This is a sermon (my first sermon) that I preached on May 5, 2024 at the 6pm service for the Cathedral Church of St. Luke.
“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?”
I. Introduction
When the Dean asked me to preach tonight, I was a little surprised. You see, I’ve never actually done this before. (So thanks for being the unwilling participants of this peculiar experiment.) Sure—I’m a lawyer and a teacher, I’ve had my share of public speaking engagements, taken my turn at teaching history and Bible and the like. But a sermon? Well, I’ve listened to hundreds of them by now, so surely I must have some inkling of what one says in a sermon. But, much like the proverbial person who, when asked the very simple question “what’s your favorite book?” proceeds to forget every book they’ve ever read, I suddenly realized I had no idea what a sermon was. So anyways—hope y’all are ready for my 40 point, 2 hour long attempt at figuring out what it is.
At least one of the things that I do know you have to do in a sermon is to joke about how long the sermon’s going to be… Check.
I thought the Dean might have had some purpose, some motive in asking me to do it at this particular point in time. For those that don’t know me, I’m the Ryan that keeps getting prayed for in the prayers of the people from week to week, and hopefully soon will be on the track to some kind of ordained ministry. Perhaps, then, the Dean had reason for me to do this sermon now—as a stepping stone, a last chance to see that this really wasn’t the line of work for me? No, it would seem—he’s just out of town, and Canon Dan could only do the morning services this week.
So you’re stuck with me. And I’m stuck with not really knowing what it is I’m doing up here. Which is perhaps for the best. I’ve heard it prayed many a time before a sermon that God would speak through the speaker, in spite of the speaker. No better way to do that than to have a speaker that doesn’t know what he’s doing. God made Balaam’s a… donkey… testify to the truth; maybe I can do it too. (Note to self—don’t say curse words in a sermon).
But of course that presents a problem. Because lawyers, lawyers aren’t always the best at telling the truth. Even academics, the career I’d have if life were a bit more linear, aren’t that good at saying what the truth is—they’re more trained in saying what the truth isn’t. To stand up here and give a sermon, to stand up and testify to the truth, is fundamentally an act in saying what you believe God is saying today—in declaring what you believe to be true.
Although my story is a bit more complicated than this, it’s also about saying who you are. And I thought about my own career today, and how being a lawyer has been a difficult road for me. And why is that? Well I have an answer for you—it’s that law is hard. No, not hard that way—the intellectual challenges of law can be exciting, and I love getting to help people and hope to do that more in the immediate future. But it’s hard in the sense that the law is about hardness and harshness—it’s fundamentally about coercion, about making people do things they don’t want to do because you’ll get the state to take their life, liberty, or property if they don’t. And that also struck me, because that is not the way of the gospel. Jesus promises to us that his yoke is easy, his burden is light. The commands of the world are onerous, and if you keep them, the best the world can offer you is that it will leave you alone, it will not actively do injustice to you. But Jesus in our gospel passage today says that he has just one command for us, that we love one another as he has loved us. And I don’t think anyone would describe love as hard or harsh.
And so those are the two things I want to focus on today in our passages—love and belief. And to do that, I want to do some church history too, and look at what people who didn’t have that same love and belief as Jesus were doing, i.e. some heretics, and what the gospel brings us instead. And I know what you might be thinking—heresy? It’s a first sermon and my guy’s going to talk about heresy? Just bear with me—if you stick around for the church history, I promise it’s not the kind of sermon you’d think one about heresy would be.
II. Acts
First, our passage in Acts. We picked up at the end of Acts 10. Earlier in the chapter, we see the well known story of Peter being called by Cornelius, the Roman Centurion. God sends Peter a vision, wherein he tells Peter to “kill and eat,” and reveals to him that it’s ok to eat non-kosher food, that as a Christian he is no longer bound by Jewish dietary law. Peter goes to Cornelius’s house and preaches, and for the first time, the Spirit came upon Gentiles:
45 The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, 46 for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, 47 ‘Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?’
Although the Jewish Christians with Peter are shocked, the sign is unmistakable, as the entire story of Acts shows the widening of God’s kingdom—first at Pentecost, then among Samaritans, then among God fearers, and now upon Gentiles. And these Gentiles are soldiers, Roman occupiers, no less! And yet the presence of the Holy Spirit among these people is unmistakable, and the later Conference at Jerusalem confirms what Peter and Paul have witnessed among the Gentiles.
But yet, God’s plans are not without their detractors. The very first heresy that we encounter in scripture is over this very idea—the idea that these new Gentiles can’t be Christians unless they become Jews. This is what the entire epistle of Galatians is about. The Apostle Paul does battle with this idea that you can’t be a Christian unless you become a Jew, unless you practice Judaism, an idea that Peter himself had succumbed to even after his revelation in Acts. The people who were spreading this idea we generally refer to as the Judaizers. These Judaizers. they were possibly even well meaning, we can even sympathize with them perhaps. “What’s wrong with being a Jew? All the people in this Bible of yours are Jews? You can fit in with them, and leave behind the filth of the Gentile world.” And of course, the Gentile world of Rome was filthy and worth leaving behind—that’s certainly not the point, to join them in their defilement, as Paul will point out in other books. But ultimately Paul will have none of it—the gospel is about the unification of Gentiles and Jews in the love of God and for each other, and it is a gospel that does not put commands like the cutting of flesh and ritual purification on its adherence, but instead asks them to love one another as Christ in God loved you.
So we see our first glimpse at a heresy in the early church–the Judaizers, who would split the church between Jews and Gentiles, and would force the Gentile Christians to become like Jews to be Christians.
III. John
Next, let’s look at our reading in First John. The Apostle John confronted heresy and the disunity of the Church as well in his own way, likely a few decades (at least) after Paul wrote Galatians, due to John’s long life on this earth. Much of First John has this as its goal—to emphasize the bodily incarnation of Jesus, the historical reality of Jesus’s ministry, and the reality of sin in our lives. We see this in the first part of the epistle—John insists that he is declaring what he has heard, seen with his eyes, and touched with his hands (1:1). He points to the light of God, that “if we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another…”, as well as the well known sentence from our confession and absolution, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1:6-8).
John is speaking specifically to the early church heresy of Gnosticism, which Bishop Smith centered his sermon around just a few weeks ago. Gnosticism was a viewpoint that espoused “secret knowledge”—gnosis—as the way of salvation. For reasons that may seem obvious, we don’t have a definitive definition of the “secret knowledge” that they espoused. They were at least good at keeping a decent amount of it a secret! Much of our knowledge of it comes from Church Fathers like Irenaeus who wrote against its influence in the church, although recent archeological discoveries have started to shed some light on it. The late church historian Jaroslav Pelikan has provided some descriptions. I’ll paraphrase and quote from him for a bit.
First, it is a system of secret knowledge which seeks the redemption of the “inner, spiritual man” who possesses knowledge of the entire cosmos. (82). It offered a spiritual Jesus who did not actually die on the cross, who was anointed by the Supreme God (who was notably not the God of the Old Testament, that God being a crass and worldly figure), who descended from heaven “to bring the revelation of the redemption from the created world, from sin and from sex.” As one gnostic wrote, “Christ came to destroy the God of the Jews, but to save those who believe in him, that is, those who have the spark of life in them.” Because the physical world was seen as evil, Gnosticism could take two related directions: either it could deny the ultimate realty of our physical world and the importance of our bodies and live in extreme asceticism, eschewing sin and sex completely; or it could deny the ultimate realty of our physical world and the importance of our bodies, deny that sin is a reality, and live in extreme hedonism—throwing one’s self headlong into sin and sex because they don’t ultimately matter.
For the Gnostics, there was a sharp divide between the Supreme God, and the Creator God—the Creator God sometimes appearing as a demiurge—a lesser god, and sometimes the enemy of the Supreme God.
And for John, this may have even been personal, for the Gospel of John was a favorite proof text of some of the Gnostics. They pointed to John 1, which sounded to them much like Greek philosophy, talking of Jesus as the divine logos, deducing that Jesus came as the logos of the Supreme God to reveal the futility of the worship of the God of the Jews.
But John will have none of it. While perhaps before we could see some way to emphasize with the Judaizers, some way to see their influence in the church as somewhat benign, with the Gnostics, it’s difficult to see anything but the human tendency to be puffed up with knowledge and to look down on others. As the Apostle writes in our text, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,” that is the creator God, the God who made the physical stuff that we inhabit every day and into which Jesus was incarnate, “and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.” There is, for John, no separation between Jesus and the Father, no ability to deny one and take the other. And what is the test of our love of God? “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments.” As one commentator states, “John interprets the love of God in terms of human love. We show love to God as we love our brothers and sisters. There is no valid love of God where such human love is rejected or absent.” (Smith 120).
So we have the Gnostics, who would not only divorce body from soul and Jesus from YHWH, but also brother from brother in the pursuit of their so-called secret knowledge.
IV. Augustine
In the Fourth Century, Saint Augustine, by then the Bishop of Hippo, a town in Northern Africa near the ancient city of Carthage, would use I John as his text to preach against another heresy prevalent there. Augustine preached against a group of people known as the Donatists. The Donatist controversy was actually quite old by the time Augustine had become bishop, much less a Christian, but it had taken hold in Northern Africa and was splitting the church in two during Augustine’s day.
During the last Roman persecutions of Christians under the Emperor Diocletian, the Roman governor in North Africa had been somewhat lenient, and would let Christians live if they would renounce their faith, which for him only required handing over copies of their scriptures. Although maybe not showing the courage of the martyrs, many did, and were allowed to live and continue about their lives, simply without attending church. It’s not the behavior any of us would want to espouse, perhaps we fancy ourselves being able to face down the lions in the Coliseum, but human nature being what it is, many took this easier route. After Diocletian died, Constantine became emperor, and many of the same Christians repented and returned to church now that it was safe to do so without persecution.
For the Donatists, however, repentance was not enough. The Donatists, per Jaroslav Pelikan, “demanded that the church be purged of those among its clergy and bishops who had been guilty of betraying the faith under persecution. Only that church was a true church in which ‘the communion of saints’ was a communion of genuine, perfect saints.” He continues, “The moral pollution of the church’s bishops by the mortal sin of apostasy invalidated the ordinations they performed, canceled the efficacy of the baptism administered by their clergy, deprived the church of its requisite holiness, and thereby brought on the fall of the church. In the name of this demand for holiness, the Donatists felt obliged to separate themselves from the vast body of those who called themselves catholic Christians; for there could be no fellowship between the church of Christ (the Donatists) and the synagogue of Satan (the catholics).” (309). Harsh words, and you can see how it would have had a significant ripple effect if they saw baptisms and ordinations invalid.
For Augustine though, this could not be. In one of his homilies on I John, commenting on our reading, he points out that many “know” Christ and “have faith,” as even the demons do. But the one who has true faith is the one that has joined love to faith. As he writes, “[The Christian], He has joined love directly to faith, because faith is empty without love. With love it is the faith of a Christian; without love it is the faith of a demon.” (147).
What is the content of this love, per Augustine? He points to 5:2:
“What is this, brothers? A short while before he was speaking of the Son of God, not of the sons of God. See, one Christ has been proposed for us to contemplate, and it has been said to us, Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Son of God has been born of God, and everyone who loves the one who has begotten him—that is, the Father—loves him who has been begotten by him—that is, the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. And there follows: This is how we know that we love the sons of God. It is as though he were going to say, “This is how we know that we love the Son of God.” He who shortly before was saying the Son of God said the sons of God, because the sons of God are the body of the only son of God, and, since he is the head and we are the members, the Son of God is one. Therefore, he who loves the sons of God loves the Son of God, and he who loves the Son of God loves the Father.” (147-8).
Thus, for Augustine, to love God is to love his son, and to love his son is to love his body, the Church, and the Donatists who would cleave the church in half for a purer love of God do not truly love him at all.
V. Conclusion
To conclude, I want to return to our gospel reading. Because all of these forays into Church history really are just meant to be exposition of what Jesus said in that passage:
“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 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 is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’ No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go out and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”
Every one of the examples from tonight—the Judaizers, the Gnostics, the Donatists—each one of them claimed to love God better, to know better, to be better than their brothers and sisters. But Jesus says that’s not how it works. In other parts of the gospel, he says the whole of the law and the prophets boils down to two commandments. But here he’s clear—how do you show you’re keeping the first? What is the fruit of you loving the Father? How do you show that you’re a friend to Jesus and keep his commands? By loving one another.
And who is our brother? Who is our sister? Certainly we don’t choose them, any more than we choose our own brothers and sisters. Jesus is clear. We did not choose Jesus; he chose us, and he chose those who would accompany us on this pilgrimage. And of course, loving hardly has to mean liking. Any of us with more than one sibling might be able to attest to that! Paul’s words to many of the churches might show that. But while love might not mean you like your brother, if it’s to mean anything at all, it must mean you don’t leave your brother.
This has never been an easy command to keep. The church has been rent asunder by heresy and schism, as much as it has been by the mere treachery of good intentions throughout its entire history. We think we know better than our brothers and sisters? Perhaps we do. But it means nothing if we do not love them.
So, may we today love God by loving our brothers and sisters—even the ones that we would not choose to love. Amen.
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