But How Do You Know?

I John 3:16-24

Our reading today contains two paragraphs.  And both begin with the phrase, “This is how we know . . . “  Verse 16 reads, “This is how we know what love is.”  Verse 19 reads, “This is how we know we belong to the truth.”  This section of the letter suggests that those who would receive and read the letter had questions about how we know. 

This is a good time for us to talk together about how we know what we think we know.  Do we know anything as people of faith?  Do we know anything as those following Jesus Christ together?  What is it?  And how do we know it?

 

And remember, this letter is written to a group of people who were living in the confusing, perplexing aftermath of a church split.  Some had left the community.  And the respected teachers were at odds with each other about what was most important. The groups who chose to leave left because they were inflamed with the clarity of a new teaching that took them in new directions.  And those left behind are bound to ask, “How do we know we belong to the truth?”

Do you ever stop and wonder whether you might be wrong about a whole range of things?  Even stuff really important to you?  Even stuff you’ve based your life on?  One sign of being an adult is realizing that you could be wrong about some of the most basic and fundamental things you believe.

We’re pretty good at shielding ourselves from life’s largest questions.  We stay busy.  We work.  We raise kids or take care of parents.  We’re focused on our own health issues.  When invite a thousand distractions to make their home in us.

But there are still those unavoidable moments of quiet.  They don’t come round often.  But they’re there.  Those open spaces in our lives where we finally emerge from the dense woods out into the open meadow.  And it’s there in those spaces, at those moments, when the large questions emerge for us.  These questions can shake you.  They can rattle what appeared moments before to be cast in concrete.

Sometimes life-shaping questions emerge when we travel.  By encountering a different place, with different architecture, different habits of speech, and different rhythms of life, a new light is cast back on what you took to be “normal” about your home.  And once you travel, you can no longer see it as “normal.”  When we travel, we begin to notice all oddities and bits of strangeness about our home places. 

Both Stephanie and I grew up here in the Midwest, car culture.  But in New Haven and New York, we walked almost everywhere we went.  We own cars.  But we don’t like owning them.  And in fact, with Henry now 15, we’re likely going to acquire a third car we don’t want.  There were many days in New York when we would walk 8 or 10 miles, on purpose.  And now I find myself unwilling to park over a block from my destination, or else I’ve failed at some kind of parking game. 

I just finished a piece of travel writing by Pico Iyer.  The Lady and the Monk is a book about a year Iyer spent in Kyoto, Japan.  Iyer tries to pay attention to the uniqueness of life in Japan: how Japanese festivals and parades convey the quiet and controlled character prized by the Japanese; how spare and sparse are their furnishings; how much their lives are bound by tradition, expectation, and duty; how they not only remove their shoes before entering a home, but really care that the shoes are lined up just so.  But of course you needn’t go to New York or Kyoto.  Kansas City will do.  Or a walk.  Or a book.

Sometimes life-shaping questions emerge when you learn to see your family in a new light.  We all grow up in families, and it’s all we know.  Whatever happens, we take as normal, because it’s normal for us.  And then we form a friendship and begin spending time in the house of another family.  And we see that they do things very differently.  Or we go off to college and meet people from other places, whose families looked nothing like ours.  Or we get married, and experience the shock that our spouse’s family doesn’t observe birthdays and holidays like ours did.

When you become aware that not all families lived like your family, you begin to see your family with a clarity never available before.  You might notice that underneath your family’s life there was some fear.  Or that they were anxious in ways that made them save too much or spend too much.  You might notice that there were secrets buried and not to be mentioned.  Or that there wasn’t much physical affection.  Or that your family discouraged honesty about what everyone felt.  Or that there was an unwritten rule that it was never ok to be sad, or depressed, or angry.  What once felt normal, now appears to us as the highly specific and imperfect thing it is.  This realization can happen at 12 or 52, but it always shakes our easy confidence.

Sometimes life-shaping questions emerge as we grow older and look back on the path we’ve traveled.  Why did I choose this path rather than that one?  Did I go for what I wanted?  Or did I choose the safe path out of fear – fear of the unknown, fear of risk, fear of failure?  Did I pursue the dreams that animated my youth?  Did I stretch and find the upper limits of what I’m capable of?  Or did I choose the path of least resistance – the easy way?  Why did I marry him or her?  And why then?  Wouldn’t someone else have been better for me?  Why did I have kids so early?  Or why so late?  Or why didn’t I have children?  And why am I on this career path – when it allows me to express only a small part of who I am?  Why do I live here in this place?  Wouldn’t some other place afford me greater opportunities?

All these questions about how we got where we are emerge in the stillness of a night when we can’t sleep.  They creep up on us during a long drive.  They nudge for our attention on rainy days when not much is going on.  How do we know that the life we’ve created, the people who belong to us, the work we do, and the place we live – how do we know whether it’s all the unfolding truth of who we are or whether it’s largely a lie?

Our reading today poses for us quite fundamental questions about our lives that are questions of faith.  How do we know that the faith our families passed down to us, or the faith of our community, is true?  Didn’t we just inherit what we believe about God and what’s true?  Did we ever really take the time to conduct a broad and sweeping research campaign about how best to arrange our lives and what to believe?  Polls show that most people believe in God.  OK, but which God or gods do we believe in?  Maybe we believe in God because we’re responding to what’s real.  Or maybe we’re afraid to imagine a world with no gods.

Part of growing up into adulthood is coming to grips with some awkward and troubling facts about the world.  One fact is that most people in North India grow up Hindu.  Most Indonesians are Muslim.  Most Japanese are Buddhist.  Most Italians are Catholic.  Most Israelis are Jews.  And most middle Americans are Christians of one stripe or another.

If most people believe what others around them believe, how on earth do we have any confidence that what we believe bears any relation to the truth?  Isn’t it just obviously true, that if you grew up in central Africa you’d believe in ancestor worship?  If you grew up in North Africa you’d be Muslim?  And if you grew up Chinese you’d be an atheist?  So why did I believe so easily what I inherited either from my parents or what most people around me believe?

Is there anything about belonging to a specifically Christian community that grounds your life and gives it solidity?  Is there anything about the Christian faith, lived out in a congregation, that provides stability and firmness to how you’ve built your life, what you hope for, and how you live in the world?

These are the questions that call to us from our reading today.  These are the kinds of questions that want to get asked, and yet they so rarely get a chance to be heard. 

The two questions raised by our reading were: How do we know what love is?  And how do we know we belong to the truth?  Now I know it can be difficult to ask these kinds of questions.  It’s a little late in the game, some of you are thinking.  I’m already miles downstream, it’s hardly worth trying to paddle back upriver.  I’ve woven the fabric of my life, and it might not be perfect, but I can’t imagine wanting to unravel it.  I’ve spent a life building the house I live in, and it keeps me dry enough, so I’d rather not even entertain the possibility that the level I used to keep everything straight was off-kilter.

But friends, in these dangerous, troubling questions there is life and energy!  There is the possibility for renewal and redirection.  There can be sparks from the embers that bring parts of you back to life where you thought all hope was lost.  These questions can give birth to a new kind of confidence that we belong to God and that God’s Spirit will help us learn the way of love.

This capacity to ask large questions is built into faith itself.  We are a scripture reading community.  And Scripture itself is continually calling us to examine ourselves.  Jesus made a habit of creating a crisis in the lives of his listeners.  He never apologized for creating tension filled moments for his listeners, forcing them to choose one direction or another.  He frequently raised the possibility that everything we’ve believed has been a lie, forcing us into the uncomfortable position of considering whether we might need to scrap the whole thing and start over. 

We’re part of a Presbyterian tradition of churches.  This is a tradition that actively invites self-criticism and ongoing repentance.  If you’re Presbyterian, you basically sign up to believe that your life is continually out of balance and in need of major overhaul.  You agree to gather with others and say out loud together that your life is bent away from the grace and goodness of God, asking for a powerful renewal that will turn you in a more life-giving direction.  One theme of our tradition is that we are “reformed, and always reforming.”  That is, we agree ahead of time that things will likely calcify in unhealthy ways, customs will harden, traditions will begin to paralyze and suffocate, patterns of life will become poisonous.  And when it does, we agree to listen for God’s voice in Scripture calling us out of those prisons into the new light of day.

“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (v. 16).  He “laid down his life for us.”  This curious phrase is a way of gathering up all that’s said in the four gospels, and having all its weight compacted into a single phrase.  He laid down his life for us.  He had his life in hand.  He held his life.  And rather than clutch and keep it, rather than hoard or hold it, he laid it down.  He set it aside. 

For us, love has a face and a name: Jesus Christ.  And we’re here for only one reason: to learn to lay our lives down for others.  Usually, laying down our lives will not result in death, as it did for Jesus.  Though it might.  When we go and stand with those who are hated or despised or targeted, we may well be crushed with them. 

But what most of us are called to are smaller, more daily ways of dying for others.  When others have needs, we share what we have.  When older members need a ride, we drive them.  When someone is lonely or depressed, we visit them, or write them a note.  When our kids need adults to love and care for them, we make ourselves available as Sunday School teachers, as volunteers for youth group, or on Thursdays after school.  When someone is recovering from surgery, we make food and deliver it.  When a family gets in a bind financially, we share what we can to help.  When someone needs to tell their story, we make time to listen.  We love by our actions.  And our love always bears the face of Jesus Christ.

And so now to that second question: “How do we know that we belong to the truth?” (v. 19).  How do we deal with our finicky hearts?  How are we to live with the constant voices in our heads – voices that often reinforce patterns of shame, failure, guilt, and unworthiness?  We know we belong to the truth not because we can convince ourselves it’s true.  Not because we never waver or doubt it.  We know we belong to the truth because God has claimed us in Jesus Christ.  God has adopted us into this new family by faith.  God’s light has shined in our hearts.  This is God’s doing.  And there is no undoing it.  Even when I doubt it, it remains true.  Even when I can’t see it as true, it remains true.  Even when it doesn’t feel true, it remains true.  Because it has its truth outside my own life and experience in the movement of God towards us in Jesus Christ.

This is God’s command: to believe in his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another.  This is the very center of your life.  Of course there is much in you that must be carved away.  But what God has given you holds firm.