Loving Truth and Action (Deut. 6; 1 Jn. 3:16-24)
The man’s name is Chuck. Chuck used to tell as many people as possible that his hero is Jesus Christ. He declared every chance he could, that he desired to meet “honest, loyal people who are devoted to things and take them seriously.” The company of friends forty-four year old Chuck kept shared the same sentiment … always emphasizing a message of love rather than hate.
The forty-three year old woman’s last name, rather poetically I’m sad to say, was Lynch. She had been a loner seeking the company of those who wanted to share the message of love she and Chuck and too many others held in common. Having made a connection through the internet, she had taken a flight to meet Chuck and his inner circle last November. Something didn’t sit right with her once face to face in the company of Chuck, his son, and several others. She turned to leave for home. That’s when Chuck, the avowed follower of Jesus Christ who valued honest, loyal people, allegedly shot Lynch to death and had her body dumped in a backwoods canal.
I read all this while sitting at the car dealership this past week awaiting a repair. It was in the current issue of Time magazine, an article titled, “Rebranding Hate in the Age of Obama.” The “rebranding” focuses on the racist rhetorical downplaying of violence and hate in favor of a message about love. Love, that is, of only a single sort of “white” people. They sell baseball caps with the message IT’S LOVE, NOT HATE, have their sweet Sunday-school aged children draw signs that say, WHITE PRIDE WORLD WIDE, and sing songs about the evils of oppression (against their understanding of the Aryan race, that is.) Hooked, lined, and sunk, Cynthia Lynch had believed Chuck’s KKK offshoot was softer than the older white supremacists. She apparently had wanted to be part of this “new” generation. We don’t know what happened to change her mind at some point during an initiation ceremony, but she lost her life trying to reassert her freedom in the face of their brand of “love.”
It’s an interesting article that argues that certain racist groups are trying to come across more “normal” and “non-threatening” these days, now that arguably the most powerful person in the world is an African-American. That said, while an interesting report, its words and pictures made me feel sick. All that free coffee at the dealership re-brewed itself in my belly several times over. I sat there waiting for word on the minor minivan repair just shaking my head and muttering a little louder than I should have been in the company of other customers.
Somewhere in the midst of all this I started thinking about the text I’d already chosen to preach on this morning. I thought about how racists read the same words, but come to a vastly different conclusion about 1 John 3:18’s exhortation to “let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”
We know all too well from history and the history being written still today how hate groups put their version of love and truth into action. Their understanding of the God who embodies truth and action in the Gospels could not be any more polar opposite than my understanding. This is so obvious that there is no further need to elaborate on it. My attention this morning is instead on what we are doing in our personal and communal lives to firmly stand with the Jesus who loved and loves all races and who went to the Cross to bring about the reconciliation of every person in the world with God and with one another.
“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?” This question of 1 John 3:17 is a rhetorical call to action. It’s not just a call to charity for the sake of being charitable. It’s a call to be charitable of heart for the sake of God’s heart. It’s got a firm root in Israel’s sacred shema from the sixth chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy, which exhorts us to act with our whole heart, soul and might in response to our steadfastly abiding God.
This action begins by holding fast to our individual and collective remembrance of all the ways the Scriptures attest to how God has lovingly interceded to deliver suffering humanity from injustice. Rob Bell, pastor of the 11,000 member Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan, states it this way in a recent interview — “Our redemption experience is deeply tied to extending our redemption experience to others. God says,” continued Bell, “I know how you are. You’re going to forget Egypt and how I rescued you. You’re going to forget your own liberation narrative unless you’re endlessly extending generosity to the widow, the orphan and the stranger among you. And so God connects personal salvation with acts of justice, compassion and mercy.”
How have you experienced divine redemption? Has this stirred you to go out and help God help others experience the same?
When we remember our redemption experiences and honor those we read of in the Bible, we indeed should feel compelled to extend that Good News. We do this in so many ways — by being faithful stewards of our personal wealth, by advocating for socio-economic balance and equity, by giving our valuable time to directly assist people burdened by oppression, by praying for others, by deepening and growing our knowledge and experiences of God’s love.
We find ourselves, in a myriad of ways, striving to be what Sister Helen Prejean was to death row inmate Robert Lee Willie just before his execution. In the movie version of this real life tale, entitled Dead Man Walking, we hear her say, “I want the last face you see in this world to be the face of love, so you look at me when they do this thing. I’ll be the face of love for you.”
I get to wondering whether or not there was a face of love for Cynthia Lynch or for Raymond “Chuck” Foster that could have helped God transform their poisonous, deadly prejudice. I wonder and then I resolve that we need to keep stirring one another up to be bold faces of true love. We must understand and be vigilant that the identification of “Christian” is a verb!
One solid reason we need to stir one another up is because every single one of us can succumb to the more unintentional resistance to God talked about in the eleventh chapter of a new book in our church library called Love One Another: Becoming the Church Jesus Longs For.
“It should be obvious,” writes Whitworth University professor and this book’s author Gerald Sittser, “that the Christian life is not a journey for casual weekend strollers. It is more like a strenuous hike in the Rockies.” He talks about how some people are very intentional in their resistance to God, while others are more naturally inclined toward inertia, that is, toward sluggish inactivity. It is “the human condition at its unselfconscious worst,” which in Sittser’s opinion, “may be the more deadly of the two simple because we are unaware of it, like death by gradual poisoning.” This inertia is like “water that flows to the lowest elevation possible, where is can rest after cascading down mountainsides.”
We all spend or have spent enormous chunks of our lives cascading down mountainsides. And all this cascading pulls us toward the need to rest. Naturally, we need this rest. God commands it. The trouble is, in the words Sittser that I find myself fully agreeing with, this inertia can also come about in the form of “comfort zone Christianity …,” to “a laziness of spirit, deadness of faith, a routine that gives the appearance of religion without cultivating a heart for God … to dead worship, exclusive churches, lifeless devotions, token service, easy giving, and superficial knowledge of the Bible.” The professor points out that in the Book of Revelation this inertia is labeled “lukewarmness” and is considered more dangerous than open rebellion.
It’s clear to me that hate groups are always at work against inertia within their ranks; what are we doing for one another and the communities where we live and serve to keep our reconciling, ever-inclusive faith vital, fresh, and aggressively loving? I ask you to pray on this in the coming week.
One suggestion I have right off the bat (can you tell it’s baseball season?) is to invite folks you know to come to worship here on the 17th – we’ll have the bell and gospel choirs from the Good News Home for Women here, along with a speaker testifying to what our support of this mission field means. Another suggestion is to support all of the ASP fundraisers here and with our sister churches. This will in turn directly support the welfare of impoverished brothers and sisters in Appalachia. Friends, please keep a careful eye and heart on all that FPC is doing in loving truth and action. And if you feel stirred to spread this love in some new way, don’t hesitate to let me and the Session know.
I know that the violent, vigilant outreach and advocacy coming from hate groups of all sizes and shapes will not cease. I also know that all that effort combined cannot ultimately trump the love of God in Jesus Christ. This, my faithful friends, is what we are to hold fast to when we are going about our daily routines, find ourselves reminded of evil, and have coffee re-brewed in our bellies. “We know that we have passed from death to life,” concludes 1 John 3:14, “because we love one another …” Amen.
