Joyful Obedience

Sermon as preached at Lambs and Evington UMC on 5/10/15

Read 1 John 5:1-6 

Image Courtesy of Vanderbilt Divinity Library

As we have journeyed through 1 John a bet you can sum up in one word what the main theme running throughout the text is. (Love).  We have looked at the love of God who has claimed us as children of God. We have looked at the love of Christ who calls us to lay down our lives for one another just as Christ did for us. We have even looked at where love comes from and discovered that we are able to love only because God first loved us. As we turn to chapter 5 of this great book, we see love being expressed in a different way. We hear love being expressed through obedience. Our scripture says, “For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome,.”

            Some of us may have no problem with this text at all; obedience has been ingrained in you from your very childhood and you would expect nothing less from our God than to demand obedience. Those veterans among us this morning probably know a thing or two about obedience as well. On this Mother’s Day we probably remember a few things about obedience from our loving mothers. We probably remember being told not to do this or not to do that, and remember the consequences for it when we didn’t listen. Still most of us remember this with fondness knowing that our Mothers did it because they loved us. For many however, obedience can be a nasty word, a trigger of sorts to all kinds of bad thoughts and feelings. There are probably a large contingent of people who grew up during both the civil rights and the free love movement that learned obedience was an oppressive word. For women who are taught that they are second class and subservient to men, obedience, especially in the Bible, is just another way to make them feel lesser. Obedience to God the Father may mean something completely different and terrible to a child who grew up in an abusive household. I even have to admit, that there was always something off putting, something that made me cringe when I heard the word obedience, especially when I heard it in church.

            I believe that if we are one of those people who cringe at the word obedience it is probably because first we have seen power abused before, and second because we have a false understanding of freedom. For many of us, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” We are free when there is nobody or nothing to tell us what to do but us. Freedom is to be rid of fear, rid of enemies that could harm us, rid of government controls our lives, and free from a God to whom we must be obedient. Our common notion of freedom is summed up in John Lennon’s hit song Imagine where he asks us to, “Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace.” Lennon shapes an image of the perfect world, a peaceful world around the idea that if we were just free from rules and structures all around us.

            But rules do matter, structure is important, and yes obedience is necessary. This is hard for some to wrap their heads around, especially older children who are starting to enter in to that time in their lives where every other question is why? Why do I have to go to school, Why do I have to take a bath, Why are the commandments and obedience to God important? To answer this question I usually like to play a little game with the kids. I pick up a ball of some sort, and I tell them that they are going to make us their own game using the, expect there can be no rules in the game. Kids will call out ideas such as you have to throw the ball into a basket to score, and I will gently tell them, that’s a rule. Well, maybe you can bounce the ball as high in the air as possible and whoever gets the ball first wins. Well who gets to bounce the ball? “The oldest person.” Well that’s a rule too. And the activity goes on like this until the kids realize that they need rules in order to play a game. A game without rules is actually no fun at all.

            As Christians, sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that the world would be a better place if we were free from rules. Everything would be better if everyone and everything would just let me decide what I want to do. We even sometimes convince ourselves that our spiritual life is better not when we listen to the commands of God, but when we are free to live and Worship however we want. For Christians though this isn’t freedom. Sure, through Christ we are free from sin and death, but so often we emphasize the freedom from, and forget to emphasize the freedom to. We are free from sin so that we may finally have a right relationship with God. We are free to be faithful servants. We are free to be disciples of Christ, we are free to be kingdom builders.

            In the gospel of John Jesus says, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” This verse reminds me of when we gather for communion and often start with a prayer of confession, telling God all of the ways that we as a church have failed to be the Church; and as we do there is one line at the end that sticks out. “Free us for joyful obedience, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Those are two words that you have never associated with each other; Obedience and joyful. When we realize that as we confess our sins that Christ has already forgiven them, that our failures and shortcomings do not stop God from calling us into the world transforming ministry of Kingdom building, and that God still promises victory even with our failure; then we begin to understand the role of joyful obedience. Imagine you were walking up for a job interview for a important project in the community and the boss asks for a resume and you say, “well I failed at this, and I forgot to do this, and I didn’t listen to this when I should have…. do you think you would get the job? But God says, “Ok, welcome aboard, this is how we are going to change the world.” Who wouldn’t want to work for a boss like that? Who wouldn’t joyfully follow such a God?

            The question we must ask is how do we obey? We know that our obedience is best summed up in the two commandments to love the Lord your God and to love your neighbor, but what does obedience to these commandments look like? It looks like Jesus. If we want to follow the way of the Lord, we must learn from the example of Christ. Who as Philippians tells us, “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-even death on a cross.” If we look at Christ’s ministry to the world then we will know what perfect obedience looks like, we will know what it means to love God and Love neighbor. Obedience looks like a young Jesus sitting and listening to the Rabbis in the Temple. Obedience looks like Jesus healing the sick and giving sight to the blind. Obedience looks feeding 5000 tired and hungry listeners who had gathered to hear the word of God proclaimed. Obedience looks Jesus as he went out alone to pray and be in communion with God the Father. Obedience is Jesus washing the feet of his own disciples.

            As we see Christ’s obedience to the will of God throughout his life and especially in his time of ministry we see the essence of this obedience almost bookended with two acts. Although Jesus’s impact in the world started that night he was born, his real ministry started at the Jordan River. John the Baptist for some time had been preaching a gospel of repentance and foretelling of the Messiah who was coming who would be greater than he. As he was baptizing members into this very truth, the one whom he was talking about arrived. John recognized this significance, and at first he refused to baptize Jesus. He insisted that it should be he that should be baptized by Jesus. In this first act of baptism, Jesus humbled himself, and received the same claim upon his life that we now as brothers and sisters in Christ have also received. You are my beloved with whom I am well pleased. Jesus did not see himself as better than others, not needing to be baptized, but instead he embraced his humanity and our need for repentance and forgiveness and was baptized by John in the Jordan River.

            This marked the true beginning of Jesus’s ministry that included all of those forms of obedience that we mentioned before. Jesus’s final act of ministry however may be the greatest example of obedience the world has ever seen. As Jesus cried out in the garden before his arrest, “Father if you are willing take this cup from me, but not my will but yours be done” we see perfect obedience. We see Jesus who even though he was about to endure a gruesome death, yielded his will to the will of the Father. We see a God who could have torn himself down from the cross, but suffered for our sake. We see the Messiah who did not come with the sword to topple the enemies, but who through love and mercy exemplified on the cross established a new world order. This truly is love for God and love for neighbor, this truly is obedience.

            We see that Jesus’s ministry in a way in bookended with his baptism and his death on the cross. The elder writing 1 John notes this in our scripture for this morning saying, “This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood.” Christ’s ministry through the world started with the water of baptism and ended with his blood on the cross. We know that this really isn’t the end of Jesus’s ministry. On the third day Jesus rose from the grave conquering sin and death. He visited with his disciples and walked on the road to Emmaus with some fellow followers. Next week we will celebrate Jesus’s ascension into Heaven where he now sits at the right hand of God the Father, and the week following we will celebrate Pentecost; where the early church was born and received the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus’s ministry is not over, it now through the power of the Holy Spirit continues in us.

            The cornerstones of our ministry here on Earth are also the water and the blood. Like Christ our ministry in the world begins with the waters of baptism. Though God’s grace had worked in our lives previously, at baptism we are claimed as one of the children of God, and at confirmation we affirm that we will be obedient to God. In the United Methodist Church we profess to be a faithful member through our prayer, presence, gifts, service, and witness. And through the blood of Jesus we carry out those vows. As we gather around the Communion Table we are in prayer with one another to God. We are present and gathered from our individual day to day activities as one body, the Body of Christ. We offer our gifts before the Lord, and we are prepared by God’s grace to go out into the world in witness and service to be Christ’s body for the world. Like Christ, the foundations of our obedience to God is the water and the blood.

            Through this obedience to Christ we are free to do some amazing things. We are free to gather as young and old, rich and poor, black and white and truly experience a loving community that the world cannot give. Through the obedience we are able to seek justice and topple oppressive regimes. Let us not forget that the Civil Rights Movement that did so much for this country was in rooted in Christian practice. Through obedience we are able to come together as a community and provide a house to a man in need, and provide food and resources for those who do not have them. Through obedience to God, colleges like Liberty and Randolph, and my Alma matters Duke and Randolph-Macon were created to give us our children opportunities for education that many of our parents and grandparents did not have. Through obedience to God, Ann Jarvis and her daughter Anna recognized the gifts and voice that women and in particular mothers had, at a time when women had very little rights; and through obedience these women helped to establish this very holiday of Mother’s day that we celebrate today. When we are obedient to God, When we follow Christ’s example of loving God and loving others, we participate in these groundbreaking ministries. We participate in the building of the Kingdom of God, and who wouldn’t want to be part of something as spectacular as that? So this morning may our prayer truly be, “free us for joyful obedience.”