along behind Jesus, but we think the grass is greener on the other side and wander off and get ourselves lost.  When all those things happen, our Good Shepherd does not abandon us to face the consequences of our own errors.  Instead, he himself deals with our situation, going as far as to lay down his life so that death could no longer threaten us.  Ever since Jesus died and rose again, we never have to worry about facing death by alone, because even in death, Jesus is now with us.  Not even death can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord, and if death can’t, nothing else is able to, either.  Jesus died fighting off that big bad wolf on our behalf.

But just because Jesus has overcome death, doesn’t mean it isn’t threatening to us.  The twenty-third psalm has this powerful verse: Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for you are with me.  A lot more paths lead through the valley of the shadow of death than we might wish.  Death casts his deep, dark shadow in far too many places.  An earthquake in Nepal.  Bombings in Syrian churches.  Plane crashes.  Car accidents.  Terrorist attacks.  Cancer diagnoses.  The slowly accumulating ravages of time that just wear out our mortal bodies.    Looking up at the steep cliffs on either side of us while we go through such experiences is more than a bit scary.  The threats are many and the way ahead is not always clear.  The shadows confuse us, depress us, and threaten to take away our hope.  But with our Good Shepherd, we don’t need to lost hope.  We do not need to lose our way.  And we do not need to be afraid of any evil.  Nothing that happens to us will ultimately be evil, because Jesus is with us and evil can’t win when he is there.  Evil can’t win, can’t touch us, can’t harm us.

Sometimes in those dark valleys, we confuse the real evils from the vagaries of human life.  The real evils that Jesus is always protecting us from are things like hatred and resentment toward whoever or whatever we think got us into this unpleasant situation to begin with.  That hatred and bitterness is the kind of hardheartedness that leads us to kick God out of our lives and turn way his saving love.  Another evil is an amnesia about God’s love for us as his children, where we forget what God has done for us or that he is always on our side.  Still another evil is selfishness that can beset us when we are threatened, where we think we are entitled to whatever we want because the going is difficult, instead loving each other and trusting God to give us what we need.  Real evil separates us from God and one another, and it damages the soul.

We might associate whatever natural processes are causing us difficulty, or are threatening our health, as evil, but they are not necessarily evil.  They may just be part of how life works, even if we don’t understand why the world is set up that way.  If God chooses, he can protect us from any threat and heal any illness, but for some reason that we can’t comprehend, he doesn’t always.  But even in those cases where things don’t seem to work the way we would want them to, we can trust that even in the valley of the shadow of death, even in the shadow of death we find on the other side of our own deaths, we shall fear no evil for God is with us, and, as the last line of the psalm states, “I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”  Even if the valley of the shadow of death leads us through our tombs instead of around them, Jesus is still with us, ensuring that no evil can harm us after we die any more than it did before we died.   Jesus ensured our protection even after death by laying down his life for us on the cross, descending to the dead, and then rising from the grave.  We celebrate that resurrection throughout this Easter season, as well as every day of our Christian lives.

To return to First John, just like Jesus laid down his life for us, we are to lay our lives down for one another.  We don’t lay our lives down for quite the same purpose as Jesus did.  We aren’t capable of overcome the powers of sin, death and the devil once and for all.  We aren’t the Messiah, but we are supposed to think and act like Jesus, our Messiah, did.  Jesus’ attitude was that it was worth giving up everything, including his life, for people who were messed up, sinful, disobedient, recalcitrant slobs like we are.  Nobody who Jesus died for was worthy of his death. Nobody was more important than him, as if he were the secret service agent taking a bullet. Nobody was even close either to the glory of his divine nature or to the sinlessness of his human nature. But Jesus didn’t care.  He died for us who are so far below him, emptying himself entirely, carrying his cross, and washing our feet along the way.  We are called to follow Jesus, talking up our cross, washing feet, and laying down our lives for one another.

Very few people are called to go so far as to die for someone else.  But our attitude, to be like Jesus’, is that we ought to love anyone and everyone enough to lay down our lives for them if need be.  We are supposed to remember that everyone we meet, from our most beloved family members to our worst enemies at school or work to the most annoying people we meet in line, is someone that Jesus loved enough to die for and that we should also consider them as someone we would die for if necessary.

Since there are limited ways to actually help someone by dying for them, John provides an immediate concrete example of how we can take a step toward dying for another.  He writes, How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refused to help?  John has just lowered the bar dramatically.  If you aren’t called to lay down your life for someone, you should at least help them.  If you see someone who is hungry and you have food in your pantry then feed them.  If you have clothing and someone has no shoes or no coat, then give them what they need.  If you have a checkbook with anything in it and there are people who are homeless or victims of a natural disaster or refugees or in any other kind of need, then write the check and send it to somebody someplace that will do something.  If we don’t, John says, we clearly don’t have God’s love abiding in us. 

Certainly there are also other ways for us to help people in need that come even closer to dying to self.  We could give our time, perhaps our most valuable commodity, to others.  We can give our hearts to them, listening to those who need friendship and love.  We can pour out our souls in prayer before God on behalf of those in need, which is its own type of dying to ourselves for the sake of another.

Note why John says we should people: not because they deserve it (because they might not); not because if we give generously, we will receive generously (although we probably will); not because by helping people we help Jesus (even though we do).  John says to help people in need because it is one component of laying down our life for someone else, and we are supposed to follow Jesus in doing just that.  And since Jesus laid down his life for us and has taken away any evil that death could do to us, then we can confidently lay down our lives for others, or even just give them what we need, confident that as we follow Jesus, we need not fear any evil.

Through Jesus’ Good Shepherding, Jesus loves us and lays down his life for us.  We fear no evil, even in the valley of the shadow of death because he is with us.  We can follow Jesus and help others in their time of need, laying down our lives for them in imitation of Jesus who laid down his life for us.

            We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.

Children of God -- 1 John 3:1-4

                                                           Easter 3 2015 (Year B)

                                    Acts 3:12-19;Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48

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.