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“Boldness Before God,” Rev. Melissa St. Clair, 4/26/15

“Boldness Before God”

A sermon preached at

Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, CO

by the Rev. Melissa St. Clair

April 26, 2015

 On this fourth Sunday in Easter, we read from both John and 1 John – if you turn to the very back of your Bible, right before you get to the final book, Revelation, you’ll find a whole slew of short letters – 1, 2, 3 John, and Jude. 1 John has similar themes – light and love – to the gospel of John, the fourth book in the New Testament, but it’s not likely that they were written by the same John.  (Nor was book of Revelation, also written by a John; John of Patmos.)

It’s not a name, however, that binds our two readings for today – it’s love. The image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd reminds us that each one of us has immeasurable worth in God’s eyes; we all are loved in equal measure, even those who aren’t yet part of the fold. We don’t get to decide who is “in” or “out” – Jesus has just as much concern and regard for those he has yet to draw in.

In 1 John, it’s God’s love for us in Jesus that roots us in the love we’re to offer to others –and ourselves.

READ 1 JOHN 3:16-24

Ben and I are on the cusp of an entirely new adventure in adulthood: home ownership.  As we submitted document after document and began signing line after line  – only to warm up the writing hand for closing day, from what I understand – my thoughts vacillated between, “Surely, they’re going to figure us out.  They’re going to realize that we’re not real adults” and “What the heck are we doing??  Isn’t this a lot of money?”  Finally, at the end of this week, after we found out that our loan was approved, Ben turned to me and asked out loud what had been on my mind no less than every hour of the day for the last month, “Did you think we were actually going to get this house?”

My friend and colleague Mary Ann McKibben Dana calls this “failure to adult.”  She articulates something I’ve so often felt: that there is this body of knowledge about adulthood that I somehow missed. Who knew you can lift up the surface of the electric stovetop and clean underneath it? When were we supposed to learn that if you don’t check the oil level in your car regularly, you might ruin your engine? (Sorry, Dad. It wasn’t for lack of trying on your part. And, in my defense, I haven’t had this happen…yet.)

Mary Ann has a decade more life experience than I. Mary Ann’s dad, even more. And yet he expressed some of the same frustrations in a home improvement project gone wrong. Not only was the project going poorly; he could hear his own dad’s voice in his head, berating him for not knowing how to do something so simple: You should know how to do this. What kind of man are you? As the voice got louder, he swung the hammer harder, until he had literally knocked a hole in the wall in shame.

Maybe your shame script doesn’t sound exactly like that one; we each have our own. I know I do.

Not good enough. Who do you think you are?

As if it wasn’t easy enough to feel this way navigating the ins and outs of everyday life, the internet and social media allow us to compare everyone’s outsides to our insides. Apps like Facebook make it all too easy for us to compare our “real-life messiness” to someone else’s “carefully curated persona.” That’s not encouragement to post every dramatic detail of your day-to-day in an effort to be more “real,” so much as a reminder that what we see of others through social media is simply a selected sliver of their actual lives – as opposed to the real-time nitty, gritty details of our own lives that we know all too well.[1]

And this doesn’t just apply to social media. How often, when asked on a Sunday morning how your week was or what’s going on in your life, do you reply with the highlight reel? Or, after contemplating really going into detail, you think better of it, and just sum it up in a word that can be an indicator that things are anything but – “fine.”

We’ve been groomed to believe that it’s not socially acceptable to be vulnerable. To admit when things aren’t fine. It’s easy to judge those who do unleash a torrent of honesty rather than giving the stock answer we expected from our question that was more perfunctory than personal.

Love in truth and action, not in word or speech. 

A few years ago I had the privilege of serving on the staff of the camp in the Ozark Lakes Area of the Mid-America Region called “That Camp About God and Sex”; “sex camp” for short. It’s a week-long residential camp for 8^th graders that focused on…being created in God’s image. Being fearfully and wonderfully made. Being called “good” by God. Yes, we talked about sex and sexuality – from the biology and anatomy behind it to the emotional and spiritual aspects of it. And all of it was rooted in this simple, profound, yet hard to accept truth that we are God’s children, God’s beloved. I still remember our closing worship from that week vividly: We gave each camper a necklace, and as we put it around his or her neck, we looked each one in the eye and reminded them of just that.

Beloved, we are God’s children. The third chapter of 1 John begins that way and that thread is woven throughout.

The first church I served in full-time ministry after I was ordained was Community Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. It was a big church – 350-400 people gathering for worship each Sunday in a Frank Lloyd Wright designed building to match an eclectic congregation.

Each Sunday morning, we would be greeted and greet one another in the same way: “Good morning, God’s beloved” was the standard welcome to worship. Then during the passing of the peace, the greeting time, we’d be invited to greet one another by saying, “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us. 

What would it look like – and feel like – for us to turn up the volume on this script?

God’s loves me. I am love in truth and action.

You know I’m gonna ask you to say that with me.

Believing that, really believing that, and living it has incredible side effects. It’s like milk, only better: It does a body – mind AND soul – good.

This is why I love our small group opportunities – it’s a chance to be really real. It doesn’t always happen instantly; it may take a few weeks or months of gathering to get to the point where we feel comfortable enough together to go to places that aren’t so comfortable. But when that happens, oh man. It is communion in the holiest sense.

Maybe you haven’t found a small group that works for you yet. In a church our size, there’s not necessarily a small group meeting at every time of day, every day of the week. And yet, in a church our size, there’s plenty of space to say, “I’d really love it if we had this” – and then run it by a pastor and run with it. You have two pastors who want to help empower, equip, and support you. We’re here as a resource to support you and help you live out your calling, even as you calling and supporting us as your pastors allows us to live out ours. For that, we’re so very grateful.

The next time the volume starts to get cranked up on this malarkey:

Not good enough.

Who do you think you are?

If people found out how screwed up I was, I’d be fired/ridiculed/judged. 

[Fill in the blank with your shame script of choice here.] 

Would you turn to 1 John 3:16? Not John 3:16. I’m sure many of you know that one by heart. But it’s worth committing 1 John 3:16 to memory, too: We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 

When we allow ourselves to accept the assurance of God’s love, it becomes a whole lot easier to love others – and ourselves. When we know we are loved and when we are loving, we are our best, most authentic, most real selves. When we believe that we are worthy of such love and that others are too, it’s then that we are bold and free before God.

It’s probably not news to you that the world needs more people who feel bold and free.

Just think of yesterday’s news alone from Baltimore and Nepal. And Friday’s from northern Colorado. This world needs more love in action; more people who act out of the assurance of being loved, rather than the despair of fear and shame. 

To close this morning, I’m going to read this passage again, this time from The Message, which is more than a translation of the Bible, it’s a paraphrase. It’s Pastor Eugene Peterson’s interpretation of the Greek and Hebrew scriptures in contemporary English. It’s 1 John 3:16: 

This is how we’ve come to understand and experience love: Christ sacrificed his life for us. This is why we ought to live sacrificially for our fellow believers, and not just be out for ourselves. If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God’s love? It disappears. And you made it disappear. 

My dear children, let’s not just talk about love; let’s practice real love. This is the only way we’ll know we’re living truly, living in God’s reality. It’s also the way to shut down debilitating self-criticism, even when there is something to it. For God is greater than our worried hearts and knows more about us than we do ourselves. 

And friends, once that’s taken care of and we’re no longer accusing or condemning ourselves, we’re bold and free before God! We’re able to stretch our hands out and receive what we asked for because we’re doing what he said, doing what pleases him. Again, this is God’s command: to believe in his personally named Son, Jesus Christ. He told us to love each other, in line with the original command. As we keep his commands, we live deeply and surely in him, and he lives in us. And this is how we experience his deep and abiding presence in us: by the Spirit he gave us.

[1] Mary Ann McKIbben Dana, “Failure to Adult” in The Christian Century.  Posted April 24, 2015.  Read full article here.