That is What We Are

Common English Bible Chapter 3

See what kind of love the Father has given to us in that we should be called God’s children, and that is what we are! Because the world didn’t recognize him, it doesn’t recognize us.

2 Dear friends, now we are God’s children, and it hasn’t yet appeared what we will be. We know that when he appears we will be like him because we’ll see him as he is. 3 And all who have this hope in him purify themselves even as he is pure. 4 Every person who practices sin commits an act of rebellion, and sin is rebellion. 5 You know that he appeared to take away sins, and there is no sin in him. 6 Every person who remains in relationship to him does not sin. Any person who sins has not seen him or known him.

Practicing sin or righteousness

7 Little children, make sure no one deceives you. The person who practices righteousness is righteous, in the same way that Jesus is righteous.

Introduction: I hate name tags

Let me tell you about a weird personal quirk:

Last week, I was at a Presbytery event up at Pine Springs.

I drove up, walked in to the dining hall, and found the registration table.

There on the registration table was a whole pile of those classic “Hello! My name is...” tags.

Actually these were even worse, because they tried to be Spanish, with a llama on the sticker, for no discernable reason other than to just bit cute.

I am immediately allergic to name tags.

I don’t like wearing them.

I feel like a nerd any time I need to look at someone’s name tag to see what their name is.

I feel like I always get caught.

There’s no where to put them on your body that doesn’t feel like you’re a big dork.

I don’t like name tags.

And so I kind of borderline punish the people who make me wear nametags.

I will write just simply the letter J.

No Pastor J. No Jason. No Jason Freyer. No J Freyer.

Just the letter J.

Which is like, just about as helpful as I am willing to be in that scenario.

And yet, that experience got me thinking: Isn’t it interesting the kinds of name tags that we put on ourselves?

Hard to Believe

On the church calendar, we are still in the season of Easter.

I mentioned on Easter Sunday that there is a whole lot about the Easter story that is hard to believe.

What is hard to believe about the Easter Story

Typically dead people stay dead.

Short of some wacky Abbot and Costello bit with mummys in toilet paper scaring people, I don’t know any recorded story of a dead person coming back to life.

Sure, we have documented cases of near death experiences!

Sure, we have people we thought were dead but turned out to be experiencing something else.

Doctors are even getting really good at reviving patients who have died on the table.

But those stories tend to be within a matter of minutes.

The Gospel story of Easter is insisting that Jesus rose from the dead a whole three days after he had died.

That’s a little hard for some people to swallow!

God and humans are two different classes of thing

Part of what makes that so hard to swallow is that to believe that Jesus could rise from the dead, you have to believe that Jesus is God himself.

You can (believe me, I know) spin some confirmation students around in circles with this one.

Our faith affirms that Jesus was 100% human.

He cried when he was a baby.

He stubbed his toe on something in the middle of the night.

He had to deal with annoying coworkers.

He knows what it feels like to be betrayed.

There is not a human experience with which Jesus is not intimately family.

And yet, Jesus is also at the very same time 100% God.

He is the second person of the Trinity.

He was there at the foundation of the world.

He is of the same substance as God.

He could do miraculous signs and wonders that the average human cannot do.

And he had the power to beat back death at death’s own game.

I don’t know if there are any math majors in the room, but typically something cannot be 100% of two opposing ideas at the same time.

So it’s hard to wrap our head around some of the metaphysics of what’s going on there.

But there’s a deeper thing that is difficult to believe in this Easter story:

That God could Love Us.

Our culture truly doesn’t understand this idea right now.

We are in a culture that doesn’t hold the door open for the person behind us.

We are in a culture where please and thank you are disappearing from our daily vocabulary at an alarming rate.

We are in a culture where we are increasingly worried about what is mine than we are in what we owe our neighbors.

So the idea that in spite of all of our sin, in spite of all of our wrong doing, in spite of everything we have done to disrespect God,

Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, goes to the cross on our behalf to take care of our sin problem and raise us up to eternal life with him, just because he’s good and generous?

That doesn’t make any sense at all to us, or to the world around us.

Just because these things are hard to understand doesn’t mean they aren’t true.

I don’t exactly understand Newton’s third law of motion, but I have been on airplanes plenty of times in my life!

But what if the lack of understanding is much deeper, and much more personal?

Hard to believe that we are God’s Children

Our text in John’s letter today tells us the end result of the Easter story:

Because Jesus went to the cross,

Because Jesus died on our behalf,

Because Jesus rose again on that Easter Sunday,

Because Jesus invites us to rise again with him,

Then we have been given the title of “Child of God.”

John prefaces all of that in the beginning of this chapter by saying “This is what love looks like!”

Love looks like being adopted in to the family.

Love looks like being given a seat at the heavenly banquet table.

Love looks like the inheritance that rightfully belongs to Jesus Christ now belongs to us.

Love is welcoming.

Love is inclusive.

Love sacrifices.

Love gives us a new name to write on that name tag.

Child. Of. God.

That’s what love is.

John’s problem in the early church is that no one wanted to pick up the name tag.

There were some false teachers going around that were saying that Jesus wasn’t quite as powerful as they thought he was.

Kind of like Jesus was a good teacher, and had a lot of interesting spiritual insights in to the world.

But spiritual insights for them (for them) were reserved for Sunday mornings and the occasional sighing at sunsets.

They would have wanted nothing to do with being called Children of God.

That’s just not who they were.

John is begging them in this letter to see the truth.

See what kind of love the Father has given to us in that we should be called God’s children, and that is what we are!

There’s a wonderful story about Martin Luther.

One Sunday one of Luther’s congregants came up to him after church.

Pastor, he said, why is it that you preach about God’s grace week after week after week?

Luther thought about it for a minute, and then said “I suppose it’s because week after week after week we forget!”

John is pleading with his congregation in this letter:

You might forget something on your grocery list.

You might forget to file your taxes (who’s a procrastinator with me on that one?)

You might, in the midst of a global pandemic that is too old to keep blaming for this, keep forgetting what day of the week it is.

But don’t forget this.

Never forget that FOR YOU, Jesus Christ went to the cross.

FOR YOU Jesus Christ took on the punishment of sin.

FOR YOU Jesus Christ beat back death at death’s own game.

Yes, it was for the whole world, but you are a part of that.

And you are a Child of God.

What is truly is unfortunate is that the more we forget that we are children of God, the more likely it is that we will make a similar mistake:

Hard to believe that those around us are God’s Children

Part of the experience of the human animal is trying to survive.

So we learned pretty early on that we need to determine what is a threat, and what is ok to be around.

Sabertooth Tiger? Threat.

Cute puppy dog? Let’s dress it up in funny outfits and be friends.

Rain? Helps the crops to grow and does good things.

Too much rain, like hurricanes and hail and tornados with floods? Threat.

People who say yinz instead of y’all? My people.

People who support the Baltimore Ravens? Threat.

So part of our hard wiring in our brains is this desire to categorize everything.

If I can put a label on you, if I can match you up with other like-people, if I can use those tools to quickly determine if you are a threat or not, then I am more likely to survive.

And while that certainly has helped us climb our way up to the top of the food chain, it has left us in a perpetual state of sorting that isn’t always helpful.

If what John is saying about us is true,

If Jesus Christ lived for me

If Jesus Christ died for me

If Jesus Christ rose for me,

Then it must be true for everyone else around us.

That insufferable person who can’t master an iPhone yet insists on using the express self-check out? Child of God.

People who don’t know how turn signals work? Child of God.

John Mayer fans? Child of God.

Democrats? Child of God.

Republicans? Child of God.

People who don’t vote? Child of God.

People who say Black Lives Matter? Child of God.

People who say Blue Lives Matter? Child of God.

Baptists, Methodists, Evangelicals, and Catholics? Child of God.

Presbyterians? Child of God.

Sin Follows

What John tells us next is that when we forget that both we and our neighbors are children of God, sin follows.

He says sin is a rebellions against what the truth is: That we are Children of God.

This works on two levels when it comes to sin:

Easy Choices:

Using curse words

Look, I don’t think there’s anything sinful in saying a few choice words when you stub your toe in the middle of the night.

But when those curse words are directed at someone else,

When those curse words are meant to make someone feel less than what they are,

When those curse words are meant to wound or hurt those who disagree with us,

When those curse words are meant to dehumanize,

Then we have forgotten that the person we are aiming those words towards is a Child of God.

Watching R rated movies

My understanding is that a movie is rated R either because it’s excessively violent or it’s excessively sexual.

Violence

A culture that celebrates violence doesn’t much care about the humanity of the person who is injured.

Even when we know in the back of our minds that it is pretend, that it’s really just ketchup or whatever, we are on some level refusing to respect the humanity of someone who’s getting shot to death or whatever.

And this has a trickle down effect, as we’re learning that the more and more violent the media we consume is, the more and more likely we are to be violent ourselves.

Sex

I had a professor who was outrageously Scottish.

He told us that pornography isn’t wrong because it’s naughty.

It’s wrong because it dehumanizes people.

When we over-emphasize sex in our media, both the pornographic and the average every day, we run the risk of during a child of God into an object to satisfy our more base desires.

In both cases we literally sin because we are forgetting that this person is a Child of God.

Getting all kinds of greedy

Harder things to talk about:

Domestic Violence and Abuse

All this month we are collecting donations to support Domestic Violence Services of Southwest Pennsylvania.

Domestic Violence is something that a whole bunch of churches don’t really want to talk about.

But it’s actually quite hard to look past:

Every 9 seconds (count them out) a woman is assaulted or beaten in the US.

Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women—more than car accidents, muggings, and rapes combined.

Domestic violence victims lose nearly 8 million days of paid work per year in the US alone—the equivalent of 32,000 full-time jobs.

Men who as children witnessed their parents’ domestic violence were twice as likely to abuse their own wives than sons of nonviolent parents, creating a vicious cycle.

And while there are so many psychological and sociological explanations and nuances and complexities behind all this, but theologically it seems very clear to me:

Anyone who is able to engage in domestic violence is able to do so because they’ve forgotten what they are:

That both they, and their partner, are children of God.

Systemic Racism

Our country in recent weeks has seen a marked increase in the amount of attention paid to our original sin.

The trial for Derek Chuvin.

An officer in the army being harassed and pepper sprayed at a traffic stop.

An unarmed young man shot and killed ten miles away from the trial

And let me push pause for a second here:

I can hear some of us in our brains running to political rationals, reasoning, and positions for each of those examples.

Those are fine and we can talk about those another time, but stay with me here:

Our problem of race in this country is a spiritual one.

At the founding of our nation, we thought it was totally ok to buy, sell, and own human beings.

It is pretty hard to buy, sell, and own children of God.

So we had to convince ourselves that our black brothers and sisters were something less than that.

We even went so far as to write down in our constitution that they were 3/5 of a person.

And truth be told, even 244 years later, it’s kind of hard to shake that impression, isn’t it?

And we haven’t just done it to our African American brothers and sisters:

Japanese folks were placed in internment camps during WW II

Muslim and Arab folks were harassed and hated in the months that followed September 11, 2001

And even recently after discovering that COVID likely originated in Wuhan China, there has been a marked uptick in hatred toward Asian Americans.

Again, the complexities of this are myriad, and we could spend a life time trying to untangle the mess of it all.

Political

Sociological

Anthropological

Psychological

But spiritually, this is a simple one:

We are able to participate in and ignore the realities of systemic racism because we forget that we are children of God, the same as our brothers and sisters of African, Asian, or Muslim descent.

Suicide

Truth be told, this is another topic that most folks don’t want to address in a pulpit.

Even saying the word Suicide can be a challenge for some folks.

A friend of mine actually works in the field of suicide prevention, and has taught me a whole bunch about this epidemic in our country.

Some folks are afraid to talk about suicide because they think that talking about it will inspire suicidal ideation in folks, but research suggests the exact opposite is true.

The more we talk about suicide, and the more open we present ourselves to talk about it, the more likely it is for someone to seek out the help they need.

Some folks think that suicide is the ultimate selfish act, when in reality selfishness isn’t really much a part of the conversation.

In reality, folks are most likely to consider suicide when they lose hope.

There is just no hope in them that tomorrow will be any better than today.

I might sound like a broken record here, but there are countless nuances and complexities with the topic of suicide,

Psychological

Social stigmas

Funding for mental health

etc.

But from a spiritual perspective, someone who is on the verge of considering suicide, they have lost the ability to see themselves as a beloved son or daughter of God.

Application

All of this points to the absolutely vital nature of our remembering.

It is absolutely vital that we remember that when it comes to being a Child of God, THAT IS WHAT WE ARE.

It is absolutely vital that we engage in rhythms and practices in our daily life, like reading the scriptures or praying together, to be reminded that that is what we are.

It is absolutely vital that we as a church community, in both the high points and the low, remind each other that this is what we are, beloved children of God.

It is absolutely vital that we reach out in to the world and remind them that yes, they are beloved children of God.

And John makes clear, for as much as Children of God is what we are, we still have some room to grow.

It hasn’t yet appeared what we will be.

We haven’t yet seen a world without domestic violence, but we can speed it’s coming by remembering who we are.

We haven’t yet seen a world without racism, but we can speed it’s coming by remembering who we are.

We haven’t yet seen a world where folks loose hope to the point of taking their own life, but we can speed it’s coming by reminding them and ourselves who we are.

My friends, know it.

You are a child of God. That is what we are.

Thanks be to God.