Gentle Reader,
I spent several months living in the letter of First John. It’s a gorgeous letter. One that leaves a forever mark on the reader. It was beyond a privilege to share this letter with the teenagers of the Rocky Mountain District Church of the Nazarene during their Supercamp week. As I write this introduction, I’ve been home for a little over a week and I’m still processing my time with them. They are beautiful, beloved people. Never count the teenagers out.
Below is the first message in the God of Stories series. It was preached on the evening of July 29, 2024. May you be as arrested by the story as I am.
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I am Pastor Marie and I’m so glad to be with you all this week! Our time together is limited, so I don’t want to spend much of it on sharing about myself. Feel free to come have a chat with me when you see me around this week, but in this space I’m more interested in what Jesus has to say to us. However, I know that I get distracted if I don’t know anything about the person who’s preaching or teaching, so here’s some fast facts about me:
- I have double jointed big toes, which seems pretty pointless.
- I’m married to a bald, bearded, bass-playing, tattooed man named Chris.
- We have two Mini Australian Shepherds named Abbey Road and Eleanor Rigby because The Beatles are my favorite band.
- My fortieth birthday is on Saturday, so I am in fact, old.
- I just began coursework for a Doctor of Theology degree from Northwest Nazarene University.
- I’m on staff at the Spokane Valley, Washington, Nazarene church.
- Give me coffee and a book and I’m happy.
- And, finally for now, I hate meatloaf. I don’t care if it’s your mom’s award-winning meatloaf, your grandpa’s recipe passed down through generations – it is disgusting.
Something I love: stories. I love reading them. I love listening to someone tell a story. For much of my life I intended to be a journalist and spend my days chasing down and writing stories. An entire wall of my living room is given over to a bookshelf packed with novels, biographies, history, theology, even a few comic book anthologies.
I love stories because, even though I am very introverted and will need a five-month nap after this week is finished, I find people fascinating, and that’s what stories are – records of people. And people are so complex. Multifaceted. We are capable of scaling great heights and then almost immediately descending into the lowest of lows. We each have different strengths and weaknesses. Our personalities and passions are so varied. None of us looks at life in the exact same way. We’re all just different, and that’s a beautiful thing.
But in our differences, there is something common to us all. Whether we always recognize it or not, we are all in search of something or someone to bring sense to our stories. We crave meaning. We want to know who we are. That we matter. That all of this is going somewhere. That there’s a point.
I’m gonna go ahead and spoil this whole thing right now: our stories, ourselves, only make sense when placed within the context of an overarching, redemptive story. God’s story. And in that story, we’re not the main character. We’re not the author. Our meaning, our identity, our point is not derived from being on center stage. Instead, we are freed up to be a cast of colorful characters who delight in constantly pointing to the one who is both the Author and the Star: the God of Stories.
I have a friend who learned about the importance of listening to God the hard way. In a public way. In a way that was recorded for people down through the centuries to read and maybe laugh at a little. Or be mildly horrified by. My friend’s name is John and he’s been dead for a couple thousand years, but it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. We’re actually going to be really nosy this week and look through some of his mail. Specifically, we’re going to work our way through a letter that is creatively titled First John. This letter will aid us in discovering that our stories only make sense when placed and told within the bounds of God’s story. John’s original audience needed to discover that as well. Through this letter, God will challenge and invite us to let go of trying to be the god of our own story and to give the pen of our lives to the God of Stories.
Before we open his mail, let’s take a minute and get to know John. He’s a little brother. I have one of those, and so my sympathies go to James, the older sibling. We meet this duo over in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus is out walking by the lake one day and sees James and John working with their dad. They were a family of fishermen, so I imagine they smelled like…well, fish guts and such. Jesus saw these brothers and said, “Come follow me.” Come hang out with me. Come be my friends. Jesus chose the unexpected people in the unexpected places.
Nobody knows exactly how old John was when Jesus invited him to become a disciple – someone who sticks real close with a teacher and learns to live like they do – but he is thought to have been somewhere between the ages of 14 and 18. He was the youngest of the group. He was just like all of you.
And he was a hothead. You’re going to learn more about this tomorrow during some group and individual reading and reflection time, but here’s another spoiler: at one point, John (and to be fair, his older brother James) asked Jesus if they could call down fire on a town. Just kill everyone because they had rejected Jesus. In my mind I can just see the horrified expression Jesus must’ve had on his face. And then came the scolding. Like I said, John learned a hard and very public lesson about the importance of listening to Jesus, recorded for us to read centuries later.
That record goes on to share how John’s whole life gets flipped upside down and inside out by Jesus. Bit by bit, he learns to stop trying to hold the pen and to give the pen to God. He is the only one of the male friends of Jesus who stays as Jesus hangs on the cross. He stays in the agony of that moment. We’re not told why exactly, so this is just my guess, but I think John knew he had nowhere else to go. He couldn’t go back to the person he’d been before. As Jesus begins to take his last breaths, he tells John, “I need you to take care of my mom now.” Tradition tells us that John did just that. He took Mary into his own home and she became part of his family.
This young man is completely overtaken by the story that God is writing. It defines his entire life. Six decades later, at the end of the first century, he writes this letter. Tradition again tells us that a few years later, as he lay on his deathbed, he kept whispering, “Little children, love one another.”
How do you get from wanting to wipe out a whole town to constantly telling people to love each other? That’s our question this week. We are going to find the answer to it as we journey alongside John through this letter and through bits and pieces of his story as told in the gospels.
One last pause before we dive in: I believe that you are intelligent folks and will probably notice at some point that this letter doesn’t actually have a signature. There’s no named author. That said, this letter became associated with John within about a hundred years of its writing. It covers some similar themes and has a similar style to the Gospel of John. So we are going with the long tradition of John as the author of this letter. We are on solid ground with that choice. That said, if we’re wrong and somebody else wrote this letter, that’s okay. Ancient standards of authorship claims are different from ours. What matters is that God worked in this person’s life to teach the first audience who read this or heard this, and to teach us today. God wants people to know God. That’s why we have this letter and this whole Bible.
Now, I invite you to stand as we honor the reading of Scripture. Hear the word of the Lord.
We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us – what we have seen and heard we also declare to you so that you also may have fellowship with us, and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.
– 1 John 1:1-5, NRSV
This is the word of God for the people of God. And we say together: thanks be to God.
We have no idea who this letter is written to, which on the one hand is annoying because I like to have the details, but on the other it gives us the freedom to see how this letter is also written for us today. It is appropriate for us to understand ourselves as the recipients of this message. Not the original ones, of course. There’s a lot of separation between us and them – culture, language, time. But again, God continues to speak through these ancient words.
And who’s ready for a lesson about these ancient words? Wooo! What’s most interesting about what we just read is that it’s actually poetry. How many of us would think to start off an email or a long text with a poem? That’s…a move. What we see here is parallelism, where lines and phrases are repeated or reshaped to express similar thoughts in different words in order to drive home a singular point.
Seen, heard. Declare, testify.
John isn’t making this up. He is an eyewitness to the life of Jesus. He is boldly saying, “Here’s the facts. Take ‘em or leave ‘em.” But he does it in such a way that sticks in the minds of the listeners and readers. Kind of like the way a hook would stick in the mouth of a tilapia, one of the common fish in the Sea of Galilee, where John worked with his dad and brother.
Now why does he use the word “we?” Does John have multiple personalities? No. This culture was much more communally oriented than ours is. This doesn’t mean that they didn’t have any sense of individualism or never used the word “I.” It just means that the “we” was bigger than the “I.” This is something that John learned along the way with Jesus. We’ll see him learn how to step out of the center, where he doesn’t belong, where we don’t belong, and come to understand that there’s something much bigger going on. Something God-driven.
I think there’s also something else happening with this “we.” Tradition tells us that John is the last of the apostles, the last of the original people who walked with Jesus during Jesus’ time on earth. And he’s writing this letter toward the end of his life, when the others have all been killed because of their allegiance to Jesus. So I wonder if maybe John is remembering not only what he witnessed, but also remembering the others who once made up the “we” with him. The “we” who shared the same message that he’s sharing now.
What is that message?
Jesus is life.
Jesus was alive then.
Jesus died.
Jesus is alive now.
For John, it’s all about Jesus. And John stresses the humanity of Jesus here. They saw, they touched. But when we flip back a bit and check out the first chapter of John’s Gospel, we notice that the divinity, or the God-ness, of Jesus is stressed. Why do we have two different things going on? Well John wrote this letter and that Gospel for different reasons. Jesus is fully God. Jesus is fully human. The Gospel counters the claim that Jesus wasn’t God. The letter counters the claim that Jesus wasn’t actually human, but only appeared to be. Jesus models for us how to be human, how to live a life of loving obedience to God, while also being God. It’s both/and, never either/or. But at different times and places, one gets emphasized over the other. So John writes in ways that draw us back to the reality of Christ being fully God and fully human.
So Jesus is life. Jesus is the source and the sustainer of the life that we want. A life of freedom and wholeness. Of restored relationship with God. We think sometimes that we can find what we want in other sources. Other places. Social media, relationships, politics, a fat bank account, our achievements like good grades or being captain of the team. None of those things bring us life. Only Jesus does that.
When I read the Bible, I find myself asking a lot of questions, and those questions come out in my sermons. So hear this from me tonight: questions are good. It is good for you, it is right for you, to ask questions. That’s how you learn. That’s how you grow. God does not require you to check your brain at any door. Relationship with God involves all of you – your heart, your soul, your mind, every part.
So a question I had: Why is John bothering to put ink to parchment and send this letter? Because he wants the readers to have the kind of fellowship with Jesus that he has with Jesus, and then they can enjoy that fellowship with each other. And so I gotta ask another question: What the heck does “fellowship” mean? Most often we define that word as “friendship,” and that’s true. But what it really means is to have something in common. Something important that is shared, that transcends any boundaries.
John is living in a highly multicultural world. The Roman Empire snakes around the whole Mediterranean Sea. There’s all kinds of languages and practices and behaviors. Beyond this, it’s a stratified society. Those at the bottom know they’re at the bottom, and those at the top know they’re at the top. And while there is some mobility, some chance to climb the ladder, those at the top and those at the bottom don’t really mix. And men and women don’t really mix. But Jesus is cutting through all of that. People from all different sorts of experiences and past beliefs, rich people and people who are slaves, they’re hearing the message and by the grace of God, they are responding positively to it. And Jesus is the only thing they have in common. Jesus tears down the walls that separated them before, and they have to figure out how to be together. They have to figure out how to prioritize, how to focus on, this most important thing that they share.
So one reason John writes is to remind them of this. To help them refocus. He writes in order that they might have joy together. They won’t agree on every little thing. They’re going to continue to be people who have different perspectives and abilities. But they can and do agree on Jesus. That’s where the joy is. That settledness, that peace, that ability to love others even when you disagree, it’s found in remembering that you agree on Jesus.
John wraps up this poem with a big, bold claim: God is light and in God there is no darkness. This echoes the opening of the Gospel of John – the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. If John’s letter is like an apple, then this is the core. God is light. God is not abusive. God is not manipulative. God is not hateful.
And so the things that are, the things that draw us toward self-centeredness, hate for others, hate for ourselves, they aren’t of God. Even if they have God’s name attached to them. And sometimes they do. But God has no darkness. So if it’s dark, even a little, it’s not coming from God.
The thing about light is it spreads. It’s plain. It’s available to everyone. God isn’t hiding. Now, God is God and will always be beyond our full understanding, otherwise God wouldn’t be God, but God is knowable. Again, like I said, that’s why we have this letter and this whole Bible. God doesn’t belong to just a few exclusive uber smart people. God is for everyone, everywhere, all the time.
We have the privilege of being away from our norms this week. My other long dead-friend Paul tells us in one of his letters, to the Christians living in the city of Rome, that God reveals Godself in the wind, in the trees, in the grass, in the rivers. None of these things are God. They point to God. So as you play games, and play in the creek, and probably get a little crispy in the sun, think about that. Think about the way that God isn’t hiding. That God is for everyone, everywhere, all the time. Because that’s your third spoiler. That’s how John moved along the line from wanting to commit murder to wanting to love all those whom he encountered. He discovered that God is life. That God is light. And that those things, life and light, that God, through Jesus Christ, is always ready and willing to enter into our lives and turn them upside down and inside out.
John learned that God’s story is not only the better story, but the best story. And it started by him taking a step of faith, of trust, and saying, “yes” when Jesus said, “come follow me.” Jesus is saying that to us tonight. Let’s follow him this week, wherever he might lead us.
GRACE AND PEACE ALONG THE WAY,
MARIE
Image Courtesy of Joyce Hankins