I John 3:11-24 "Creation's Purpose: Love" Scott Hoezee

If I am feeling a little cheeky, then on a Monday if someone asks, "What did you preach on yesterday?" I will reply, "God. The Bible." A typical response to such a non-helpful answer is, "Yes, I realize that, but what specifically did you say about God and the Bible!?" Obviously every sermon is about God and based on the Bible. Those are the basics from which we start and about which we preach and think.

Yet later tonight if someone asks me what I preached on, I will say "Love," and in this case I am not being cheeky, even though in a sense saying you preached on love looks to be about as vague as to say you preached about God. Because there is a sense in which every sermon is about love. In addition to being one of those diaphanous, wispy words which everyone uses but no one can fully define, love is also the keynote of the gospel. God is love. Jesus is love. God so loved the world that he sent his only Son. This is my commandment that you love one another. If I speak in the tongues of men and angels but have not love, I am nothing. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Peter, do you love me? Love your neighbor as yourself. Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love and the greatest of these is love. The fruit of the Spirit is love.

Each year when Easter rolls around preachers face the daunting task of saying something fresh about the resurrection. The pressure is on for the Easter morning sermon because, after all, what's more important than Jesus' resurrection? But that's just it: the resurrection is so important that it weaves through all sermons. By the time Easter comes you realize that you've been talking about the resurrection all year already and so what can now be said in concentrated form that has not already been spread out in slightly diluted form the entire year?

So also tonight with love: this is so near the very heartbeat of the gospel that we talk about it and think about it constantly. Now that we are at the conclusion of this Fruit of the Spirit series, we come to what is indeed the juiciest of all the fruit. But all along in this series we noted the interdependent nature of these fruit, saying by way of a sermonic refrain that you need all of the fruit to have any one of them.

But even so love is a special case. Cut open most real fruit, an apple, say, or a peach, and you will find seeds at the core. Cut open any fruit of the Spirit and you will find love at the core. As we will see tonight, love is its own separate fruit, too, with its own distinctive qualities, but so vast is love's scope and influence that it plays a role in the entire sweep of the Christian life, including, therefore, in every fruit of the Spirit.

This is something the apostle John seemed to sense better than anyone among the New Testament writers. The letter of I John is by no means the longest letter in the New Testament and yet it far and away contains more references to love than any other New Testament book, including the gospels. The word "love" crops up thirty-five times in this brief letter. By comparison the entire book of Romans has "love" only fourteen times and even with its elegant ode to love in I Corinthians 13, I Corinthians contains the word "love" just sixteen times. But then, John's gospel also has the word love almost twice as many times as it comes up in any of the other three gospels.

All in all it is clear that John saw love as the number one defining trait of God and of those who are children of the heavenly Father. Loving one another in imitation of God is, John writes in verse 11, the message we have heard "from the beginning." Those of you familiar with John's theology and style know that he liked to use that word "beginning" as a Genesis-like harkening back to the original creation. "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God," is how John famously opened his gospel. This letter likewise opens, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard and which we have seen with our eyes and touched--this we proclaim concerning the Word of life."

And now in this third chapter John says that love is also "from the beginning." Love was from the beginning because God was in the beginning. Love, in other words, has something to do with the very creation in which we live and of which we are a part. Creation itself sprang from the bubbling overflow of God's love. Like a shaken-up bottle of champagne, so also God's love within the Trinity was so effervescent, so richly pressured and full that sooner or later the cork had to explode out and when it did, a river of sparkling love gushed forth and sprayed everywhere.

Creation is that overflow of love. God wanted to share the life and the love he already had so exquisitely among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Greek theologians of the Trinity in the early church liked to talk about what they termed "perichoresis," which is a Greek word meaning in essence the interpenetrating dance of love shared by the three persons in the Godhead. Whereas in the Western tradition of the church we have tended to depict the Trinity as a triangle, the Eastern church has always preferred a circle. The Trinity is like an ever-moving circle of dance in which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit constantly and forever move in and through one another in perfect bliss, harmony, and self-forgetful joy. The three persons of God are so invested in one another, so interested in one another, so caring of one another that although three persons they form just one God. They've been serving each other from all eternity and finding holy joy in that loving co-service.

So it is no surprise that at some point those three persons decided that so great was this love, so focused was this love on the other, that they wanted an entire universe of others with whom to further share the love. God was under no compulsion to create anything. Yet it is just so like God to want to create, to want to share the love. God's motivation to create the world is similar to what motivates us to invite as many friends as we can to the wedding of one of our children or to an anniversary celebration: we want to widen the circle of our own love and joy; we want to share the grand event with those who are close to us. Something very like that was what brought about creation in the first place: the love of God within the Trinity bubbled over in a desire to spread the joy around. "Let us create some more creatures so that we can then invite them to our holy party!"

In one of his many canny passages in The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis imagines the demon Screwtape writing the following to his nephew Wormwood, "God really does want to fill the universe with little replicas of himself. We want cattle who can finally become food; he wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, he wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; he is full and flows over. Our Father below [the Devil] has drawn all other beings into himself, [God] wants a world full of beings united to him but still distinct." Here Lewis captures not just the essence of God and creation but of love versus hate: love always overflows and expands outward to include others. Love reaches out to others not to snuff their distinctiveness but to embrace them for who they are.

But hatred seeks to conquer, to eliminate differences until only a single master race of like individuals is all that remains. Hate seeks to eliminate the other so that the self can be all in all. Hate, John writes, makes you like Cain the murderer. Hate seeks to isolate itself for the sake of nursing of your own ego and, if necessary, hate will kill off others if that is what will create a private world in which you not only keep looking out for good old Number One but in which looking out for Number One is the main event.

In a sad irony, however, that hateful way of trying to "realize yourself" is self-defeating. The secret to life, John would say, is the love which gave birth to the universe in the first place. You see, in the Trinity of God each of the three persons does not think about himself but only and always about the other two. But because the other two are likewise invested in the other, that one's needs are always taken care of. In the love of God within the Trinity, each of the three persons is all in all! By not looking out for Number One each of three ends up being Number One!

That's what love does: it naturally makes us so take care of one another that, in the perfect world and in the perfect congregation, you would not have to worry about yourself because everyone else would already be not only worrying about you but taking very good care of you. The thing we all desire is to feel important, valued, worthwhile. In our sin, and so in our lack of love, we try to achieve those positive feelings by isolating ourselves, by putting others down, by competitions through which we can win (and others therefore lose). We puff ourselves up by deflating others through backbiting gossip, the spread of innuendo and the fostering of suspicion as to the motives of our brothers and sisters.

In all of these ways we try to attain what even God wants us to feel, which is a sense of worthwhileness and importance. But God knows that the way of evil and hate will never accomplish that. Only love for one another can grant to each the dignity which we deserve as God's imagebearers. These are things which, in love, we communicate to each other within community but which, without community, we can never feel. When in pride and arrogance we become self-aggrandized, snooty, proud, we saw off the limb we're sitting on, cutting ourselves off from the very community which, if only it could be filled with love, would become a place of grand mutual affirmation and care.

But maybe all of this is sounding too vague and generalized to be helpful, so let me try to conclude with some specifics of what the presence of the fruit of love would look like. But because we are concluding this entire series, let me also suggest briefly how love motivates and activates all of the other fruit of the Spirit.

Obviously, based on everything we've already said this evening, in a church community like Calvin love means we care about and are concerned about one another. Love does not necessarily mean that we all be each other's best friends. It does not mean we will all like the same things or enjoy the same kinds of activities. In fact, to insist that everyone be just like you would be very unloving in that it would wipe out the very distinctiveness which makes each person uniquely beautiful and beautifully unique. Love does not mean that we are all so similar as to make each person everyone else's best buddy.

But love does mean that there is a core of investment in each other--one which makes us want each person to flourish. Love means that even though we are perhaps not the best friend of so-and-so we surely hope and pray that so-and-so has a rich life of fellowship, laughter, and care. Love means we pray for each other when there is sickness or grief even as we are genuinely happy with one another when there are reasons to rejoice.

But the only way that can happen in a still-sinful world requires something else. In the history of the English language, particularly in the King James Version of the Bible, "love" was regularly rendered as "charity." Today "charity" carries with it a very different meaning, of course, and yet I want to recover one traditional aspect of this word for love by saying that the only way we can love one another with any kind of caring consistency is if we extend toward each other a very charitable attitude.

Earlier I said that our love is to be like God's trinitarian love. But as a perfectly just and holy God, the three persons of the Trinity have one big advantage which, for now at least, we lack: namely, they never have to forgive each other for some lapse, hurt, or sin. We do and we need to forgive one another in loving charity regularly. Precisely because we are not always loving, we say unkind things, do unloving deeds, or just flat out make mistakes borne of mindlessness or inattention. And the result is always the same: someone gets diminished, hurt, or wounded. Once that happens these actions which stem from a failure of love then become obstacles to love. If the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit forms the universe's most beautiful circle of fellowship, then the way by which our past failures of love tend to block future love forms the universe's most ugly vicious circle.

But that is all the more reason why we need to take a charitable attitude toward one another. By that I mean letting the other fruit of the Spirit, motivated and motored by love, to dictate how we live together in this community. We take a charitable attitude toward each other by letting compassion remind us that we are all in the same boat, sin-wise, and so we all goof, all make mistakes, all say words we wish we could take back. Hence, we all need grace and forgiveness, from God but also from one another. So in compassion for our fellow sinners we try not to deny anyone the very forgiveness we need at times, too. We treat one another charitably by letting the fruit of patience help us to stick with each other. We don't bail on the congregation because we disagree with some decision or because we are a little annoyed by this or that aspect of the worship.

We treat one another charitably by letting the fruit of gentleness squelch the harsh words we sometimes feel rising in our throats like bile. We feel the anger that comes up in us when we are wounded and, though there are certain actions which rightly make us angry, we try to deal with even our anger in gentle ways lest we make things worse.

We treat each other charitably by letting the fruit of faithfulness help us to keep our promises: the promises we make to each child at his or her baptism (even though we have no idea how the child will turn out or whether he or she will want our help in later years). We keep the promises we made in our public Profession of Faith when we vowed to work for the good of the church and contribute to its kingdom work. We treat each other charitably by exercising the fruit of self-control, thus arresting words which could maim.

We need this loving charity. Today "charity" is a negative word for many. "I don't want your charity! Just keep your charity! Charity begins at home!" No one wants to feel condescended to, and so it's not charity anymore but "assistance." No one wants to be serviced and so it is no longer the "Department of Social Services" but the "Family Independency Agency." We prefer to look self-sufficient, in need of, if anything, just a little assistance but not of the kind of wholesale charity that suggests inability and dependency.

But if we transfer such attitudes toward the ultimate charitable Giver, God himself, then we can none of us be saved. We need the love of the Father to condescend to us in our weakness, we need God's charitable attitude toward us or we're lost. Taking our cues from God, we see that we need each other's charity, too. No community on earth can exist for long without love. No congregation can stay together, no marriage can survive, no family can be even remotely happy without love: forgiving love, understanding love, compassionate love, patient love, faithful love, gentle love.

You cannot have any one of the fruit of the Spirit unless you have them all and you cannot have them all without love. In a profound verse in I John 3:24 John asks what is as vital a question as you could think of: how do we know if God really lives in us? John's answer: we know it by the Spirit God gave us. At the conclusion of this series, we could add that we know God lives in us, individually and as a Calvin Church community, by the Spirit he gave us and by the fruit of the Spirit he nurtures in our lives. "By their fruit you will know them," Jesus once said. Indeed.