We love because God First Loved Us

 Faithworks UC Camp Hill 21.08.2022

Jeremiah 1:4-10 

In 1 John 4 verse 19 it says, “we love because God first loved us.”

It might seem a bit strange to start my sermon on Jeremiah with a quote from 1 John. But I think it is really important for us to consider that God’s action of loving the creation and its people is always, is always, the first move.  Anything that we do is a response to God’s love. Therefore, it is this fundamental truth of the love of God, as the first cause of all things, which should shape how we interpret these passages and understand ourselves and our own personal life stories.

Now this is not the first sermon I have preached on these passages this week.  In Chapel, on Tuesday, I reflected on this passage with the students at the school where I am a Chaplain. And I am going to pick up on one of the key themes that was identified by the students who form my Chapel team. In calling Jeremiah, God says this:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

and before you were born, I consecrated you;

I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

The question raised by the Chapel team was whether Jeremiah had any choice about God's plan for his life. The students then wondered, how much control do we have over own lives if God has a plan for us? This is actually a very complex question and probably lies as a conundrum in each one of our own lives. It involves the age-old question of free will and determinism.

However, the phrase we love because God first loved us implies that we do have a choice to reciprocate the love that is shown to us. I believe the statement infers that we have freedom to choose to love God and others even if God has a plan for our lives. I will return to this question of free will and determinism a bit later in the sermon.

The choice for Jeremiah is expressed in the formulaic way the call to be a prophet is expressed.  God calls Jeremiah, Jeremiah expresses humility and unworthiness to that call, and then God reassures Jeremiah that God will guide him and give him the words to say, and that God will be with him through the work that he's going to do.

God's love for Jeremiah and for the people of Israel, and for the nations that Jeremiah was to prophesy to, precedes Jeremiah’s answer. Jeremiah may not appear to have a choice about God’s plan but there are choices that he does appear to be make.

 Now, lest we be a little deluded about what being called by God and being part of God's plan might mean, it is important for us to deal with the context.  Jeremiah lived around 600 years before Jesus and his task was no easy one.  God was sending Jeremiah into the world with God's message precisely because people had gone astray. The implications for Jeremiah’s life were not going to be good ones. In his commentary on Jeremiah, Chris Knights, says this.

 “The example of the life of Jeremiah shows that all too clearly [being called does not equate to an easy life]. ‘I am with you and will keep you safe,’ God said to him, but that did not prevent him from being rejected, worse being imprisoned and being left for dead. It didn’t stop him from wishing that he had never been born. The promise of God being with him and keeping him safe was not a promise that he would be kept from all the changes and chances of this fleeting world. But it did give Jeremiah the conviction of the rightness of his cause, it did keep him loyal to the message he had been given by the LORD when pressures on body, mind and spirit were encouraging him to pack it all in.” (end quote)

 My point in sharing what Jeremiah was going to face, after being called by God, is to remind us that being involved in God's plan is not always easy and being a follower of Jesus does not mean that we are going to necessarily have a good life. What it does mean is that we understand that God's love is with us in this life whatever our experiences might be. I am emphasising the idea that God's love is with us in this life because Jeremiah did not have a concept or understanding of life after death. Jeremiah’s prophecies revolve around consequences for lived existence not something that was going to happen after people died.

So, being called by God, or seeing ourselves as part of God's plan, is not an easy thing. It is a complex notion and a complex interplay between how much freedom we have to respond to God's love and God's plan for our lives and how much of it is predetermined.

This takes me back to the question of the students. If God has a plan for my life, do I have any control over what is occurring? Am I actually participating in making my own decisions and can I actually choose to love God? 

When I preached on this topic with the students, I suggested that the question of determinism and free will is as old as humanity as itself and is as current as the newest thinking in the frontiers of science. 

I am not going to rehearse all of what I said to the students the other day, but I will mention a little bit of it to give you a sense of the scope of this conversation. In terms of Christian thought, we can go back to the debates between Augustine and Pelagius at the 6th century, we can talk about the interface between Erasmus and Martin Luther at the beginning of the 16th century. We could also discuss the debates between Whitfield and Wesley in the 18^th Century.  The debate between Whitfield and Wesley is particularly pertinent to us as people in the Uniting Church who come from two different traditions of thought which true on Whitfield and Wesley. 

Having noted the history of Christian thought around this topic I thought it pertinent for the students to understand that the issue of determinism and free will is not something that is restricted to Christian thought.  It is certainly part of philosophy, politics, and economic theory but I think even more so science. In terms of political theory and economics we might want to point at someone like Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto which suggests a deterministic journey of humanity towards the end of history played out in economic theory.  Or we could point at Max Weber and his Protestant Work Ethic as another expression of inevitable economic systems.

In psychology we can begin with Sigmund Freud and discuss how he thought our unconscious desires determine how we're going to act and then we could trace how psychology has developed for last 150 years. We could mention the experiment of Benjamin Libert in 1983 who demonstrated that prior to our conscious mind kicking into action our unconscious mind is already influencing our decision making. With science we might explore the progress from Newtonian physics which suggested a deterministic universe to the current understandings of quantum mechanics which I have very little idea about but once again buys into whether things are random or determined. 

The reason these debates remain important is because I would suggest to you that most people who live in western culture travel through life having a false belief that we have complete control over our own lives and our own destinies. Even as Christians we think this way.  Kathryn Schultz in her wonderful book “Wrongology” basically says that our default setting is that we think we're omniscient and omnipotent. We think that we are right all the time and that we have power over what is happening to us.  This, of course, according to Schultz is incorrect.

The thing I would suggest we are not wrong about is the fundamental idea that I began with. We love because God first loved us. But of the different things for us to believe and think this is one which we constantly forget, ignore, or simply do not believe.

Returning to Jeremiah the task of a prophet was not to speak about the future, to predict things, but was to speak about who we are in relationship to God. God who created us. God who loves us. God who desires us to enter relationship with us. And, so also, God who becomes one of us. As already indicated, in the case of the prophet Jeremiah, sharing a message about God's love for us and God's desire that we love one another and the creation in which we live is not popular.  In the TV series “Good Omens”, based on the book by the same name, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, the scene when Jesus is being crucified involves one of the key characters asking what Jesus said that got everyone so upset.  The answer is “he told them to be kind to one another.” It seems that we really do struggle with this notion of living one another as human beings.   

The other day one of my year nine students approached me at the end of the lesson and asked me the question did I believe in the miracles that Jesus did. My answer to this is like many things with me, a complex one. I might say yes, I do believe that Jesus did miracles, there are too many miracles recorded in the New Testament for me not to believe that Jesus did some.  Whether Jesus did all the miracles described or did them in exactly the way they are described, is a completely other question. But, regardless of whether I believe in the miracles or not I do believe that the gospel writers recorded the miracles not so that I would believe in the idea that Jesus did miracles, but I would be able to answer the question who Jesus is.

 My answer to this question is that Jesus is the eternal Word made flesh.  He is God incarnate. And therefore, he is God’s love in the flesh. How do we know God loves the creation? We know this because God became a part of it.  To return to 1 John 4, but now in verse 16, “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.”

If there is anything that I think is predestined, it is this, that God loves us and that ultimately in and through the person of Jesus we love God. And so, the restlessness within us around whether we have complete freewill or things are predestined, in my opinion becomes somewhat secondary to our immersion in God's love. In Augustine’s great work The Confessions he says, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they can find rest in you.” The restlessness of our hearts might be reflected in Jeremiah’s self-doubt “I am only a boy” or the question of my students “If God has a plan for my life do I have any choice” or in the great debates of history about free will and determinism.

Ultimately, many of the answers to these ultimate existential questions elude us. They remain mysteries of our existence but what we believe is important. Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler in the journal Psychological Science say that “Studies have … revealed a connection between belief in free will and experiencing life as meaningful and fulfilling. People who find their life meaningful tend to believe in free will. Conversely, when people’s belief in free will is undermined, they tend to report that their lives are less meaningful.”

The reality of life that we all experience is that our choices are limited but that we still can make choices or at least believe we can. In the context of the choices that we make, believing that we love because God first loved us, invites us into a relationship with God which immerses us in love and thereby encourages to make choices which reflect that we are loved. The good news of Jesus’ existence transcends our inability to love one another as we should and encourages us to move beyond being indignant when we see God’s love being played out for other people and into sharing in the mystery, wonder, and joy at the possibility of God’s love for all people being not only the origin of all things but also the destination of all things.

 

Domesticating the Divine

 John 1:10-18 January 2, 2022

It would be appropriate on the first Sunday, after the first day of the New Year, to begin by wishing you a ‘happy new year’ and to encourage you to reflect on the year that has been and to think about the year that lies ahead. 

However, time is an abstract and we could at this point consider whether what Noah Yuval Harari points out in his book Homo Deus is true.  He says everything we do as human beings is based on stories. Stories we've made up for ourselves to help us understand our lives and make them work better.  This would include how we understand time.  In this case we would be asking ourselves the question is it really a new year after all?  After all doing a quick scan of the internet I found at least 11 cultures that do not celebrate New Year’s day on January 1^st.

Alternatively, we might think about the problem of time philosophically buying into the ancient debates of Parmenides and Heraclitus around how time operates.  Or we could contemplate the fact that in the 16^th century we changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

Yet, I digress, and as we gather on this day we gather as Christians who have just heard read the astounding claim that the Word became flesh and lived among us. 

This somewhat perplexing claim is the claim of the church that in Jesus God became, becomes, and is becoming flesh. It is the doctrine of the incarnation, which the great theologian Thomas Torrance called “utterly staggering.”  Torrance notes in his book Space, Time and Resurrection, “that after the incarnation He [Jesus] is at work within space and time in a way that He never was before.” Noting the work of the Early Church theologian Origen, Torrance goes on to say, “as soon as we talk like this, however… or even say about the Son that ‘there never was a time when he did not exist’, we are using terms ‘always’, ‘has been’, ‘when’, ‘never’ etc., which have a temporal significance, whereas statements about God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, must be understood to refer to what transcends all time and all ages, and all eternity, since even our concept of eternity contains a temporal ingredient.”   As a Christian one may say somewhat sceptically “New Year’s, indeed.”

In my understanding of the Christian faith this is the defining point and distinctiveness of what it means to be Christian, to believe that in Jesus God became one of us. All else is secondary.  The virgin birth, the ministry, the miracles, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension are all aspects of Jesus’ life as God with us. All point to this utterly astounding claim of our faith, the incarnation.

So, on this first Sunday after what we call the new year, we wade into the deep waters of our faith to contemplate the mystery of God with us and consider what God is doing in our midst.  As I contemplated the question of the Word becoming flesh it caused me to ask whether our attendance in church is about us using Jesus to drag God down to earth, to domesticate the divine, if you will.  To try to make Jesus and God more relevant to us.  Or, in coming to church, do we come to encounter the mystery of God in Jesus dragging us up into the heavenly realm, to share in God’s divine existence.

The complexity of this question is reflected by the complexity of the writing of John's gospel which occurred at least 60 years after the ascension of Jesus.  Far more than Matthew, Mark, or Luke, it is John who leads his readers into a deeper contemplation of the implications of Jesus’ identity as God among us.  In the passage from John 1 John challenges us with these words. “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.” And more confronting, “No one has ever seen God.” 

I have wondered what John’s readers may have made of this statement almost 200 years ago and what we make of it in our time as we consider the ways in which people claim to encounter and experience God.  Thus, as part of today’s message I want to share a poem with you, entitled “Eyes to See”.

Eyes to See

No one has ever seen God, yet

Abraham greeted three strangers in the heat of the day.

Jacob wrestled with a man until the break of day.

Moses stood before a burning bush as he worked through the day.

Elijah met God, after a storm, in the silence of the day.

But no one has ever seen God.

 

No one has even seen God, yet

I have looked into the eyes of a lover.

I have beheld the birth of a child.

I have seen the joy and laughter of my children.

I have watched for wisdom in the eyes of my elders.

But no one has ever seen God.

 

No one has ever seen God, yet

I have contemplated as the waves roll crashing against the shore.

I have wandered in the bush and seen the desert bloom with life.

I have stared up at the mountains reaching towards the sky.

I have gazed at the stars wheel through space putting on their nightly show.

But no one has ever seen God.

 

No one has ever seen God,

This is what John teaches us

This is his controversy with his people

But, this is his conviction: Jesus came to make God known

This is his hope for a world gone blind

No one has ever seen God, but Jesus.

 

Jesus has seen God, the Word made flesh.

Jesus sees God, at the moment of creation.

Jesus sees God, when God chose a people for himself.

Jesus sees God, as he walked through his life.

Jesus sees God, in his death and in his resurrection.

And Jesus sees God now and evermore.

 

Jesus has made known to us what he has seen.

Have we seen God?

Have we beheld Jesus?

Have we sensed the Spirit?

Have we understood God’s love?

God’s invitation to see glory is the incarnation.

 

No one has ever seen God.

This day, God, we implore you send your Spirit

Give us eyes to see

Give us ears to listen

Give us minds to know

Give us hearts to hope

For we who see the Son, see God.

For we who have already seen the Son I wonder what it is you see when you hear Jesus’ name mentioned.  In Chapter 14 of John Jesus says to Philip, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”  I do wonder at Jesus tone of voice at this point.  Is there a bit of exasperation and frustration at Phillip?  “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” Or is it more encouraging and formational?  “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” Whichever the case we might well ask how our glimpses of Jesus are glimpses of the divine?  How do you see Jesus?

Do you see Jesus in the manager and pray to ‘baby’ Jesus like Ricky Bobby in Talladega nights?

Do you see Jesus on the beach calling his first disciples? A leader of men and women.

Do you see Jesus’ healing and performing miracles? The wonder worker full of compassion.

Do you see Jesus’ teaching his disciples or arguing with the Pharisees? An earnest teacher.

Do you see Jesus turning over the tables in the temple? A prophet full of righteous anger.

Do you see Jesus washing his disciples’ feet? A servant leader.

Do you see Jesus before Pilate? A man standing before the unjust powers of the world.

Do you see Jesus hanging on the cross? Our wounded healer.

Do you see Jesus cold and lying in his tomb? Sharing our descent into the undiscovered country.

Do w you e see Jesus coming to Thomas who was full of doubt? A comforter and encourager of faith.

Maybe there is an image, an event, a concept that comes to mind when you think abut Jesus.  Glimpses of who he was.  Ironically, when I asked one of my students what first came to mind when I mention Jesus, she said the toy Jesus that I have. It is still in its packaging, in my office.

We all play with our ideas of Jesus. Sometimes like Phillip we don’t see past the man to the divine. Sometimes like Peter, we deny our relationships with him. Sometimes like Thomas, we doubt the stories.  Sometimes we simplify Jesus’ existence so much that we avoid the concept that Jesus is the Word made living among us.  He becomes a teacher to follow, a wise sage, a friend but not the one that we sung of at Christmas in the great carol of the Church, Hark the Herald Angels sing.

Late in time behold Him come,

Offspring of a Virgin's womb.

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see,

Hail the incarnate Deity,

Pleased as man with man to dwell,

Jesus, our Emmanuel.

Notwithstanding the anachronistic language of the hymn the carol asserts John’s claim afresh for us and reminds us that “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see” – Jesus.  God’s purpose in sending Jesus undoubtedly affirms our created existence but in Jesus, the Word made flesh, we also see a human living God-wards.  In preparing today I read a fascinating article about the translation of very first phrase of John’s gospel, “and the Word was with God.”  Christopher Atkins connects John’s writing to the thought of Philo of Alexandria, the first century Jewish philosopher, who brought the thinking of the Greek philosophers into conversation with the Jewish theology of the time.

Atkins argues that the phrase might be better translated “and the Word was God-wards”, suggesting that the eternal existence of the Word, in Greek the logos, existed towards God.  Through Jesus becoming flesh and the sending of the Holy Spirit our lives are drawn Godwards into the mystery of the divine.  It is as Paul wrote to the first Christians in Ephesus, With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” God’s plan in Jesus is to gather all things into him, to share in God’s divinity.  It is the ancient notion of theosis.  In his prayer of John 17 he says, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

Knowing Jesus, or maybe better put being known by Jesus, and by God is eternal life.  Again, a better translation might be read as eternity life.  Although, returning to where I started with Torrance and Origin, knowing Jesus means that at some spiritual level we transcend the abstract concept of time and might I dare to suggest space as well.  God in Jesus and through the Spirit lift us beyond our mundane mortal existence to encounter and experience the promise of the gathering of all things into him.

Today we will celebrate the communion.  It is a time we look back into the past and remember what Jesus did in dying for us, so that we might see the risen Jesus, who is our host, coming from the future, to meet us in the present.  We declare the mystery of our faith as we share communion “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again!”  He is the alpha and the Omega, the beginning and ending of all things, he is our origin and our destination, because our lives are hidden in his.

It would be appropriate on the first Sunday, after the first day of the New Year, to begin by wishing you a ‘happy new year’ and to encourage you to reflect on the year that has been and to think about the year that lies ahead.  So, I do say to you Happy New Year but let me conclude with these words and this reality that because the Word became flesh we should now and always remember until time passes into irrelevance “God’s mercies are New Every morning” and we who seen the Son have seen the face of God.