A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
11 August 2024
1 John
5.1-6
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.
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 what’s actually 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 it certainly seems to be the case
that 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.
And all too often, the rich and the powerful
end up with their voices being heard
above those that try to represent the poor and the weak.
This is the context in which I want us to hear our reading this morning
from the first letter of John,
a passage 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’s offering to the implied question
of, ‘who are the children of God?’,
is that God’s children are those who believe that Jesus is the Christ.
This statement is highly significant,
because it was very much contrary to the views held by
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.
Interestingly, the Jewish scriptures have an echo of this idea
of there having been half-human-half-divine heroes of old,
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
someone God 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).
It’s also worth noting that sometimes
the idea of being ‘children of God’
was a concept that was applied
to the whole Jewish people (Exod 4.22; Hos 11.1).
And 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 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 he is making 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, then 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.
Many of you will remember ruth, my former colleague here at Bloomsbury,
who used to joke that all of her sermons boiled down to one key assertion,
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 experience,
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,
and I don’t know if you’ve walked up Tottenham Court Road recently
going up past Goodge Street Station,
but there is now a permanent tent city
and large numbers of people making their homes on the streets.
The ecumenical group of West End Churches, which we’re a part of
wrote a letter to our local MPs a couple of months ago
to highlight this issue and to call for the proposed Criminal Justice Bill to be amended,
as it would have effectively criminalised homelessness.[2]
Thankfully the bill in its proposed form was deferred by the General Election,[3]
but the scapegoating and victimisation of the vulnerable
remains a constant threat in our city.
So 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 of themselves make a person righteous before God.
They reveal God’s wrath
at the insidious persistence of the power of sin,
but offer a solution which is a burden too great for any human to bear:
the ten commandments do not make a person perfect,
and neither do they make a person right with God.
The Jews of the first century knew this well,
which is why they had systems of confession and sacrifice
built around the rituals of the temple in Jerusalem.
But John, the author of our letter, himself a Jewish follower of Jesus,
offers a different perspective,
he provocatively suggests that the commands of God that reveal his love
are in fact ‘not burdensome’.
His point is that we discover our status as God’s children,
as those dearly loved by God,
precisely when we keep the commands of God
that have come into the world
not on tablets of stone,
but through the revelation of God’s son Jesus the Christ.
In other words, we discover God’s love for us
when we listen to and obey the words of his son Jesus.
So we enter into God’s love when, in obedience to the revealed word in Christ,
we practice love for one another.
And 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… says John…
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 God’s 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 will 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,
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 because Christ’s body is the hope of the world,
therefore it is through us that God’s love is revealed to all.
And so we come to the cross,
the ultimate moment of God’s love for us.
The body of Christ 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
are marks of the love that binds us to one another,
and 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.
[1] https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/s/self-harm
[2] https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/49532
[3] https://www.crisis.org.uk/get-involved/campaign/the-criminal-justice-bill-and-homelessness/
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