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David Orendorff    I John 3:1-7    April 26, 2009

One of the things I love about the first letter of John is that it is apparently written by not just one individual, but by a congregation. In the first four introductory verses it is clear that it is being written as a faith witness of one congregation to other congregations: “we have heard; we have seen; touched with our hands.” Verse 1:4 concludes the introduction with “that our joy may be complete.” Unless John is writing in the royal “we” (which I doubt), he is writing on behalf of a congregation. I like to think that, though the letter was not originally intended for us (they didn’t even know our continent existed), it is a letter from a long-ago congregation to our congregation.

We are not sure of the geographical location of this congregation, but it seems likely to have been in the area of Ephesus. In the ancient world, Ephesus was a center of travel and commerce. Situated on the east side of the Aegean Sea in modern day Turkey at the mouth of the Cayster River, the city was one of the greatest seaports of the ancient world.

Three major roads led from the seaport: one road went east towards Babylon via Laodicea, another to the north via Smyrna, and a third south to the Meander Valley.

Like Paul’s letters, this letter was written addressing a common problem in the life of the early Christian fellowships. Paul J. Achtemeier summarizes it this way:

Some members, or former members (I John 2:19), while claiming not to sin (cf. 1:8), fail to obey Jesus’ commandments (2:3, cf. 2 John 4) and hate rather than love their brothers and sisters (2:9-11; cr. w John 5).[1]

For John, hating is sin. And hating to him means not loving in the way Christ loved. We don’t like to talk about this in church, but each of us, if we have been around churches for any length of time, have experienced sin. And each of us, when we are honest, have sinned. What the early church struggled with, we still struggle with. John’s congregation is sharing their experience of overcoming (perhaps not perfectly, but hopefully) the struggle for love in a congregation.

John’s congregation is offering a way for other congregations to be without sin, to not hate but love each other. John’s core advice goes something like this: God is love. We know this because we saw in Jesus true life, and this life was love. And just as Jesus is God’s child, so are we. We are made by God, made in the image of God, and adopted by God as beloved children. And when we are our best selves, we are love like Jesus. John writes, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” And in chapter 4 he writes, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (I John 4:11)

Whether we can figure it out or not doesn’t really matter. God knows us for who we really are because God made us to be who we are. And like God, we are first, foremost, from the beginning until the end, love. We are the beloved children of God. This is not a debate; this is the divine statement of the truth. Accept it and get used to it.

From the experience of a broken congregation, John’s congregation was realistic and recognized that, though we are the children of God, we sometimes sin, sometimes in unloving or hateful ways. You know what he is talking about.

For the followers of Jesus, sin is not doing a “don’t,” it is not doing the one true “do.” Jesus, and so John, state the law, the commandments of God, in the positive: “Do this.” We are to “Love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength; and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.” We are to “Do unto others what we would have them do unto us.”

In today’s scripture John writes what at first blush seems a contradiction (3:6): “No one who abides in Christ sins.” It seems particularly contradictory because of what John wrote in 1:8: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”

Far from being contradictory, John is being very consistent-when we live like the children of God, when we abide in Christ. To abide in Christ means to love each other. When we are loving servants, we never sin because we act in love. And when we fail to love we are not abiding in Christ.

I was struggling in writing the sermon to get the words right about never sinning when we abide in Christ and told this to the folks who see the sermon draft. Robert Stewart responded with his understanding and has given me permission to share his words with you.

I guess for me there is no contradiction in the statements, because my brain takes the simple answer first (probably me taking the easy way out). For me, when you abide in Christ you make a choice to love God, and love your neighbor. You make conscious choices to love others. Being human (which God gave us the gift of) we can act/fail-to-act in a way that is not loving and therefore we sin. At that moment we are not abiding in Christ. The next step is the key. If we are honest and own our act and work to amends then we move back toward the abiding in Christ. If we choose to ignore the act, deny it, then we are not abiding in Christ. I think of Peter when he denied Christ three times, he could have easily:

1) Pretended it had never happened (I doubt the people that heard it would have told any of us).

2) Accepted himself as a failed disciple and run away from Christ and his calling

3) Or from what we can tell, he knew it was a sin (a moment of not abiding in Christ), he repented and he grew greater in his Christ abiding.

Look at me trying to preach to the preacher <grin>.

Regards and Prayers, Robert

Sin, then, is a measure of when we are abiding in Christ (love) and when we are not. It is a measure both of us personally and of us as a community. Just as we individually sometimes fail to abide in Christ and thereby sin, so too this can and has happened in our Christian fellowship. I don’t need to make the list for you; you have already done that in your head.

From last week’s scripture we know that when this happens, when we know we have failed to love, then our grief is our confession. And by our confession we are forgiven and return to abiding in Christ.

Yes, unloving and even hateful things have happened among us, but that is not who we are. The failure to love is the exception not the rule of our life together. We are the beloved fellowship of Christ who most often fully abide in Christ. We are love. And the more often we abide in Christ the more often we are without sin.

John’s congregation advises our congregation that when we sin, we are to remind each other that we are children of God, that Christ has died forgiving us and been raised to that we might abide in his eternal love. For when we abide together in Christ, in love, our joy, like the fellowship of John, is made complete.

Shalom and Amen.