Last Sunday morning I had the joy of visiting the young people’s groups in the Parish Centre. I went into Pathfinders, and they were in the middle of a conversation about the different ways that God speaks to us. They were talking about the Bible, and the Holy Spirit, about God speaking through other people, and through our conscience. As I was listening I thought it was appropriate to share something that had happened to me recently. I had been reading the Bible, and I had come across a particular Bible verse, that spoke to me and connected with the way I was feeling, something that I needed to hear. A couple of days later I received a card in the post from a friend, who had felt prompted to drop me a line of encouragement and had included that very same verse. I shared with the Pathfinders that in my experience this is how God speaks to us, a combination of the Bible, of someone else, and for the same message to come from different directions at the same time.
When I got home from church, I sat down at my desk, and saw a postcard sitting next to my computer monitor. When I had been talking to the Pathfinders I had forgotten this postcard, but I had picked it up at a Youth Event we hosted here at All Saints last month, about the same time as these other things were going on, and on it was printed the same verse.
So that was three times in the same week – which had prompted me to keep the postcard.
Later that afternoon I sat down to start thinking about my sermon for this morning. One of the things that I do when I prepare a sermon is to look back and see if I’ve preached on the passages before. And do you know what, I had. I have an All Saints day sermon, from 2014, based on the reading we had from Matthew’s eye witness account of Jesus’ life. I had a read through, and thought, that’s OK, I can use some of that material, update it a bit, and that will be a fine sermon for this week, and it’ll free up some time to do other things. All sorted.
Then I felt a little nudge, maybe my conscience, or maybe the Holy Spirit, and decided to look up the other reading, the one from John’s letter. And I read this,
“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are”!
1 John 3:1
The verse that I read in my Bible a month or so ago, the verse a friend sent me in card, the verse printed on the postcard at that youth event, the verse I told Pathfinders about last week. The first verse of the second reading of the lectionary set for All Saints Day.
Even then, I faced a bit of a dilemma. It’s pretty obvious, even to my thick skull, that God is wanting me to absorb the truth of this verse more deeply and fundamentally. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he was asking me to preach on it this morning. One of the perils of being a preacher is that we can end up just using sermons as our own little therapy sessions. But, as I reflected on it, I decided to take the risk. It was, after all, set as one of the readings for today, and it is such an important truth for every Christian to hear, to reflect on, to deepen our trust in.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about love recently. Last week at St Catherine’s I was preaching on Jesus’ command to love God and to love our neighbours. Here at All Saints love forms part of three of our core values- to love God, to love each other, and to love our neighbours.
Later on in this letter, in chapter 4, John goes on to teach about love. Among other points he makes are these core ones: “God is love.” “love comes from God.” “We love because he first loved us”. All of these make the point that God is the source and definition of love.
Love doesn’t come from and is not defined by our hormones, our feelings, or our attraction to someone. God is the source and definition of love.
How long is a metre? We all have some idea, it’s about this long. If you wanted to be more precise, you could get a tape measure or ruler out and measure it. But, if you wanted to be really sure, the metre is now defined in relation to the speed of light. Before this definition was arrived at, though, if you wanted an exact metre you had to go to France to see the official “metre” a precisely engineered length of platinum/iridium alloy.
The point is this. If you want to use a metre rule to measure things, then you need a common definition of what a metre is, one that doesn’t change. If you want to know what love is, then you need to go back to the source, to the definition of love, to God.
John writes. “See what great love…”
See. Open your eyes. Look. Take notice. Open your senses. See. This love is great, it is lavish, it is generous, it is overflowing, it is rich, it is golden, it fills our senses, it overwhelms our imaginations, it is creative. God lavishes love on us. See.
And what is it that John particularly wants us to see?
“We should be called children of God! And this is what we are!”
In John’s first book, in his account of Jesus’ life on earth, in the very first chapter, in John 1:12-13 he wrote this:
“Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”
Right at the foundations of John’s understanding of who Jesus is, and why he came to earth is this idea of those who follow Jesus being children of God.
This idea is picked up again in John 3, when we read of a conversation that Jesus had with a Jewish scholar called Nicodemus. Jesus tells Nicodemus that “no-one can see the Kingdom of God without being born again.” Nicodemus is confused. He knows where babies come from, and that there is no going back. Jesus explains to him that people need a spiritual rebirth, to be born again in Spirit.
John summarises the conversation in what might be one of the most well known verses in the Bible when he writes, in John 3:16
“For God loved the world in this way, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
It’s not only John that teaches us about this, Paul talks about this a lot as well. In his letters to the churches in Rome, in Galatia, and in Ephesus he talks about us being adopted into God’s family, about us being heirs of the Kingdom.
In Romans 8:15, for instance we read this:
“The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”
Now, I do have to acknowledge that there is a difference. Paul tends to talk about being adopted into the family and John talks about being born into the family. For us that seems like a big difference, but my suspicion is that in the culture of the time, when adoption was more common, it would have been less significant. We do also have to remember that both are metaphors of what is actually going on in our relationship with God – neither are perfect descriptions.
What they have in common, though, is much more important. They are both rooted in the love of God. They both include the work of the Holy Spirit. The coming of Jesus to live among us and to die for us are key to both. Both affirm that because we are children in this family we can call God, “Father.”
See, this is what God’s love looks like. It comes to us. It lays down life for us. It includes us in God’s family. It fills us with the Holy Spirit. It gives us an inheritance. It is lavish and generous. This is what love is. It is only as we receive this love, as we trust it, as we absorb it, as we overflow with it that we are released to love others in the way that God loves us.
This good news is for all of us. I said earlier that I wasn’t sure if this was something that God was wanting for me to encourage us all to reflect on. One of the things that swayed me towards sharing was the fact that today is All Saints day. It is a day on which we remember and celebrate those who have gone before in the faith, who have left us a legacy of faith, who surround us and cheer us on. But there is another facet to this. We are All Saints, as a church family, but we are also all Saints. Every single one of us who trusts and follows Jesus is a saint. Each and every single individual. We are made holy by Jesus’ work on the cross. We are also made children of God by that love. We are all children of God. Every single one of us who trusts and follows Jesus is a child of God, loved, cherished and valued. So, as we celebrate All Saints, let us also believe and celebrate that we are All Children.
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