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Scripture
Reading:
NRS 1 Corinthians 13:8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will
come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come
to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part;
10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned
like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I
know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13
And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is
love.
Today we are pulling materials from two of John Wesley’s
sermons. The first is titled Original Sin
from 1759 and the second is titled God’s
Love to Fallen Man from 1782.
The writers and intellectuals of John Wesley’s day began to
explore the ideas of enlightenment, that human beings were both innocent and
perfect from birth and because of that there was in fact no such thing as
original sin. Since there was no sin there was no need for God and for divine
grace. Some things haven’t changed in the last 250 plus years. In fact John
Wesley argues they have even gone so far as to say that in reality we are
created just a little less than God. But if that is true, Wesley asks, “…what must we do with our Bibles? For they
will never agree with this.” [i]
Wesley suggests that if we were born and never educated
about God, we would never have a relationship with God. He uses the example of
infants raised without being spoken to who develop no language outside of
infant babbling raising the reality that language is learned just as everything
else. We know that children must be taught how to reason between right and
wrong. Without such education children become little more than animals fighting
and manipulating for what they desire. That leads to the conclusion then that
what God saw before the flood is in fact the reality of human behavior. The
truth is we are born with a self-centered brain focused on what we need, desire
and want. Our very nature then is selfish and evil in that we don’t consider
the impact on others, only that we are satisfied in our desires. We know for example
that there is a ruler in China. We may even have seen his picture or heard his
name, but if we were to meet him on the street would probably not know him. So
it is with God. If we never have the chance to meet God, the opportunity to
learn of God, we would not know God nor desire a relationship with God. No
human being loves God by our very nature anymore than we might love a rock or a
sunset. So in our inherent nature we invent God. That is why we create idols to
replace the emptiness we sense without the knowledge of what that emptiness
represents. So we go about our lives doing what we want and to who we want because
it is our inherent nature to do so.
So what then separates us from goats or other types of
animal? Wesley would suggest that nothing. The strong among us would find a way
to bully the weak and control them into submission. What we see we desire and
our nature is to have it any cost. So what then is the answer?
God loves us unconditionally and unendingly. I have often
been told that my answer is too simple, that is truly must be more complicated
than what I say. There must be rules, doctrines and guidelines that I am not
telling and I am using this simplistic explanation to suck people in. But the
reality is that it is simply that God loves us unconditionally and unendingly,
nothing more, nothing less. We make it difficult because we want to believe
that life everything else it life, it can’t be simple and uncomplicated. God
loves us unconditionally and unendingly.
In a sense we need to be glad that Adam fell. “For if Adam had not fallen, Christ had not
died.”[ii]
Could God have prevented Adam’s indiscretion? Absolutely but to what end. If
Adam had not had the freedom to sin then “free will” meant nothing and the love
of God means nothing. God did not create human beings with intelligence and
choice only to attach strings that made creation out to be a puppet show.
Because Adam sinned, the world has the ability to know and experience grace. If
we never fail we can never truly succeed since it is in failure that we
recognize our weakness and seek to find our strength. So our failures led God
to send us Jesus out of God’s love for us. Through Jesus we have the
opportunity to experience that love first hand.
Today is the day we celebrate love. It is if you will, one
day we set apart during the year to recognize relationship and we find ways to
express our relationship with each other especially those special to us. But
why one day alone each year? Why not every day. Well the answer is probably
buried in the background of Hallmark, Candy makers and those who stand to gain
millions of dollars from setting aside one day. God wants us to know love every
single day of the year. Jesus came to the earth not to bring atonement for sin
alone, but more importantly to bring the knowledge of relationship and love. If
we view Jesus from the viewpoint of atonement alone, then we center our human
existence on what Adam did as the central view of what God created. But God
created us perfect, created the world in a desire to bring love into physical
reality, and we are the ones that perverted that, not God.
Richard Rohr writes that it was God’s plan all along to
bring Jesus into the world. That the 14.8 million years since creation began,
God has intended all along to bring Jesus into the world. Not to bring
atonement but to allow us to learn about God. Jesus came not to change how God
is in relationship with us but how we are in relationship with God.
So what does perfect love look like? I read a poster just
the other day that sums up perfect love in a wonderful way. It said, “You come
to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect
person perfectly. Jesus came to teach us to look at the world perfectly. To see
the love that weaves its way in the flaws of humanity, in the creases of age,
in the beauty of a sunset and in the imperfections of our bodies. What lies
within all of those things is the love that God gives each day, reaching out to
us in a desire for us to feel the warmth of an embrace, the whisper of a kiss
and the fullness of being loved. Today is the day when we have the opportunity
to go out and change the world. It cannot be done through violence, deceit or
manipulation. It can only be done when people understand that you care about
them in an authentic genuine way. Paul sums it up well when he wrote these
words, “4 Love is patient;
love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on
its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in
wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7
It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all
things. 8 Love never ends.”
As we go from this place today let us go with a desire to
open our hearts to the world around us. Let us go forth from this place in a
desire to share love with everyone we encounter. That is the way of the early
disciples. Let it be our way too.
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