Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "People Who Are Loved Behave Differently "
Date: April 30, 2006
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  1 John 3:1-7

Last Sunday evening at 9 o’clock, if you were not watching Desperate Housewives, Masterpiece Theatre or The Sopranos, then the 227th broadcast of the Hallmark Hall of Fame had a storyline that touched my heart.  A 16-year-old teenage boy shows up on the doorstep of his aunt, a writer.  He had been born to her mentally ill brother, who had met his wife in a mental institution.  The boy suffered both neglect and abuse as a child.  He was taken as an infant from his parents and raised by another aunt and uncle, both of whom were alcoholics.  He was returned at age six to his parents, from whom he finally ran away.

When he arrived at his aunt’s door unannounced one evening, he was disheveled, starving, and lacking in most social customs.  At one point, as he gradually moved to a normal life under her loving concern, he asked in exasperation, “How much to sleep, eating proportions, how do you learn that stuff?”  That was not a part of his normal life, due to the extreme neglect and abuse he suffered growing up.

I realize the show was a television drama, but lots of abandoned kids as well as adults are out there who need to be loved and nurtured.  Their plight, and any progress that they make, gives credence to the idea that people respond to love.

And that’s the message in First John 3:1-7.  I like the way the New International Version translates John:  “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!”  Certainly those who are “called children of God; [for] that is what we are,” are important in every sense of the word, and that requires something of us, the loved, in return.

We are loved by the “Father,” we are children of God.  We must therefore behave as children of God.  Paul uses the dualism of light and darkness in Ephesians 5 to make the same point:  “For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light.  Live as children of light — for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true” (5:8-9).  All of this brings us to two essential, take-away ideas.

First, People who are loved behave differently from those who aren’t.  We are loved.  We are called therefore to love.  This affects our relationship with God and the community.

The message of apostles John and Paul and the essential teaching of Jesus Christ is that once we declare ourselves as followers of Christ and seek to live by all that means, we live by a different set of rules than those that governed us when we were simply inhabitants upon this planet:

•  We love our neighbors as ourselves.

•  We listen for God’s voice, not our own.

•  We consider ourselves to be subject one to another.

•  We practice kindness and charity.

•  We bear each other’s burdens.

•  We forgive rather than bear a grudge.

Jesus Christ taught us all about proper manners, about proper behavior, and it doesn’t simply involve saying, “More tea, pastor?”  Jesus said, love God above all things, and love your neighbor as yourself, that is the summation of the law. (Matthew 22:37-40)  That’s how we are called to live.  That’s where we find the rules of civil behavior.

Love is the message we have heard from the beginning.  This is the message of Jesus — that we should love one another as God loves us.  (3:11)  It’s out of love that we treat each other as we should.  Civility is merely following the golden rule — treating others as we wish to be treated.  What could be more Christian than Jesus saying, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Matthew 7:12)  If you want people to be kind to you, be kind to them.  If you don’t want to be cut off in traffic, don’t be the guy who cuts off other drivers.  If you want to be let out into traffic, let others out.  If you want civil treatment at the grocery store, or in your kitchen, treat others with civility and respect.  Even if you don’t get civility in return, keep your cool, and let the civility flow.

The second take-away idea for today is this:  People often express the qualities and tendencies of their parents.

A writer once studied the Amish people of Pennsylvania in preparation for an article on them.  During the time he spent in the playground of the Amish school, he noticed that the children never screamed or yelled.  This amazed him.

He spoke to the schoolmaster.  He said he hadn’t once heard an Amish child yell, and asked why the schoolmaster thought that was so.

The schoolmaster replied, “Well, have you ever heard an Amish adult yell?”

It’s the old “apple-doesn’t-fall-far-from-the-tree” concept.  It might not be about bloodlines, but it is about Spirit-lines.  We are the children of God.  This implies that we — by nature — will express the qualities, tendencies of God!  That’s what John is getting at with all this talk about sinning in the second half of today’s lesson when he writes:  “No one who abides in [God] sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him .… Everyone who commits sin is a child of the devil; for the devil has been sinning from the beginning .… Those who have been born of God do not sin, because God’s seed abides in them; they cannot sin, because they have been born of God.  The children of God and the children of the devil are revealed in this way:  all who do not do what is right are not from God, nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters.” (1 John 3:6, 8, 9-10)

Now, I am not going to presume that just because we are Christians, we never sin, in ways large and small, or as the Catholic Church used to define sin, as mortal or venial.  But the point is that we should be trying not to sin, and to be aware of it if we do and seek to make reparations.

If we behave in a typically non-loving, non-forgiving, non-merciful manner, our very relationship with God is thereby called into question.  People who know God, who are God’s children, do not live this way.

So, to apply John’s approach, would we say our behavior in private or in public more closely resembles God, or the devil?

It’s not always an easy thing to face rude and boorish behavior from others — not to speak of unkindness — with a civil response.  People who understand that they’re loved, who understand that there is a Spirit-line from God to and through them, will act in love and charity as befitting their station in life — a station secured for them by the cross of Christ.  They will act to increase the store of human kindness.  Who knows how you might change someone’s day for the better because of your kind response to them when they’ve acted toward you in an angry, fitful or sharp manner?

A little later in this same chapter from John’s first letter, he concludes:  “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.  And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him.” (1 John 3:18-19)

 

(Portions of this sermon adapted from “Newportance,”

Homiletics, Vol. 18, No. 2, March-April, 2006, pp. 68-72.)