from Rev. Jill Saxby
1 John 3:16-24
Here we are in the third week of Easter. I love the old-fashioned name for this season, “Easter-tide.” The high tide moment of the whole Christian year is Easter, when we tell the story again of the women discovering Jesus’ empty tomb. Then, like the ocean’s tide, the Easter tide rolls out from that moment, and slowly, but profoundly, changes everything.
I once sat for a long time, trying to see the moment when the tide changed in a small cove off the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, site of the world’s largest tides. The day before, we had easily seen the profound change caused by the outgoing tide by visiting at high tide, then coming back six hours later to look again. At high tide, there was no beach, simply a small inlet, ringed with trees growing right up to the water’s edge. By low tide, a large bay and a beach a quarter-mile wide had appeared, and those same trees were now clinging to the tops of cliffs as tall as six story buildings.
But if you sit and stay to try to watch the change, it’s hard to see much happening from one moment to the next. Just one small wave after another.
That’s how it is, I think, with Easter. The Easter-tide rolls out from the empty tomb. It washes over the doubts of the disciple Thomas. It flows through the upper room where other disciples are hiding and overcomes their fear and grief. It rolls on over the road to Emmaus, and eventually into all the corners of the Empire, and changes everything. Eventually, somehow, it reaches the shores of our own hearts and of our own church. Often, the Easter-tide effect can’t be seen or felt in any single moment, and yet it can still, over time, change lives.
Our scripture today is a letter to a group of small churches about a century after the women found the empty tomb, from someone who was trying to describe how to see with our own eyes the difference Easter makes in the world. He says the key to Easter’s power is God’s self-giving love: “we know love by this, that he gave his life for us.” A little further in his letter, John puts it even more simply and directly, in what I think is one of the most beautiful and powerful verses in the Bible: “God,” he says, “is Love.” God is Love. Love is God.
If that is true, then if you’re searching for God, what you should be looking for is evidence of self-giving love – not just in words, but love in truth and love in action. Where such Love is, says John, there is Christ Risen. Where such Love is, there is the church as it was meant to be.
Where such Love is, there God abides. “Abide” is another wonderful old word, like “Easter-tide.” These days, no one who wanted to know your address would ask, “where do you abide?” But “to abide” does mean “to dwell,” with a sense of permanence about it. God abiding in us means more than a passing emotion or even a moment of mystical insight. It’s more than the words of any doctrine or creed can ever express. God abiding in us is Love dwelling in us — subtle, powerful, life-changing.
The 20th century Christian philosopher Simone Weil, put it this way: “God created through Love and for Love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love, and beings capable of love, from all possible distances.”
Our letter-writer John says there are two parts to this Love – God’s for us and ours for others, especially those in need. The two parts are so essential to each other they can’t be separated. To say they are like two sides of the same coin doesn’t really capture it. The image that comes to my mind is a very modern one: the double-helix, like a DNA molecule — two strands intertwined, intricate, essential to life. Love that lays down its life for others is the DNA of the church.
John’s letter gives a powerful example of what this Love might look like in action: God’s love cannot abide, he says, in anyone who has the world’s goods but refuses to give them away to help a brother or sister in need. Certainly, this is exactly what makes the Community Crisis Ministry here at our church a true ministry to all of us – not only to those we help but to all of us who support this program with our gifts and prayers. This ministry gives us a chance to open a space in our midst for God’s love to abide.
But this scripture says God’s love abiding within us is about more that sharing our worldly goods with those in need. John was writing to a group of churches that felt threatened with extinction from overwhelming outside pressures. And yet still, he told them: “he laid down his life for us, we ought to lay down our lives for one another.”
What could this idea possibly have to do with us, here on the safe and distant shores of North America in the 21st century? Well, the truth is that the old forms of church we’re all familiar with are passing away in our generation. Already, here in northern New England, fewer people attend church weekly than in any region of the country. The fastest growing group in Maine are those who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious.” The mainstream churches are finding it harder to maintain the old, outward forms of church – the big 19th century buildings, the large professional staffs, the denominational offices.
But, I think John’s prescription is still the right one. I believe that in the years to come we will see new life arising in the churches – precisely at those points and exactly in those ways where the we figure out how to lay down the church’s life for others.
There will be lots of ideas about how to do this and what this means. But I’d like to offer just one this morning, and to illustrate it I want to share a story with you, a folk tale that originated in Africa, I’m told.
Once there was a village of people who lived beside a river. One day, the people saw something come floating down the river. It turned out to be several life rafts, carrying people who were wounded and starving. The villagers waded out into the river, grabbed the life rafts and pulled them in. They gave them food and shelter and care. The next day, the villagers were amazed to see another, larger bunch of life rafts coming downstream toward them, with even more people. Again, they pulled them in and cared for them. This went on the next day as well, and the next, each time, more and more people in need came down the river, storm-tossed and suffering.
The villages’ resources were starting to feel the strain. They held a village meeting. Some argued for ignoring the next batch of life-rafts that came by. We’ve done all we can, they said, what more could be expected of us. Some said, who are these people anyway? They are strangers, not one of us, why should we have to get stuck with helping them? They argued long into the night until finally, one wise person stood up and said, maybe tomorrow, first thing, a bunch of us should go upstream together and find out what is causing these people to become wounded and hungry and homeless and see if we can stop it. And so they did.
At the Maine Council of Churches, we use this story a lot to describe what we think the calling of the churches is now. We call it doing “doing upstream ministry.” Many of you as individuals do this sort of upstream ministry every day in your own lives. But I want to suggest that we as a congregation could do more to go upstream together. That because of the Community Crisis Ministry and our other outreach programs here, we have a calling to do so.
Our scripture today says we are to love not in mere words and speech but “in truth and in action.” But speaking the truth to power is one of the most important actions we can take on behalf of our brothers and sisters in need.
Because the truth is: one in eight Maine families is living in poverty today. One in six of our children, one in ten of our senior citizens are poor. For a family of three, which is the average family size in Maine, that means living on about $19,000 a year. The truth is that here in Maine we just took away health care coverage from 14,000 of our low-income neighbors, many of whom suffer from chronic illness. The truth is that virtually everyone we help here at the church has already exhausted their General Assistance benefits before they come to us, but now our legislature is being asked to cut the program even more. The truth is that much of what you hear about cheating and fraud in the welfare system is a myth — every study has shown that the rates of fraud in Maine are actually very low.
There are things that need to be said now, out loud and without fear, by people of faith going upstream together. We are the ones who have felt the effects of the Easter-tide, God’s self-giving love, working in our own hearts. We can do what I call the “ministry of showing up,” bringing an unexpected presence and a moral voice to our civic debates about taxes and public benefits. We are the ones who can say that our incarnational faith teaches us to treat others as persons to be loved, not problems to be solved or wished away. We are the ones who worship a God of abundance. We can say that the truth is, in our rich country, we do have enough for everyone to be fed, to be sheltered and have access to affordable health care. What’s lacking is the moral and political will to make it happen. We can show up and say, we’ve listened carefully to the Sermon on the Mount, and nowhere does Jesus ever say: “blessed are those who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.”
For each person in need whom we help directly through the Crisis Ministries program there are tens of thousands more whom we could help by going upstream, showing up in the halls of power and speaking the truth our faith has taught us, about how God has something better in mind for humanity than endless competition, winners and losers, haves and have-nots.
What I’ve learned at the Maine Council of Churches is that when people like you do show up and speak out, it makes a difference. Your words are not mere words, because you have loved your brothers and sisters in need in truth and in action. You have a powerful witness to make.
Once the Easter-tide has rolled through, the God who is Love is already at work. Love is calling us to lay down our privilege to remain silent when others are suffering; to lay down our fear of appearing too political; to lay down our suspicion that we are somehow different from those wounded people out on the life rafts. Once the Easter-tide has rolled through, there is no more “them and us.” There is only Christ, the Risen One, who said “the hungry and homeless are me; as you treat them, you are treating me.” Love is calling us to expand, each day, who “counts” in our hearts as a “brother or sister.”
The Easter-tide has rolled through this church. The Community Crisis Ministry is one of the easiest ways to see it at work. If God is Love, then we ourselves can become what so many people, hungry in body and in spirit, are searching for right now: the evidence of Easter — proof you can see and hear and touch — that God is real, that Jesus lives, and that new life is arising, even now, even here, in this very room. Amen.