This evening's sermon

It's easier to jump straight into cold water than to slide in inch by inch. So here goes.

Sermon 19 October 2008: Prov 4:1-18, 1 John 3:16-4:6
“All you need is love, love, love…Love is all you need”
Doesn’t that date me! & I can’t say I think much of the rest of the lyrics. But that phrase, trite as it sounds, is quite simply true.
A religion, a faith, based on love? Unbelievable. Based on obedience, fair enough. Based on wisdom, oh yes. But love?
The funny thing is that you do need wisdom, & you do need obedience. But scour the religions, the philosophies & the ideologies, & they won’t tell you that above all you need love. To live The Good Life, to build the perfect world, to create permanent revolution, to keep the ten commandments…just do the right things. Tick the boxes, & Bob’s your uncle. But how about love?
The two readings we’ve just heard, placed next to each other, are quite remarkable. I wish we had time for you all to read them for yourselves now, before I go on. I’d love you to read them afterwards. Because, even more clearly than is usually the case, the New Testament reading interprets the Old. The reading from Proverbs is about wisdom – about Wisdom with a capital W, Wisdom the person; & the reading from John’s epistle reminds us what Wisdom with a capital W actually taught us when she became incarnate – when he became incarnate – & lived among us. Forgive the gender-bending. But it does us no harm to note that while Jesus was of course a man when incarnate (well, as a human being he had to be one or the other) in his nature as Child of God, he...she....is neither. He is the Power of God; she is the Wisdom of God. & the Holy Spirit is the Love of God & is the Spirit of Jesus. So when Wisdom was made flesh & dwelt among us, love was her meaning & love was her command. Proverbs’ “Get Wisdom” has been interpreted & clarified by the Gospel’s “Get Love”.
Love then, love & grace, which is simply the way God’s unconditional love manifests itself towards us imperfect & sinful human beings. So is that what we see when we look at Christians? Here’s another sentence from that reading from St John: “This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming, & even now is already in the world.”
I find that a chilling sentence. Not because John says that the antichrist is in the world, as I think that is very likely. Satan has been “roaming through the earth & going back & forth in it” since the time of Job & long before. & of course there was that small matter of a piece of fruit in a garden at the beginning of time.
No, I find it a chilling sentence because of the use that has been made of it, & of sentences like it, throughout Christian history. I have many times been a member of groups described by someone as the antichrist – I’ve been a Roman Catholic, I’ve been a Socialist, I’ve been on several Gay Pride marches, I’ve been in the audience when Bishop Gene Robinson was here in conversation with John Armes...in fact, in the opinion of some of those who met in Jerusalem before the Lambeth Conference, I suspect that the whole of the Scottish Episcopal Church has pretty strong links with the antichrist.
Philip Yancey, in his wonderful book “What’s so amazing about grace?” says “I think back to the comment of the despairing prostitute that originally prompted me to write this book: ‘Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse!’ & I think back to the life of Jesus, who attracted as if by reverse magnetism the most unsavoury of characters, the moral outcasts. He came for the sinners, not the righteous. & when he was arrested, it was not the notorious sinners of Palestine, but the moralists, who called for his death.” Yancey also quotes Bill Clinton, that famous flawed Southern Baptist, thus: “I have been in politics long enough to expect criticism & hostility. But I was unprepared for the hatred I got from Christians. Why do Christians hate so much?”
A far cry from the comment, quoted by Tertullian in his Apology, “See how these Christians love one another!”
As Kierkegaard so often said, try as you will to wriggle out of the difficulties of Christianity, again & again you are brought up against the clear, plain, unequivocal words of Jesus. When pinned down & asked for a straight answer by a canon lawyer he replied without hesitation: “The greatest commandment? To love God; & (which is the same thing) to love every other human being” (because that’s what the word “neighbour” means).
Loving God & loving neighbour is the very same thing. Actually the very same commandment. The very same action. & that, in my opinion, is the antidote to this awful tendency to see the antichrist everywhere. That person you see before you has the very human nature taken by the Son of God. Your approach to them is – IS, not just “indicates” – your approach to God. If you see Christ everywhere, you won’t see the antichrist. & I think we can safely leave the antichrist to God. The real struggle is not with people. The real struggle is against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. & we cannot cope with this; only God can. So perhaps it would be a better idea for us humans to let God deal with that, & concentrate on the one thing he has told us to do, which is to love.
God is love. That’s another of those phrases we are so used to that we don’t realise how astonishing they are. Thomas Aquinas in his learned way said that we can’t define God; we can’t know “what” he is, only “that” he is. Can’t we though! We can, & there it is in the epistle of the Beloved Disciple. God-IS-love. So if we do want to know the spirit of antichrist, to recognise it & avoid it, this spirit of antichrist, which only God is powerful enough to conquer, it is, surely, the spirit of unlove, or, as Philip Yancey would have it, ungrace.
God is love. God is not an abstract noun – we have turned solid, personal words like love & wisdom into abstract nouns because we are such a faint reflection of the reality that is God. In my opinion the only purpose of our life in Christ is to turn us into created reflections of his uncreated love.
I’ll finish with a quotation from an Eastern Orthodox author. Asked for whom we should, or should not, pray, he sweeps aside what he calls “Western ideologising” & answers thus:
Love in Christ is lived experientially, as a charismatic state. In this state, the Divine Comforter gives to man a compassionate heart, with the immediate result that he is now dominated by a boundless love for all of created nature. This charismatic love in Christ is most certainly not a sentimental love, that is, love within the limits of createdness; rather, it is the uncreated energy of God, which enters into our heart, making it merciful, in the likeness of God. Insofar as our Lord is all-merciful, so our hearts become all-merciful, by the action of Grace,
Just as our all-merciful Lord Himself does not hesitate to pour out His Grace—& this lovingly—even on the evil spirits & on those who reject Him, so also he who loves in Christ pours out his prayer lovingly, unconstrainedly, & naturally on all, being unable to restrain the abundance of life, giving what he has been given.
& so let us pray: Christ my God, set my heart on fire with love in You, that in its flame I may love You with all my heart, with all my mind, & with all my soul & with all my strength, & my neighbour as myself, so that by keeping Your commandments I may glorify You the Giver of every good & perfect gift. Amen.