Purpose, Path, Power

The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 6:1-8, Romans 8:12-17, and John 3:1-17.

Before my granddaughter got one, I used to think “kitten” was a noun. Now I realize it's a verb. This tiny thing is always rocketing around the room, exploring every nook and cranny, climbing on the furniture, the curtains, my leg. She is always ready to attack and do battle with stuffed animals, my shoe, the dog's tail. She's never still. I envy her energy.

The architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller said, “God is a verb.” And indeed when Moses asks God's name he says, “I Am That I Am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.'” (Exodus 3:14) God's name in Hebrew is the third-person masculine singular causative form of the verb “to be.” Richard Elliott Friedman and the Jewish Study Bible feel that a better translation of this is “I cause things to be.” Everett Fox translates the name as “I will be there.” Yet another option is “I will be what I will be,” meaning “My nature will be evident from my actions.” But what everyone seems to agree on that God's name is a form of the verb “to be.” God is a verb.

And the God of the Bible is an action verb. In the beginning he is creating things and pronouncing them good. He makes covenants. He provides a sacrifice for Abraham in place of his son. He liberates slaves. He leads a nation to the promised land. This is not some philosopher's God, who is static and above all things, passively observing the world, an object to contemplate. This is a God who does things.

God the Son is no different. The first gospel written, Mark, is a breathless account of Jesus going around Galilee and Judea, healing, feeding and teaching people. The word “immediately” appears in Mark 17 times, impelling the narrative from event to event. He also makes a covenant and liberates those enslaved to sin by providing himself, God the Son, as a sacrifice. And then, he of whom John says, “In him was life,” returns to life, walking, talking, cooking and reaching out his nail-pierced hands to be touched.

Throughout both the Old and New Testaments, the Spirit is also active—in creation, in choosing and inspiring leaders, in speaking through prophets, in empowering Jesus and then in empowering and guiding us, the body of Christ, whom Jesus sends out to spread his message to the ends of the earth.

Today is Trinity Sunday and I am supposed to be explaining the Triune God so that you understand the idea. But I agree with C.S. Lewis that it is more important to experience the Trinity. So let's look at God another way.

We all have a vision of achieving what is good in life. It may be a vision of everything that is good in the sense of being right, or it may be a vision of everything that is good in the sense of being enjoyable. And most of us think that the two are very different. But in God they are the same. As we said, God made all things and pronounced them good. The problem is that we misuse them and thus often miss the pleasure found in doing things the right way, the way God intended. We are like babies, who, presented with a ball, try to put it in our mouth and see if we can eat it. Only when we realize that the purpose of a ball is in the throwing and in the rolling and in the bouncing, do we discover the true pleasure of a ball. Even a kitten or a puppy knows that. Using something the right way is also using it in the most enjoyable way. And that's how it is with God's gifts.

So our goal, seeking a good life, is really about seeking this binocular or three dimensional vision of God, the source of what is both right and pleasurable.

But we need help getting to that goal and God provides that as well.

First it helps if we have someone who not only tells us the way but shows us. And God the Son does that. He lives a life of love and service, telling people about God's goodness, forgiving, healing and feeding people. But he doesn't live a fairy tale life. It is a very human life. We see Jesus dealing with obstacles in the form of determined opponents as well as dense students and fleeing friends and even a family that at times doubts his sanity. He has followers who want him for what he can provide for them physically, not spiritually. He is so busy he can't always find time to eat and so tired he can sleep through a storm in a boat that's being swamped. He cries at a friend's grave and prays for an alternative when facing his own imminent death. During his worst hour of pain and humiliation, he feels abandoned by God. But in the end he is vindicated by the God who causes him to be once again. In Jesus love conquers hate, light conquers darkness, life conquers death. That's the kind of example we need as we encounter similar obstacles while going towards our goal. By his works and with his words Jesus helps us.

But to get to that goal we also need insight and encouragement and strength and comfort. And God the Spirit provides that. He enters our hearts and minds and starts to change them so that we grow to be in ever closer harmony with God, the source of all that is good and right and enjoyable. Because he works behind the scenes, we often forget about him. But he is the one who drops an apt word of scripture into our mind or asks a pointed question that clarifies the issues at stake, or urges us to leave our comfort zone to do what's right and to help those in need. He recasts the world around us so we see it with new eyes. He assures us of God's love when we are assailed by doubt. He is God's intimate presence, the Father and the Son making their home in us and living their life in us. (John 14:16-17, 23)

If you can't wrap your head around the Trinity, don't worry about it. You don't need to understand exactly how a car or a computer works to experience the benefits of either. Just know that God is the light at the top of the mountain we are climbing. And he is our guide showing us where to step and what to avoid. And he is the motivation, spurring us on and encouraging us to take that next step. God is the goal which gives us the purpose we long for in life as well as the path to that goal and the power to make it to that goal. Or as Jesus put it, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

On Fire

The scriptures referred to are Acts 2:1-21.

The invention of fire was a huge advance for humanity. The Greeks thought it was a gift, stolen by Prometheus from the gods. One theory of how we got our big brain involves the invention of cooking food. Cooking makes food easier to chew and easier for our stomachs to break down. So our jaws shrank and our brains grew. And because we spent less time looking for food and digesting it, our big brains could occupy themselves with other problems. All thanks to fire.

Regardless of whether that theory is correct, fire is powerful, which makes it tremendously useful in some ways, like cooking and giving light and keeping us warm. But in other ways fire is dangerous. If you are careless with it or around it, you could get injured or killed and your home as well as the whole community could be destroyed.

So it is interesting that when God appears to Abraham, he appears as “a smoking firepot and a flaming torch.” (Genesis 15:17) When God appears to Moses he does so in fire. He first appears in a bush that appears to be on fire but which is not consumed. (Exodus 3:2-3) Later when God gives the Ten Commandments to Moses, he appears as fire on the mountain. (Exodus 19:18) And he leads the Israelites to the promised land in a pillar of fire by night and of smoke by day. (Exodus 13:21-22)

And the more dangerous aspects of fire are also there. When a bunch of Levites, which were kind of like deacons, try to usurp the high priest, they are destroyed by fire. (Numbers 16:35) It always bothered me that Belloq, the evil archaeologist in Raiders of the Lost Ark, didn't remember that part of the Bible before dressing up as a priest and opening the ark. Of course, then the movie wouldn't have had that awesome ending.

God, speaking from the pillar of fire, does inspire awe as well as fear in the Israelites. So why does he often, though not always, appear as fire?

For one thing fire, though pivotal to human development and society, is not a natural element like water or earth or rock or wood or even air. Fire is a chemical reaction, an event. Mankind's first encounter with fire was probably a wildfire or possibly a tree struck by lightning. Mastering it, as Wikipedia points out, allowed humans to have a source of light and warmth, protection from predators (remember Mowgli confronting Shere Khan), as well as a way of creating better hunting tools and as we said, cooking. So here is this almost living thing that is not an inanimate element of nature you can simply locate and acquire, and yet it becomes essential to human life. We cannot imagine civilization without it.

Humans are meaning-seeking animals. Other animals can figure out the “how” of things. Humans wish to figure out the “why?” Other animals can discern and even invent new uses for objects or phenomena. Only humans, as far as we know, wonder why certain things are so inherently beneficial to us. As we said, fire was a game-changer and was considered a gift of the gods. Perhaps God, who speaks to us in metaphors drawn from everyday life, decided that, for certain purposes, fire was the best physical metaphor.

As the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery points out, “Just as all physical life depends on the fire that is the sun...so does all spiritual life depend on God. Just as fire both purifies and destroys, so does God purify the righteous and destroy the wicked.... Just as fire lights up the blackness of night, so does God overcome the dark powers of evil. Just as fire is mysterious and immaterial, so too God is enigmatic and incorporeal. Just as fire is always...changing its shape and cannot be held for examination, so is God the indefinable who is beyond our grasp.”

Like fire, having God in our life is beneficial as well as powerful and we have to have a healthy respect for him. But I think there are a couple of other reasons why fire makes a good metaphor for God and one is important to our passage about the first Pentecost after Jesus' ascension.

We are told that “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” One aspect of fire that we have not discussed is the fact that it spreads quite easily. And that's what the Spirit is doing here: spreading the gospel to a group of Jewish pilgrims from countries all over the known world who grew speaking languages other than Hebrew and Aramaic. The tongues of fire indicate that God intends the good news of who Jesus is and what he has done for us to spread like wildfire.

And indeed God's Word is compared to fire. Jeremiah wrote, “Sometimes I think, 'I will make no mention of his message. I will not speak as his messenger any more.' But then his message becomes like a fire locked up inside of me, burning in my heart and soul. I grow weary of trying to hold it in; I cannot contain it.” (Jeremiah 20:9 NET) When the risen Jesus walked on the road to Emmaus with the 2 disciples, he explained that the Christ must die and be raised. When they realize it is Jesus himself accompanying them and he disappears from their sight, they say, “Didn't our hearts burn within us while he was speaking with us on the road, while he was explaining the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32) God's Word generates an intense desire to share and spread it. That is probably what the tongues of flame represent.

But there is another thing that scripture compares to fire: love. In the Song of Solomon, it says, “For love is as strong as death, passion is as unrelenting as Sheol. Its flames burst forth, it is a blazing flame. Surging waters cannot quench love...” (Song of Solomon 8:6-7) If that is true of human love, how much more does that describe God's love for us? If, as 1 John 4:8 says, God is love, he is not mild affection or faint fondness but a burning love. As it says in Deuteronomy, “For the Lord your God is a consuming fire; he is a jealous God.” (Deuteronomy 4:24) The context here is God telling his people, who have entered a covenant relationship with him, not to go after or worship other gods. Jealousy is bad if it is unwarranted, if your lover or spouse is unreasonably jealous. But if you love someone, you are going to feel jealous if some other person steals away their love from you.

And God's situation is unique. He not only created us in his image, to be loved by him and to love and enjoy him forever, there are no other gods. So this would be like finding out your spouse was seriously in love with and wanted to leave you for James Bond or Wonder Woman. You not only might feel jealous, you would realize that they are delusional and you would be worried that they are headed for disaster, like the folks who stalk celebrities because they believe they are in a relationship with them. That's how God must feel when we put ephemeral, not to mention wholly imaginary, objects of love ahead of him.

Yet he continues to love us. Paul says, “But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8) Most people expect a religious message to go along these lines: God will love you if you do something for him. They don't anticipate the good news that God loves us in spite of what we do, in other words, unconditionally. Still less would they think it likely that God would take the initiative in repairing our relationship. The idea that God would become a human being was unthinkable to the Jews. And no one would ever think that God would willingly let himself be killed by sinful people to bridge the gap between the divine and the human. Or that he would then offer his eternal life to the very species that rejected him. Why would he ever do that? Because he has a burning love for us.

In this life we are faced with the question of whether the universe we live in is cold and indifferent to us or whether the love that we see in ourselves and the other animals is neither unique or anomalous but reflects something that is intentional and cosmic. And that love is not merely sex or a perfunctory part of insuring our genes gets passed on. Look online and you can see a monkey carrying the body of her dead infant for days, mourning that specific offspring. You can see elephants trying to revive a dying member of the herd or panicking as they try to rescue a baby that has fallen into water. And in this day when we can live better than the kings of old in comfort and with a variety of foods from all over the globe and with countless hours of entertainment, why did we find the last year so hard? Because we missed our friends and our family and all those we loved. Seeing them in a little electronic window was not the same.

We are created in the image of the God who is love, a love that is not discouraged by our unfaithfulness, but which seeks to win us back. A love that is stronger than death, that is unrelenting, a blazing fire which flood waters cannot quench. We long for this love that longs for us. Because such love is as essential as fire. We need its light; we need its warmth; we need its protection. The world needs it. And we know the source. Jesus said he came to set the world on fire. His words of love are burning within us. Stop bottling them up. Give them voice. Let them spread through this cold world like wildfire.

What's in a Name?

The scriptures referred to are Acts 1:15-17, 21-26.

The first of the Great Courses I listened to was called The Other Side of History. Rather than being about the great men and movements of traditional history, this was about the everyday life of the average person in various eras and cultures. So the lectures were on “Being Egyptian” and “Being Greek” and “Being Medieval,” with specific lectures on things like “Being a Greek Slave,” “Being a Greek Soldier or Sailor,” “Being a Greek Woman,” “Being a Sick or Disabled Greek,” “Being an Old Greek” and even “Being a Dead Greek.” You learned what it was like to be Jewish under Roman rule, to be a Celt in Ancient Britain, to be a medieval heretic and to be a Viking raider. The professor, Dr. Robert Garland, explained how hard it was the glean this information from the sources we have since average people didn't usually get to write about their lives. Only the literate did, which meant the rich and the educated are our main sources of history. We rarely even know the names of average people from the past.

So the apostle Matthias is one step above most of the people. But just one step. The most we know about him for sure is what we have in today's passage from Acts. We know he was a follower of Jesus from the baptism of John all the way to the ascension. He is chosen by lot over a guy with 3 names, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus. So he becomes the only apostle who was not one of the twelve disciples, replacing Judas who was a disciple but who, for obvious reasons, never became an apostle.

And that's it! If you try to find out more about Matthias you get a bunch of stories from various sources that are hard to reconcile. A lot of them have him going to Ethiopia, which may simply mean Africa, while many others have him going to what is now the country of Georgia, just north of Turkey and bounded by the Black Sea to the west and Russian to the north and east. He was stoned there around 80 AD. Or he may have been stoned and beheaded in Jerusalem. Or he may have died of old age. Apparently nobody at the time bothered to write down and pass on the details of the last apostle chosen. Which is why I say he is just a step above the average person of the time, who lived and died without anyone recording so much as their name.

That's very different from today when everyone seems to have a social media account so that people in the far corners of the world can find out their names...and use them to create false accounts and commit identity fraud! But theoretically future historians will be able to look back on every person's digital record and get a better idea of how the average person lived. Naaah! There will be too many. They will have programs that will sift through the mountains of personal data and summarize what the average person posted. Actually they have those programs now. And who knows how long after my death Google will decide that my blog takes up too much memory on their servers and deletes it.

We will be forgotten in a few generations and our time will be represented by celebrities, whose lives are definitely not typical. So we have a lot in common with the apostle Matthias. He was not as big a personality as Peter or Paul, but nevertheless, he was chosen by God to spread the gospel. So somewhere people believed and some churches were started because of him. And some of their descendants are probably still believers. Matthias is like one of those long-bearded pastors from 150 years ago whose black and white photos line the hallways of some old historic churches. No one alive today ever heard them preach or knows much about them except that at some time in the past they were the shepherds of the church and they kept it going so that it still is around today. More than that, think about the then-important church secretaries and choir directors and treasurers and vestry or council members whose names might still be preserved in dusty records in banker's boxes stacked in storage but who are as good as forgotten.

The point is that one's importance to the work of God's kingdom is not necessarily indicated by one's fame or the lack of it. There are lots of workers in the fields of the Lord and not everyone makes the cover of Living Lutheran or The Living Church. And being well known is hardly an sign of one's worth as a human being. On Time Magazine's list of the 100 most significant figures in history, Hitler comes in at number 7. Yeah, he changed the world, but not for the better. Likewise Napoleon comes in at number 2, just under Jesus at number 1. But we wouldn't even know about Jesus if it hadn't been for some obscure fishermen and tax collectors and a tent-maker and (gasp!) even some socially unimportant women spreading the word about him.

The important thing is not having your name on a plaque or on a building or trending on social media. Rather it is what Jesus says in Revelation. To the church in Pergamum he says, “To the one who conquers, I will give him some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and on that stone will be written a new name that no one can understand except the one who receives it.” (Revelation 2:17) A secret name Jesus gives you! That's cooler than earthly fame. And to the church in Sardis, Jesus says, “...they will walk with me dressed in white, because they are worthy. The one who conquers will be dressed like them in white clothing, and I will never erase their name from the book of life, but will declare their name before my Father and before his angels.” (Revelation 3:4-5) Speaking of himself as the good shepherd, Jesus said, “He calls his own sheep by name...” (John 10:3) Who cares if the world knows your name? The world will not last forever. Its glory will fade. It is far better than earthly fame to be known individually by the eternal God and it is far sweeter than the acclaim of men is to be called by name by Jesus, who loves us and gave himself for each and every one of us.

Love and Obey

The scriptures referred to are John 15:9-17 and 1 John 5:1-6.

I can't remember if it was an episode of The Crown or an episode of Victoria but there is a point at which either Prince Albert or Prince Philip has to adjust to the fact that despite being married to the Queen, he is not a king but her subject. A lot of guys have trouble with their wives being more powerful than they are but they rarely have to literally obey her commands. And yet, by all accounts these were happy and successful marriages. Unlike, say, the more traditional marriages of Henry VIII. But he is an outlier. Most royal marriages do not end in beheadings.

Still the marriages of Albert and Philip point out that differences in power do not preclude love. Which helps us understand something that pops up in both our Johannine writings for this Sunday. Both tie our love for God with obeying his commandments. 1 John says, “For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments.” And in the previous chapter of the gospel of John, Jesus says, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me.” (John 14:21) Wait a second! Isn't God's love for us unconditional? Yes, but here John is talking about how we express our love for God. And we do it by obeying his commandments.

This bothers us because we tend to think of love as egalitarian. After all, the phrase “obey” is no longer part of the wife's vow in the wedding ceremony. If we love God, why do we need to obey him?

Even today we expect underage children to obey their parents and this does not mean that there is no love between them. And the very rational reason we expect this is that the parents, by virtue of being older, should know better than their children. Yes, we can think of exceptions to this, but they are by definition exceptional, just as the marriages of Henry VIII are to the rule of royal marriages. Thus, for instance, we do not let children enter into legal contracts on their own. Parents and children generally love each other despite their differences in power.

With God the difference is even greater. And God is not merely our metaphorical Father but our literal Creator. He designed us and how we and the universe work. So he knows infinitely better than we what we should and shouldn't do.

But he didn't make us as robots, merely following programming without the ability to decide if we want to or not. Because a robot cannot love. Ironically, that fact is at the heart of the Steven Spielberg movie A.I. In the film, a childless woman gets an android boy to be her son and at a certain point she activates an irreversible imprinting protocol that makes the android love her. And even when abandoned by her, the android boy seeks her and wants her to love him back. But despite his experiencing the feelings of love, it isn't real because it is programmed. He has no choice. Real love has to be a choice.

God created us so that we have a real choice of whether to love him back or not. But since the universe is created by the God who is love, love is the best choice to make. It's like the fact that you can live on junk food, but that's not the best food for your body in the long-term. To live a long and healthy life, you need to cut way back on the fries and soda and candy and eat a balanced diet, including, as your mother said, your vegetables. Mother usually knows best. God always does.

Human love is not exactly like God's love. In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis uses the fact that Greek has different words for love to explain the differences and the limitations of each. Yet they all get used metaphorically of God's love for us and ours for him. We have been talking about familial love, in which God is like our parent and we his children. In our gospel passage, Jesus speaks of his disciples as friends. And, yes, there are even parts of the Bible that use the image of romantic love for our relationship with God. The Song of Solomon would never have made it into the Bible had the Jews not seen it as poetic depiction of the love between God and his people Israel.

Why does the Hebrew Bible use the image of God and Israel as husband and wife? Because a parent and child do not have an absolute choice when it comes to loving one another or not. But individuals do when it comes to marriage. Rereading Genesis this year I was struck by how, even in a culture of arranged marriages, we are told that Isaac falls in love with Rebekah and Jacob with Rachel. Marital love requires choice and commitment and loyalty. And that makes it a pretty good metaphor for our relationship with God.

The New Testament changes that image somewhat to make Jesus the bridegroom and the church his bride. But in this metaphor Jesus isn't just a poor carpenter. He is the King of kings. Which means the church is not only his bride but also his subject.

I recently finished watching the HBO documentary series Pray, Obey, Kill about a Swedish Pentecostal church that devolved into a cult centered around a woman who called herself the “Bride of Christ” and the “Queen of Heaven.” As with all cults, she, the leader, was given the power to act as a god to her followers. She demanded gifts and ultimate loyalty. And, as with most cults, the whole thing degenerated into sexual sins, violence and eventually murder. I find it interesting that this so-called “Bride of Christ” did not feel she had to obey Jesus, her “husband,” when it came to his commands not to commit adultery, and not to harm others. But then cult leaders don't like to play second fiddle to God.

We love the real God but we are to obey him. This could be a problem if he were, like that cult leader, unreasonable and abusive. But, as it says in 1 John, “his commandments are not burdensome.” (1 John 5:3) The Greek word translated “burdensome” literally means “heavy.” In various contexts, it can mean oppressive or even violent or cruel. God's commandments aren't any of those. Especially the one Jesus gives in our gospel: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12)

And all of Jesus' commandments flow from that one. He commands us to treat others as we wish to be treated. (Luke 6:31) He commands us to be merciful as God is merciful. (Luke 6:36) He commands us to be reconciled to a sibling who has issues with us. (Matthew 5:24) He commands us to give to the needy. (Luke 6:30) He commands us to take care of the hungry, poor, sick, disadvantaged and despised. (Matthew 25:35-40) He commands us not to pass judgment on others nor to condemn them but to forgive them. (Luke 6:37) These may not always be easy but they are not oppressive.

They are in fact liberating. They liberate us from our suffocating solitary existence and give us useful roles in a community where we can express and receive love. They give us a sense of purpose and a variety of ways to use our talents and gifts. They expose us to people and situations we might not otherwise encounter. They challenge us to grow and enlarge our understanding of and our empathy for others. They help us become more Christlike, which is to say, more like the persons we were meant to be.

And 1 John makes this surprising assertion: “And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world.” Jesus said, “In the world you have trouble and suffering, but take courage—I have conquered the world.” (John 16:33) But Jesus does not conquer by spilling the blood of others and forcing them to be part of his kingdom, as worldly conquerors do. He conquers the world by shedding his own blood and inviting people to willingly become citizens of his kingdom.

Jesus started this process by what he did on the cross. Through his death and resurrection, he liberated us from the penalty of sin, the evil we commit. Through his Spirit living and working in us, he is slowly liberating us from the power of sin in our lives. When he comes again to consummate his kingdom, he will liberate us from the very presence of sin. By being reborn through Christ, we can be part of his conquering the world and its snares and temptations.

But we must be reborn through him to be able to keep his commandments. We cannot do them on our own power. Which is why he gives us his Spirit to help and to empower us. Only through the power of the Holy Spirit within us are we able to follow his commandments to love God with all we have and all we are and to love each other as Jesus loves us.

Of course the most obvious example of showing your love for someone by obeying them is foremost on our minds today. It is Mother's Day and the way we show our mothers that we love them is to listen to them and do what they say. Like God, your mother has your best interests at heart. She wants the best for you. She wants you to be the best person you can be. Which is why she tells you to eat your vegetables and to be polite and to drive the speed limit and to watch your language and to call her once in a while! Many of us have lost our mothers but we can still hear them giving us advice if we just stop and listen.

But the point is that they tell you these things because they love you. And God gives us his commandments for the same reason.

And out of love for you, so that you can get out of here early and make it to the Mother's Day brunch of your choice, I'm going to wrap this sermon up early and summarize it in a way you'll remember:

God loves you; love him back. God loves others; love them too.

Lost Connections

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

If Jesus had been born today, I believe today's gospel would be about cellphones. Let me explain.

In the community of the chronically ill, to whose ranks Covid-19 is adding people daily, you will eventually hear of the “spoon theory.” It's not really a theory but a makeshift explanation of our problems with energy. Apparently a chronically ill woman met a friend for lunch at a nice restaurant and the friend complained that they rarely did that anymore. The other woman, casting about for an explanation, gathered all the spoons from the table and said that her energy each day was like so many spoons, which she had to give up or spend on any activity she wished to do. Taking a shower might cost her a spoon or two, getting dressed another, going shopping might cost a great many. She had to be frugal and budget the spoons given her every day and that meant choosing not to do some things in order to have enough spoons or energy to do other things.

That was a good improvisation but, to my mind, it needs to be improved upon. I have no idea how many spoons or how much energy I have at the beginning of the day. I might wake to find I have a normal amount of energy, or little or none. And that can change at any time. I can start out feeling normal and suddenly feel my energy draining rapidly by mid-morning, or mid-afternoon or at night. I might not get any energy back the rest of the day. Or I might just as suddenly find my energy restored after 40 minutes or as much as 3 hours later. What's really frustrating is at the end of a bad day suddenly feeling my energy return—at bedtime! So you have to add to the spoon analogy some kind of waiter who randomly takes your spoons or alternately gives you more, perhaps as some kind of prank.

I was discussing this online with others in the ME/CFS community when someone gave us a much better analogy. We are like faulty cellphones. You know how you plug your phone in at bedtime so it will charge overnight? We have all had the experience of picking it up in the morning only to find that it wasn't fully charged or that it didn't charge at all. Or you do have a full charge in the morning but when you check it just an hour or two later you are mysteriously down to 15%! And the longer you have your phone, the longer it seems to take to charge it and the shorter the time it holds the charge. At some point it may not charge at all. So you have to get a new battery, or, if you have an iPhone, a whole new phone! Unfortunately you can't do that with a body that just won't charge or hold a charge.

If you are lucky you will find that the problem is in the charger cord. You check to see if it is firmly connected to your phone AND to the plug AND to the outlet. Or you change the cord out for a new one and all is well. But you may have discovered that those cheap cords you can pick up in the drug store or the convenience store have a very limited lifespan. Or the part that plugs into your phone gets bent easily and suddenly it won't stay in. And so in just a few months you have to get another cord.

In the first century, of course, they did not have electronics, so Jesus used the grapevine as his metaphor. But the point is the same: you need a good connection.

Many if not most of the problems we Christians have are due to not being properly connected to Jesus. And I think, as Jesus used the grapevine as his metaphor, we, who may not know much about viticulture, can get some insights from thinking about it in terms of the devices we use every single day.

If you think about it, we need 3 different kinds of connection: one to get power, one to connect to the internet and one to get the right content. So let's look at each.

Sometimes the problem is that we just aren't connected to the power source. You can probably see where I'm going with this. The analogy is obvious and so is the solution. If we don't feel any connection to God, we need to check if we are communicating with him in prayer and by reading his Word. Are we worshiping and sharing the body and blood of Christ with the body of Christ, his church? And are we doing these things regularly?

Sometimes the problem is not that our device isn't physically connected and charged, it's that it can't connect to the internet. You don't have enough bars or you don't have the password or the router is down. And if your device is a tablet or a Kindle, it is almost useless. Now you may have some downloaded content you can use offline, like a book. But you can't get Wikipedia or the news or the weather.

If you aren't connected to God, what you need to know about him and from him is cut off or limited. Some people walk around with content about God and Jesus and spiritual matters they got when they were in Sunday school. And then there's the question of what was transmitted to them. One of my Sunday School teachers probably attended Sunday School himself in the early 1900s. If he didn't keep up with the latest in Biblical scholarship and theological reflection, what he passed on was probably influenced by what he was taught a half century before he taught me.

In the same way people who aren't actively connected to God today haven't gotten any updates on their childhood conceptions of him. They have no real time connection to the person they are supposedly following. That's like your GPS being out and so you find an old Rand McNally road map in the glove box to guide you but it's copyrighted 1978! Some of those streets have been altered or renamed or cut off by a highway built in the intervening 40-odd years. On the other hand, Jesus, we might say, is the Waze, the truth and the life!

Seriously, though, there are a lot of outdated ideas about God out there. It's like when you boot up your computer in the morning and go to a familiar website. You might notice that it's not actually interactive at first. The stories are a day or more old. What you're really looking at is a screenshot of the last time you visited the site. You need to refresh it. And we need to refresh our ideas about God occasionally.

Some people are stuck with ideas of God that date back to Late Bronze or Early Iron Age theocratic Israel. So they are obsessed with things like ritual and purity and certain kinds of people being acceptable and others being excluded. They also believe a lot of interpretations of passages in the Bible that have been overturned by recent scholarship. But chiefly they lack the most fundamental understanding of the nature of God, found in our passage from 1 John: “God is love.” And they might actually disagree with 1 John that “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear...” How are we going to keep people moral if we don't teach them to fear God and hell?

They obviously haven't upgraded to Covenant 2.0, which would give them a clearer picture of God, focused through the lens of Jesus' teachings and his life, death and resurrection. And that leads us to a problem we see even when we are connected to the internet: the quality of the content. The internet gives us access to virtually all the knowledge of the world, yet some people gravitate to and get mired in the disinformation that is also out there. They are presented with angry and distorted takes on people and sinister motives that are supposedly behind certain groups and movements.

And the same thing happens with the Bible. People bring their own prejudices, fears and desires to the Bible and it often acts as a Rorschach test for them. Angry people see only an angry God. Fearful people see only a God to fear. Overly scrupulous people see a nitpicking God. People obsessed with purity see a God primarily interested in that. The Westboro Baptist Church elevated a person's reaction to homosexuality to the most important issue in Christianity. I often wondered how they dealt with things like the commands to love others including those we perceive as enemies. Then I heard an interview with a member who was expelled for basically asking about such things. The answer she gave is that they don't deal with it. They ignore such things or explain them away. A lot of people don't go to the Bible to hear God's position on things; they go to hear their positions coming out of God's mouth, even if they have to do a lot of editing to make that happen.

Like I said, the lens through which we view scripture must be Jesus. As John chapter 3 so famously says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever trusts in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world should be saved through him.” (John 3:16-17) Everything Jesus does is done out of divine love and to rescue, not condemn, the world. How do people miss that? It's held up at every single football game!

God is love; Jesus is the God who is love incarnate. If we want spiritual power, if we want to learn more about who God really is, if we want to do what he wants, not what we want him to want, we must be connected to Jesus. We need to connect to him through prayer, through his Word, through the sacraments he gave us, and through worship with others who are connected to him. We need to refresh our link to him and update our understanding. God's people aren't a bunch of nomadic tribes fighting to conquer a land anymore. We don't live under a mere human who rules as king by divine right. There is not one designated temple where we must go and make sacrifices. We don't belong to a race that must be kept pure from contact with other races.

“...the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world,” 1 John tells us. The focus of the Bible does at first narrow from all the people in the world to Abraham, and then to his grandson Jacob and his twelves sons, and then of the twelve to the tribe that comes from Judah and then to the descendants of David and finally to Jesus. But with Jesus the focus shirts to his twelve disciples and then to all the Jews, and to the Samaritans and to the Gentiles and then to every tribe and nation and tongue in the whole world. Because real love enlarges us and the circle of those we love. God loves everyone and wants everyone to know it. And we are to be the connection to and channel of that love.

“If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” That is a huge promise. But it doesn't mean that God is like Aladdin's genie. If we are connected to the God who is love and his words of love dwell in us, we will only ask for what will help us spread his love and connect more people to Jesus. And of course he will give us whatever we need to accomplish that.

And I hope that if you sense that you have lost your connection to Jesus, you react as you would if you find your phone is almost out of power or if you realize you have lost your internet connection or that you lost the link to the article you were reading online, and you immediately seek to restore the connection. The good news is you don't have to rely on some wires or an electric company or an internet provider. You can be in touch with God in a second, any time at all, wherever you are, whatever the rest of the world is doing or not doing. And with him you never have to worry about using up your data. We're on an unlimited grace plan.

The Logic of Love

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

My granddaughter got a kitten this week. It is very young and just weaned. She kept bringing it toys and I told her that it is a baby and it has just been taken from its mom and siblings and familiar surroundings. So I asked her how she would feel in the same situation. And she said, “Sad. And lonely. And scared.” I said, “Right. So you need to make her feel loved and safe, so she will trust you and come to see you as her mommy and feel a part of the family. Right now, she needs you to just hold her and pet her.”

Life has always been a matter of learning whom to trust and whom not to. A fortunate child has parents he or she can trust. This gives them the confidence to try and to do things, secure in the knowledge that their parents are reliable and have their best interests at heart. But eventually you go into the wider world and find out not everyone can be trusted. And, unfortunately, some kids learn that they can't trust their parents and this also shapes the way they approach the world.

The same principle applies to machines, systems and institutions. People become attached to certain products because of their reliable performance. Some folks have had a system work well for them. Some people have grown up in churches which gave them comfort and inspiration and community and a sense of purpose.

But again not everyone is so fortunate. Somebody said that a computer is the most expensive thing you will ever buy that you just expect not to work right at times. And so some people, having had a bad experience with them, distrust them and avoid using them if they can. Some people have had bad experiences with the justice system or some other branch of government and consequently do not trust them. Some people have had bad experiences with their church and, sadly, do not trust any other church or religious persons in general.

Trust affects behavior. If you trust a friend who recommends a restaurant, you will probably go there for a meal. If you trust an expert, you will take their advice. If you trust a news source, you will believe their reporting on a subject.

So what is crucial is whether the person or system or institution is trustworthy. And we usually determine that on the basis of our experience, our history with them, or with someone or something like them. A person who is burned when investing in one venture may be reluctant to ever invest again. A person dumped by one person they had a relationship with will be wary of entering into another relationship. Now that can be fine if the venture was a scam and you learned the telltale signs of a scam and how to distinguish it from a sound business venture. And if the other person in the relationship was a sociopath or narcissist or abusive, it can be a good thing if you are now able to spot the signs and symptoms of that kind of person and then find someone who does not have a personality disorder.

But often people overgeneralize their experience. People raised in trustworthy environments may be too naive and uncritical when they encounter predatory people and groups. And those who grew up in chaotic circumstances can have a hard time learning to trust others. “Once burned, twice shy,” as the saying goes.

We are seeing this play out in our country and in our world. Scandals and abuses have damaged the trust people have in government and other institutions. So we have a lot of people who do not trust the vaccines that have been released. People of color remember the Tuskegee study in which black men with syphilis were told they were being treated but they were not, in order that the course of the disease could be observed. Trust is built up or demolished by the history of a relationship.

Trust is vital to every relationship, from the one with the person you trust to cut your hair properly, and who trusts you to pay them for it, to those you love. It is difficult, if not impossible, to work with someone you don't trust. Because trust affects how you behave with them.

Trust, which is also called faith, is therefore at the heart of our relationship with God. And our history with God shows us we can trust him. It begins with his love for us, demonstrated in the fact that Jesus laid down his life for us. As Paul pointed out, it is rare for someone to give his life for a good man, yet Jesus died for us while we were still sinners. (Romans 5:7-8) The whole logic of our passage in 1 John derives from this fact.

You would trust somebody if they merely risked their life for you. If a firefighter went into a burning building, found you and said, “This way!” you would follow him. Jews trusted Gentile friends who hid them from the Nazis during the Holocaust because, if found out, the Gentiles would be sent to the death camps as well. And indeed some, like Corrie Ten Boom and her family, were sent to the camps and some, like her father and sister, died there. The Jews they hid and did not betray were saved, however. You can trust someone who puts their life on the line for you.

Jesus is a unique case in that he did die for us. Usually you would be grateful to such a person but their death would preclude any further relationship. But Jesus rose again and so we can continue our relationship with him and we can trust him more than anyone. Which means when he says that “this is the way to live,” we should follow him.

John is focused on something we see all too often in the church: people who say they believe in Jesus but their actions show that they don't. Not really. And we are not merely talking about those who talk righteously but do wicked things which are explicitly condemned by Jesus. It can also take the form of affirming what Jesus said but not actually doing anything about it. The example John chooses is the person who supposedly is the recipient of God's love but who doesn't do anything practical to help someone in need. If Jesus gave his life for us, it is only appropriate that we his followers give self-sacrificially out of love for others. And in most cases we are not asked to give up our life, just give up stuff in our life to help the lives of others.

“Little children, let us love, not in word and speech, but in truth and action.” Jesus told a parable in which a man asks his 2 sons to go into the vineyard and work. One says, “No,” but later changes his mind and does go. The other says, “Yes,” but doesn't actually go. “Which of the two did what his father wanted?” asked Jesus. And the answer is the first one. (Matthew 21:28-32) Words are cheap. Proof of love is found in what you do, not what you say.

And yet the church gets very invested in words. It has divided many, many times over words. Not God's Word so much as our words seeking to explain God's Word to our own satisfaction. And, yes, there are parts of the Bible that are difficult to understand. But that shouldn't distract us from the parts that are crystal clear. Like Jesus' commands to love others, including our enemies. Like his command to turn the other cheek and not repay evil with evil. Like his explicit statement that what we do to the less fortunate, to the hungry and thirsty and underdressed and sick and alien and imprisoned, we do to him, for they are his family members. Like the fact that he said the world would be able to identify his disciples by their love for one another, not, you'll notice, by their theology or their politics or denominational labels nor even by being excessively and ostentatiously righteous. In other words, not by the things church people so often think are the mark of the saved.

My mom read the Bible to us at bedtime, but I didn't read it for myself until I was a teen and I read a modern translation. And I was impressed by how often the word “love” appeared in the Bible. 969 times in all its forms, according to openbible.info. That's way more times than the words “holy” (686) or “righteous” (581) or “righteousness” (284) or “pure” (104). Or even “faith” (514). It's not that those things aren't important. But we tend to talk even more about stuff that it is essential not to forget. And God's Word talks about love a lot. Which makes sense since, as it says in 1 John 4:8, “God is love.”

All the other virtues come from love. If you are indifferent to other people, you do not care about justice for them. Or peace. Or forgiveness. Nor do those things matter if you hate other people. But if you love people, you want to see them treated fairly and justly. You want them to be well and live in peace. You are willing to be merciful and forgive them. God loves us and that why he wants those things for us. And why he demands them from us.

Everything follows from the logic of love. And love acts when those we love need action. When your child or your spouse or your best friend needs help, you provide it or find someone who can. You don't stand around mouthing pious platitudes or wishing them well. You act. And that's what John is saying. “Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and in action.”

And again, if you really love someone, you care about the truth. You don't want a doctor lying about your loved one's diagnosis or prognosis. You don't want your loved one to lie either. And you know that if you lie to them it is a betrayal of the trust that upholds your relationship. The truth is not always easy but lies and falsehoods poison relationships.

Another thing that love does is motivate you to help your loved one be the best version of themselves. You want your child to be a good person. You want to be married to a good person. You want to be friends with a good person. So if you see them doing or contemplating destructive or self-destructive actions, you speak to them and encourage them to be better than that. You may even have to be blunt at times, if they don't respond to gentler language. You may love them regardless, but certain actions and words can damage and cripple the relationship and nobody in love wants that.

Ultimately John summarizes it thus: “And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.” That is what Jesus requires of us in a nutshell. First, that we should put our trust in the essential nature of Jesus, the Son of God, who is his Anointed One. If God is love, then Jesus is love incarnate, love embodied in a person who is both fully human and fully divine. Jesus both knows and understands what it is like to be human and he can also use his power to help and to save us. And that why we can trust him.

But while we are saved by his grace when we put our trust in him, we are also to reflect his nature in our lives by loving others. If God is love and we are created in the image of God, we are most like God when we love. And the recovery of that image of God in us is a big reason Jesus came to us and did what he did. If we do not love, it would be like Superman discovering his powers and then not using them to help the world, but just using his heat vision to make popcorn. Worse, 1 John 4:8 says, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” A Christian who does not love others is a contradiction in terms.

But who, apart from God, can love everyone? Nobody. Not unless we have God's Spirit living in us and through us. We receive his Spirit at baptism and we are to grow in his Spirit. However, as Paul reveals, one can quench the Spirit. (1 Thessalonians 5:19) One can ignore his voice and his urging as did Jonah. So we can resist God's Spirit within us. But if we do not obey his commandments, how can we say we are his followers?

If you trust someone who has more knowledge than you, you do what they say. God knows everything, as our passage reminds us. So we do what he says. And he says to put our trust in Jesus and love one another. That's the only thing that will really change the world in the way God wants it to be changed.

People try to change the world with force and intimidation. If those don't succeed they use manipulation and deceit. Those things can change the world but not for the better. One study found that violent movements only succeed ¼ of the time. Non-violent movements succeed twice as often. And as for lies, they are eventually exposed.

We are to show our love in truth and in action. Like the first Christians who showed God's love to the poor (Acts 4:34-35), to the sick and disabled (Acts 5:16; 8:7), to those in prison (Acts 16:22-34) and to people of all races and nations (Acts 8:26-37). The church went on to build hospitals and schools. The abolition movement was begun by Christians as was the civil rights movement. Today churches run homeless shelters and food pantries and literacy programs. Local churches provide space for AA and other support groups. National churches help immigrants get settled. They are often the first to respond to disasters through their relief programs. By acting together, we can fulfill Jesus' words that we will do greater works than his. (John 14:12)

But that doesn't excuse us as individuals from showing love to the people we meet in ways, big and small. Our witness is crucial. We are made in God's image, which Jesus, the very image of God, came to restore. And our goal is to grow and become more Christlike every day. We may be the only Christ some people encounter. And while we may not yet offer a perfect reflection of the God who is love, we should at least not introduce distortions into our reflection of him. We need to be trustworthy and loving.

People, like kittens taken to a new home, can be sad and lonely and scared. They need a place where they feel safe and loved. They need people they can trust and who make them feel a part of the family. And if they find this faith and love they will also find hope—hope of a new life with their loving heavenly Father and his Son who loves them enough to die for them and the Spirit who pours out his love into their hearts for all eternity.

No Conspiracy

The scriptures referred to are 1 John 1:1-2:2 and John 20:19-31.

I just finished watching the HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm about the conspiracy theory that seized the imaginations of so many for the last 3 years. And while the preponderance of evidence is that it was started as a LARP, or Live Action Role Playing game on the internet, before being taken over by a pornography website owner and his son, what is most disturbing is how many people accepted the idea that the world is run by a secret cabal of baby-eating Satanists. As Joseph Uscinski, University of Miami Associate Professor of Political Science, points out, people who believe in one conspiracy theory tend to believe in others. And so Q Anons also bought into other preexisting ideas of certain people pulling the strings behind the curtain of global and national affairs, ideas that came from white supremacy, antisemitism, right wing extremists and Christian heresies. And what is dismaying is how widely this melange of far-out ideas spread. Though it started in the US, Q has followers in the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Spain and Latin America. It is a worldwide cult.

As someone said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” And with the internet, it can make it all the way around the globe. I like the internet. I use it extensively to check facts and sources, like that quote which I erroneously thought was said by Mark Twain. The website Quote Investigator tracks the original version of the saying to Jonathan Swift in 1710. The internet is a great tool for discovering the truth about something. So it's ironic that Q would drop hints and ambiguities and ask riddles, causing its followers to do the “research” to figure out just what the heck the messages meant. No wonder they pulled in so many disparate and bizarre ideas.

What is upsetting is how many Christians got dragged into it. Many of my colleagues found themselves trying to educate members of their congregations on what the Bible really said, much as medieval bishops had to tell their people that Jews did not eat Christian babies for Passover.

One appeal of conspiracy theories is letting people think they know some big dark secret others don't. Another is they claim to explain what's wrong with society or the world and who's responsible. And it takes contemporary conflicts—between countries or political parties or religious groups or ethnic groups—and turns them into manifestations of a great cosmic war between good and evil. And so those whom the theorists disagree with are cast ultimately as agents of Satan. And that gives those who identify as being on the side of God an excuse to do whatever it takes to root out evildoers.

And unfortunately Christians who see things this way tend to frame events in apocalyptic terms. They see themselves as part of God's army whose job is to fight those on the other side, often literally. Which means they haven't really read the apocalyptic passages in the New Testament very closely. Christians are never shown as or told to be warriors for God. They are commanded only to be witnesses to the gospel of Jesus, and, should it come to that, martyrs. God fights his own battles.

Jesus also lived at a very tense time. His people saw the Gentiles, and especially the Romans, as Satan's agents and some were all too ready to revolt against the empire. Which they did a few decades later—disastrously. So at the beginning of all 3 gospel accounts of his apocalyptic talk, Jesus says not to assume that this is the end of the world. “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginnings of birth pains.” (Mark 13:7-8; cf. Matthew 24:6-8 and Luke 21:9) And as any parent knows, birth pains start long before the actual event.

Jesus is also concerned about people falling for false Messiahs. “Watch out that you are not deceived. For many will come in my name, claiming 'I am he,' and, 'The time is near.' Do not follow them.” (Luke 21:8; cf. Mark 13:5-6 and Matthew 24:4-5) And “Then if anyone says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ!' or “There he is!' do not believe him. For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.” (Matthew 24:23-24) Jesus, and only Jesus, is the Messiah, as our passage from the gospel of John reminds us. (v. 31)

Written during a time of persecution, the first letter of John seeks to correct problems that churches were having on three essential issues: beliefs, behavior and belonging.

First, John emphasizes that he knows who he is talking about: Jesus. He is speaking as a companion of Christ—“we have heard”...”we have seen with our eyes”...”touched with our hands...” Jesus is not imaginary or an illusion. He calls Jesus “the Word of life.” This harks back to the first few verses of John's gospel. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God....In him was life and the life was the light of mankind...Now the Word became flesh and lived among us. We saw his glory—the glory of the one and only, full of grace and truth, who came from the Father.” (John 1:1,4, 14) Jesus is the Word, the flesh and blood expression of who God is, the God of life. In his words and actions he revealed the nature of God.

John then reveals the reason for writing his letter: “we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you may also have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” In other words, I am writing this so you can share in our fellowship and in the fellowship between Jesus and his Father. And then he goes on to show just how to do this.

First, we have to recognize that “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” In other words, God is good and true and holy. Darkness hides what is false and what is evil. God does not ask us to deal in evil or spread falsehoods. And anyone who does is not acting in God's name. One interesting thing in the Q documentary is how its followers would try to explain away or ignore predictions that did not come true. The Wikipedia page has a list of some of the major predictions Q got wrong. Why didn't Q being wrong tip people off that it wasn't true?

It turns out people have an amazing ability to not deal with facts that contradict their beliefs. They dismiss or diminish their significance. In fact, studies show that being confronted with facts that challenge your deepest beliefs won't necessarily weaken them but can actually strengthen the hold of such beliefs. I recently ran into a nurse who believed that the vaccine is really an attempt to put a microchip in us. I said, “Why? We already have things that monitor where we are and what we do and say: our cellphones. And we say 'yes' to all of those service agreements that ask if an app can use our camera and microphone and have access to our location and contacts. Why would anyone go to the trouble of creating a fake virus just to accomplish a less easy way of doing those things?” I don't know that I convinced them.

John is especially interested in the contradiction between our beliefs and our behavior. “If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true...” No Christian should be leading a life in which they are deliberately doing what is evil or anything that must be kept in the dark because it goes against what Jesus told us not to do. Part of the reason that less people are identifying as church members these days is because of the exposure of prominent Christians who abused their positions to cover up sexual and financial sins. You'd think they would have heeded Jesus when he said, “Nothing is hidden that will not be revealed, and nothing is secret that will not be made known. So then whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms will be proclaimed from the housetops.” (Luke 12:2-3) And in the information age, every misdeed will appear on every device in the world. It's bad enough when a beloved actor, comedian, writer or filmmaker is exposed as an abuser; how much worse it is when a Christian leader is revealed to be a hypocrite who harmed those they were supposed to help!

John says, “...but if we walk in the light as he is himself in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” Sins that are not dealt with disrupt our relationship not only with God but with each other. Because the person has put their own personal concerns and desires over the commandments to love. Remember that Jesus linked the commandments to love God and to love others. Why? Because, as John says later in this letter, “For anyone who does not love his brother or sister, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must love his brother and sister.” (1 John 4:20-21) Or as Sister Claire Joy put it, “...love God above all, and then prove it...by loving your neighbor as yourself.”

Of course, in this life we are not perfect, which is why John goes on to say, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Never trust anyone who claims to have never made a mistake or to have never done anything wrong. Every time I see a meme online about never apologizing, never listening to other people's criticisms, or never letting anyone stand in the way of your dream, I feel there should be a disclaimer: “Does not apply to narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths and the arrogant.” The world has suffered too much from people who wouldn't listen to others or take constructive criticism or admit they were wrong. You need to acknowledge your sins. If you don't tell the doctor your symptoms or pretend that nothing is wrong, he can't help you. And if you do not confess your sins to God, he can't help you either. Because it means you either don't trust him enough to admit your sins to him or you don't trust him to forgive them once he hears them.

But next John says, “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” John assures us that he will forgive us our sins and what's more, he will cleanse us from all of them, not just some. Sometimes, when Jesus healed someone, he would say, “Your sins are forgiven.” (Mark 2:5) He never said, “A few or some of your sins are forgiven.” Jesus wants us to be totally well spiritually as well.

John goes on to say, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.” Of course, he wants us to avoid spiritually and morally unhealthy thoughts, words and acts, just as a doctor wants you to avoid physically unhealthy habits. But it would be unrealistic to think we will always do that. So he adds, “But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous...” Jesus is on our side, advocating for our forgiveness and restoration.

And we know he takes our salvation seriously because “...he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins...” Jesus poured his life out on the cross for us. As John says later in the letter, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.” (1 John 3:16) Everything Jesus does demonstrates his love for us. He wants to be in fellowship with us and so we know he is motivated by his love to advocate for us when we fall.

Nor is his love limited. John says, “...he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” Remember that the gospel of John famously says, “God so loved the world...” Which means so should we. And we need to spread the good news of that love at every opportune moment.

Which is the opposite of what a conspiracy theory does. It singles out a group or groups of people that are so evil that we must stop them by whatever means necessary. Including extermination. It's what Hitler did. It's what all would-be demagogues do: designate one or more groups as scapegoats and blame everything that is wrong with society on them. Which implies that the favored group is not at fault, or, in other words, without sin, which John says is a lie.

In the passage from Isaiah we read in Holy Week, he says, “All we like sheep have gone astray; every one of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the sin of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6) All have gone astray, every one of us. No group, no individual is innocent. We are all in the same boat and we all need God's grace. Yet we are like people on death row pointing fingers at each other. We all need mercy. We all need a pardon. Jesus provided it at great cost and it is free to those who admit they need it.

Yes, there are conspiracies out there. And the reason we know this is because someone in them blabbed! Someone always does. As Ben Franklin said, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” Ironically that's one reason we know that the disciples weren't part of a conspiracy. Chuck Colson, Nixon's hatchet man, who came to Christ and started the ministry Prison Fellowship, said this: “I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world—and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.”

As John says, we saw him; we heard him; we touched him. We know what we are talking about. We know who we are talking about and with whom we share fellowship. And we know this: that God is love. Not hate. Not blame. Not condemnation. Love. And those who know God love one another and want to spread that love to others. It's not a deep dark secret. It's the good news and it's for everyone.