Rev. Brent Gundlah
It’s a blessing to be here with you today, outside the four walls of our usual gathering space. It’s good to get out of our comfort zone every once in a while, to experience things from a different perspective. It is in this same spirit that I chose to focus today on a passage from a book that doesn’t get a lot of attention in church, and to think about it in a non-traditional way.
The three Letters of John appear near the end of the Bible — right before Revelation. First John, the source of our reading for today, lacks the typical opening and closing a letter would have, and so reads more like an essay or a sermon.
For centuries it was assumed that the author of John’s letters was the same person who wrote the Gospel of John, but scholars don’t necessarily agree about that anymore. We do know that whoever wrote these letters believed strongly in the teachings of John’s Gospel, and was now interpreting them for their faith community.
The writer (let’s just call him “John”) is concerned that people are spreading false interpretations of the gospel and so he wants to get the word about the right one. To that end, John focuses on a few specific topics in this first letter, one of which is Jesus’s commandment to “love one another” (probably because he doesn’t believe folks are actually doing that). Have you ever heard that hymn from the 1960s called, “They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love”? Well, John clearly didn’t write it, but he could have, because that’s basically the point he’s making in today’s passage.
But what does love actually look like? To answer that question, John points to the example of Jesus. But is the answer necessarily the same for us today as it was for the letter’s original readers back in the first century?
The world’s a very different place now, and our understanding of it is very different too. And so if John, in his letters, seeks to reinterpret the gospel for his place and time, then perhaps we should reconsider the meaning of John’s letters (and the gospel) in ours. Truth be told, we’ve always been called to reinterpret the Bible in our own context.
In 1967, a scholar named Lynn White Jr. gave a lecture, later published in the journal Science, called “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” that subsequently became one of the cornerstones of eco-theology. Focusing on the the period since the Industrial Revolution, White reflected on the human tendency to look at the world purely as a resource for our consumption, on the one hand, and our exponentially-increased ability to exploit that resource, on the other.
Taking a wider focus, White then looked back to the church of the Middle Ages, and then all the way back to the creation story in Genesis, in order to understand the historical roots of this mindset. He concluded that, from the very beginning, Judeo-Christian theology has justified and normalized the exploitation of creation by setting up a system in which superior humans have dominion over inferior nature — a way of thinking that eventually led us right through the ages and to the ecological disaster we find ourselves living in now.
But one of the blessings of being able to think critically is that it enables us to reframe how we see the world and our place in it. For example, we know now that the entire universe doesn’t revolve around the earth; we know that living things and their environments evolve; we know that humans don’t actually stand above or outside of the rest of creation (even if we do have outsized ability to affect it, for better and for worse); and we know that we are but one part of an interconnected web of life that is both fragile and resilient.
And so when you think about it, it would be kind of odd if we didn’t also reconsider the way we look at our tradition’s sacred texts in light of our ever-changing understanding of the world and our place in it.
Take, for example, our reading from the First John. As I said earlier, John wants his readers to focus on Jesus’s commandment to “love one another” — an idea we’re able to grasp more fully by observing Jesus in action. As John explains it, “he laid down his life for us — and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” And this gives us some things to ponder.
First, does Jesus actually expect us to sacrifice our lives for one another? If push were to come to shove, I kinda think he does; but, let’s be honest, how often are we faced with the opportunity or the need to do that? And so what if the meaning of “laying down our lives” could be construed more broadly? What if it means simply putting aside our own needs and wants and priorities for those of another?
In John’s human-centered world, the idea of “another” would have meant another human being; but what if, given our different understanding of the world, “another” meant another living thing, or another part of creation? What would it look like for us to put the needs and wants and priorities of other living things ahead of our own?
John then goes on to pose what seems like a rhetorical question: “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” In the original Greek of the New Testament, what we see translated into English as “the world’s goods” or “material possessions” is the word bios, which can also be translated as “life” or the “means of living” or the “things that sustain life.”
And what if the meaning of the words “brother or sister” used here in the context of John’s very human-focused world view was expanded to encompass all living things? Then the question John presents here would take on much broader significance — and if we actually lived into what it calls us towards, we’d probably have cleaner air, a fuller Great Salt Lake, and a whole lot less lush, green golf courses in the desert of Southern Utah.
We need to understand that John’s question is not rhetorical — nor is the one I just asked. Indeed, the very next thing John says to the readers of his letter after asking it is this: “Let us not love in word or speech, but in truth or action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth.”
John is, of course, sharing his thoughts with a relatively small faith community of people in a specific place at a specific time. But, in the increasingly vast and interconnected world we inhabit today, we might want to rethink his words about community and our responsibility, framing them a bit more broadly than he did and so, to that end, I took a crack at it; here goes…
We know love by this, that Jesus put the needs of the world ahead of his own — and we’re called to do the same, to be stewards of the creation of which are a part, not dominators of it.
For how does God’s love abide in anyone who selfishly hoards the means of sustaining life, while seeing other living things in need of them?
Talk is cheap, so what are we actually going to do in order to make this right?