Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

First John 3:16-24 May 3, 2009

We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us - and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 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? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him. And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.

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"We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us - and we ought to lay down our lives for one another." This is about as good an explanation of the Christian life in a single sentence as you're likely to find anywhere. Everything moves out from the center. Everything rises on the foundation of Jesus' willingness to give up his own life for the sake of others. This is the fundamental logic upon which our faith is built. It's the keystone that holds everything together. Pick whatever metaphor you like, describe it any way you choose, at the end of the day the faith we all practice together stops making any sense the minute we start thinking it's all for our own benefit.

The interesting thing is though, when we look at the sacrifice of Jesus - which most of us do only rarely and only under protest (the cross isn't exactly pretty now is it) - when we do look at his sacrifice it's really rather easy to dismiss it as something he did, but we could never do ourselves. Claudia Highbaugh, commenting on this passage, observed that "Most people do not have what it takes to be a martyr..." That is the biggest understatement I've heard in a long time. Martyrdom isn't what you'd call wildly popular these days, among healthy people anyway.

Actually, it hasn't ever been wildly popular, but there was a time when it was wildly common. The early history of the church was filled with martyrs. Back then it was dangerous to be a Christian, as in some places it still is today. Christians were being burned, crucified and fed to the lions right and left. And strikingly, though they certainly didn't go looking for it, they didn't tend to run away from it either. You've probably heard that old line first spoken by Tertullian, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." He was making the point that the more people allowed themselves to face persecution for their faith, the more faithful people there seemed to be. Christians were popping up like weeds all over the old Roman empire, largely because their example of love for one another and confident faith in the face of death was such a powerful inspiration.

We've been talking in the Matthew class about how Jesus redefined what it meant to be a messiah, and people were not happy about it. Most people were looking for him to pick up the sword and defend Israel against the foreign occupation. Instead, he picked up a cross and laid down his life on it. It's hard for us to appreciate how bitterly disappointing this was to all those who were longing for a revolution. But Jesus knew that the revolution of love and self-sacrifice would ultimately prove far more powerful than any revolution of war could ever be. Looking back from the standpoint of two thousand years later, it's easy to see how right he was.

Self-sacrifice was and is the beating heart of a true Christian faith. But how do we reconcile that with Highbaugh's obviously true comment that, "Most people do not have what it takes to be a martyr"? Part of the problem is that our understanding of martyrdom is far different than it used to be. When we talk about martyrs these days, the word is almost universally despised. It brings to mind long-suffering people who act like everything they do is for you when, in fact it's mostly for themselves. "Look at how much I sacrifice for you. I work my fingers to the bone. I put aside my own dreams. And this is how you repay me?" We may call this martyrdom, but it's really self-sacrifice used as a weapon. In my experience, you can never grovel quite enough to please someone like this. If that's our image of what it means to be a martyr, it's hardly any wonder we run the other way.

Or, on the other hand, the preaching of self-sacrifice has too often been about how we're supposed to put everyone else first all the time. Giving your whole self away to others is "Christian," supposedly, while attending even to the least of our own needs is just selfish. This, too, is mostly a guilt trip. In this message, it's hard to escape the feeling that God wants us all to be doormats. Are we supposed to lay ourselves right down on the ground and let people to walk all over us? That's not Christian. It's just plain unhealthy.

In both of these cases, the idea of self-sacrifice is being used in a way that is psychologically unbalanced; sick and distorted. And yet, if we believe that this is what it really comes down to, how are we ever going to fit it together with the self-sacrifice of Jesus, and come up with anything remotely positive? Let's see. Self-sacrifice is an illness. Jesus was self-sacrificing. Therefore Jesus must have been sick. That's the equation. That's the only logical conclusion we can draw if we cannot see self-sacrifice in a healthy way, and in a society that mostly rejects or even abhors self-sacrifice, it's hardly any wonder the church isn't doing so well.

Self-sacrifice was and is the beating heart of a true Christian faith, but we have to understand it in a healthy way. As crazy as it may seem to some, Jesus himself is our best example. In the practice of his ministry, Jesus gave himself to the crowds, but then took himself off to pray and recharge his batteries. He healed and ministered to those around him, but was not opposed to Mary ministering to him in turn. He got a lot of grief from the religious authorities, but he didn't roll over and play dead. He stood up to them. In the end, he gave up his physical life, not because he had some kind of obscene death wish, but because the only alternative was to give up the truth of his message. And, we are given to believe, he did so knowing that his death would not be the end of his life.

Jesus was profoundly self-sacrificing, but he certainly wasn't any kind of doormat, and he didn't use his self-sacrifice to make people feel guilty. He was a whole, well-balanced, generously loving and giving man, who ministered to others out of his confidence that he was and would always be held fast in the palm of God's hand. That's the example he set for us. That's what he meant when he said, "Go and do likewise."

Still, Highbaugh is right when she says that most of us don't have what it takes to be a martyr. She's right, that is, if what she means is that not many of us would be able to actually sacrifice our lives for the love of others. It's something hardly anyone would go looking for and that happens only in extreme circumstances. We honor soldiers for making what we call, "the supreme sacrifice." We honor firemen and police for doing so. But in the average lives most of us lead, self-sacrifice is usually less literal.

Ronald Cole-Turner puts it this way. "Laying down our lives, at its core, can mean any number of ways in which we lay aside our claim to own our lives. We lay down our lives when we put others first. We lay down our lives when we live for the good of others. We lay down our lives when we make time for others. To love others is to lay down our life for them. When we lay down the completely normal human desire to live for ourselves, and when instead we allow the love of God to reorient us toward the needs of others, we are laying down our lives."

This is what John means when he says that we need to love others, "In truth and action." There are any number of ways we can embody our love for others by laying aside, for a time, our own ego needs. And in fact, looking for ways to put love into action has always been a sign of true Christian faith. True disciples of Jesus have always known that the need for love is vast, and that their calling is to do what they can to address that need. The harvest, as Jesus put it, has always been plentiful, even though the laborers are few.

I'd like to close with an old story I've always found touching and that brings all this into some focus for me. It's a piece written by James Baldwin:

The joint, as Fats Waller would have said, was jumping.... And, during the last set, the saxophone player took off on a terrific solo. He was a kid from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had discovered he could say it with a saxophone. He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his 20-odd years, and screaming through the horn. "Do you love me?" "Do you love me?" "Do you love me?" And again - "Do you love me?" "Do you love me?" "Do you love me?" The same phrase unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated with all the force the kid had.... The question was terrible and real. The boy was blowing with his lungs and guts, out of his own short past; and somewhere in that past, in gutters or gang fights ... in the acrid room behind marihuana or the needles, under the smell in the precinct basement, he had received a blow from which he would never recover, and this no one wanted to believe. "Do you love me?" "Do you love me?" "Do you love me?" The men on the stand stayed with him cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning.... But each man knew the boy was blowing for every one of them.

Jesus knew, as much as anyone ever has, that there is a desperate and abiding need for love among the children of God. And the mission he gave into the hands of those who would call themselves his followers was to understand that his self-sacrifice was and will always be a model for our own. We are called to love others as we ourselves have been loved, in truth and in action.

Amen.