To Love your Brother or Sister

Sermon by Jamie Howison on 1 John 4:7-21 and John 15:1-8

When I was a kid my family had a cottage at Victoria Beach, and right through elementary school all of my summers were spent there. The family would move up a couple of days after school had ended for the summer break, and my mum would stay there with the three children, with my dad joining us for weekends and his vacation weeks. It was a pretty splendid time for a boy like me, as we were not all that far from being what today are called free range kids; out for hours on our bikes, exploring the woods and fashioning all kinds of imaginary adventures, searching for empty soft drink bottles to cash in for penny candy, playing baseball every evening at the community club grounds, fishing, hunting for frogs and crayfish… it was quite idyllic in so many ways.

Being away from the city for the summer meant that we were also away from our church for two months—I don’t know that I minded that all that much—so from time to time my parents would take us to the church service held at the community club. There they would have set out rows of stacking chairs on the creaky old floor—the same chairs used for the weekly movie nights—and some visiting minister would lead a generally mainline Protestant service. There’d have been some singing, though I don’t recall if it was led with a piano or maybe a guitar; those were the mid-1960s, and the folk hymn was just coming into fashion, so maybe we had fashionably modern ministers there, who were keen on such innovations. I don’t remember going all that often, which probably means that on the whole it was an underwhelming church service, because in the city we never missed a Sunday, and I have a gold attendance pin from Westwood Presbyterian Church Sunday School to prove it!

Strangely, though, I have a very vivid memory of a sermon from one of those Victoria Beach church services, in which the minister preached on a portion of tonight’s reading from the 1st Epistle of John, specifically this:

Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.

I have no idea as to whether he preached on more than just that verse, but I was powerfully struck by what I did hear him say, which was basically: You can’t love God if you hate another person, and you are lying— lying—if you say you love God but at the same time hate someone.

Oh my goodness, did that ever trouble my young soul. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old, but I suppose was I serious enough about things to a) be listening to the sermon, and b) be shaken by it.

You see, my family were church folks. Not in a narrowly pious or moralistic way, but the language of faith was simply a part of our home. There was a blessing before dinner and prayers at bedtime. We certainly knew what Christmas was really all about, and I remember my dad reading us the nativity story from the big family bible, right before we hung up our stockings for Santa. The basic bible stories were familiar; just part of what you knew, what was in the air. So, I was pretty sure that I loved God, and I sure liked Jesus.

But I’m also this little boy who was pretty sure I hated the bullies in my school, and sometimes when I got really mad at a friend or my younger brother, that ominous statement would spring from my mouth: I hate your guts. And what about the girls in my class? I mean, we were at an age when all the girls thought that the boys were for the most part gross, and the boys believed that the girls all had cooties. One of the girls in my grade was thought to have the most serious of cooties, and I’m sure I hated her… I might have even told her that I did.

How can I hate Susan with her cooties, and that bully Grant, and sometimes my friend Brian when he was being a jerk, and my little brother when he was being a real pain… and then love God? The minister said I’m a liar. Am I?

I was sufficiently rattled by this that once we were back in the city at the end of the summer I actually raised the question with my friend Brian; the very one whose guts I had occasionally said I hated! I vividly remember being in my front yard playing, and out of nowhere I just blurted out what this minister had said in his sermon. Now Brian’s family were not really a church family—except perhaps being able to identify a church that they didn’t attend—but that was a time when we said the Lord’s Prayer in school, had daily bible readings at the beginning of the day, and at Christmastime sang carols and performed the nativity pageant in the school auditorium. The idea of God was simply in the cultural air that we all breathed, in other words, and even those kids whose families didn’t go to church still believed in God.

I don’t really remember much about what he said, but I do recall that he took it all really quite seriously. What I know is that I decided that you didn’t throw around words like “hate” too loosely, because those words could make a liar out of you.

Now some of you may be thinking that given that the six or seven year old Jamie was wrestling away with this stuff in this way, I was pretty much fated for the ministry… and maybe in some sense I was, though the junior high version of me would most definitely have suggested otherwise!

The thing is, at some level I really did “get” what John is trying to convey here to his community. In some very real sense, this passage—and the whole of the 1st Epistle of John—is an extended improvisation on a key piece of Jesus’ teaching from the Gospel according to John:

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’ (13:34-35)

This is the one clear commandment or mandate that Jesus gives to his disciples in the Gospel according to John; to love one another, just as he had loved them. That doesn’t mean to feel warm and fuzzy toward others, but rather to choose to love, and to do that from a posture of both servanthood—recall Jesus washing his disciples’ feet—and friendship, which is another powerful theme in John. To choose to love is to choose not to hold hatred and animosity for others; to not stand in a posture of hostility or resentment or jealousy. It means aligning what one says about their belief in God with how we actually think about and treat the very real people in this very real world.

That is a mandate that is at once quite simple and incredibly challenging, and that’s what I was recognizing all those years ago when I heard that minister preach on that Sunday morning in the Victoria Beach Community Club. I knew that I deeply resented and feared the bully, that I could sometimes experience animosity to my friends, and that my little brother could drive me crazy. And yet there I was, sensing this call to not let those emotions take over; to not become as mean as the bully.

But how in heaven’s name do you carry that off, without just succumbing to the bully? The heart of the answer is carried in today’s gospel reading, when Jesus says, “abide in me”. “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” And the fruit that is born is not “stuff” or success or anything like that, but instead the things that Paul in Galatians calls the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” And this is not about becoming spiritual superheroes—so pure, so good—but about being truthful about where the gaps are in our lives, and then surrendering to our need to be branches of the one true vine. I didn’t quite grasp all of that when I was a kid, but I think I was well on the way, and I’m pretty sure that I still am.