Sermons from Past Years

II John "Hearts Going On" Scott Hoezee

Let me open with a couple of stories. First, writer and poet Kathleen Norris sometimes gets asked to come into schools to help students learn a little bit about writing poetry. One day Norris was in a 5^th grade classroom where she asked the kids to write a poem using some similes. To Norris's surprise, one little boy wrote a strikingly good poem entitled, "My Very First Dad." "I remember him/like God in my heart, I remember him in my heart/like the clouds overhead,/and strawberry ice cream and bananas/when I was a little kid. But the most I remember/is his love/as big as Texas/when I was born."

Norris was impressed with the poem but this little boy's teacher was stunned by it. For one thing, the teacher said, this boy was not a very good student. But what was really surprising for Norris to discover was this child's history. Yes, he had been born in Texas but he had never known his father--the man had skipped town on the day this boy was born. "I remember him like God in my heart," the little boy wrote. But what he really meant was there was nothing to remember--no father, no love, and maybe no God either.

A second story comes from the life of Winston Churchill. When Churchill was still very young--seven or eight years old--he was packed off to boarding school. Not surprisingly, he quickly became enormously homesick. So he would write pathetic letters home to his mother, begging her to come visit him, pleading with her to arrange it so he could come home for the weekend sometime. But Winston's mother had never really had much time for her son--she was far too wrapped up in a busy social life.

So when she received her son's earnest letters begging for some love and attention, she usually just tossed them aside. Indeed, Churchill biographer William Manchester once made a sad discovery. While looking through some boxes of Churchill's old letters and diaries, he ran across one of those letters in which young Winston begged his mommy to come visit him at school. But not only had his mother ignored this plea, she had even used the backside of the letter as scratch paper on which she scribbled out a guest list for a party she was planning to throw the next month!

In both of these stories it is not difficult to imagine how much damage was sustained by the hearts of these boys. For a mother or a father to say or do things that are so unloving and brutal all but insures that this child's outlook on life may turn out to be bleak and cold. But I tell these stories because in some ways I think something similar is happening to a whole generation of young people. Because it seems like a lot of people today have become jaded by their bad experiences with love and commitment.

According to a survey that was just published, dating is rapidly becoming a thing of the past on college campuses and also in many high schools. The traditional model of one boy taking out one girl, of two people forming a romantic relationship and then seeing how that relationship develops, is fading away.

Instead what a lot of younger people are doing is called "pack dating"in which large groups of men and women travel together to the mall and to movies. Within these packs it is possible that you may be closer to some people than others, but in general the trend is moving away from romantic couples and toward these bigger packs--unhappily, it is also true that within these packs casual sex fueled by alcohol is on the increase.

Why is all of this the new wave of the 90s? Because it is less risky, requires less commitment, allows you to have fun without the worry of forming attachments. After all, a lot of high school- and college-age people now say that they have never in their lives seen a successful or happy relationship of love. Their parents are not happy, marriages all around them routinely fall apart, Hollywood rarely if ever provides examples of good marriages but instead glorifies the carefree life. So why risk forging a relationship yourself?

Maybe this is also why a lot of the young people in Generation X report feeling powerless and oblivious to the world. The world is moving too fast, some young people say today. Its problems are too big, its technology too mind numbing. So rather than get involved, rather than try to make a difference, a lot of people today are just sitting back and letting stuff happen--it's the channel-surfing approach to life. "We're just coasting" one young person said in a recent issue of Christianity Today. "We don't stand for anything and we figure we'll never make much of a difference in life anyway."

Ninety years ago at the beginning of this century young people all over the world got pumped by a slogan of a famous minister. This minister looked to the coming years of the new 20^th century and he said that his goal was "The evangelization of the world in this generation!" To meet that goal he founded a group known as the Student Volunteer Movement, and high school and college students from all over the world joined this group. Young people everywhere were eager to become missionaries. So by the tens of thousands they joined the SVM and then moved out to change the world.

But at the end of this sad century it is hard to believe that young people anywhere could even believe that the whole world could be changed, let alone volunteer to make it happen. No, we now think that the world is too complicated and dangerous a place. Dictators hide biological weapons behind their backs, terrorists bomb passenger jets, and sometimes even little boys grab rifles, hunker down in the bushes, and systematically shoot little girls on the playground. It's a hard world, one where making a difference seems like, at best, a remote possibility.

So in this cold, brutal, often dangerous world, a lot of people--and not just young people--have turned inward, have become selfish, have begun to demand that the world take care of them, not that they should help take care of the world. The same survey that found pack dating has become all the rage also discovered that students today have become very demanding toward their schools. They want it their way right away, demanding that colleges begin to provide 24-hour service to meet their needs and schedules, they want guaranteed parking spots, better food; they want never to have to stand in line and they insist that their teachers behave more like polite clerks than scholars.

When this century began many people could still get enthused by the slogan, "God so loved the world." Then things changed such that by the 1960s the Beatles coined an alternative slogan by which to energize the world: "All you need is love." But now things have changed again to the point that we've moved from "All you need is love" to "All you love is need."

Small wonder that sociologists say that Generation Xers live for the moment, take consumerism for granted, don't trust adults, feel weak and powerless toward the world, don't stand for anything and so are just coasting along with a remote control in one hand and a computer mouse in the other. I don't know how much of this characterizes you young people seated in front of me here this morning. I'd like to think that none of these ideas or attitudes is in your hearts, that you look at life and the world far more hopefully and joyfully, that maybe you have more in common with those optimistic Christian students from ninety years ago than with the cyber-suckled, self-centered students of today.

I'd like to think that, but all I have to do is look into my own heart and check my own attitudes and then I realize that probably at least some of what I've described is inside your hearts after all. Because I know that I am not as hopeful or optimistic as people used to be either, and maybe the same is true of your parents. But that's why this morning I want to challenge you young people and all of us to read John's little letter as though it were written directly to us in 1998. Think of this letter as a kind of Post-It note that God wants to stick to your notebook, reminding you of who you are to be as a follower of Jesus.

I pointed out earlier that the reason a lot of younger people today are going in for pack dating instead of traditional dating is because it feels safer. The lack of love we see around us frightens us into thinking that the world is not secure or safe or stable enough for us to try anything risky. But I think that this lack of security may lie behind a lot of the powerlessness and fear that grip people today.

That's why John's letter can be so encouraging. These days people believe there is no such thing as truth. No, we're told, there is at best just differing opinions out there, different ideas, different strokes for different folks. Truth is relative--what's true for you doesn't need to be true for me. But John says there is such a thing as Truth and he talks about it all over the place in this letter and in the letter we'll look at this evening. "There is Truth in the universe" John says, "and it lives inside of us."

What is this Truth? It's the truth that once upon a time Jesus Christ came down to this world in the flesh. It's the truth that this same Jesus was full of grace and love. And because of that, John writes in verse 3, we know that this wonderful love and grace of God will be inside us forever. That's why John goes on to say how important it is to walk in the truth. Every day of our lives we need to embody Jesus' truth and what that means is walking in love. "All you need is love" John says. But he doesn't mean mushy, emotional love.

No, when John talks about walking in love, he means doing the hard work of obeying God's designs for life, he means doing the hard work of serving your neighbors and taking care of them as cherished imagebearers of God. "The Truth of the whole universe is love," John writes. "God so loved us that he sent Jesus, and Jesus so loved us he died on the cross. Now it's our turn: the Truth of Jesus is in us and so we need to walk in this truth by living lives of loving service every single day toward every single person we meet."

This is nothing new, John says. We've known all along that we are here on this planet to do something other than kill each other. We've sensed all along that racism and sexism and kicking people in the ribs just because they're different is wrong. We knew a long time ago that we were created to do something other than hurl nasty words at each other on the playground, on the bus, in the hallway. Each of us knows deep down that sex was created for something other than date rapes, that it belongs somewhere other than the casual and empty encounters so common today.

This idea of being filled with the truth and so living a life of love is not a new commandment--it's as old as creation, John says. But in this sinful world it's never been easy to do so we need to work at it. Love is not an emotion that comes and goes, love is our job, it's a task we need to work hard on. Because the ultimate Truth about everything is that Jesus loves us enough to die for us. Truth is not relative! Because the Truth of life is that we are here to serve and love all people all the time all over the place.

If you young people, you newcomers into Generation X, if you want to stand for something, if you want to do something in life other than just clicking the remote control to see what's the newest and latest thing--if you want to live the Truth, then forget about what's hot and what's new and go back to what's old: the love of God in Jesus. Do what many of you did this month in Monterey, Mexico: namely, stand up for service, reach out to people very different from you in love.

Because you don't need to hoof it clear down to Mexico to find people who are different or who are in need. Just glance down the hallways at school tomorrow and you know exactly where you will be able to find the kid nobody talks to. Look around you right now in this church and you'll see one of your friends who you know is having a hard time with his or her parents right now, who feels guilty about something he or she did, who is struggling with drinking or messing around with pot.

Look around you--and get in the habit of looking around you for the rest of your life--so that you can see people in need. Look around you and then remember that you already know the deepest and most vital Truth in the cosmos: the Truth that God's love is everything. In a world in which so many of your peers feel afraid of commitment, are so fearful of reaching out because they have themselves experienced so little love--in a world like that don't any of you ever forget that you are already loved, don't you ever forget that once upon a time most if not all of you were brought up to a baptism font like that one and had water drizzled onto you as a sign that God loves you beyond words. You are loved! You are held in God's grace. Let that wonderful gospel good news give you the courage to break away from the rest of your generation, to stop merely coasting and to make a difference.

You know, last month I mentioned the movie Titanic a couple of times and both times I had the distinct feeling that you young people were listening a bit better than usual--at least I know that a few of you corrected me when I got a couple of details wrong! I'm not sure what you've seen in that movie to make it such a runaway hit. Maybe it's just Leo, maybe it's no more than a rollicking adventure punctuated by great special effects. But maybe it's something more.

As I said a few weeks ago, it's funny how at the end of this sad century people everywhere--starting with you young people--have been swept away by a movie about the beginning of this century. Set in 1912, Titanic takes place at exactly the same time when young people everywhere were volunteering to become missionaries to evangelize the world in their generation. It was a happy, optimistic time--a time when young people on the bow of the great ship could stretch out their arms, face the future with confidence, and declare themselves "the king of the world!"

Times have changed. You and all of us are more cynical now. We're not so sure we can change the world, our faces rarely glow with optimism. We're not so sure we'd sacrifice our lives for someone else the way Jack Dawson does at the end of the movie. And yet, here we are in 1998 and we've been drawn to a movie about hopeful times, optimistic outlooks, and personal sacrifice. Maybe part of the attraction is that John is right: we already know the Truth--it's inside of us. And the Truth is that we are supposed to love each other in Jesus Christ and that we are then to take that love and use it to serve the world.

In the end the message of Titanic is summarized in the movie's Oscar-winning song, "My Heart Will Go On." I don't know if a heart gripped by romantic love really will go on forever. What I do know is that a heart gripped by the grace of Jesus will go on because Jesus goes on. Long ago the apostle John wrote about how overjoyed he was to hear that some of his children were walking in the truth. It should be our prayer--adults and young people alike--that some day the same can be said about our lives: that our hearts went on, always and ever walking in the Truth of love through Jesus. Amen.