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Grace, mercy and peace be to you …
What if someone were walk up to you and ask you if you’re an American… what would most of us say? “Of course I am!” In fact, if asked how you came to be an American…. most of us would say it was because we were born here … right?
Excuse the grammar … but Americans are something that we “be.” Our Citizenship was not something we obtained by the sweat of our brows or by the size of our checks. We just are Americans … plain and simple.
Now today, we hear in the first Epistle of John that we have a second citizenship, as it were. We are called children of God … because that is what we are.
Last week we talked a bit about God being our perfect parent. He can’t be our Perfect Parent if we’re not His children, can we?
One of my pastors in years back would take a child whom he had just baptized and raise him up and say the words of 1 John 3, verse 1 …
“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called the children of God, and so we are.”
Truth is… we became Americans as we took our first infant breaths on American soil … We became Children of God as He imparted His Spirit to us through His Word and the waters of Holy Baptism.
Did we DO anything to make ourselves Americans? No, we were just born here. Did we DO anything to make ourselves Children of God? No! We were just born again by God through the water and the Word.
So, if you were to ask the average Christian citizen of the United States the question: … “Are you an American?” Most would say, “certainly.” But if you were to ask them about their Christian citizenship… the answers you are likely to get might sound more like, “I hope so.” “I think so.” …expressing more doubt about their Christian citizenship…. than about their being a citizen of e Pluribus Unum.
Why that doubt? Because people don’t really see membership in God’s kingdom as a state of being … like being an American Citizen. Our Christianity somehow in our heads gets equated to how often we go to church, or to how much money we put in the offering … or to how often we pray, or read the Bible ... or even if we have made a decision for Christ … all Do-ing things… not Be-ing things.
That’s why what happens in Baptism … especially so in infant Baptism… is such a powerful an image. It shows us that becoming a Christian is an act of God’s grace on our behalf. He adopts us … and He makes us one of His Children … without any merit or worthiness in us … without us jumping through any hoops … without us even deciding for Him.(more about that later.)
So now … the answer to the question, “Are you a Christian?” for all of us should be just as firm and as certain as our answer to the question about our nationality … “Yes, I’m a Christian… because of God’s pure love for me, because He has made me His child…
As soon as anything we DO gets involved in determining our Christian citizenship … doubt immediately jumps in with both feet. Did you really DO enough? Were you as sincere when you did it as Molly or Joe?
None of that! We BE Christians solely because of God’s Grace …. Because of His love for us in Jesus Christ. And that should be very comforting.
But Pastor, why do those doubts seem to keep creeping back in?
Because of the devil, the world and our own flesh. What do they do? They tempt us… not to ACT like Christians … to DO other than what Christians DO. And when we DO those things, in comes the Devil to level the charge: “See what you just did! (Never mind that I just told you it was alright to do it!) But now, how could God ever love a person who does the kind of thing you just did?”
And with that… comes the guilt and the doubt. Guilt that shouldn’t be there … because Christ Jesus died on the Cross for whatever sin we just committed … And doubt because, in our humanness … we believe that God Loves us … only if we’re Good.
Remember again, God is our perfect parent. He loves us because we are His. It’s about our identity … not about our actions.
Human parents, imperfect as we are… still love our children the same way … we love them because they are ours … in spite of their sometimes deliberate disobedience.
Speaking of which… I’ll tell another story on myself. Back in those days when I was 8 or 9, I had been told by my mother very strictly to say out of the part of our subdivision that was under construction.
The builders had built several home foundations that were below grade, like with crawl spaces, but had ceased construction for some reason. These foundations had filled with water and had become what looked like raw cinderblock swimming pools …
My friends and I had no interest in getting into them, the water was ugly … but they were great places to launch lumber scraps pretending that they were ships, which we could bomb with rocks, dirt clods, or whatever else was at hand. Guy-stuff.
Well, one day … a couple of friends and I went to the forbidden place and we began our bombing runs … I picked up something heavy and standing on the blocks, I heaved it over my head at the ships and lost my balance and fell into the foundation.
The water was only knee deep, but my jeans and shoes were soaked with muddy, oily water. No way could I hide where I’d been. I expected to be killed by my mother.
But, when I got home, she was so distracted by my younger brothers … that she just told me to go change … and spared me the expected tongue lashing and whatever other punishments might have followed.
Now… although I didn’t mind missing the punishment I was due … because of that, though, I do remember wondering about her concern for me.
… Because if she was that adamant about me not breaking that rule … and I got off … I wondered if she really, truly cared all that much about me in the first place.
Side-bar. Kids at that age do think like this… but they only go so deep. A psychologist might infer from this story that the reason I broke the rule and “accidently” fell in was to get my mother’s attention all along. A nine-year-old might not think that deep … but the end result was the same … my mother’s not punishing me led to me conclude that she didn’t care as much as I had hoped.
And so … maybe… isn’t that the same sort of situation we put ourselves into with God? He calls us and makes us His Children … and then expects us, out of love, to chose to keep His Law, His Commandments.
But when we’re tempted and we knowingly and intentionally disobey … and then when lightning doesn’t come down from heaven and vaporize us on the spot … aren’t we left wondering if God noticed… or if He even cares? Or…. if He truly loves us?
Now, my mother, God love her, was a good parent, but she wasn’t perfect. I expected to have been tarred, feathered and grounded.
That she would have held me accountable for my actions… I not only had put my life at risk, but I had also directly challenged and spurned her authority.
Now when we intentionally spurn God’s authority, He has every right to throw the book at us as well. But He doesn’t. He punished Jesus in our place. Jesus is our scapegoat.
It’s like when I came home from the construction site covered in mud and guilt … He washed me off, accepted my apology, forgave me and took my guilt away. All the punishment I was due, however, didn’t go away … it went on Jesus in my place.
And so … maybe if you’re feeling like you’ve been getting away with something because you’ve not been confronted with the consequences … you’ve concluded that God isn’t affronted enough to care….
Well … God reminds us every week of where your and my punishment has gone. He calls us to His table and says; “In, with and under these earthly elements of Bread and wine … I give you the very body and blood of My one-and-only son … who gave up his life as a sacrifice, out of love… for you… to suffer the punishment that you deserve.”
To wit: Jesus was tarred, feathered and grounded for my transgression, in my place, in God’s eyes. God still sees me as His child, yet with my sins removed, paid for, cancelled … for the sake of Jesus suffering and death.
So now … all this brings us to verse three of our reading from first John. We hear there again, “And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.”
If our hope, our confidence of our salvation is in Christ Jesus, then we are to purify ourselves…. How do we do that?
Well, God never tells us to do anything without also giving us the wherewithal to do it. When He made you His Child, He also imparted the Holy Spirit into your heart. And so, with the help of the Spirit, He has given you the power to say “NO!” to sin.
Does that mean, then, with the Holy Spirit’s help, we are to stop sinning? Let’s look at it this way … if every time I sin, I remember that the punishment due me for spurning God’s authority and doing what He forbids … is being laid on Jesus … how does that square with who I am…namely: His child?
“Jesus loves me, this I know” … we sing. We sing it because we know that Jesus loves each of us so much that He willing died a sacrificial death on our behalf. Does it make sense, then, that I would intentionally go out and do things that would punish Jesus even more, He, who died for me…?
…To make His hurt on the cross, all that more profound??? …There’s a lot of love in Jesus, isn’t there?
Well … today we are observing All Saints day. And usually on this day, the spotlight is on all those of us who once were here on earth, but who are now gracing the Throne of God in heaven.
Their spiritual journey on earth has come to an end. And we give thanks to God for the roles they played in our lives, both physically and spiritually.
But we are still in our pilgrimage here on earth, and yet we are called saints for the very same reason they are. Because our sins have been forgiven, just as theirs had been forgiven, through the blood of Jesus Christ.
And so … God, through St. John today, is calling us, as Saints, to BE who we are… BE His Children, even as we are still here on earth: Be pure, even as Jesus is Pure. BE Pure. Not play at it, emulate it, mimic it, or make excuses why we’re not.
We can never make ourselves a Child of God … only God can do that. But we have to work at living like one … And that’s where a so-called “decision for Jesus” has meaning.
- When we decide to pray that He would help us by His Spirit to make our lives a refection of His.
- When we decide to confess our sins, receive His unconditional forgiveness and, with His help, set our eyes on Him instead of on the attractions that have led us astray in the past…
-- then, we are deciding to be whom HE has already made us. Saints!
That’s our part of the Christian life … striving to think, speak and act like who we already ARE … a child of God… and so then, living like one to His glory…
You could very well call it… deciding to live “All for Jesus.”
In Him. Amen.
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