On Friday night I was having a conversation with my son about God, faith, religion and - in his mind - the damage religion does when it is not carefully thought out. He was relating that a colleague of his at work has recently become involved in a church, and it is beginning to consume his life. He tends to repeat whatever he is told without thinking. So this colleague pronounced that if people don’t love God, they can’t love others either.
It was interesting that we were having this particular conversation, because I had already decided to preach on the text of John - whoever loves comes from God. This is precisely the opposite of what my son’s colleague was saying. We don’t have to love God first, and then find the capability to love others. It is the other way around - humans are born to love, and the love we are capable of having for others connects us to God.
So it raises for me the question of what constitutes “right belief”. Is it a so-called orthodox belief that only Christians are selected by God, and can have a relationship with God. Is God so limited? What, and who, defines our relationship to God? Us?
Is baptism evidence of “right belief”? We bring children for baptism, make promises on their behalf. Does that mean they have “right belief” just because of that action? We confirm our children when they are teens, and they are considered members of the church. Is that all ‘right belief’ takes? Or do those young people then continue to learn and discover what love in faith means?
Is prayer “right belief”? What kind of prayer? Is prayer alone the most important thing? Does God ignore us if we don’t pray a certain way? Does God do what we ask and turn others down?
What about social justice and outreach? Is that “right belief”? Shelters, warm meals, Habitat for Humanity builds, compassion. Are those the only evidence of “right belief”? John’s Gospel talks about Jesus being the vine, and us the branches. Jesus was love, Jesus is love. So if that is the case, then we also are born to love - and out of that love surely comes a mission. A church with no sense of mission has cut itself off from the Vine. Without connection to the Vine, mission in the church is just mission by any other social agency.
What about the ‘born again’ experience? Is that the earmark of “right belief”? We know that deeply moving experiences can change lives. Is that all? One moving experience which connects us to God, and suddenly we have “right belief”? What does it mean to be “born again”? Who defines what “born again” is?
I suggest that beyond baptism, beyond orthodox or unorthodox faith stances, beyond prayer, beyond social justice and outreach, there are the two statements from John which put all of those things into a different perspective.
First, we have this statement: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”
....and this statement: “For God is love.....if we love one another, God lives in us, God’s love is perfected in us.”
Love. It is the single most important thing in the Christian faith. Prayer, baptism, outreach, life in community - these are all important things. But I would go so far as to say that the most important is love.
Agape, or love within a community, is the single piece, the one criterion that gives meaning to everything else we say or do. We might be able to recite the creeds, and the Lord’s Prayer, but if we do not have love, we are what Paul says is a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. We may have experiences that take us into God’s holy presence, but without love it does us no good. And though we feed the hungry and rescue those who are perishing but have no love, we are nothing. We might think baptism is all it takes - but unless a child learns to love throughout life - it is a meaningless ritual.
To have love - agape - is to have God living within us; everyone who loves has God within them.
But this one simple statement takes us well beyond the Christian context, and into a world-wide context. “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God; if we love one another, God lives in us.” It means that God lives within human beings regardless of whether or not they are baptised, or whether or not they pray, or even whether or not they claim they are Christian. God is love. God cannot be contained by one faith, or one way of looking at faith. God lives because we love.
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