A Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter
April 14, 2024
Text: 1 John 3:1-7
See what love the Father has given us that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
There’s a short passage from the Gospel of Matthew where the disciples come to Jesus and they ask him, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” Then, Jesus looks around a sees a child standing nearby. He calls the child to come over and sits the child down in the midst of the disciples, and he says, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child welcomes me.”
When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense that Jesus would use the image of a child as an example of how we’re supposed to come before God and serve God in our lives.
Children aren’t arrogant or overly concerned with themselves. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. In my experience, children tend to care for others before themselves. If you look at a group of children playing, they tend to care about serving others before they serve themselves.
Children play with reckless abandon. They’re care-free. They have curiosity and use their imaginations without stopping to worry about what other people will think.
Children also depend on their parents to keep them safe. They trust their parents to love them and care for them, no matter what.
Thinking back to my own childhood, the thing I remember most was being told by my parents, over and over again, that there was nothing I could ever do that would make them love me any less. And that continued into my young adult years and even now. I don’t get to see my parents in person very often because we live in different places. But I know—without a doubt—that what they’ve always told me is true. There is nothing I could ever do that would make them love me any less.
The reason why I’m sharing this with you today is because I think that the relationship between a child and a parent is a beautiful way of understanding our relationship with God and the unconditional love that God has for each of us.
As I was reading today’s lessons, the passage that really drew my attention this week was our lesson from 1 John, and in particular, the very first line: “See what love the Father has given us that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are.”
There is a word of reassurance in this passage, a word of comfort. It’s almost as if the author is writing, “Don’t be afraid. You are God’s beloved, and there’s no where you can go where God isn’t already there.”
1 John—along with 2 John and 3 John—are New Testament letters often attributed to John the Evangelist, the same person who wrote the Gospel of John, although most scholars agree that they were most likely written by a different author, writing in the style of John the Evangelist. It’s hard to be sure, but it’s obvious that whoever the author was, they drew inspiration from John’s Gospel.
The author of 1 John is an elder of the Church—someone who’s obviously been around a while—writing to a community of early Christians who are brand new to the faith and who are struggling to follow the way of Jesus in a world that doesn’t understand or know him. This letter was written probably written some time between the years 95 and 110—only 60-70 years after the death and resurrection of Christ. The Church at this point is still in its infancy. It has yet to spread to the far corners of the earth as it has today. And the pressures felt by those early Christians must’ve been extraordinarily difficult.
I would say that it’s hard to imagine living in a world that doesn’t know or understand Jesus. But, I would be wrong.
In the past two thousand years, the Church may have spread to the ends of the earth. There may be far more Christians now than there were in the first century. But, even today, we still struggle to follow the way of Jesus. We still feel the pressures of the world around us, telling us that we should only live and care for ourselves and that our worth is measured by material things.
But, that isn’t who we are. We aren’t children of the world. We are children of God. That is what we are.
The world will try to convince us that we are what we do and that our worth is measured by how successful we are in our work.
The world will try to convince us that we are how much money we make and that our worth is measured by how many homes we own or how many vacations we can afford to take each year.
The world will try to convince us that we are the perfect life we present to others on our Facebook pages and Instagram accounts and that our worth is measured by how many likes we get or how popular we are.
The world we also try to convince us that we are our worst mistakes and that we aren’t worthy of love or forgiveness.
But, dear friends, none of that is true. Because at the core of who we are, at the deepest levels of our being, we are children of God.
And, if we live into that identity, the world will not know us or understand us. We live in a culture that values individualism more than anything. The world teaches us to care only for ourselves and what we want. The world won’t understand why we live for Jesus because to live for Jesus is to follow a different path, to turn from sin and self-centeredness and to offer ourselves in God’s service.
So, we have a choice to make. Actually, on any given day, we have lots of choices to make. Will we live as children of God or live for what the world expects of us?
To live as a child of God means to go against the grain of what the world expects. As one author writes, “In a culture of individualism, we belong to a community—the Body of Christ. In an age that seeks security through violence, we seek solidarity, forgiveness, and peace. In a society that finds personal identity through social networking, we find our true name in baptism and in following Christ.”
As hard as it is to believe some times—and it is—God has claimed us as his own and set us free to experience abundant life in his Kingdom, abundant life as his children.
Often, we doubt our worthiness of God’s love and think to ourselves that it surely can’t be true because we’re constantly trying to live up to society’s expectations and who the world says we should be.
But, we have no reason to ever doubt our belovedness. From the beginning, we were created in the image and likeness of God as God’s beloved. Because of our Lord’s sacrifice on the cross and his victory over death, we have been redeemed with God, and marked and claimed as Christ’s own forever.
Because of Jesus, we can believe the message to be true in our lesson today from 1 John. We aren’t who the world says we should be. We are the beloved of God. “See what love the Father has given us that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are.” Amen.
The Rev. Eric Mancil 