The Past Two (and a half) Weeks: a reflection based on 1 John 3 (by Josh)

Preached at Christian Union, August 17 2014

The past few weeks have been nothing like I’ve ever experienced, as you all can imagine, and as many of you can relate. Personally speaking, just to be honest to my church family here, I have experienced the highest joys and hopes and have dreamed the deepest dreams, and I have felt great darkness, great fear, frustration. …The first week of Joey’s life was a whirlwind of energy, as the adrenaline of becoming a new father was like a drug to me, I didn’t need more than an hour or two of sleep a night, I was mesmerized by this fascinating little man that wasn’t here and was suddenly here, and didn’t care about much else. The second week, fatigue began to hit me hard; now in the third week, all those crazy emotions have risen to the surface, and so right now, if I’m honest, I’ve been having trouble parsing through it all—which is something I’m not really used to. 

So you’ll forgive me, I hope, if what follows here isn’t a neat and tidy, systematic sermon with a clear point or two--- because right now where I am, I feel like the most authentic thing that I can offer you all, my church family, are the raw thoughts I have that are giving me hope right now--- as I’ve been reflecting on the third chapter of 1^st John the past couple of weeks…. Because, every New Testament author has their own “pet phrases” and key ideas, and for the writer John, one of his favorites is to see the church as the “children of God.” – Really it’s another way to say “family of God” which is how we often speak of church, but “children” has a certain connotation, that understandably, I find appealing right now! – And so I’ll reflect here… and as my thoughts revolve around Joey Dae, so will the thoughts I offer. But I hope that as you listen for the next few minutes, you’ll reflect along with me, and consider for yourselves what  these words and ideas offer you and your family, on this day. 

…. So here we go…

1 John 3:1-2

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. ²Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

This is the Good News of Jesus’ Mission for John: Join in heart and mind to Christ, and become part of this new family. We became a new family, a new kind of family, at midnight on July 31^st, 2014—the culmination of nine months of persistent nausea, 15 weeks of bedrest…not to mention that little thing called labor. Of course it isn’t all resolved at that point like it is in the movies; there is hardly a breath to take between our former life and the start of our new one with our beloved child. Yet thankfully at our hospital we had 15 minutes. Immediately after emerging, the nurse quickly wiped Joey up and placed him, stomach down, onto Amy’s chest and stomach. And his wild, uncomprehending eyes that darted about, immersed with light for the first time, his little lungs filled with those first breaths of air and the cries that go with them… within a minute he settled again, feeling Amy’s warmth, her skin, her heartbeat that only a few minutes prior was the metronome of his existence. And I placed my hand on his back, to feel for the first time his soft, frail skin. People have described that feeling of becoming a parent to me, none of it does it justice. It’s not an elation--- for me at least, it was a feeling beyond feeling. All I know, is that in that moment, I disappeared from my own eyes; he was all my eyes could see--- him and Amy, who struggled so mightily to bring him into the world, so that I could meet him. That moment will always remain with me… a sublime moment that came to an end, perhaps appropriately, with Joey deciding to take his first bathroom break, even as he continue to lay there so peacefully. We’re hoping that this isn’t an ominous sign of things to come.

What could Joey know in those first moments? We are born social creatures; it’s how we are made, I believe. We need each other. Never is that more clear than in the first moments of life… Joey’s eyes sought his mother’s, looking for her voice, long muffled to his ears, how heard clearly for the first time. We are called Children of God; like Joey, how much of this do we truly comprehend? Can we even begin to understand this? John seems to question this. We are spiritually, typically, like infants, struggling to see and hear. In a world full of noises and blinding lights, distractions and preoccupations, God can be easy to miss, as we’ve talked about many many times before here. Yet if we listen we can hear, perhaps especially in those moments where we feel most vulnerable, cold or afraid, or simply unknowing… the voice we recognize deep in our bones, as the voice of Unconditional Love and Acceptance, of a loving Mother who never tires or fatigues of looking into our eyes, letting us rest our heads on her chest. 

See what love this Father, this Mother, has for us. We don’t always, but sometimes we feel like newborns, frail and confused. Thankfully the “knowing” God, that John talks about, isn’t about head knowledge. Despite what the bookstores say, you can’t read a book or study your way into being a good spouse, or a good parent or good child. Likewise we can’t study our way into loving God. But in our most feeble, vulnerable moments, to simply rest our heads, to look towards the faint sound of grace—well this is the place to start, and is the place to which we can always return, and in it, we can re-discover the resilience of God’s love, that is a Given, simply by our sheer, beautiful existence, that cannot be undone.

⁸Everyone who commits sin is a child of the devil; for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. ⁹Those who have been born of God do not sin, because God’s seed abides in them; they cannot sin, because they have been born of God. ¹⁰The children of God and the children of the devil are revealed in this way: all who do not do what is right are not from God, nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters.

¹¹For this is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. ¹²We must not be like Cain who was from the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. 

The devil, and demons, are personifications of the evil in our world… that is, it is how the ancient, and especially medieval and pre-modern, church communities imagined spiritual evil. And while there may not be a literal creature with red horns and a pitchfork that tricks people into signing their souls away, spiritual evil is a reality. There are “powers” at work in our world, however you want to understand them—and our modern biases against talk of angels and demons shouldn’t dissuade our acknowledgment of this. We see Powers, in the world--- whenever peaceful protests and otherwise-loving people become fearful and angry mobs, or whenever police officers charged with upholding peace act out of fear and anger against those they're charged to protect---whenever inertia lulls affluent yet otherwise-loving people of faith into stagnation and disinterest about the worldwide poor and oppressed, or when otherwise-loving people become members of Gestapos and KKKs and Al Qaedas and Boko Harams. (All people who by the way were once infants, all of whom remain children of God.).... Powers also rear their ugly heads in our psyches, in our souls, in our old wounds that scab over, but years later are ripped back open… our deeply personal, irrational, anxieties, fears, loneliness, that those external Powers often exploit for their own cause. 

As the great patriarch of the church Augustine would say, all of these things, these inner and outer voices can turn our hearts, which are made to love and be loved, towards ourselves and towards self-preservation or dominance, as was the case in that ancient story of Cain and Abel---- or, sometimes, we lose sight of love altogether, as was clearly the case of Robin Williams, whose recent passing has personally struck me very hard. Timothy Radcliffe is a well-known spiritual writer, and I had the pleasure of being his teaching assistant a few weeks ago while he taught a one-week night course at BC--- and he spoke of Christian love as both Eros and Agape--- that is, both an intimacy, and a self-giving. Both a giving, AND receiving. In love we both delight in the other, and also allow the other to exist on their own terms, to not dominate or control them. Another spiritual writer I like, Miroslav Volf, talks about it as both an embrace, AND a letting go… followed by a re-opening of the arms to start the cycle again, to take the risk to open oneself up, but to have the patience to wait for the other to receive you. If we ONLY give--- we debase ourselves… If we ONLY receive, we are only using each other for our own sakes. In either case, we either misplace love, or forget love, and the Powers consume us. It’s a delicate balance. 

Right after our 15 minute-old Joey gave Amy his own messy salutation, I got to cut his cord. I tried to see this as an act of love, in the way I could show love in that moment, as much as Amy holding him to her skin was. We were embracing him, and also, letting him go. He couldn’t stay in the womb forever; to try to keep him there, safe as he may have seemed, would have not been truly loving. He now needed space to think, see, discover, and dream for himself. To begin the long journey of becoming. 

It’s not an easy way to think…. It’s even harder to think this way once you become a parent, I’ve discovered… because infants are wholly dependent upon you, and can only begin to “understand” your love, on an almost primal level, by your presence, your touch, your responsiveness. And as I mentioned before, especially in the beginning, your desire to give your whole self, for the sake of your child, seems almost, dare I say, easy. (That is, until your body and mind remind you of your limits.) To protect forever, to coddle, to shelter against all germs, boogymen, traffic, against all pain, all difficulty, to hope and pray for an easy and contented life--- this all makes a lot of sense to me suddenly. 

But even as we embrace, we know that cutting cords will also be a part of this journey we’re on with him. For otherwise, what we claim is our love for him, will actually be our anxiety, our fears, in disguise. I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt the kind of crippling anxiety that I’ve felt in the past few weeks. Helping Amy through these past few months, being with her through her labor, all seemed like cake, in comparison to having to let doctors examine Joey, even to let others hold him…. To learn to be okay with leaving him during the day so that I can do my work. This is me learning how to love him—even now, I have to let go, even as I continue to embrace him too.

God loves us, and holds us, but does not possess us, he does not cling to us out of his anxiety, but allows us space and freedom to be, to grow. Living according to this love, is to do “right”, to be “righteous,” --- to love one another. This is the way of the Community of God that Jesus formed, in which glimpses of heaven appear on earth.

^{One final, short reflection:}

¹⁶We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. ¹⁷How 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? ¹⁸Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action…
 ²³And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.²⁴All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.

This ‘laying down’ is the self-giving agape love that marks the Beloved Community, the Family of God, we as God’s children. Children of Love. For John, our journey as Children of God into spiritual adulthood begins with our clinging to God, as he says, “abiding” with him, even in our unknowing, our limited vision for what God is up to in us, and in the world. Over time, as we engage in the great dance of Love with God, who embraces and lets go, we become God-shaped lovers, who loves as God loves, with compassion and utter lack of possessiveness. 

This journey, this growing into who we were made to be, isn’t a straightforward one. It isn’t always pretty. And all the while good and evil powers and people are at work, either pulling us towards or away from growth. But it’s an illusion to think that once we “grow up,” we stop growing. The journey Joey has begun, will never be complete. To fancy ourselves as “grown”, fully matured, with all the answers in life and faith, is actually to atrophy. Like a muscle that, once it stop being used, begins to shrink and lose strength, so our souls, our capacities to love, can shrink. And so how do we continue to boldly face the journey? 

The way I am working on right now, as a new parent, is to engage in the prayer, the spiritual practice, of trying my best to see every moment of life as a gift. In the fleeting moments we have with Joey in his newborn stage, every moment is a gift. For life is infused with God’s grace. Everything is given, we possess nothing. The great Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez calls this God’s gratuitousness. 

Watching Joey sleep, hearing him coo, feeling him snuggle into our arms--- it’s pretty easy to see the gift there.  But the 2am feedings? The seemingly insatiable wails? Diaper changes? … during which Joey has a penchant to constantly kick alternately with both legs, full force? --- (He’s gonna be a soccer star. Or a karate champion, not sure which.) The gift might seem a little harder to find. And yet it’s there! My boy is telling me what he feels and wants. He can’t put it into words yet, so he communicates however he can—lungs, hands, feet. He’s telling me what’s wrong, he’s putting his trust in me to solve his problems. I’m probably gonna long for these days when he’s 15 and giving me the silent treatment. --- Every moment is a gift. 

Some moments of life are, of course, even harder—even seemingly impossible—to find grace. We know tragedy and heartbreak in our own lives. We know tragedy and despair in our world—in Gaza, in Honduras and along the U.S./Mexican border. When people blame God for the evil actions of humans and the powers they helped create, or for natural disasters, we misunderstand how God wills and acts in our world; we box God into an image that conforms to our own limited imaginations. But God’s spirit, does WILL the good, constantly and steadily. And God is, as I like to say, in the redemption business. Just as in the cross, God took what appeared by all accounts to be the most horrifying end to Jesus and his Beloved Community, and redeemed that moment, as a moment of love at its most visible, a love that can even defeat death.

And so even suffering, even as it remains suffering, can also have threads of grace that carry us through the suffering into new hope. Precious children: let us love as God loves, not with words or speech, but in truth and action. For every moment is gift: in the Spirit of renewal he has given us, as we walk the road, as we journey the journey, as we abide. 

• "The thing for which I would pray above all others, would be for ever to behold his face, for ever to lay my head upon his breast, for ever to know that I am his, for ever to dwell with him." 
                          – C Spurgeon