Let us love one another

1st John 4: 7-21, page 241 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent the Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent the Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the Day of Judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. Sermon Men and women end up in the Maury County Jail for any number of reasons – public drunkenness, domestic violence, possession of illegal drugs – but no one ever goes to the Maury County Jail for the food. I saw a meal. It had been sitting on a counter, not in any rush, and consisted mostly of starch – pasta, potatoes, rice. Something wet to drink, maybe it was tea, and a piece of cake for dessert. Even with dessert, it costs you, the Maury County tax payer, less than a dollar a meal to feed a Maury County inmate. Those who are guilty or accused of minor offenses go to a large room with about 40 beds. Those who are guilty or accused of something worse are assigned a space with room enough for a single bed and not much more. The walls are hard, the windows are few, the smell is a strong mix of body odor, shame, and disinfectant, and time passes slowly. That’s how plenty of people think it should be – some people deserve punishment. And maybe they do. Many in our world fight to ensure that people get what they deserve – the unlawful deserve punishment, the just deserve justice, the hard working deserve their fair wage, and the innocent deserve to be defended. But there are others in our world who believe something else, and it’s really something very different – that no one should get what they think they deserve. Instead, everyone, whether they think they deserve it or not, should be given love. These people are called Christians. They give away meals – the last Friday of April they gave away 190 meals, better than anything you’d ever receive in a jail, to people who had done nothing to deserve it. They give away property too – allowing boys and girls every day to use a building where they can do their homework in peace without ever paying a dollar in rent. And they give away time – stopping to listen to the cries of the voiceless while everyone else keeps walking. Taking children who have never been before fishing. Spending afternoons working on houses that they’ll never set foot in. Bowing their heads in prayer for people who they don’t know and may never meet. We believe that even in a world where people are controlled by the barrel of a gun and satisfied by the glow of a television, there is truly a stronger force that rules our world though few can see it and even fewer than that believe in it. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” While fear of jail will keep some from stepping over the line, there is a far greater power for motivating women and men to do what is right. I saw a glimpse of it not long ago. I was invited into the home of a widower. He was interested in showing me some pictures of his garden. These pictures were in a picture album, and I, being a nosy person couldn’t help flipping to the beginning of the album though I hadn’t been invited to do so. There were wedding pictures there. A young man who resembled the widower I had come to visit, and a beautiful young woman. I asked him if he remembered that day. He looked off and said, “I, take you, to be my wife; and I promise, before God and these witnesses, to be your loving and faithful husband; in plenty and in want; in joy and in sorrow; in sickness and in health; as long as we both shall live.” “As long as we both shall live,” he said, though the love he had for her has lasted much longer than that. No one ever forgets love, especially the kind of love that makes you feel so incredibly lucky – a love that you think you don’t deserve. And here is the foundation for living – not the fear of punishment, but the desire to live in a way that honors the love that we have received. “God first loved us.” How you view the world is related to whether you believe it or not. Believing that you aren’t worthy of love is the sin that leads to every abomination imaginable. Filling up the pit of worthlessness is terribly dangerous business – whether with food or alcohol or drugs – the pit never fills and the feeling never goes away. An early death awaits, but that kind of warning doesn’t change anything for people who believe that death is what they deserve. Warnings and punishment lose their power. But often more than warnings and punishment are at work in our world. In our jails are chaplains whom our church supports. They testify to something that is especially hard to believe in that place – they also pray with and counsel inmates, and have been known to give them rides home when their time is complete. One tells the story that Jim Casselberry told me, that of a young man who needed a ride home. He was given back the clothes that he wore when he first entered that jail, and without any where else to go he asked the chaplain to take him home to his mother. What he expected her to say I don’t know, but coming home from jail is a lot different from coming home from college. He knocked on the door while the chaplain waited, and wordlessly his mother opened the door and wrapped her arms around him. People who are loved this way – in a way that they can’t deserve or earn or even explain – believe that they are worth saving. That’s how change begins – to be saved you must first believe that you are worth saving. “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent the Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” How could you ever doubt your worth in light of this truth? How could you ever doubt your worth in the shadow of the cross? How could you ever doubt your worth in the sight of this table where he offers you his very body and blood that you might know your worth? “We love because he first loved us,” and that is the foundation of righteous living – not the fear of punishment that keeps us from slipping out of line, but the belief that you are worthy of love is the foundation that allows you to love others. Love one another, as God first loved you. Amen.