Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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How dare we assert that God is love? Two sisters abducted in broad daylight from the front porch of their Virginia home, six days later found murdered. How dare we say God is love? In Africa, thousands die simply because they are of the wrong tribe. In the so-called Holy Land, ancient blood feuds cannot be quelled. In America, the alabaster cities don't gleam anymore, -- they stink with corruption and crime. How dare we say God is love! How dare we say it when, twice in this century, Western civilization has devoured its brightest and best in global war -- both times provoked by Europe's "most Christian", most educated nation, Germany, the home of Protestantism? How can such things be, if God is love?

On a hot summer night in 1847, Frederick Douglas, that eloquent former slave who was such a powerful force in the anti-slavery movement, was delivering a speech to an abolitionist group in Ohio. Douglas was especially discouraged that night, and his words were bitter. He painted a bleak and hopeless picture of black people trapped forever in slavery, and plantation owners would never bend, and good white folk who knew what was right but wouldn't stand for the right. After Douglas had gone on for a while, a black woman in the audience, Sojourner Truth, stood up and shouted, "Frederick, Frederick, is God dead?" It is easy to become discouraged when "the wrong seems oft so strong," easy to be cynical about God and about the claim that God is love.

We should remember, however, that when John wrote the famous words I just read, about God's so loving the world "that he gave his only begotten Son" -- we should remember that John's world was worse even than ours. His world was dominated by Roman armies and guided by pagan values. Might made right. Torture was commonplace. Slavery was accepted. The poor were not helped. The ill were not cared for. Women had no rights. Newborn baby girls as often as not were often thrown into the city dump. Imprisonment and execution (without benefit of trial) were every-day occurrences. And many in John's day laughed at the new Jesus religion and mocked its followers for insisting, as they did, (against all evidence) that God was love -- and went to their deaths insisting it. Frankly, the older gods, the arbitrary and capricious gods of Greece and Rome reflected life better! You remember those gods. They were jealous, and temperamental and petty. They played favorites among mortals and dabbled, for their own amusement, in human affairs. The enemies of Christianity argued (with some truth) that the old gods more accurately accounted for all the nonsense, all the absurdity, all the darkness in the human soul, which (unfortunately) constituted life. Only a fool would believe in just one god and only a damn fool would say, "God is love".

But this man John had seen a light in all that darkness, and he says humbly that so far the darkness had not extinguished it. That light, of course, was Jesus Christ. So John is telling the story of Jesus, but he's telling it differently. He begins not in Bethlehem but in heaven, where Christ (the Word of God) existed, he says, from the very beginning. And then he goes on to say that (for a very brief moment in time) that Word became flesh (in the form of Jesus of Nazareth) and dwelt among us; and that he, John, was a eye witness to this event. He actually beheld the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus. And his argument is this: that the life of Jesus (which he is even now telling) is a window into the very heart of God. And when we look through that window with him, he says, what we will see (from the beginning of the story to its end) is love. We will see Jesus healing the sick out of love. We will see him feeding the hungry and redeeming lost sinners out of love. And finally, "having loved his own" John will say, Jesus "loved them unto the end". That is, he followed through. He didn't fail when the going got rough. Because Jesus so loved his own, whom John will call "the children of light," he died at the hands of the children of darkness… and loved them, too. And then, to strengthen the faith of his disciples, because he loved them, he came back from death to encourage them and build up their faith. That is the story as John tells it. His theme all the way through is this: we see God in Jesus, and what we see is perfect love

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in his wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace.

(It's not just a schmaltzy tune. It goes to the very heart of our faith.)

So we see that the assertion, "God is love," doggedly insisted upon by John and the other early Christians, was not without foundation. It was rooted and grounded in the life of Jesus. The early Christians and their enemies, it seems, were simply examining different evidence and listening to different witnesses. The cynics, the enemies of Christ, looked around them, listened to the opinions of their friends, and concluded (based on the evidence as they saw it) that God could not be love. Christians looked at Jesus, listened to those who had seen him, and said God must be love. What you look at and who you listen to makes a world of difference.

Clarence McCartney tells of visiting a modest home where a mother and her young son lived. Over the mantle was a memorial plaque with the words, "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" -- the self-prophetic words of Jesus from John's Gospel. But McCartney soon learned that, in this home, the words had a very special meaning. Because, when that boy was a toddler, on a family outing, he had tumbled out of a row boat. His father had jumped in to rescue him. But, by some twist of fate, the boy was saved and the father drowned. McCartney wondered what effect it would have on that boy, to grow up with those words over the mantle, to be constantly reminded that his father had loved him enough to give his life for him. And then McCartney asked what effect it might have on us, as Christians, to have these words of John before us all the time, about how God so loved us that he sent his only Son. What different does it make if God is love?

Well, if we believe it sincerely, it sets a choice before us, a choice from which there is no escape. And John saw that. If there is, in fact, darkness everywhere (he goes on) and one true light pierces all that gloom, then persons will (in fact) either be in the darkness or in the light. It's not that Jesus came to condemn -- quite the contrary!

But his shining exposes those who prefer hatred to love, darkness to light. Jesus doesn't condemn them, he says. They condemn themselves by not standing in the light of God which is not visible in Jesus Christ. Darkness has its charms. Last January, in a beautiful spot on a Caribbean island, I read a terribly disturbing book: Joseph Conrad's, "Heart of Darkness". (Conrad was born in Poland, and didn't speak a word of English until he was twenty-one -- but when he learned it he sure learned it well!) The novel is about some sophisticated Europeans who venture, for different reasons, into deepest Africa. How quickly they surrender their civilization! How easily they learn to excuse brutality and greed. How fast human life loses its value. It is not really a book about Africa, I think. It is about us and our world, and how much darkness there is all around, and how easily we slip back into that darkness unless we keep our eye on the light, unless we focus on the love in God in Christ Jesus.

At Capon Springs last week, Bob Stamps (one of our leaders) said that ninety-nine point nine percent of all miracles are unseen. But every now and then one has to surface so we will believe in them. The greatest unseen miracle is the miracle of God's love. It is, as the song says, "a miracle of love and grace." How can we be sure? By listening to the testimony of the witnesses, testimony about something that happened a long time ago which revealed the full character of God, and that something was Jesus. And God's character, which we see in Jesus, is pure, unconditional love. That raises for us the inescapable choice (not much room for fudging on this, in John's mind), and our choices lead to consequences: Choose hate (and all its cronies: exploitation, and greed, and neglect, and prejudice) and perish. Choose love and find abundant, eternal life. Either we hide in our hearts of darkness (because our deeds are evil), or we stand in the light.

If the landlord (the proprietor, the very builder) of this place where we live is love, can we afford to live by any other rule? If he is light, can we prosper if we dwell in the darkness? If over the mantle of our home are the words, "Greater love hath no man than this…", shall we not, also, lay down our lives? This belief is contrary to all the wisdom of our time. But, then, it was back then, too.