Sermon 21st July 2013

Today, our Vicar, Cameron Barker, concludes our study of the book of John. His sermon is based on the reading from 1 John 5 verses 13-21.

OK, it’s confession time – again! So: I almost lost all my hair this week. No, I wasn’t tempted to shave it off in this heat-wave; but I was on the verge of tearing it all out! At various points I thought that each of these items – starting with the suitcase – would be the way to start this final sermon in our series from 1 John. And we will come back to the suitcase, the Bible, and the slinky as we go through today. But I then made what I thought was a fatal mistake: I read through all the sermons that we have heard in this series – and thought that I was lost! How is it possible to sum up such a wide-ranging, diverse collection of teaching as we have had during these past 3 months?

As ever, though, a solution was at hand – eventually! All of these items can and must be put aside for now, and have their place taken by the words of a wise old farmer. He dryly observed that the most active animal in the farmyard is a chicken that has just had its head cut off! His point was that merely generating lots of activity is not necessarily a sign of life. And those are words that John himself might have written, I’d say. You see, just as he had done with his Gospel, when John reached the end of his letter he explained why he had written it. Here’s how it’s expressed in the Message version: “My purpose in writing is simply this: that you who believe in God’s Son will know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you have eternal life, the reality and not the illusion.”

My now-experienced eye tells me that statement could easily be made into a good tweet! But, as I hope regulars have come to expect by now, there is far more to this than that. Yes, there are significant, and practical, consequences to that statement of purpose from John. And that’s the relevance of the chicken observation, if you haven’t yet worked that out. I might instead have re-tweeted my recent quote from Nietzsche, which makes the same key point: “To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity’. For John, purpose was vital: first and foremost was God’s loving purpose in sending His Son to die, to offer life to all people. All activity must spring from that purpose, if it is to bring life.

Now John had witnessed, and experienced, this for himself, remember. As he wrote at the start of his letter: (NIV) “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched, this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard.” And that is what prompted me to bring along my great-grandfather’s suitcase. Here’s something that has been around, has seen all sorts of life, and places: surely the Antiques Roadshow would place a great value on it? But nothing like as high as the value of this Bible, which contains this book that was written by an eye-witness to such literally universe-changing events.

So that’s how John began, with a clear statement about God’s loving purpose in Jesus. In what has followed he has then been equally clear about what our purpose is to be. As John also wrote at the start, in coming to believe this reality for ourselves, we, like John, must share it with as many others as possible. That makes God’s joy complete, and our own too. But that, of course, is only the beginning of it: each time that John has come back to God’s loving purpose in his letter, he has kept on showing more of God’s purpose for us. From start to finish, John has not ever let us forget that purpose is absolutely key.

Now it is true to say that John has expressed much of that in all sorts of ‘interesting’ ways. There have not been many weeks where if we had have tried to fill in the dots from John’s start point that we’d have landed up where he did, I’d suggest. And that’s not least true of today, in the way that this letter ends. But that’s why this slinky has made in into the case. As we’ve noted before, John didn’t write in straight lines. In these months we seem to have covered the same ground more than a few times. But it’s been more like a different point around the circle, I’d say. John has taken us on all sorts of circuitous adventures. They have at least potentially got us to new places, not just in our faith but in the breadth of our understanding of it, and in our living of it – in and for Him.

It’s obvious, then, that any attempt to summarise our learning from this letter would be doomed to failure. I’m not so foolish as even to try that, then. Instead, I will point you enthusiastically to our revamped website, where most of the sermons from this series are posted, in word and/or audio form. Each one is a full meal in its own right, as served up by the different chefs on the preaching team. What we have each tried to do is unpack how John has set out the practical consequence of God’s key purpose: sending his Son both as our Saviour, and also as our example. We have gone around these various circles with John; and the journey has been well worthwhile. It is also a journey that we can take time and again, as our faith-life develops.

So it may not often have been too linear a journey; but this is one that has moved us on, at least potentially: if we have ears to hear. Either way, John has brought to here, to this point of knowing, as he comes to his stopping place. It may not be a place where many of us would have chosen to have ended a letter, perhaps. But John clearly thinks that he has said enough for his first readers to be clear in, and about, their purpose. We do need to keep the context of this letter very much in mind, if we are to make proper sense of it today. So, as I explained at the start, John likely wrote this as a kind of covering letter, to go with the Gospel that bears his name. Some people who had read John’s account of Jesus’ life were making wrong use of it, and this was kind of a corrective for them. It was meant to help them to realise God’s purpose, and their own.

Clearly that wasn’t always happening back then, though. It may have pained John greatly, but it was still real. People who should, and could, have known better were choosing to close their ears to the truth and reality of God’s purpose. That may well have been the “sin that does lead to death” which John writes of here – an on-going refusal to believe this truth about Jesus that John had declared. Despite filling many pages on this topic, none of the commentators are sure about its meaning – which may reflect John’s own uncertainty. He is sure that there is sin that leads to death: but he doesn’t define it, or even say that we can’t pray for people who are in that place. We can and must pray for those who do sin, John says; and we must do so confidently, in a life-giving way.

Here is one practical consequence of us knowing that we have eternal life, John says. Again, it may not be the one that would spring immediately to our mind, perhaps. But here it is: now we can be bold and confident in approaching God in prayer. What we know now also is that God does hear us when we ask Him things. Note that this isn’t asking for what we want, though; but rather for what God wants. And if that does remind us of some other teaching on prayer, that might be because of who taught John to pray. It’s a handy reminder to have though; and one that’s entirely in keeping with the rest of John’s letter. Once again, it’s based on the example of Jesus himself: know what God’s purpose is, and choose that rather than our own, even at great cost.

And here’s another point on the slinky that we have visited a few times along the way. Sin matters to John, because sin matters to God, just as believing the right things matters. One very often leads to the other – either positively, or negatively. Believe the wrong things, and chances are that we’ll behave the wrong way. Believe the right things though, and chances are that we will then behave the right way – or at least try to; and there is help on offer with this, John reminds his readers. We won’t always get it right even then; but we can know this. We can know we belong to, and live in, the God who helps us to know who He is and what He’s like through His Son.

At the start of this series I quoted from the introduction to John’s 3 letters in the Message version. As we end it would be good to hear Eugene Peterson’s very helpful words again, I think. So: “The 2 most difficult things to get straight in life are love and God. More often than not, the mess people make of their lives can be traced to failure, or stupidity, or meanness in one or both these areas. The basic and biblical Christian conviction is that the two subjects are intricately related. If we want to deal with God the right way, we have to learn to love the right way. If we want to love the right way, we have to deal with God the right way. God and love can’t be separated.

“John’s letters provide wonderfully explicit direction in how this works. Jesus, the Messiah, is the focus: Jesus provides the full and true understanding of God; Jesus shows us the mature working-out of love. In Jesus, God and love are linked accurately, intricately and indissolubly.

“But there are always people around who don’t want to be pinned down to the God Jesus reveals, to the love Jesus reveals. They want to make up their own idea of God, make up their own style of love. John was pastor to a church (or churches) disrupted by some of these people. In his letters we see him re-establishing the original and organic unity of God and love that comes to focus and becomes available to us in Jesus Christ.”

Having reached the end of this series, we can say all that in the past tense, I’d hope. Since Easter this is what we have seen and heard, and also learned how to live better too. Our activity is meant to be of the kind that brings life, as is God’s purpose, rather than being of a headless-chicken variety. As John concludes – in the Message version again, “This Jesus is both True God and Real Life.” John has written this letter to help people like us, in all ages, to know the reality of this: to live in it; and to live it out. From start to finish John has packed his teaching full of practical advice and good examples of what that looks like in practice. Our challenge now is to take hold of those, and to live them out: loving choice by loving choice. This is eternal life, reality not illusion: it’s for living, and for sharing, at any cost. We are to follow the example of Jesus, who is the True God who gives Real Life. We are to do that by loving God and loving each other God’s way. And so let’s pray for His help to keep working on doing just that ...