God is Love

Let me begin by saying that after a three-week bout of pneumonia and extended recovery here at home, it is a joy to my heart to be back again with you.  I rejoiced weekly in that period of convalescence over the reports I heard from you.

When I first came out of the fog in the Kaiser-Ontario Hospital, the first thought that came to my mind was, how am I going to get a sermon done for this Sunday?  Then the reality of my hospital bed hit – there’s no way in God’s green earth I would be in any shape to be in the pulpit that coming Sunday.

Shortly, only perhaps a half an hour later, Faith called.  I fumbled through the blankets to find my phone.  When I expressed my concern, she cheerfully responded, “Don’t worry, Rev. Forney, we’ve got six years of your sermons on file here.  One will work.”  And, it did.  Barbara read it.  Ellen made sure the altar was properly set up. Deacon Pat officiated at Deacon’s Mass.  Joseph as acolyte ensured that things went smoothly.  Beth stepped up to provide the music.  Faith made sure the welcome and announcements were read, and you all showed up and carried on splendidly.  And during that week, you oversaw the planting of forty donated bareroot fruit trees in the orchard area of the church grounds.  Fresh fruit in two years for our food distribution program.  A Resurrection People you are indeed!

Shortly after, Christopher arrived on the scene from Brooklyn, New York, to stay with Jai to provide moral support and assist in the immediate needs of caring for me.  Bishop John stopped by my room with the Eucharist and prayer.  Many other visitors followed.

Last Friday, after a trip of several weeks seeing our vast and beautiful country, Christopher, Alexis, Brian the Cat, and Cookie the dog arrived in Claremont after a month-long cross-country road trip.  They had been in Texas to view the eclipse with friends, visited my old Army stomping ground in San Antonio to appreciate the River Walk, Carlsbad Caverns, and then the Grand Canyon – all sights Alexis had never seen.

They are now ensconced in a triplex in Loma Linda.  This past week they’ve been spending hours upon hours assembling Ikea furniture.  I say that if any marriage can survive that ordeal, it’s bound to last.  To boot, Christopher has volunteered during their stay there while the condo in Anaheim is under renovation, to teach English as a second language here at St. Francis for adults in the evenings – a task for which he’s uniquely gifted.  Alexis will finish our church’s website after they settle in and she returns from a brief visit back to New York to be with family and assist an ailing mother. 

Life is good, and it’s all about Love.  All Joy.

This is the bond of care and concern, sacrifice for the good of one another that is at the heart of John’s gospel. It’s his understanding of the core of the faith.  “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”

And from the same community of faith comes the First Letter of John.  “God is Love and those who abide in Love abide in God, and God abides in them…”[1]

This Love is sacramental, which is to say it finds visible tokens of expression in our daily lives.

“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.”

You know these commandments from Jesus reply to an obnoxious lawyer who was testing him in Matthew’s gospel.  Jesus’ reply? — quoting the Torah from Deuteronomy – “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like unto it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”  You know these commandments.  “On these two hang all the Law and the Prophets.”[2]

And the purpose of these teachings?  “I have said these things to you that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” [3]

Unfortunately, much of the religion that far too many have grown up with was legalistic and punitive – about avoiding damnation and hell-fire.  Toxic.

Far too many have rejected faith as a life-affirming option due to the trauma they bear, often for their remaining days.

I think of my friend in basic training some fifty years ago; he had only a negative understanding of Christianity.  As I was a conscientious objector being trained as a medic in the Army, so were all those in our company,

D-3.  Most were Seventh-Day Adventists, who got the designation automatically along with a few Jehovah’s Witnesses adherents.  And some of us were standard brand Protestants.  Maybe one or two Roman Catholics. 

Then, there was Holderbaum, a Buddhist.  When I asked him, with his last name, how was it that he was Buddhist, he responded: “Well I knew that I wasn’t a Protestant because they can’t drink, have sex or go to movies.  Or have fun.  I knew I wasn’t a Catholic because I didn’t believe in the Pope.  So, that must have left Buddhist.”  So, a Buddhist monk led him through filling out his application for conscientious objector status.  In any case, like me, he was against killing people in the Vietnam War.

The purpose of the faith in Christ is to experience Joy.  Teilhard de Chardin somewhere, I remember, said that “Joy is the most profound evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit.” 

The faith is not about worrying about God’s wrath, it’s about entering into the blessedness of a way of life that affirms all creation, including oneself.  St. Augustine put it this way: “Love God and do what you will,” for those who truly are centered in God will naturally do that which is life affirming.  They can’t help it.

As Mel White wrote in his book, fear leads to “religion gone bad.”[4]  In the opening preface he recounts the gristly torture and murder of a young man solely because he was gay. 

The reason the perpetrators gave for their crime?  “I had to obey God’s law rather than man’s law.  I didn’t want to do this.  I felt I was supposed to…I have followed a higher law…My brother and I are incarcerated for our work of cleansing a sick society…I just plan to defend myself from the Scriptures.”  [5]

All in the name of a perverted and blasphemous version of the Christian faith.  Definitely NOT what Jesus lived and preached.  Definitely, religion gone bad!

Deeply grounded faith in and through the Jesus Movement brings not only Joy but amazing acts of courage.  Acts one might think to be unlikely until the moment arises. 

I think back to my first church I served fifty years ago out in the high desert off Hwy. 395 in Inyokern.  Our lay leader, Bill White, once told me a most amazing story of his father who was a Methodist pastor in Florida.

It was in the time of the sixties, and Bill’s father had begun thinking about how his all-white congregation might learn about their Black neighbors across town.  He thought a girls children’s choir should be pretty non-threatening.  Wrong!

The children arrived at his father’s church that Saturday afternoon to rehearse and spend the night before Sunday’s service.  Around 9:00 PM a group of hostile whites began to gather at the church – many of whom were armed.  Suspecting there might be trouble, Bill’s dad had decided to spend the night at the church with the girls and their chaperones.

When he heard the shouts and looked outside to see the crowd with their torches and weapons, Bill’s dad went outside to meet the gathering, now some fifty in number.  One fellow, holding a shotgun, demanded, “I want you to send those girls outside now.”  To which Bill’s father responded, “If you want those kids, you going to have to come through me.”

A long silence was followed by some scuffling of feet as some of the mob began to melt away.  And then more.  More silence and some whispers as even more left.  Finally, the guy with the shotgun lowered it, shamefacedly turned and left also.

This is the sort of courage his faith gave him.  The next day, those kids gave a marvelous performance, singing their two anthems.  They were not the wiser as to what had transpired the evening before.  The courage of that moment and the joy of that children’s choir lives on through the ages in the retelling.  It’s the sacramental presence of God’s Grace.

It was with a most joyful heart that Bill recounted this event to me.  When I ran an ecumenical fair housing program in the San Gabriel Valley, this was the same joy I would witness as our fair housing volunteers returned after having secured a rental apartment for a prospective tenant of color from a hostile owner or manager – an act of courage to be sure.  Like the anthem proclaims, “There’ll be Joy in the Morning” — for every day holds the promise of Easter Joy.  That’s sort of our thing as members of the Jesus Movement.

It has been said that there are two, and only two, most important days in your life: the day you were born and the day you figured out why.  All the rest flows from the “why,” and living in to that realization usually takes a lifetime.  The novelist Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead, writes, “There are a thousand reasons to live this life; every one of them is sufficient.”  Most of us grow into that understanding.

I close with my favorite quote from James Baldwin from his essay, “Nothing Personal”:

         For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; The earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us.  The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.[6]

In this duty, and yes, in the courage, is divine Joy — a doorway to the eternal.  Amen.

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[1] 1 John 4:15b, NRSV.

[2] Matthew 22:37-40, NRSV.

[3] John 15:11, NRSV.

[4] Mel White, Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006), xiii – xiv.

[5] Ibid.

[6] James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 393.

May 5, 2024
6 Easter

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98;
1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17 “God is Love”