Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
6th May
2016
1 John
5.1-6
Deuteronomy
30.11-20
Listen to this sermon here: https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/2018-05-06-simon-woodman-truthful-testimony-in-a-world-of-fake-news
Sometimes it can feel as though Fake News has taken over the
world.
Honestly?
Sometimes I’m not sure who or what to believe any more.
If my social media is anything to go by,
the world is
full of people who think in ways that are very similar to me,
as we
merrily share our favoured Guardian articles,
which
have been carefully written to simultaneously feed and assuage
our
vague collective sense of liberal middle class guilt.
But common sense tells me that this can’t be the whole story
of my country,
so
sometimes I make an effort to step outside
of
my carefully constructed echo chamber,
and I read
an article or blog from a paper or author that I don’t agree with,
and
of course I am astonished at what I find,
and
I wonder how anyone could believe such lies;
just as I’m
sure that those who regularly read the material I struggle with
cannot
believe that I have myself been so easily deceived.
Where, or what, the truth is, can be very hard to fathom.
I have been particularly stuck just recently by the
difference in the reporting
between the
Russian news agencies and our own,
over both
the Salisbury attack, and the events in Douma in Iran.
According to the British Press, the weapons used in both
cases
are most
likely of Russian origin or used with Russian support;
but according to the Russians,
both events
are staged and fabricated.
Who do you believe?
Does who
you believe depend on where you live?
Or who else
you have been listening to?
It’s no wonder that lesson number one
in the ‘how
to set up a dictatorship’ handbook
is that you
first take control of the media.
In the end, it doesn’t usually matter if it’s true,
what’s
important is that people believe what you tell them.
The various vested interests that finance and control
the various
wings of the Western free press also know this very well,
and use it
to great effect.
It is widely acknowledged that more than one British Prime
Minister
has been
elected on the strength of the editorial direction of The Sun newspaper.
And while the extent of the impact of the social media news
manipulation
perpetrated
by our next door neighbours Cambridge Analytica
in
both the Brexit and Trump elections will be long debated,
certainly, if you can control what someone reads and hears,
there is a
good chance that you can control the person.
There is no doubt that we live in strange times politically,
with
established orthodoxies facing threat from all sides,
and
maverick or extremist voices
garnering
more attention and power than they deserve.
We don’t yet know how the various political and economic
cards
that were
flung into the air following the 2008 financial crisis will land,
but it’s a fair bet that the rich and the powerful
will end up
with their voices being heard above those
that try to
represent the poor and the weak.
And it is in this context that I want us to hear our reading
this morning
from the
first letter of John,
which takes us deep into the question of where true power
lies,
where truth
itself lies,
and where
lies lie.
The logic of the passage is not entirely straightforward,
and various
commentators tie themselves up in knots
working
out how it all fits together,
but I think it’s worth trying to follow John’s logic here,
because he
is making a profound point about the way the world works.
His starting point is Jesus,
which is
generally, I think, a good place to start.
He says that
‘Everyone
who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God’.
So, the answer he offers to the question of, ‘who are the children
of God?’,
is that they
are those who believe that Jesus is the Christ.
This statement was very much contrary
to the
various Greek and Roman religions of the first century,
who believed that the children of the gods
were either
gods themselves,
or possibly
were the half-god-half-human hybrids
who
became great heroes like Odysseus and Ulysses.
The Jewish scriptures also have an echo of this idea
of there
having been heroes of old who were half-human-half-divine,
and we can
read about this in the strange story of the Nephilim
in
Genesis chapter 6 (v.2-4);
but the dominant Jewish perspective by the first century
was that a
child of God was someone whom God had adopted
and
showed special favour to,
such as the
great King David, or one of his descendants,
or possibly
the long awaited ultimate ‘son of David’
who
would be their messiah (cf 2 Sam 7.14).
Sometimes, it’s also worth noting, the idea of being
‘children of God’
was a
concept that was applied to the whole Jewish people (Exod 4.22; Hos 11.1).
The Christian perspective, being explored here by the author
of 1 John,
is
similarly multi-layered.
The very earliest Christians drew on their Jewish heritage
for
metaphors to understand what they had experienced
through
their encounter with Jesus,
and they
kind-of-fused the Jewish idea
of
a son of God being a human/divine being,
with the
idea of him being a messiah born of the house of David;
and so in the gospels we get stories such as the virgin
birth
being used
to convey their understanding that Jesus is no ordinary human,
but
rather that he is the son of God,
as
well as being the son of Man, and also the son of David.
This theological journey is in the background to what we
meet in 1 John,
who takes the
logic a stage further.
It’s not just Jesus who is the son of God,
rather,
anyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ, that he is the Messiah,
is
themselves now a child of God.
Just as sometimes in the Jewish scriptures
the whole
nation of Israel could become the children of God,
so the same
is true for those who believe that Jesus is the Christ.
The logic John then uses to prove this is a kind of proverb,
where he
asserts that ‘everyone who loves the parent loves the child’.
This means that if you love God, you will love Jesus;
and it
builds on his previous assertion
that if you
believe in Jesus, you are yourself a child of God.
The point is that if you are a child of God, and if you love
God,
then you
will also love all God’s other children.
And here we get to the nub of his argument.
If we are
all children of God, we must love one another.
And if we
do not love one another, then maybe we don’t really love God?
He goes on,
‘by this we
know that we love the children of God,
when we
love God and obey his commandments’.
Our status as God’s children begins with our affirmation
that Jesus is the Christ, but we know it to be true by keeping his
commandments. As John says,
‘For the love of God is this, that we obey his
commandments’.
We will know that we are God’s children who love our
heavenly father
when we
keep his commandments,
and God’s love is expressed for us as his children,
by giving
us commandments to keep.
One of the things I hear time and again as a pastor,
is that so
many of us doubt, deep down, that we are loved by God.
Ruth’s sermon from last week took us to the heart of this,
and her
message was that ‘God loves you, get over it!’
But what if you can’t? What if I can’t?
What if, in
my heart of hearts, I feel that I am unlovable, even by God?
What if
that is true for you? For us?
We have a crisis of self-hatred in our country,
with people
carrying wounds that are so deep
that often
they can barely be acknowledged,
let
alone brought to healing.
Did you know that the UK has the highest rate of self harm
among adults
of
any country in Europe,[1]
and I know
from my own struggle with it over many years,
that it can be a demon which it is
hard to exorcise.
If the world could learn the love of God,
so many
things could be so very different.
The London homelessness crisis continues to deepen,
with this
last year seeing the seventh consecutive rise in rough sleeping,
an 18%
increase in London compared with the year before.[2]
Those of us who spend time around this church during the
week
will know
this is true based on our own experience
of
being a building which tries to keep its doors open
and
to offer hospitality to those who come through them.
And some of us here this morning will have first-hand
experience
of what it
is to have nowhere to go to sleep indoors at night.
I’ll say it again:
If the
world could learn the love of God,
so many
things could be so very different.
But how do we know that God loves us?
How can the
world learn that God is love?
This knowledge will not come, it seems,
by
contemplation, or meditation.
Rather,
says John, we learn that God loves us
when
we keep his commandments.
This is an
active, not a passive process.
And what we are talking about here
is most
emphatically NOT the Ten Commandments of the Jewish law.
I’ve argued before, and will doubtless do so again,
that the Ten
Commandments are not binding on Christians.
The whole point of the revelation that Jesus brought
was that
the commands of the Jewish law
could not
make a person righteous before God.
They only serve to reveal God’s wrath
at the
insidious persistence of the power of sin.
The ten commandments are a burden that none of us can bear.
In contrast, the commands of God that reveal his love
are, as
John says, ‘not burdensome’.
We discover our status as God’s children, dearly loved by
God,
when we
keep the commands of God
that come
into the world through the revelation of his son Jesus the Christ.
We discover God’s love for us
when we
listen to and obey the words of his son Jesus.
And we enter into God’s love when, in obedience to this revealed
word,
we practice
love for one another.
The command that reveals God’s love
is none
other than the love command itself.
We find it in John’s gospel (13:34-35) where Jesus
says to his disciples:
I give you a new commandment,
that
you love one another.
Just as I have loved you,
you
also should love one another.
By this everyone will know that you are my
disciples,
if
you have love for one another."
But it is so easy for us to hate one another,
just as it
is so easy for us to hate ourselves.
Of course, we don’t call it hatred. We are far too reserved
for that kind of language.
But we
might admit, sometimes, to finding someone ‘a little bit difficult’.
Which is, of course, code for
something far worse.
And we
might subtly but effectively side-line those whom we struggle to love,
quietly distancing ourselves from
our sisters and brothers in Christ.
And we
might find ways of exhibiting our passive aggression towards others,
all the while maintaining our own perspective
of self-righteous restraint.
But, but…
if we can
learn to love the children of God,
if we can learn
to obey the command of God spoken in Christ
that we should love one another as
he has loved us,
then this
is a victory of faith which can conquer the world.
Here’s the fascinating part of John’s logical flow in our
passage for this morning.
Having started with Jesus,
and the
love God shows for all his children who believe in Jesus,
And having moved us from there into the command
that those
of us who are God’s children must love one another,
we suddenly find ourselves in a position
where we
can conquer the world!
It turns out that we are not commanded to love each other
for the sake of the church,
we are
commanded to do it for the sake of the world.
As John says,
‘whatever
is born of God conquers the world.
And this is
the victory that conquers the world, our faith.
Who is it
that conquers the world,
but the one who believes that Jesus
is the son of God?’ (vv.4-5)
He takes us full circle back to our believing in Jesus,
which was
what triggered our status as God’s children in the first place.
If we believe, then we are children.
If we are children,
then we are loved.
If we are
loved, then we must love.
If we love,
we conquer the world.
That’s John’s argument, in a nutshell.
The whole world is saved,
by the love
that God’s children show for one another.
Because it is through our love for one another,
that God’s
love for the world is made known.
So if, like me, you find yourself sometimes despairing at
the state of the world,
if, like
me, you are sometimes afraid to turn on the news
for fear of what you will see.
Then here is good news for a change.
The love of God conquers the world,
and does so
through the love of God’s children,
who live in
obedience to the loving command of God’s son.
Which is why what we do here on a Sunday matters.
It would be so easy to not go to church,
to look for
our spiritual sustenance somewhere else,
online, or
in a book, or on the Christian TV channel,
or via our Christian-subset social
media bespoke echo chamber
where everyone thinks like we do.
But that is to avoid the command to love one another,
it is to
avoid the necessity of living in the tension of intentional community,
of forging
and sustaining relationships even when they are difficult.
The church, I firmly believe, is wherever the sisters and
brothers of Jesus
gather to worship him as the Christ,
and 1 John
tells us that when we do this,
we are learning to live in the love
of God,
and that the
love that God has for the world is being made real in our midst.
I do not think that it is overstating it to suggest
that
because we are the body of Christ,
and that Christ’s
body is the hope of the world,
it is
through us that God’s love is revealed.
And so we come to the cross,
the
ultimate moment of God’s love for us.
The body of Christ is broken for the salvation of the world.
It is not enough to simply be baptised by water into a
loving community.
Rather, we
are baptised into the body of Christ,
which is
crucified before it is ever resurrected.
The pain and the suffering that we bear together
is a mark
of the love that binds us to one another,
and is a
sacrament of the love of God for the world.
We bear in our midst the marks of the crucifixion
that Christ
bears eternally.
We have to learn to carry our own cross, to die to self,
before we
can truly know what it is to enter the new life of selfless love
that God places
before us in his son Jesus.
This is how the world will be conquered,
when the church
learns to live in love,
as all God’s
children follow the command and example of his only begotten son.
When we create a community of love,
we create
something that is deeply, fundamentally true,
in the way
that nothing else is.
Because as we do so, we discover the truth that God is love,
and that
God loves the world absolutely.
And this is the truth we offer to the world,
because it arises
from our own lived practical experience of living it into being.
And here we come full circle, back to a world of fake news,
where nothing
is to be trusted and no-one is to be believed.
But we come to that world with a message to proclaim
and a testimony
to offer,
through the
spirit of the one who has shown us the truth.
As John puts it,
‘the Spirit
is the one that testifies,
for the Spirit
is the truth.’ (v.6)
We are the children of God,
and we
offer the testimony of truth that God is love.
And we do this because we are called by the Spirit of Christ
into a community of love,
that bears witness to a new way of
being human
where love triumphs
over hatred,
and life triumphs over death,
and where
the love of God is made known through us
to all people.
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