Sermon Tone Analysis

Dangerous Love

Sometimes self-sacrifice can mean physical death.

We know that when we stand beside victims of injustice or hate or racism, we might become the next victim.

If we go in love to those who are under daily threat of violence or war and share with them a witness for healing and peace, we have to expect that the next bomb or bullet will find us.

In every age, Christians have acted with such Christlike love, going where they do not have to go and suffering what they could easily avoid.

The Greatest Love

When we hear scripture about giving up our lives, stories like this one from G. Curtis Jones come to mind:

Clark Vandersall Poling was a classmate of mine at Yale Divinity School.

In due time he became a chaplain in the army.

On a dark February night—the third to be exact—1943, the cargo transport Dorchester, carrying 904 men, was torpedoed at 1:15 AM and sank in iceberg-infested waters within twenty-five minutes.

The ship was within ninety miles of her Greenland destination.

Six hundred and seventy-eight men were reported “lost in action.”

According to the quartermaster Frank A. Benkler’s affidavit, there were four chaplains aboard, including Clark—Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant.

Without regard for personal safety, each chaplain unfastened his life jacket and gave it away.

The courageous men were last seen standing hand in hand, praying for the safety of their men.

“Greater love has no man than this …” (John 15:13).

I’ve had alot of people ask me if I feel safe going to Israel right now.

I leave in exactly one week from today and I’ll be there though the 16th.

On the 14th, the American embassy to Israel is supposed to begin it’s very divisive move from Tel Aviv - a city that belongs to Israel as per UN rulings - to Jerusalem - a city that is claimed by both Israel and Palestine and is declared by the UN as a city that should be international, or without an official country, much like Washington, D.C. is not in any one American state.

That story is powerful and beautiful.

It is quite a dramatic example of someone laying down their life for another.

Many people are pretty upset about this move and there is the possibility of some serious conflict because of the move.

Regardless of who you feel has the rights to Jerusalem either in part or as a whole, this embassy move shows potential to destabilize that city and cause some serious issues.

There are some important to ask about this story.

How many of us, however, will ever find ourselves in such a situation?

And how then, can we show that sort of sacrificial love on a day to day basis?

Serious issues in Israel and Palestine rarely result in marches or peaceful protests.

Serious issues in Israel and Palestine make what happened a while back in Charlottesville look tame.

And how then, can we show that sort of sacrificial love on a day to day basis?

So, people ask me, “Aren’t you afraid to go?”

Nope.

I mean, I totally understand things could get wacky while we’re there.

But that’s exactly why we’re going.

Difficult Love

Laying down our lives for others does not literally mean dying for another person.

It can lead to that, but what John is really getting at here is living for the good of others first.

If you live for the good of others first, that might mean handing someone your life-vest when they haven’t got one.

But that’s not all John means.

It’s not even his main point.

Laying down our lives for others does not literally mean dying for another person.

It can lead to that, but what John is really getting at here is living for the good of others first.

If you live for the good of others first, that might mean handing someone your life-vest when they haven’t got one.

John has little tolerance for people who have means and yet do not use them to look out for those with less privilege.

John is talking about using your resources to protect others, such as being careful what companies you patronize because lets face it, there are some companies out there that treat people terribly.

There are manufacturers that exploit children for production of goods, there are ones that have destroyed local economies, ones that don’t care well for their employees’ health and financial needs and more.

Self-sacrifice is little daily actions, as much as the big once in a lifetime ones.

Self-sacrifice might mean letting the antsy driver trying to merge in before you.

Laying down your life might mean allowing that person who has just cornered you talk until they are done without you making excuses to bow out.

Maybe it’s getting up a little early to start the coffee for your loved ones.

We lay down our lives when we put others first.

We lay down our lives when we live for the good of others.

We lay down our lives when we make time for others.

To love others is to lay down our life for them.

When we lay down the completely normal human desire to live for ourselves, and when instead we allow the love of God to reorient us toward the needs of others, we are laying down our lives.

John is pretty hard on Christians who say they have the love of Jesus in their hearts but do not share their material goods with those in need.

We can only imagine what he would say of us today in a world in which almost half the people live on less than two dollars a day.

The challenge of global poverty can overwhelm us.

Perhaps that is why John does not speak of the poor in a collective or generic sense, but speaks of a brother or a sister, the one in need who is before us at that moment.

If we close our hearts to that sister or brother, we close our hearts to God.

All those little things add up to a life of thinking of other people first.

It is a mindset and a spiritual focus that changes how we act in even the smallest of moments.

And they change something about you.

Christ-like love changes us.

It changes us when we realize how much Christ gave up to show us love and it changes how we see the world when we consciously re-orient our own lives and actions.

Speaking up and out for the good of the people is risky.

Jobs, relationships, money, life are taken away when individuals take on responsive and responsible activity for the good of the people—especially people in need.

Most people do not have what it takes to be a martyr.

This passage, then, is very easy to pass over.

No one is really willing to be burned at the stake, hanged, or shot as a result of speaking truth to power.

There is a tendency to move on from this passage and look for an assignment in the Gospel that has a much more accessible entry.

Just before this passage, John has said that those who don’t really love one another are living in death.

Loving one another is to turn away from a life lived in the shadow of death and fear and self-interest in order to live in the light of Christ.

And here, John says that the only way to truly love is to act sacrificially just as God did in Jesus Christ.

Even if we want to, we cannot ignore this fundamental commandment to love sacrificially because this commandment to love is grounded in the love that Jesus showed for us on the cross.

Jesus DIED to show us the power of this commandment.

The commandment to love requires us to remember that our standing before God is made whole because of Jesus.

It is our confidence in the love of Christ that gives us the confidence to go forward and love others like Jesus did.

Just before this passage, John has said that those who don’t really love one another are living in death.

Loving one another is to turn away from a life lived in the shadow of death in order to live in the light of Christ.

And here, John says that the only way to truly love is to act sacrificially just as God did in Jesus Christ.

So yes, sometimes this love leads to death in order to save another.

Active Love

The commandment to love is grounded on the love that Jesus showed for us on the cross.

The commandment to love is a command to act.

Just as we know Christ’s love through his action on the cross, others know God’s love through us by our actions.

The commandment to love is made possible through the spirit.

Love is known in action.

How do we know God’s love?

It is through God’s action in sending Jesus Christ into the world, and through Christ’s action of laying down his life for us.

The actions of God show us what God is like.

The same test applies to our love.

How do others know what is in our heart?

It is by our actions.

Just as God’s love is known to us through the visible action of Christ, so our love is known to others through concrete actions that mirror Christ’s own.

Christ lays down his life, and we are to lay down our lives.

The early Latin writer, Tertullian of Carthage, declared that the one thing that converted him to Christianity was not the arguments they gave him, because he could find a counterpoint for every argument they would present.

“But they demonstrated something I didn’t have.

The thing that converted me to Christianity was the way they loved each other.”

Perhaps the portion of this text that is worth investigating is “let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

This short fragment of the entire pericope invites everyone who has language for, or a concept of, love to take on the work of sacrifice.