"Love in Truth and Action" - A Sermon preached at the First United Presbyterian Church of Lackawanna Valley on Sunday, April 25, 2021
Newport Presbyterian Church is nestled in a neighborhood in a section of Bellevue, Washington. Once you duck under the overpass of Interstate 405 and turn off the bucolic Coal Creek Parkway you travel along tree lined streets dotted with lovely homes. Downhill behind the homes is a body of water known as “the slough,” connected to Lake Washington. Streets to the right lead up the mountain into neighborhoods with names given to them by their developers in the latter half of the twentieth century. One of those roads, identified by a carved wooden sign, leads instead into the property of the chu The road winds in to the left, and the church appears on the right. The building was built in keeping with the Northwest surroundings: its dark wood siding blends into the landscape of towering trees. The driveway leads to a series of parking lots that ring a small island of trees and shrubs, in the middle of which is a rugged wood lectern surrounded by five or six log benches arranged in a circle, where one can imagine a Sunday School class or an adult Bible Study gathered on a warm sunny day.
As habit dictates, the car in which we drove nestled into a parking space in the section of the lot where we always park when attending this church. For my wife, Jan and I, prior to Covid 19, that meant, once or twice a year. For the other occupants of the car, our eldest daughter, her husband, and our two granddaughters, it means slightly more than that…but not by much, I’m sad to say. (All the more reason the bedtime “Jackson the Monkey” stories Jan tells the girls have lessons embedded in them to point “the way” a child of God should go.)
As my son-in-law put the car in park and shut down our battery driven ride, we noticed something different about the parking spaces next to us. In the first stood a port-o-potty and one of those recep-tacles specially designed for disposing cigarette butts. At the end of the other two spaces there were wooden stakes pounded into the ground bearing signs. In bold black letters on white backgrounds the signs read:
“I have a question,” announced the six-year-old who is rarely without one. “Why is there a port-o-potty in the church parking lot?”
Her mother answered: “It is for the people who must sleep in their cars because they have no place to live. The church lets them park their cars here in a safe place at night.”
Accustomed
to seeing the colonies of domed tents of nestled under overpasses and in the
side yards of churches in and around Seattle, our little one didn’t need any
further explanation. After church, on the way to brunch near the iconic Pike
Street Marketplace, we would pass several encampments. For the moment, as we walked up a slight hill
to enter the church behind a young Asian-American woman being pushed in her
wheelchair by her mother, it was enough to conclude the impromptu lesson on living
as Jesus commands by noting that their church was doing what it can to live
love, “not in word or speech, but in truth and in action.”
Those
words from the first letter of John are part of what many consider to be a commentary
on the Gospel of John. They come as the author attempts to teach the twin
themes of John’s Gospel: belief, that is, trust, in the power of the name of
the Lord Jesus Christ, and the commandment to love one another as Christ has
loved us. The living out of that trust or belief, and the love the Lord commanded,
rooted in the example of Jesus himself.
The love Jesus commanded and lived is more than mere words. It issues in action. “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another,” writes the author of John. Talk is cheap. Actions speak louder than words. “Life reveals the children of God,” as one notable Christian put it.[i] In words similar to those found in the Letter of James, John writes: “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 to help?
A few years ago, I was typing those very words into my scaled-up-so-I-can-read-it Sunday morning script when there was a knock on the door. There stood a familiar figure whose life has taken at least two steps backward for every half-step he manages forward. I listened to the latest chapter in his tale of woe that included a severe medical condition, and co-pays for every visit for treatment or medication prescribed to counter side-effects. With the words of First John across the room on the computer screen, and a balance in my Pastor’s Discretionary Fund, I was confronted with the question raised in our reading: “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 to help?
The only choice possible was to embrace the answer John provides: “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” So from the funds my congregation set aside for such moments, my visitor was provided a tankful of gas to get him the next treatment and enough dollars to cover the co-pay.
One Saturday evening during our visit out in Washington, we once more loaded into the son-in-law’s car, drove down from the heights of Cougar Mountain to an indoor soccer field on the valley floor. It was a chance for Jan and I to watch our granddaughter enjoy a team sport in the company of others who are fast becoming their best friends. I must say that being indoors, with a snack bar and beverages available was a much better deal than sitting on a frigid aluminum bleacher a few days later freezing as a bunch of four, five, and six year-olds held their last T-ball practice.
After watching our team win, with my older granddaughter making several saves as goalie, one of the other player’s fathers, who had been standing beside me most of the game, began to talk about his church. (Everyone has apparently been clued in that Katie’s father is a minister.) Dan is a successful lawyer who was serving on the Pulpit Nominating Committee of a Lutheran Church in the University section of Seattle. He and his wife had begun attending while students at the University of Washington, and stayed involved even after they bought a home half an hour out of the city. He lamented declining attendance and lack of participation by his generation; he spoke of the difficulty they’re having at-tracting a candidate to relocate to an area with such a high cost of living. He told of conversations the Lutheran congregation is having with the Methodists nearby about finding a way to work together, possibly merging, and putting one of the buildings to work as a resource for the community and a shelter for the homeless.
What
I thought would be an intrusion on my vacation, became another uplifting
moment. To hear about congregations that are willing to go beyond “the way
we’ve always done it,” that are thinking outside the box, that are looking to
meet the needs of neighbors beyond their own membership rolls was a gift. It was
uplifting to hear of people who are being honest in their attempts to be the
church in the midst of changing times. It was heartwarming because back here in
Pennsylvania I was serving a church working its way into a new future by
sharing facilities with another congregation, and dis-covering how to serve our
new neighbors. When Dan spoke of meeting
the needs of their neighbors, it was another reminder that there are people who
have heard and are heeding the message to love, “not in word of speech, but in
truth and action.”
Writing in a recent edition of The Presbyterian Outlook, pastor and author Roger Gench calls love, “the foundation-al fruit of the Spirit,” adding these words of clarification: "In our cultural context, we tend to think of love as an emotion, and thus may need to be reminded that love, in the biblical idiom, is not so much something you feel, but rather some-thing you do. It is an action rather than a feeling—an action on behalf of another’s well-being—some-times regardless of how we feel.”[ii] To put it ano-ther way, the love Jesus commanded and demonstrated and John writes about is a conscious, positive choice that seeks what is best for the other, whomever that other happens to be: friend or foe, an intimate or an enemy, someone special or the stranger you happen upon.
Expressions
of this kind of love occur around us and to us and through us all the
time. Someone questions and researches
the validity of a hurtful Facebook post that turns out to be real “fake news.” She
warns others not to believe it or pass it on.
A person doing their daily steps through the mall notices the vacant,
frightened look on the face of someone standing still at the intersection of
two hallways. He stops and offers assistance until a relieved caregiver comes
along searching for the sheep that has strayed. An individual who once was
living meal to meal with more than a few skipped along the way, quietly places
some soup cans and cornflakes in the food pantry collection box. The size and
scope of active love matters little, because the impact will be large and
lasting.
Our
Sunday sojourn into Seattle was nearing its end. After brunch in a trendy spot
just a ways down from the original Starbucks, we walked through the Pike Street
Marketplace. We stopped briefly while the girls and their grandmother
taste-tested some chocolate covered chucker cherries. We made our way past
what seemed like acres of fresh cut flowers for sale, and booths with vendors
selling t-shirts and paintings and all manner of hand-made crafts. We passed the open air seafood market where
tourists line up to watch the sales force toss huge salmon back and forth
before placing them on the scale and bagging them for a customer. Before we went out toward the street, we
passed over a walkway and looked down on the famous gum wall, watching as
people took “selfies” or made their own additions to the multicolored
confectionary collection.
Once
on the street we headed down to the waterfront, eventually taking a set of
steep steps beside a beautiful fountain, down, down, down until we were at the
level of the piers. Our destination was
near the huge Ferris Wheel that is in all the pictures of the Seattle
Waterfront. There the National Park Service has an attraction called “Wings Over
Washington.” Rising from the side of the
pier is a building that looks like a great wooden lodge you would expect to
find in one of the National Parks. After buying your tickets, you line up and
wait to be escorted into a small room, where a Park Ranger gives a humor-laden
introduction to the natural wonders and the first nation peoples of the
region. Then with some safety
instructions for the ride you are about to take, you are led into a theater.
Once in your seat, you buckle into a three-way seatbelt harness as instructed.
The lights dim; the knee-wall in front of you is lowered; the floor drops out from under your feet, and on a curved screen in front of you an eagle appears. Next thing you know, you are flying behind the eagle, up and over the mountains, down across the Haro Straight where the Orca’s rise and dive and splash you near the Lime Kiln Lighthouse. Over the endless tulip fields of Skagit County; up and over the mountains, down through white water valleys just above some kayakers; into the blasted out side of Mt. Saint Helens as it is about to erupt again; more countryside; out to the Olympic National Park, around through Deception Pass, before coming across Puget Sound into Elliott Bay and back to Seattle. It is a thrilling ride for those who keep their eyes open; an adventure to endure to the delight of your grandchildren if you are a grand-mother who afraid of heights.
While our eyes adjusted to being open again, we made our way along the waterfront in the direction of the parking garage below the Market. Just past the Seattle Aquarium there was a crosswalk leading under the Alaskan Way Viaduct which has since been replaced by a tunnel being dug beneath our feet. In the shadow of the viaduct a dozen or more tents were pitched, a multi-colored patch-work of temp-orary housing that for many is all too permanent. Attempting to be polite and respectful, I tried not to stare, but something caught my eye. There, in the midst of the homeless folk in their multi-layered, worn and weary donated outfits, was a family dressed in their Eddy Bauer best: a mom and a dad, and two children. In front of them was an array of brown paper bags with handles, the kind deli’s and restaurants provide for carry out meals. The woman was reaching into the bags and handing out sand-wiches. The man was breaking bottles of water out of the plastic wrap of the case at his feet. The kids were helping pass out bags of chips and cookies. The day ended as it began, with a teachable moment to help us all discover what love “in action” looks like.
An
act of kindness; an expression of love; a reminder amid all the evidence of
selfishness and self-indulgence which surrounded us, that there are people who see
“a brother or sister in need,” and do something to help. Such sights call us to
do whatever we can, whenever we can, wherever we are.
“Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” Amen.
[i]
William Barclay, The Letters of John and
Jude, The Daily Bible Study Bible, Second Edition, (Philadelphia, PA: The
Westminster Press, 1960), p. 97
[ii]
Roger J. Gench, “Love: The Foundational Fruit of the Spirit,” The Presbyterian Outlook, Richmond, VA, April 5, 2021, p. 17
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