So, let s sort through it.

George A. Mason Sixth Sunday of Easter Wilshire Baptist Church 6 May 2018 Fifth in a series, The Beloved Community Dallas, Texas What World We Conquer 1 John 5:1-6 What are you preaching on this week, George? My son-in-law in Brooklyn was asking as I was studying up for today. What world we conquer, I told him. That s the title of the sermon. It comes from the words in First John where he says that our faith conquers the world. He went immediately to a novel he was reading by Hermann Hesse titled Demian and read me this passage: The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world. Is that sort of what he s talking about? Sort of, I said. So, let s sort through it. Every book of the Bible was written for a reason. The reason First John was written has to do with a young church that is unsure of itself. Christian faith hasn t been around long at this point. Imagine the feeling you might have if you suddenly started believing in something people said was a new religion. New doesn t usually mean good when it comes to religion. Old is better. So, here is John s little church community. They have put their simple faith and trust in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, and all they re trying to do is to love God and love their brothers and sisters in the faith. It isn t complicated, even if it isn t easy. And for some reason, that s the problem people have with it. It s too elementary, too simple. Some of you here this morning may also feel a bit insecure in your faith. Maybe you think you don t think deeply enough to really understand what it means to be a Christian. The preacher has a Ph.D. in theology and sometimes he preaches over your head and you get a sore neck trying to raise your head to understand him. Then you go to Sunday School class, and the teacher there isn t much better. On Mondays, you feel pretty smart in your own field whether that s accounting or technology or medicine or management or education or childrearing and yet weirdly on Sundays you feel like you must be missing out on something because everybody seems to know things about the

Bible or theology that blow right by you. Well, if that s you, I hope you find some hope in this sermon today. And if you re one of the high-minded thinkers whose faith is planted in the clouds, I hope you ll come away a little more grounded so that what we call the Beloved Community, the church, will be more united and confident. We need to say a little more at this point about those silent accusers of the church First John is written to. First, this group that broke away from the church used the term world differently from the way First John thought was right. They believed this material world we live in is evil by nature. The impure visible world is fallen from the pure invisible world. Flesh is evil. The body is bad. Sex is sinful, partly because it s pleasurable and partly because having children which always involves the flow of fluids to make them and to deliver them is gross. And, okay, maybe I ll grant that point, don t you know?! This group believed the invisible spiritual world is what we should long for. Salvation s goal is the release of the soul from the body once and for all and becoming like angels. The meaning of salvation is getting secret knowledge of the real world, while keeping yourself as detached as possible from the evil, visible world we live in now. This tendency is still with us in the Christianity of our time. When we think of salvation as escaping this life for heaven instead of becoming part of God s coming new creation, we are still thinking too much like First John s opponents. When we think our human desires for intimacy are from the devil and have to be avoided at all costs because they may lead to sexual sin my goodness, where s the goodness in all that? Some of you grew up in homes where they didn t let you go to the picture show or a school dance or even play cards because those things were too worldly. Some of us were warned that studying philosophy or psychology or listening to people of other faiths not just witnessing to them would corrupt our souls. And many of us grew up wary of politics, because again, that s all about this world that is passing away. All of these are ways we fall prey to this same impulse that says the world is bad and our salvation requires staying in our Christian bubble. 2

First John affirms that there is only one world, and the world God has made is good from beginning to end. Your body no matter what is looks like or how well it works is God s good gift to you. It s not a prison for your soul; it s the home of your true self. Your neighbors who look different from you, speak different languages and worship differently from you are really mirrors of you and bear the image of God as much as you do. Christian faith looks at the world as the arena of God s grace. Salvation is the transformation of this world as much as it is of your soul. As I said on Easter Sunday, God s promise is to make all things new, not all new things. This leads us to the second thing: the man Jesus is the Son of God. Those who disdained this world in First John s time believed that the pure and eternal Christ only seemed to be human in Jesus. The divine can never get involved in this messy world. A leading teacher of these things in the time of First John was a man named Cerinthus. He believed the Christ entered into Jesus at his baptism, but then left him before his crucifixion, because the true Christ could not experience death. That is, he came by water (baptism) but not by blood (death). This Christ taught spiritual things through the human Jesus, but Jesus suffered and died alone. This is similar to Muslim teaching about Jesus, although they take it back to his conception and birth. Muslims believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, that is, when the water of Mary broke, Jesus was born of water. Like the disciples of Cerinthus, though, they believe the Christ departed from Jesus at the moment of crucifixion because they believe the divine cannot experience suffering and death. Even many Christians struggle with the idea that God was fully in Christ when he suffered and died. They prefer his moral teaching to his sacrificial death on the cross. They want a bloodless Savior who will guide us to live spiritual lives so that our souls can escape this fallen world at the moment of death and fly away to the true world of heaven somewhere else. Against this, First John tells us that Jesus was born of water and blood. The eternal God unified 3

the spiritual and material in him, even taking death into the life of God. Salvation is about the complete union of God and the world. Christ conquered the world by healing it, not by escaping it. All the sinful tendencies of our dividing heaven from earth were overcome in his victory. Our faith in that Jesus is what overcomes the world and gives us victory. Finally, these opponents of the gospel were elitists. They separated themselves from ordinary and ignorant people who didn t have their higher wisdom. They looked down on common believers in Jesus. They saw themselves as the spiritual ones who knew the truth that set them free from this world and from all those of simple faith. Even today we have that tendency. Some Christians are, as we say, so heavenly minded they re no earthly good. They separate themselves from their brothers and sisters because they alone know the truth. Churches are becoming more divided than ever today. People who believe they have the true word of God think they have to separate themselves from ordinary Christians to keep themselves pure. This spirit always threatens the church. First John tells us that the unity of love is the mark of Christian faith. If you love God the parent, you will love the child of God Jesus. And if you love the child of God, you will love the children of God your sisters and brothers right here at your elbow in the pew. Love attaches; it doesn t detach. Love hangs on; it doesn t bail out. Love perseveres; it doesn t quit. Love binds all things together. So, how does that connect with the bird fighting to break out of the egg that is the world? To be born of God is to shed or break from or destroy these false notions of two worlds that keep us from living the abundant life God has promised in Jesus a life meant to be lived now and forever. When we are born of God we begin the lifelong challenge of allowing Christ to teach us that he has already defeated those voices within us that tell us we aren t enough as we are, that we should be ashamed of not being something more or someone different. The world our faith conquers is the world of false divisions of body and soul, 4

brothers and sisters from each other and even the demonic from the angelic. The Christ who united all things in himself wants to unite all things in us and make us whole. Some of us were at City Hall this week to protest the combative spirit of some of those voices inside the NRA convention. The difference between those inside and those outside amount to this: too many of those inside see those outside as the enemy, and they profit by keeping that language of conflict going. Those religious voices outside are trying to appeal to those inside to work together with them to bring about a world that defeats fear and violence through love and peace. The key is not to become the mirror image of what you protest, thereby deepening the divide, but instead to offer a way forward together. NRA spokesman, Wayne LaPierre, likes to say that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. There are lots of problems with that statement, including the fact that in both cases there are guns involved. Not for hunting. Not for target shooting at a range. But guns that we think are the only way to protect us from one another. There s no talk of how to solve problems between people nonviolently. The other part is this: there is no such thing as a bad man and a good man. We are each of us all bad and all good at the same time. As the Soviet dissident and novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, wrote, The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either but right through every human heart and through all human hearts. The world we have to destroy in order to be born is precisely the world that wants to separate us, instead of heal us. The late Catholic monk, Thomas Merton, had an epiphany one day that describes what I think this is all about: In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness [I]t was as if I suddenly saw the 5

secret beauty of their hearts, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God s eyes. That, my friends, is the goal of our faith, a faith that really does overcome the world. It s a faith that simply loves God, loves the child of God, Jesus, and loves the children of God all around us. 6