A sermon for Sunday August 22nd, 2021:
“Free to love and to be loved!”
(Please read, Deuteronomy 10: 12-21 and Matthew 6: 5 – 15)
“Free to love and to be loved!” This is how I felt and part of what I declared when I was baptized on Easter Sunday, 2003. I only really began to grasp (the smallest part of what being free to love and be loved might mean when I became a Christian.
‘Becoming a Christian’ wasn’t some decision I made one day. It was and (continues to be) a process…on-going, often an adventure when everything seems possible. Sometimes, though, this becoming feels more like wading uphill through treacle while pushing a wheelbarrow! Sometimes, being a follower of Jesus, a member of his church, can be frustrating, disappointing and very painful. I suspect that is the same for all of us.
But it all began in an encounter with God and in a stunning realization of the love of God – the love He had for me. My baptism scripture was, “I have loved you with an everlasting love… I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.” (Jeremiah 31: 3)
What a wonderful and liberating moment it was for me when I knew this with an absolute certainty…that I had a Heavenly Father who knew me, loved me, always had and always would.
He said to me, “You are my son; today I have become your father…” It was after His own baptism that the Father said the same thing of Jesus. Mary Magdalene learned the Risen Jesus would ascend to, “Your Father and My Father, to My God and Your God…” (John 20:17)
The discovery that you belong is like manna from heaven for children like me, children who either didn’t know their earthly fathers – never met them – or children whose experience of home and family was one of confusion, insecurity and brokenness…children whose experience was of conditional, occasional, abandoned or even absent love. Often such children think all of that, somehow, is their fault and that they deserve everything they get.
But, God see (s) the trouble of the afflicted; (He) considers their grief and takes it in hand. The victims commit themselves to (Him); (He is) the helper of the fatherless. (Psalm 10:4)
How marvellous to discover a Father to the fatherless, a helper to one whose parents tried and (in many ways) failed to help him. To have that God-shaped hole in their hearts filled at last…this becomes the defining moment, and the very beginning of their lives…God becomes My God…I become His child, his son or His daughter. I am free to be loved…and it feels good. I am adopted into His Family…chosen, accepted, forgiven…
The challenge of life and of church is not so much that God loves me…though it is the central truth of my experience…but, the real difficulty, is that God loves you every bit as much as He loves me. The thing is, God is not just My Father. He is Your Father. He is Our Father. What we often call the “Lord’s Prayer” is really the “Family’s Prayer”. We have to learn to share this Father God…not, as is sometimes our way, to keep Him all to ourselves.
Notice the inclusive language of the prayer He taught them: He is “Our Father; give us this day our daily bread…as we forgive those who trespass against us…lead us…deliver us from evil….”
When we pray this prayer, we are committed to remembering others, to including them. Jesus created His church by (deliberately) choosing very different, seemingly incompatible people to be part of His Family.…people who often vied for the Lord’s attention…broken people. “Free to love?!” Now that’s much more difficult!
He put together people who started out (some of them) not liking one another and taught them, through bitter and beautiful experience, to love one another; to give to each other the very mercy they themselves had received. Psalm 68: 5-5 says, “The LORD sets the lonely in (His) families. He brings in those who were bound in chains…”
This is the same for everyone who becomes a son or daughter of God.
Families often disagree, they argue and fight, become separated from one another; but, for all their dysfunction, they are still a family. They are a lot like us…
I think Jesus often did and said things that seemed illogical, unworkable and upside down or back to front, certainly as far as the world (and its received wisdom) is concerned. The church is like this. He brought us into His Family (the church) as a sign to the world, a way of reflecting something of the light of God in a world filled with darkness, a world which needs to know God as Father. The church is for this…
Put together people who have vastly different experiences and backgrounds and tell them to work out their salvation; and work out, too, what it means to be a family…by watching Him, by listening to Him and by putting these things into practice: by forgiving one another over and over again…so that, in the end of this journey, we would be transformed (by degrees) into the likeness of the Head of the Family.
We have to confess that this likeness is often distorted. 10 Don’t we all come from one Father? Aren’t we all created by the same God? So why can’t we get along? Why do we desecrate the covenant of our ancestors that binds us together? (Malachi 2)
I have often thought that the Bible is a most wonderful book. It is honest. Honest about what God is like. But it is also a book about us. If we want to see God…if God’s Word and His Spirit combine in us…we will see ourselves in the pages of scripture, as we are; and finally, what and who we can become.
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
By God’s grace this is what we will be: “FREE TO LOVE AND BE LOVED!”
Mark Faris-Robertson (20-08-21)