1 John 3:16-24
May 7. 2006
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
The Scripture today calls us to love one another. Elsewhere in the Bible, we are commanded to love our enemies. When we love “one another” we are to love not just our best friends and family but also those who may have misused us. We are commanded to love everyone.
Upon hearing this, I tried an experiment in love for myself. I who have tried to be obedient to Jesus in a number of aspects of my life such as entering the Christian Ministry wondered if I can be obedient in this too. Thinking of my enemies, those who had wronged me in the past, I tried to offer the possibility of love. One by one I pictured the people who had hurt me. These hurts were not imagined on my part. It was not a matter of my being overly sensitive or making too big a deal out of a small slight. These people actually hurt me.
There was a person who thought that I was a male chauvinist and criticized me openly by mounting a campaign to discredit me and my reputation. Although I acknowledged my mistakes and sought for forgiveness, she worked actively against me and wanted to destroy my position. I even sought legal counsel against this person.
Then there was this person who felt that I compromised my convictions when for the sake of denominational unity and integrity I dis-invited a friend to come to a conference. Regardless of how much I tried to tell my side of the story, I could not change his view toward my position or of me. My ultimate goal was to strive for Christian community. What could be wrong with that?
Standing in line behind these two malefactors is a series of lesser enemies—those who had spoken poorly of me, those who had deliberately misrepresented me to others, people who stood in the way of my ambitions.
Looking at them one-by-one, in the face, opening up old wounds, remembering their injustices toward me, I wondered how in the world the words could come so easily from the First Letter of John, “Love one another.”
Some of you might want to say to me, “Let bygones be bygones. Get on with your life. We all have enemies—these are just yours.” But the Scripture says, “Love one another.” It is a command, not an option. We can’t just let people remain enemies in the recesses of our minds.
There are some people who have been hurt in the past and they can’t stop resurrecting old hurts. My mother was someone like that. She can hold onto a grudge all her life. We talk about the people who hurt us to other people. In loving detail, we reiterate the specific ways in which they offended us. We just love to keep our enemies, enemies for life! When someone hurt us, they hurt us not once, but for a long time. But First John tells us not to hold onto those grudges and to love one another. How can we do that?
Learning to Love One Another
In thepre-marriage counseling that I offer to couples, we talk about how we tend to think the best of each other when we are in love. You tend to idealize each other’s personality. In so doing, the weaknesses and imperfections grow small, the virtues grow large. Sometimes when a couple is so in love that I have to point out to them that we are all imperfect in one way or another and that even in their loving relationship, it’s not as perfect as they think.
When love is present, love leads us to idealize the person. This compels us to look for mitigating circumstances, to devise strategies whereby we earnestly try to see the person in the very best light. We make excuses for the person. We are compelled to ask ourselves questions like, “I wonder what was going on in his life that made him need to use me this way?” or “I know I have certain ways about me that antagonize others. I wonder how I antagonized her?” or “I have gotten lots of breaks in my life. I wonder what bad breaks she got that may have led her to view me in this way?”
It’s sad to admit that we have lived long enough to know about war. Once a war begins, we are generally free to demonize our enemies. After all, our enemies have wronged us and we are justified to view them in a negative light once the shooting starts. There’s an old saying that says in war we kill our enemies twice. First, we kill any shred of humanity in them, and then we kill them with bullets. No wonder, it was so easy for U.S. soldiers to mistreat prisoners in Iraq or in Guantanomo Bay.
Once somebody has truly, undeniably wronged us, then all moral bets are off. We think we are free to abuse this person, at least in your mind and heart, anyway that you please. You are free to say the worst things about them, to tell others what you think their true nature. We end up slandering others.
But First John tells us to love one another. This means that when we are wronged, all moral bets are definitely not called off. In fact, according to this ethic, it is precisely when we are used spitefully and wrongfully that the true moral test begins.
There was a woman who was the victim of a terrible crime. One evening, just before suppertime, she jumped into her car and ran out to buy a few items for supper. Returning to her car with her purchase of groceries, as she was fumbling for her keys, a man suddenly grabbed her arm, brandishing a long knife in front of her.
“Give me your pocketbook,” he demanded. “I would not hesitate for a moment to cut your face with this.”
Paralyzed with fear, her mouth gaping open, she just stared at the man and trembled. With that, he shoved her into the car, grabbed her purse out of her hand and, then for good measure, he slammed her head into the side of the car. She immediately became unconscious.
He left her, to make his get away. She is convinced that if she had not gone unconscious, she would surely been kidnapped, or worse. She got away from this horrible encounter with her life, but with nerve damage to her left ear.
Eventually the young man was apprehended, tried, and sent to jail for a few years, but she is permanently scarred, emotionally and physically.
This would naturally be the ending of this story. Justice was served and the victim is scarred for life.
In the days after the trial, after she had endured a terrible encounter with the young man’s mother at the trial, enduring the pain of her injuries, and all the rest, she began to pray.
She said, “At some point, I knew what I had to do. God told me that I must work to love this person who had done me wrong.”
The woman who had been terribly wronged attempted to envision her attacker as a young man who had a tough life. She thought of all of his missed opportunities, his terrible home life. She pictured him, not as her vicious attacker, but as a fellow human being who had not had so many of the advantages that had blessed her life.
This did not excuse his misdeed, but it put his deeds and his life more in the perspective of love, the way of seeing others as Jesus sees us.
First John says, “Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” This woman began to love this young man not as her enemy but as a human being made in the image of God. She chose to love when she had every reason not to.
Determined to Love
Most of us think of love as an emotion, something that one either feels or doesn’t feel. But First John speaks about love as a decision, a commitment that one makes, something that one decides to do.
The Christian faith commands us to love our enemies not just our friends. In order to love our enemies, we must presuppose the best about them; we must attempt to see their lives lovingly with charity. We may need to clench our fists together to avoid swinging them or close our lips over our teeth to avoid biting someone and in an act of daring love, show our determination to love one another no matter what.
How is such super-human effort possible? Christians are those who realize that we were once enemies of God, and yet God in Christ has loved us. This God not only forgave us in the death and resurrection of Christ, but actively loved us. God not only put up with us, but came to us and embraced us, believed the best of us, calling forth thereby the best of us.
This God therefore is not only able to love us but he commands us to love. Time and time again, God said to us, “If I have loved you, then you should love others.”
Christians are those who are determined to love. First, we are determined by love. Only by the love of God made manifested in Jesus Christ that we are given new life. From God’s love we have in Jesus Christ, we are the result of his love.
But secondly, having been the recipients of the great love of God in Jesus Christ, we are to love. We are not told to feel love, we are not told to think about love, we are simply told here to love.
Most of us here do not realize how odd a view of love we are supposed to embody. Christian love is not natural. It is not something we are born with. It is something that comes to us through Christ, something that we are expected, commanded to show to others in the world.
The ministry of the New Life Center in Chiang Mai where Rev. Kit Ripley serves embodies this kind of love. It is not natural or normative for people to want to care for former prostitutes and trafficked people who may have AIDS. But true Christian love is not natural. In our faith in Christ, we are determined to love others even when the world does not love. First John says, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” Let us love, not only in word or speech, but in truth and action.
Remember those people who misused and hurt me? I don’t hate them anymore. They too are God’s beloved children created in the image of God who for one reason or another experienced misfortunes or did not have similar advantages that I have had and perhaps directed those frustrations and anger toward me. I choose to love them.
First John tells us to “believe in the name of God’s Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as Christ has commanded us.”
Let us pray.
Lord, teach us how to love as you have loved us. Teach us to love the unloved and the unlovable. Teach us to see others as you see them; teach us to see ourselves in the light of your forgiving, forebearing love. Amen.