Easter 6 2009 – ‘Believe,
Act, Relate’
“This is my
commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
Here’s an easy question for you on a Sunday morning; what’s the most
important thing about being a Christian, what we believe or what we do? I’m
almost tempted just to leave it there and get you into groups to argue it out.
Is belief more important or actions?
I spent the formative years of my Christian life in a church that
claimed the former, but often practiced the latter. Believing the right things
was very important. I often say that I could have lined up a hundred members of
that church, asked them a question and got the same answer a hundred times,
unlike my later experience of churches where I could line up ten people and get
at least a hundred answers.
I make a joke of it now, but at the time believing the right things in
the right ways was quite literally a matter of life and death – believing right
meant going to heaven, believing wrong meant an express pass to hell. But for
all that the church had to say about the importance of belief, the way it acted
when you did something wrong said something else.
I was a teenage boy, and some of you have been there yourselves and
others have parented teenage boys and some of you have just had the interesting
experience of observing. I can tell you though, when you’re a Pentecostal being
a teenage boy and getting things wrong are just two descriptions of the same
thing. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe the right things, I’m sure I did for a
while at least, it’s just that the connection between what I believed and what
I did often got broken, and when it did I knew all about it. Whole herds of
people would descend on me to pray for me and cast out whatever needed casting
out at that particular moment, and often it would be the same thing week after
week after week. So while I was taught that right belief was most important I
soon learned that right action was even more so.
Closer to home maybe, and much of the argument and debate in the
Anglican Communion today is focused on differences over what we believe. Who
knows the truth? Whose way of reading the scriptures is correct? Who’s
understanding is God’s understanding? We see so much focus on defining Godly
belief, often accompanied by the most appalling actions.
On the other hand, during my years as a priest I have sat and spoken
with many, many people – especially men – who want to defend their lifestyles
to me by telling me that they don’t go to church or pray or read the Bible, but
they try to live a Christian life, which inevitably means they try to do the
right things. It’s the definition of the good Christian man or woman we often
hear about at funerals – we don’t know what they did or didn’t believe, but
ultimately that wasn’t as important as how they lived.
I often see this in a different way at meetings. At our clergy
conference just over a week ago we were challenged to think about how many
church meetings we go to where God and Jesus are never mentioned. So often it’s
all about the process or the rules or the way we do or should be doing things,
or getting the organisation just right. Gerald Kenney, an American Methodist
bishop last century, once said that the Methodist church was so well organized
that it would flourish in the
What’s the most
important – actions or beliefs? It’s a question faced head-on by today’s
epistle reading.
I spoke about the context of 1 John last week. Here we find a community
that has faced a major conflict within itself leading to a significant split
and now the group seeks to lick its wounds and rebuild and the author of the
epistle offers some rules and guidelines for doing so which can really be
summed up as simply ‘love one another’.
“For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments.” If ‘love
one another’ is a summary of first John, its constant refrain is ‘to love God
is to keep God’s commandments.’ For those Christians who had been born and raised
as Jews this would have been more than familiar. At the heart of Judaism is the
understanding that to love God is to keep the commandments, the better you become
at keeping them, the more you prove your love for God, and the more you love
God the closer you are to God.
We find a similar message echoed somewhat in our Gospel reading; “love
one another as I have loved you.” It’s a constant and consistent theme in
throughout the Johannine material: God so loved the world. God is love. Since
God loved us so much, we ought to love each other. Love one another as I have
loved you. And, as we discussed last week, this is love with a capital S for
service – how do we love God, by doing what we’ve been told to do, how do we
love one another, by loving as Jesus did, and ultimately by ‘laying down our
lives’ – by setting aside what we might want and desire - for the sake of each
other. Love is not simply in action, love is action, and it’s through our
actions that we prove our love.
But 1 John has at least as much to say about belief as it does action.
“And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who is it that
conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” The
Epistle of James famously insists that faith without works is dead, but 1 John
and almost all of Paul’s writings make it clear that works without belief are
just as pointless. So which is more important, what we believe or what we do?
Most of us would say, of course, that they’re both important, essential
even. Some might even say that they’re equally important, although I suspect if
I pushed hard enough you’d end up showing a preference. But I want to pre-empt
the whole conversation by suggesting that there’s something even more
important, something that both what we believe and what we do hinge on, and
it’s the something that lurks at the heart of our reading from John.
While the gospel does bolster the ‘what we do is how we love God’
argument somewhat, today’s reading goes much further in defining love as communion:
“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.” To fully
appreciate those words we need to hear them in the context of the first part of
the passage, last week’s reading, where Jesus began with the statement, “I am
the true vine, my Father is the vine-grower” and we are the branches. Abide in
me as I abide in you.
That’s a wonderful word, abide. It suggests so much more than just
experience or know or even live with. To abide suggests to dwell with and
within. One commentator I read pointed out that the Greek here is similar to
the words used in John 1: 18; “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only
Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” ‘Who is close
to the Father’s heart’, or as an older translations puts it, ‘in the bosom of
the Father’, that’s the kind of connection abide suggests, an intimate and all
encompassing closeness that can only be found in the most personal of
relationships.
There it is – the word I want to suggest stands above both belief and
action in our life of faith, relationship. Christ is the vine, we are the
branches, he abides in God we abide in him, Jesus loves us, we are to love one
another. This is about connection and interconnection and the loving service
that is love that flows between God and Christ and Christ and us and us and
each other – connecting us all back to the original vine-grower who loves us
and calls us by name.
We are all connected. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, there
is no such thing as a private Christian. There are no individual Christians. I
cannot be a Christian without you and you cannot be a Christian without me and
that’s precisely the way God designed it to be. Without relationship –
relationship with God through Christ, relationship with the other branches
around you – without relationship what you do and what you believe are simply
actions and beliefs. It’s within those relationships that we find faith.
I know many of us would be happier if that wasn’t the case. Like those
circumcised believers in Acts 10 who are astounded that the Spirit might come
to these awful gentiles, we prefer to be able to choose those we have
relationships with carefully. It’s hard work, this relating to one another.
Surely it’s OK if its just me and God? “This is my commandment, that you love
one another as I have loved you.”
What we believe is important, just as what we do is important, but
belief and action don’t make us Christians, our relationships do. The message
of John 15 and first John is as clear as it is complex, how we relate to and
with Christ and one another is how we relate to God, it’s not a suggestion or a
guideline or an optional extra for our lives, it’s just the way it is, no ifs,
no buts. May Christ who calls us friends help make it so. Amen.