For Mom

Believe it our not, we preachers run out of things to say. Last week our lectionary texts were again from the gospel of John and the first letter of John and were about love. But I had just preached about love for the previous 2 Sundays and so I was grateful to focus on Rachel's Day. This week it's the same problem but It's Mother's Day. What do I say about Mother's Day that has not been said before? That moms love us and we should love them? That's obvious. So I am going about it in a different way.

When my dad was in his final illness and weeks from death, he asked my brother and I what we were going to say about him at the funeral. So we each presented our eulogies to him so he could read them ahead of time. My dad was clear-minded almost up to the end. My mom is suffering dementia. That's part of the reason I am going to be gone for a few weeks. So I thought I would do the same for her while she can still, I hope, understand it.

My mom was a brilliant woman who, though she had gotten a scholarship to college, was advised by her mother that higher education was not the proper path for a woman. So she became a nurse instead. But she continued to read voraciously and used to go weekly to our local library, take out the maximum number of books they allowed her and then go to a slightly more distant library and do the same. And she read at a phenomenal rate of speed. And she would share what she had learned. So I was always hearing about ideas, research, history and the like. My mom had a great impact on my intellectual development.

Not only did she read to us, she encouraged me to read to my brother at bedtime as soon as I was able. I still have a great reverence for books. Unlike her, I doubt I will read all the ones I have.

There is another way in which my mother encouraged my intellectual progress. She never let a sloppy thought go unchallenged. She didn't tolerate excuses; what you did or didn't do needed logical reasons to back them up. “I don't want to” or “I didn't feel like it” would not fly. Sometimes in life you have to do what you'd rather not or refrain from foolish things you wish to indulge in. You had to have a good reason for not doing what you ought to do and you had to be able to explain it. It made me a very logical and articulate person, though throughout my life I have come to acknowledge that people more often do things not for logical but for psychological reasons.

My mom was responsible for my spiritual interests. Besides more traditional bedtime stories, she also read to us from the Bible, mostly the gospels. It was she who decided that, after years of us not going to church, we needed to find one to attend. And she found a Presbyterian one, whose minister had a PhD and addressed topics with intellectual rigor. His sermons were very learned and very long. Which is why I keep mine to about 15 minutes. In a way, you can thank my mom for that.

Mom also introduced me to my favorite writer, C.S. Lewis. She passed onto me The Screwtape Letters, Lewis' shrewd look at the psychology of temptation and I was hooked. I've read just about everything he wrote. She also got me the Complete Sherlock Holmes for what I think was my 12^th birthday. And when the James Bond movies came out she got all the original novels and short stories and lent them to me, paperclipping a note over passages that she deemed too racy, telling me to go to the next chapter. Which I did because at that age the girls in the books were the least interesting part of his adventures.

This passing on of interests was fairly one-sided, though. Mom was never very interested in fantasy, horror, science fiction or other things I was into. She did however take such things into account when making birthday cakes. When I was getting a Lionel train set for my birthday, she made a train of cakes: engine, coal car, boxcar, flat car and caboose, and put them on rails made of licorice. When I got my own clock radio, she made a cake that looked like it. She teased me by showing it to me before it was iced. I tried to guess what my present was by its shape and failed. When I received my tome of Sherlock Holmes, she made a cake shaped like an open book and spelled out “Happy Birthday, Chris” in the Dancing Men code from one of the stories!

Mom was not only a very intellectual person but a creative one as well. Besides her cakes, she experimented with meals and cuisines. We might have Japanese food for dinner, complete with all the proper cups, bowls, and utensils. My brother and I learned to eat with chopsticks as kids.

Mom kept picking up crafts and hobbies: needlepoint, soap carving, chip carving, jewelry making, painting, Z-scale model trains so small that you could set up a layout of tracks and a village in an attache case and take it with you. She would get very deeply into each of these crafts, getting the instructional books and all the tools and supplies, make a few things and then move on. It got to where we told Mom to stop working on new gifts for our birthdays and Christmas and finish some of the old ones!

As I said, my mom was a nurse and so I had no fear of doctors or medical procedures. But neither did my brother or I get much sympathy when our injuries failed to reach the level of threatening life or quality of life. Possibly because she was head nurse of the recovery room, and had seen much, much worse than our scrapes and bruises. I don't remember her ever kissing boo-boos and making them better, but we did get excellent first-aid.

Mom was just as clinical with her own affliction: hearing loss. She never felt sorry for herself, though she listened to her record collection less and less. She loved music and singing when we were young. She did realize her hardness of hearing isolated her socially. She could talk to people one on one and through lip-reading make sense of the muffled sounds of their voice. But in crowded venues, the general indistinct roar of the crowds made it impossible for her to understand much. My own loud voice and ability to enunciate clearly I attribute to talking to her, as well as my vocabulary. Certain words are hard for the lipreader to distinguish, so it helps to have a lot of synonyms at your disposal.

I can remember just 3 things she did to accommodate her growing deafness. First, she got hearing aids. She had my brother and I tested for hearing loss and thus his was caught early in his life. The joke in the family was “Chris isn't hard of hearing; he just doesn't listen.”

Second, as it became obvious that she would not be able to continue as a practicing nurse, she went to college and got a degree in library science. She took care of the medical library at Jewish Hospital, where she spent virtually her whole career, and later, was their tumor registrar, a key position for any hospital wanting to be accredited for treating cancer. So vital was she that, after years of asking for an assistant went unheeded, she announced her early retirement. She was persuaded to stay on condition that she get an apprentice who could one day succeed her.

Third, she got a helper animal. This happened after a forklift backed over her in a warehouse hardware store. The operator failed to look behind him and she failed to hear his machine. She broke her pelvis in 3 places. Eventually she got a yappy little Pomeranian, named Pretty Boy, to alert her to things around her.

Her disability did get her and the family onto the internet earlier than most people. While we could and did talk over the phone using the Telecommunication Device for the Deaf technology, with the internet we could email each other without the awkwardness of waiting for someone from Missouri Rehab retyping what we said. She bought us our first computer for that purpose.

My mother is largely responsible for who I am: a nurse, a reader, a lover of music, a person equally comfortable with science and theology, a creative person who is also very logical, a person who can bounce back from adversity and deal with it matter-of-factly. I am deeply grateful to her.

We all have mothers. They all have strengths that they have passed on to us and weaknesses as well. But a mother's job is perhaps the most difficult one in the world. We each start as a part of our mother's body. She has to expel that part, in great pain, and then nourish it and raise it and guard it and teach it. She has to take 100% responsibility for its welfare and then, slowly give that up so that her child can become an independent individual. No one gets that completely right. And yet the fact that the majority of human beings do manage to live relatively responsible lives and navigate this world without causing it or the people around them grievous harm is a tribute to the fact that most mothers get it mostly right.

I hope my reminiscences about my mother have sparked memories of your own mother. I hope you see in yourself the gifts of strengths and temperament and skills that she gave you. If she is still in this world, let her know your gratitude for what she has done for you. Forgive her for the ways in which she was not quite up to this impossible task. Show her love for all the love she has showered on you. If she is with God, thank him for giving her to you.

The Bible says we are all descended from one mother. Mitochondrial DNA shows that to be literally true. And yet Mother's Day is just 110 years old, less if we go by the year Woodrow Wilson made it an official US holiday. Odd that it took so long for us to honor the person whose body we once belonged to. And the woman who started Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis, turned against it in less than a decade because of its commercialization. She would rather people expressed their love and gratitude to their mothers through heartfelt handwritten letters.

This is mine to my mom. I hope at this point she understands it or at least grasps the sentiment behind it. And I hope that your mom will feel the same about however you express your love. Because we just don't do it enough. And one day it will be too late.

Rachel and Her Children

The scriptures referred to are Jeremiah 31:15-17.

Let's call him Jason. I get there and he is lying in bed, the TV on. His fingers are curled and his wrists bent in an unnatural way. It's what happens to your hands when you can't control them because of a spinal injury. He can move his upper arms and uses the lowers arms as you might a stick to move things with his unresponsive hands and to press his palm on the remote to operate the TV.

First I empty his urinary catheter and remove his adult diaper. I clean him up, give him a bed bath and check and change the dressings on his bedsores which are, thank God, healing. I dress him. I put a jacket on him because his thin frame gets cold. He tries to help with the sleeves but there's little he can do. Then I get his wheelchair, remove the left handrail, lock the wheels and closing my knees on either side of his, lift, pivot and transfer him into the chair. I adjust the air cushion that he sits on to protect him from developing future sores on his buttocks, put on the foot paddles and lift and position his feet on them. Then we wheel him to the kitchen so he can eat breakfast. I strap the prosthetic brace on his hand that allows him to hold a spoon and feed himself. He likes Lucky Charms cereal. He is 16.

Jason had been this way for 2 years, ever since he was shot in the cervical spine. He almost died. For some kids his age, his being a quadriplegic for the rest of his life is a fate worse than death.

Some kids do die from gunshots. If you are an American child or teen, you are 17 times more likely to die from gun violence than kids in other high-income countries. That's 1 child or teen every 3 hours and 15 minutes, 7 kids a day, 51 every week, more than 2600 a year. More than 6 times as many are injured, as Jason was, 18,270 of them a year, one kid shot every 30 minutes.

Today is Rachel's Day, observed by ELCA congregations. The reference is to Jeremiah 31:15-17, the first part of which goes, “This is what the Lord says, 'A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.'” The original context is about the exile of the kingdom of Israel. But its better known use is in reference to Herod's slaughter of male infants in Bethlehem, which wasn't too far from Rachel's tomb. (Matthew 2:16-18) Matthew reused this verse about a mother's bitter lament to underline a different tragedy and WELCA, which stands for Women of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, uses it for the ongoing tragedy in our land.

In 1994, the event began in Chicago when a member of Bethel Lutheran Church on the west side of Chicago urged her congregation to support children facing violence. And while its original focus was and is on gun violence, Rachel's Day also recognizes the roles abuse, neglect, drugs, hunger, poor health and poor education play in the deaths of children.

A report of child abuse is made every 10 seconds. 3.6 million referrals are made to child protection agencies every year, involving 6.6 million children. 5 children die every day from neglect or abuse. That's more than 1500 kids a year.

Those who survive aren't much better off. Abuse causes physical and mental health problems, like depression, that reach into adulthood. The abused child's risk for smoking, alcoholism and drug abuse is much higher. The odds they will be either a victim or a perpetrator of domestic violence as an adult increases. Sexually abused children have a higher probability of sexual and reproductive health issues. Abused or neglected children are 9 times more likely to get involved in criminal activity. You find twice the percentage of people who were abused as children in prison than you do in the general population. And abuse is not limited to the poor but can be found in any class.

That said, a child is more likely to be poor than an adult. 1 in 5 children in America (19%) lives in poverty and 2 in 5 (41%) children are living on the brink of poverty. That's nearly 30 million children, more than 5 million of whom are infants and toddlers. 1 in 30 children in the US is homeless. That's 2 ½ million kids, more than half of them under 6 years old.

Things like being poor, not knowing when you will eat next, being abused or neglected, losing a parent to death, divorce or prison, and the like are adverse childhood experiences that cause a lot of stress. And continual stress creates physical and mental problems in people, and especially in children. It physically changes the child's developing brain. Overloaded by stress hormones, such children are in fight, flight or freeze mode all the time. They can't learn in school. They have trouble trusting adults or developing healthy relationships with peers. They seek relief through alcohol, drugs, nicotine, high risk activities and sex with multiple partners. Children with 4 or more adverse childhood experiences (or ACEs) have a greater risk of chronic disease, violent behavior, becoming a victim of violence, depression and suicide. Those with 6 ACEs have an average life expectancy 2 decades shorter than those who report having none.

Shockingly, suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people aged 12 through 18. 14% of high school students have contemplated suicide and 7% have attempted it. And for every 100 attempts to kill themselves, 1 kid actually succeeds. Females attempt suicide more than 3 times as often as males; unfortunately, males die by suicide more than 4 times as often as females. Native American and Alaskan youth have the highest rates of death by suicide, with whites coming in second. LGBT youth have a higher suicide rate than their heterosexual peers. Nearly 82% of them have been harassed at school because of their sexual orientation and kids who are bullied are 2 to 9 times more likely to consider suicide.

Depressing, isn't it? What can we do?

When it comes to suicide, look for signs and symptoms. Mental illness and addictive disorders are associated with 90% of suicides. 60% of those who complete suicide suffered from depression; drug and alcohol abuse is a factor in ½ to 2/3s of suicides. Other clues include aggression and fighting, a lack of parental support, a home with high conflict and violence, problems at school, violence in the community, a family history of mental illness and suicide, self-mutilation, and usually a triggering event, like the death of a loved one, parental divorce, the end of a relationship or sexual abuse.

Then take practical steps. If you have someone who is suicidal in your home, and you have a gun in the house, take precautions. 2/3s of all gun deaths in this country are suicides. Make sure yours is unloaded, locked up and separate from the ammunition. Or you may decide to have a friend take your guns for a while for safekeeping. And you want to secure your guns even if you have healthy, happy kids in the house. A scary number of gun deaths are caused by toddlers who come across a loaded gun and unwittingly shoot either themselves or a sibling or friend, approximately 1 per week.

If you have drugs, you want to secure them as well. And not just the “hard” drugs. Remember that people have killed themselves with aspirin or Tylenol.

Those are just immediate measures to take. The chief thing to do is get your child professional help. I hope you have good insurance. Most plans ignore the fact that mental illnesses are in fact physical illnesses of the brain and usually offer less coverage.

And if everyone was that sensitive to their children's needs, maybe the other kinds of violence that children suffer would decrease as well. But that would be naive. And the adverse childhood experiences of others affect us all. Childhelp.org [here] says, “The long-term financial impact of abuse and neglect is staggering. For new cases in 2008 alone, lifetime estimates of lost worker productivity, health care costs, special education costs, child welfare expenditures and criminal justice expenditures added up to $124 billion.” According to a report by the Educational Testing Service [here], compared to those whose families make twice the poverty line, poor children complete 2 years fewer education, earn less than half as much money, earn $826 per year more in food stamps, and were nearly 3 times more likely to have poor health. Child poverty costs the United States $500 billion a year.

I hesitated to quote the monetary costs because that shouldn't be what motivates us. As parents our love for our children and our empathy for other children should be sufficient. As Christians the example of Jesus should inspire us. In Mark we are told, “And they were bringing children to him so that he might touch them but the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw this he was indignant and said to them, 'Permit the children to come to me; do not hinder them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all.' And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them.” (Mark 10:13-16) In Matthew Jesus says, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven continually see the face of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 18:10) “So it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones perish.” (Matthew 18:14) As it says in the Psalms, the book Jesus quoted most often, “Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed.” (Psalm 82:3)

What can we do? There are lots of organizations working on the various problems that affect our children which you can support as a volunteer or a donor. Contact Prevent Child Abuse America [here]. Compassion International [here] is a Christian organization that helps children around the world. Feeding America [here] works through a nationwide network of food banks to end hunger. Locally there's Lutheran Services Florida [here] and Episcopal Charities of Southeast Florida [here]. We have a Boys and Girls Club on the island. You can become a Guardian Ad Litem, a person who looks out for a child's interest in court [here].

As a citizen of a democracy you can tell our public servants not to cut funding to programs such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the Child Care and Development Block Grant, the Social Services Block Grant, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Medicaid. The same goes for Job Training and Employment Assistance, because helping their parents helps children. Only about 10% of the federal budget is spent on children. The most recent budget proposal would reduce that spending by 9% over the 10 year budget window. We like to say that children are our future. But as one young man said, that sounds like an excuse to put kids on the back burner and not deal with them now. Is neglecting the problems children are going through now a good way to ensure a better future for this country, much less the world?

I never finished reading the rest of Jeremiah 31:15-17. The whole passage goes: “This is what the Lord says, 'A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.' This is what the Lord says, 'Restrain your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your work will be rewarded,' declares the Lord. 'They will return from the land of the enemy. So there is hope for your descendants,' declares the Lord. 'Your children will return to your own land.'”

Our God is the God of love. Our God is the God of life. Our God is the God of hope. With his help, we can give love and life and hope to all children.

Connected

The scriptures referred to are 1 John 4:7-21 and John 15:1-8.

We love our “lone wolf” heroes. In movies like High Noon, Jeremiah Johnson, Die Hard and John Wick, not to mention the entire James Bond franchise, we love the idea that one man can be so ultra-competent as to defeat a legion of bad guys. And none of those heroes have superpowers. According to moviebodycounts.com (you just know that someone out there had such a website) in the 2008 film Rambo, 247 people were killed, perhaps hundreds more if you include a bomb detonated by the title character. That's almost as many as Saving Private Ryan (255) which included the Normandy invasion! I was surprised to find that the highest body count for James Bond was only 91 in You Only Live Twice and he had an army of ninjas helping him. Batman is practically a pacifist in comparison.

I wish I could say this is all nonsense. But as we see over and over again, one person with a semi-automatic weapon can do that much damage. The Las Vegas shooter fired off more than 1100 rounds, killing 58 people and injuring 851. And they weren't an army of bad guys. They were innocent concert-goers taken completely by surprise. And the coward killed himself before the police could get to him. Thanks to technology, one person can do a lot of damage.

On the other hand, our movies also feature science heroes who single-handedly research and build time machines, or turn a man into an armored, flying weapon, or create lifeforms, either biological or artificially intelligent androids, or analyze unknown toxins and engineer antidotes in less time that it takes to fill a prescription. Often these geniuses can do all of those things, as if “science” was a single subject and not a number of quite different disciplines. Physician/engineer/physicist Dr. Bruce Banner, the alterego of the incredible Hulk, holds 7 PhDs, according to Thor:Ragnarok, though, as tvtropes.org points out, none of them should equip him to fly an alien spaceship. At least Dr. Leonard McCoy in the original Star Trek, stuck to his specialty, repeatedly telling the captain, “Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a...mechanic/physicist/coal miner/bricklayer/moon shuttle conductor!”

Despite our fantasies, nobody knows everything or can do everything and almost nothing on a large scale can be accomplished by one person alone. One person may have a great idea. One person might lead a project or or drive a movement. One person may raise awareness of an issue. But they need others to do or support all of the work involved or get the word out. Bill Gates or Steve Jobs did not personally develop the software that runs your phone or computer, just as Jonas Salk did not do all of the work on the vaccine which bears his name. He had a staff. And when they decided to field test it, it took 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school officials and 220,000 volunteers. Salk was essential, perhaps, but he wasn't sufficient to do all that needed to be done.

We live in a society that is only possible because billions of people around the world cooperate to build it and make it run. Recently we saw how useless one lone rugged individual would be in the face of a huge problem. I am talking about the fire we just had on this island. When the vegetation, killed by the saltwater storm surge of Irma, and dried out by heat and lack of rain, went up like tinder last Sunday, an army of official, trained experts sprung into action. We had 60 firefighters from Monroe County Fire Rescue, NAS Key West, the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, Key West Fire Department and from Miami/Dade working together, with 13 vehicles and helicopters from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dropping 800 gallons of water on the fire every minute. I would love to see how the survivalists and “sovereign citizens” and others who think we don't need government would propose how to fight a conflagration that ravaged 100 acres over 3 days.

It used to be that scientists attributed the dominance of humans over the other animals to our superior intelligence. But now many are pointing as well to our incredible ability to cooperate way outside the bounds of kinship. One zoologist said that you don't see that kind of cooperation among our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. So we needn't worry about a Planet of the Apes revolt.

Of course if you are a Christian, this is exactly what we would expect to see. If God is love, as our passage from 1 John points out, and we are created in the image of God, you would expect to at least see phenomenal cooperation in human society. And yet we see other things in human society as well: cruelty, exploitation of the disadvantaged, violence and discord. Where do they come from? From those who put their desires above the needs of others. Not everyone wants to cooperate.

Cooperation inevitably means some compromise along the way. Working for the greater good means some measure of self-sacrifice. If you are part of a community, you can't drive however fast you want or dump your trash wherever you like or play your music as loudly as you'd prefer, especially at 3 am. Being part of a larger group of people means some self-limitation on the part of all of us. And in some cases, such as serving as a firefighter, first responder, or law enforcement officer, it means putting your life on the line. You rarely see see that level of selflessness outside of love.

Mutual love, each person putting the welfare of others above their own, is a greater motivator for holding a community together than mere tolerance or a desire for order or a hatred or fear of disorder. Love makes people go the second mile. To Jesus the distinguishing mark of his followers is our love for one another. (John 13:35) And while it is relatively easy to love family and close friends, it is harder to do so when it comes to people you barely know. To love people who are strangers or very different from you or who are your enemy, opposed to you and what you believe in, takes superhuman effort. In fact, it takes divine power. Which means we need to be plugged into Jesus.

Both our gospel and our New Testament readings are about being connected to Jesus and to each other. In the gospel of John, Jesus compares himself to a vine and us to its branches. Obviously it is better for the branches to be connected to the main vine. The Greek word for “vine” can mean “vineyard” as well. In choosing this metaphor, Jesus is probably thinking of the passage in Isaiah where Israel is compared to a vineyard the Lord plants and nurtures. (Isaiah 5:1-7) Or he may have been thinking of Psalm 80 where Israel is compared to a vine transplanted from Egypt. In both of those passages the tone is one of judgment. In Isaiah the problem is that the grapes are sour. In John the problem is with branches that aren't producing any fruit.

The fruit you expect a vine to produce is grapes. Christians should produce the things you would expect someone connected to Jesus would. He said that just as you can tell what a plant is by what it produces, so you can tell what a person is by what they produce. We are to produce good fruit. (Matthew 7:15-20) Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23) Those are the kinds of things you expect in a Christian.

But if you are having a hard time manifesting those qualities, don't panic. No plant produces fruit instantly. Jesus frequently compares the kingdom of God to growing things. In fact, at one point he says, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head.” (Mark 4:26-28) Jesus lived in an agrarian society. He knew these things take time. What he is saying in this parable is that spiritual growth also takes time.

So, too, the stuff that makes us wince, the pruning of the branches and the removal of the ones that don't produce, is not immediate but takes place over a reasonable amount of time of sterility. But you should be seeing some progress eventually. It's like when someone is hired for a new job. It will take them a while to master it. But you should over time see them growing into the job and picking up more and more skills and getting better at it.

The secret to bearing fruit is abiding or staying in Jesus. You have to maintain that intimate connection to him. You have to be getting nourishment and support from him. If you try to live the Christian life under your own power you will fail. Nobody can be that good. Certain natural tendencies, like anger at those who don't get it and envy of those doing better than you, or just succumbing to temptation, will trip you up. We all know or know of people who claim to be Christian, and who may even have achieved some great things for the church, but are not loving, trusting people. And every week we hear of someone exposed as a sexual predator and some of those people are prominent church leaders. They used their charisma and the power of their position to take advantage of others. And it's not like the requirement for Christians to be faithful and avoid sexual promiscuous is something new. Even before this awareness of sexual misconduct in society became pervasive, the Bible taught that Christians and especially church leaders, should be faithful to their spouses and above reproach. (1 Timothy 3:2-12) Neither Jesus nor Paul would have countenanced men grabbing women by any body part nor would they have dismissed it with a “boys will be boys” attitude. As for children, Jesus said, “...whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:5-6) An adult knows better.

And a Christian has to know that greatest commandments are to love, first God and then others. Thus it says in 1 John, “Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” The 2 loves are connected. As our passage from 1 John begins, “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.” The word used for love is agape, which is distinct from the Greek words for family affection, friendship or romantic love. Agape is benevolence, good will, love that is unselfish.

But if God is such love, and no one has seen God, how do we know what it is? 1 John continues, “God's love is revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world that we might live though him.” Again we need to be connected to Jesus; we are to live through him. But the first readers of John's epistle, like us, hadn't met Jesus in the flesh. How can we experience him? John writes, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” Loving one another shows that God lives in us and like fruit, it will come to maturity in us.

“By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.” In the Old Testament, God anointed the leaders of his people with his Spirit, in other words, kings, priests and prophets. But at Pentecost, all believers were anointed with his Spirit. We receive his Spirit at baptism. The Spirit enables us to live the Christian life and equips us to minister to others. But how can we know for sure?

1 John lists 3 ways and you may recall them from last week: belief, belonging, and behavior. The Spirit enables us to believe that Jesus is God's Son sent to save us from our sins. The Spirit enables us to belong to one another, kindling our love for each other. And the Spirit enables us to love boldly. Because “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” If you saw a bully beating your child, I don't care how big he was, you would charge into that situation and stop him. Fear would not be a factor. You would not be thinking of yourself, only of the person you loved and their welfare.

How did Jesus get the courage to go to the cross for us? Love. Last week we read this in 1 John “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” (1 John 3:16) Jesus loves us enough that not even the prospect of being skewered to a cross to bleed out and slowly suffocate while people mocked him could stop him.

You want to summarize the core of Christianity? It is all about Jesus: who he is, what he has done for us and how we should respond to him. He is the God who is love incarnate; he died to save us; and we should love him and love one another. And we are told to love one another over and over again: in John 13:34, 13:35, 15:12, and 15:17, Romans 13:8, 1 Thessalonians 3:12 and 4:19, 1 Peter 3:8 and 4:8, 1 John 3:1, 3:23, 4:7, 4:11 and 4:12, and 2 John 5. This is not an obscure or trivial command. It is at the heart of Christian ethics.

There are no Lone Ranger Christians. Our God is love; our every act is to be an act of love. We may express that love through teaching or healing or leading or listening or sharing or building or forgiving or reconciling or supporting or confessing or laughing or giving or protecting or befriending or singing or learning or encouraging or thanking or serving or strengthening or understanding or making art or any one of a million ways. But love requires more than one person. You can't love alone. And you can't show this broken and dysfunctional world all the love it needs by yourself. We need each other—to help and to practice loving with.

Jesus actually tells us that we will do greater works than he did. (John 14:12) Is that possible? Only if we band together and put all of our talents and skills and insights to work not for our own good but the good of all, not for our glory but the glory of God. And when the world sees all our acts of love, they will know that God is love and that we are his disciples.

In Truth and Action

The scriptures referred to are 1 John 3:16-24.

In a recent sermon I quoted the saying “When all is said and done, a lot more is said than done.” I first saw this on a poster in the 1970s but I just read a blog post on the Psychology Today website with that as a title. I have always thought of the quote in reference to the numerous committees and meetings one attends as a part of an organization or bureaucracy, where things are discussed exhaustively but they rarely lead to any kind of action, except possibly the issuing of a report. My idea of hell would be an endless series of meetings in which trivial things are painstakingly dissected with nothing concrete to show for it.

But the subtitle to this piece by Dr. Gordon S. Livingston is “A relationship is a collection of promises, explicit and implied.” This is true of a marriage, a friendship, a common interest group (like a church) or even a commercial relationship. Whether those promises exist in a signed contract, in spoken vows or are simply assumed, relationships depend on the acceptance of certain responsibilities. The promises boil down to this: I will treat you well and not harm or betray you and I trust you to do the same.

The post was otherwise kind of all over the place but it did have another good observation: “Any unkept promise ought to be interpreted as a statement of priorities.” And that's true even if the promise goes unfulfilled for what are universally recognized as good reasons. If I didn't fulfill my promise to take you to dinner or to Disney World because someone I love suddenly got ill, that simply means that the life or health of the person in question is more important than the activity postponed. If, however, I stay home to watch the game rather than go to your mother's funeral, well, that means my pleasure is more important to me than supporting you in your grief. Exceptions reveal one's true priorities and principles.

In the honor/shame culture in which the Bible was written, one's word was supposed to be inviolate. We pay lip service to this idea but sadly, we live in a culture where we routinely don't believe certain people. It used to be quite bad for someone in public life to be caught in a lie. They might be fired or forced to resigned or at least censured in some way. Unfortunately, that no longer seems to be the case. None of the tobacco industry CEOs who lied to Congress about their knowledge that smoking causes cancer went to jail. Candidates and government officials lie with impunity. Talk show pundits and radio personalities say outrageously false things and rarely pay in plummeting ratings. So we have whole websites that fact-check things that are said by politicians, talking heads, and the internet and rate them as true, mostly true, half-true, mostly false, false and Pants on Fire! The last rating means a statement is so extremely false that the person could not be merely mistaken but had to know he was lying. I haven't noticed this putting the brakes on persons who say things that, in this information age, are easily tracked down and proven to be false. People who thrive on social media don't even register embarrassment when they contradict what they previously posted.

Even in the Bible we see an acknowledgement that people can say one thing and do another. In our passage from 1 John, it says, “How does God's love abide in someone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” And while people cynically accept that politicians lie, they get outraged when Christians do so. Recently the #MeToo movement brought down David Silverman, president of the organization American Atheists, founded by Madalyn Murray O Hair. Silverman's board terminated him for sexual misconduct and assault. And yet under the Facebook post was a comment that had he been a Catholic priest, he simply would have been moved to another parish. It didn't matter that movie moguls, famous actors, comedians, governors, mayors, senators and representatives, and even atheists have been ensnared in sex scandals. People are more incensed when Christians get caught. They hold us to a higher standard.

And they should. True, we are sinners like everyone else but we should be getting help for that. We should be able to see a situation like this developing in our church and especially in our own life. We should catch it in the early stages and take action. If a prominent person in rehab were routinely binge drinking or doing narcotics or gambling, we would look askance at him. Sinning is a much broader range of behaviors but as it said in our passage from 1 John last week, “Whoever remains in him doesn't continue to sin. Whoever keeps sinning has neither seen him or knows him.” (1 John 3:6) I translated the verb for “sin” as “continues to sin” and “keeps sinning” because the Greek verb tense indicates an ongoing action or habit. Again people in AA are not surprised if someone in the program falls off the wagon. But if they aren't really trying to stay sober, the group may exclude them until the person shows that they mean to get into the spirit of the thing and starts working the 12 steps again.

But notice that in our passage the big contradiction pointed out is when a Christian fails to show compassion in a practical way. If you see someone in need and you can help them out but don't, how can you say that you have God's love in you? 1 John says, “We know love by this, that [Jesus Christ] laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for each other.” And though in that time period, you could literally die for being a Christian, he is talking about not dying here but living your life sacrificially for others.

Again the world knows this and every time a wealthy TV evangelist buys a multimillion dollar airplane or gold-plated bathroom fixtures but his church does not do much to help the poor, people get outraged. And sadly, this has led some to think all churches are raking in the money and all preachers are in it for the money. That's like thinking all radio DJs make the kind of money Howard Stern does. Quite frankly, I was going to enter seminary right after college. I became a nurse to pay my way through seminary. And then I realized I was making more money as an LPN—not even an RN but an LPN—than I would as clergy. Plus I was married by then and having kids. So my plan to become ordained went on the back burner for a couple of decades. Today, it turns out, the average pastor/priest actually makes about $5,200 a year more than an LPN, probably because the medical establishment is trying to phase out practical nurses. Still nowhere near a fortune. (Oddly enough the highest average pay for clergy is in Nevada! Is that because of all the sinners repenting or do high rollers tip the Lord well when they hit the jackpot?)

The 3 elements of any religion are belonging, believing and behavior. And every religion has more luck with the first 2 than that last one. Belonging is great. Having a group of like-minded people whom you care about and who in turn care about you is good for you psychologically and physically. In fact, most scientists attribute the undeniable and verifiable health benefits of religion to the social aspects of the phenomenon. Part of the reason they do is that you can quantify attendance. Part of it is that they are loathe to attribute the things they see among active members, like lower blood pressure, better recovery from disease and longer life, to the action of God.

It is harder to measure how much someone actually believes. Sociologists and polling organizations like the Barna Group and the Pew Research Center use studies based on self-reporting. Thus we can know what people say they believe. Gallup found that only about a quarter of Americans believe the Bible is the literal Word of God. However, the majority of Christians (54%) will agree that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. According to Barna, 56% of Americans believe Jesus is God, though that drops with each younger generation. And while 6 in 10 Americans say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus, that percentage is higher among women (68%) than men (56%), is higher among black Americans (80%) and non-white Americans (65%) than whites (60%), and higher in those making less than $100,000 (63-65%) than those making more than 100K (53%).

Behavior is, oddly enough, the hardest thing to quantify. While almost 3 quarters of Americans (73%) claim to be Christians, less than a quarter of Americans (23%) go to church weekly, though just over half (51%) say they go at least once a month. Just over half of Americans have given to their church (54%) in the last year and 22% have given to another non-profit. Overall, 96% of practicing Christians have ever given money to a church or another non-profit whereas only 60% of atheists and agnostics have. 75% of Americans say they have prayed to God in the last week, only a third (34%) have read the Bible outside of church, and about 1 in 6 has volunteered at a non-profit (19%) or at a church (18%).

Now one presumes that some of the money given to a church will go to help the needy, yet it is hard to find any statistics on how many religious programs there are to help the poor. All we can say is, there are a lot. Large churches run soup kitchens, food banks and homeless shelters. While the majority of churches in this country have less than 100 members, even small churches can contribute to things like the local food pantry or to denominational efforts. Every denomination has organizations that help the poor, immigrants, people in developing nations and gives grants and funds to local churches with specialized ministries to the homeless, the hungry, and the disadvantaged. But there doesn't seem to be a clearinghouse for all the data from all the denominations.

However, I did find a disturbing poll taken by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation. In it 46% of all Christians said a person's poverty is generally due to a lack of effort. Only 29% of all non-Christians felt that way. Worse, 53% of white evangelical Protestants blamed poverty on the person's lack of effort. Only 41% attributed poverty to difficult circumstances. I find that incredible considering that evangelicals pride themselves on taking the Bible seriously and the Bible mentions the poor, the needy, the hungry, the sick, the blind, the deaf, the lame, the fatherless, the widow, and the resident alien more than 800 times. (Reality check: how many times does the Bible refer to homosexual activity? 7 times. Which do you hear evangelical preachers talking about more often?)

Sadly, when it comes to helping the poor, many Christians point to 2 Thessalonians 3:10 which says in part, “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” But Paul was addressing people in one church who thought Jesus' return was so imminent that they had quit work and were just waiting for the second coming and mooching off others. In no way did Paul, who exhorted Christians to help the poor (Romans 15:26; Galatians 2:10), mean for skepticism to be our default attitude towards the needy. Nor did Jesus. (Matthew 5:42; Luke 14:12-14)

We are saved by God's grace not by works. But works should be the natural outcome of the action of God's grace on our lives. In fact the most famous passage about this reads, in its entirety: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, that no one would boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before that we should walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:8-10) We are not saved by works but we were created to do good works. God intends us to help others. They are a sign that we are in good spiritual health. When you are in bad health you refrain from doing things because they are difficult or impossible. When you are in good health you engage in healthy activities. You should be able to go on a long walk without getting winded. You are able to go out with friends, do things around the house, help out an aged or infirm relative or neighbor without any thought for whether you can. If you can't, there is some health issue you need to correct.

God is love. If we are in good spiritual health, we should be making that love concrete in all we do. And just as you have to be healthy to do exercise, doing exercise in turn keeps you healthy. If you ask me, a lot of the spiritual ill health we see in the church has do with our not doing our spiritual exercise, that is, not doing loving things for others. Somehow we have come to think that spirituality is strictly internal. It is something that takes place in the mind and heart. True, but if it doesn't manifest itself in how you live then it is merely notional. Jesus went off by himself to pray but then he got to his feet and went out and healed the sick and forgave the guilt-ridden and fed the hungry and guided the lost to the truth. He was the most spiritual person ever and yet he didn't shut himself up in a cave or on a mountain top and meditate his life away. He plunged into his mission of bringing good news to others, both with his words and with his works.

Somewhere along the line we have gotten the idea that what I do, standing up and preaching, is the main thing the church should do. And the world has heard our fine words and said, “Put your money where your mouth is. Act like you are following Jesus.” And the world is right. It is simply seconding what James wrote 2000 years ago: “Show me your faith apart from your works and I will show you my faith by my works.” (James 2:18) Show; don't tell. When all is said and done, there's a lot more said than done.

At the jail last week an inmate pointed to the verse where Paul says “If you declare with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9) Which makes it sound as if there is nothing more to being a Christian than believing something and saying so. I pointed out that in those days just saying that could get you killed. Saying you were a Christian in public was a brave and death-defying act. In the year 112 AD, Pliny, governor of a province in what is now Turkey, wrote to the emperor Trajan about what to do with Christians. He said he would give them 3 chances to deny they were Christians, invoke the Roman gods, offer prayer, incense and wine to an image of the emperor, and curse Christ. Those who refused and persisted in their loyalty to Christ, even under torture, he executed, as he did with two slaves who were deaconesses. Trajan wrote back that Pliny had done well.

Yet they were not able to stamp out Christianity. In fact, the bravery with which Christians faced death made more converts. Pagans were especially impressed with the way Christians stayed in cities when plague struck and took care of the dying at the risk of their own lives. They feared neither despots nor disease nor death. They made their lives and their deaths count. What they found worth dying for made life worth living.

If it were illegal to be a Christian here, as it is in certain parts of the world, would there be enough evidence to convict you? Has your life changed sufficiently that the only explanation is that the God who is love, and who was incarnate in Jesus Christ, lives in you? Are you willing to lay down your life and take up your cross for others as Jesus has done for you? Show the world.