The Conquest of Love (Sermon)

“The Conquest of Love”

1 John 5:1-6

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/10/15

         As part of my sermon preparation this week, I paced around my living room reading all of First John out loud. It was an interesting exercise. I kept losing my place because, quite frankly, the writer repeats himself about every third line. He goes around and around saying: Love God. Love one another. Love is the sure sign of God abiding in us and us abiding in God. Believe in Jesus as the Christ. Not believing in Jesus is pretty much the only sin that matters.

While that leaves out most of the details, it retains most of the substance. John takes five chapters to say what can be expressed in five sentences.

         There are several presumptions lying behind all of this, of course. John states the basic presumption in chapter one, verse one: “We declare to you what was from the beginning.” That line echoes the opening verse of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” And that verse in turn harks back to the foundational assumption of both scripture and faith: “In the beginning God created…”

As Creator, God is not simply above and beyond all things. God is a congenital presence in all things. God is the origin, the objective, and the essence of the creation. And since, as John says, “God is love,” Love is the origin, objective, and essence of the creation.

For both the gospel and the epistle of John, the greatest good and deepest hope for humankind is to “believe” in Jesus as the fullest expression of the aboriginal Love which is God. Having said that, in Johannine literature, “belief” encompasses far more than saying, ‘Yes, I believe.’ True belief cannot be separated from obedience to Love. And obedience is less an act of self-subjugation to God than the adventure of a willing and disciplined leap of faith into the great Mystery of Love.

Peter finds this out, doesn’t he? On the lakeshore after the resurrection, Jesus does not ask, ‘Peter, do you believe in me now?’ He asks him, three times, “Peter, do you love me?”

For John, to believe is to begin living an entirely new way of life. To believe is to inhabit a world which is being “conquered” by Love.

Conquered. Now there is a word we have to handle with care. In worldly culture, ‘conquer’ usually dredges up images of aggressive or even violent action in which there are winners and losers, victors and vanquished. Such images create not only polarities of us-and-them, of right-and-wrong, they also create a sense of entitlement among victors. God “blessed” us with all this stuff. It is ours. God favors us. Our conquests must be righteous.

The fourth-century emperor, Constantine the Great, had been just as pagan as his predecessors. Then, on the eve of a battle against a stronger foe, he had a dream in which he sees the chi-rho cross of Christ. Along with the symbol comes the message, “By this sign you will conquer.” The worldly emperor interprets this in purely selfish and temporal terms. He decides that if he conquers his enemy, the Christian God must be real.

Constantine does win. Shortly afterward, in 313AD, the emperor issued the Edict of Milan and legalized the Christian faith. Legalization paved the way for Christianity to become the official religion of the empire. And that allowed Christianity to devolve into the official religion of economic wealth and military power, whoever happens to wield it in whatever age. Worldly power and wealth are a constant reality. Throughout the millennia, they never change. They just change hands.

With Constantine’s actions, the church, though called to a much different kind of authority and richness, found itself in league with the very powers that killed Jesus. As the followers of Jesus got a taste for wealthy power, as they begin to share in it, and to benefit from it, they – we – began to turn a blind eye to its corrupt and corrupting ways. We began to protect it, bless it, and even worship it.

The archetypal fall of Adam and Eve has nothing on the Christian church’s very specific fall into the ways and means of worldly empire. This fall dropped us on our heads, and we lost our memory. The word “conquest,” then, began to mean the same thing for the church that it means for every Caesar, Nebuchadnezzar, and Pharaoh of the earth.

But John had said, “Whatever is born of God conquers the world.” He also says that Jesus is the one “born of God.” And he conquers the world through his execution by Rome. Brothers and sisters in Christ, if we are going to claim Christian authority for conquest, our conquest must look like Jesus’ conquest, not Rome’s.

Believing this is a stretch, isn’t it? Some of us cannot believe it at all. We remain comfortably immersed in the worldly waters of rationality and certainty. Part of me swims there now, and I imagine it always will. But the longer I live, the more spacious, God-born part of me finds the oxygen and the visibility beneath those waters insufficient for sustaining God’s abundant life and Love. It is like I had gills, and they are beginning to turn into lungs that crave Spirit and Mystery.

Herein lies the conquest: For Love of God, and in the power of the Spirit, we gulp the air of Resurrection and live lives of faith in Jesus, whom God bore from the very beginning. When we follow Jesus, conquest is not measured in battles won, lands occupied, wealth amassed, and pews filled – indeed, when following Jesus, such things usually become idols to avoid.

Following Jesus teaches us that conquest of the world means living by grace in freedom from the world. And only when freed from the world do we discover true Love for the world. For John, the earth is God’s good creation, and the world is the creation’s rebellion against God. But from the very beginning, all things belong to God.

The psalmist describes it this way: “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” (Psalm 24:1)

Through faith, we, too, are born of God. We are called to share the fearlessly gracious conquest of Jesus’ life, death and Resurrection. His conquest restores healthy relationships between Creator and creation, and between creatures – between you and me. Jesus’ conquest redeems a frightened and violent world, transforming it into a realm of revelation, healing, and hope.

The world of Caesar and the realm of Jesus stand side-by-side. Only one will last. When you pass back through these doors, may you leap gratefully and joyfully into the Mystery, into God’s New Creation, who’s conquest of Love is still just beginning.