"Truth and Love"

11-Sep-2011

“Truth and Love”

Robert M. Thompson, Pastor

Corinth Reformed Church
150 Sixteenth Avenue NW
Hickory, North Carolina 28601

828.328.6196 corinthtoday.org

It is so hard to get truth and love in balance.

2 John 1-13

September 11, 2011

Twin towers

With so much media coverage this past week, I’ve wondered what I might have to add to this ten-year anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in Washington and New York. You have heard or shared many stories of where you were that morning.

The most amusing comment I heard was probably Jane Hunsucker, who celebrated her 75^th birthday that day. Jane turns 85 today, and as she recalled 9/11 she said, “You know, you have a drink every now and then.”

I was in a church staff meeting in the Althouse Room on 9/11, and Sharon Wiehrdt was the office volunteer who interrupted our meeting more than once to give us the news. I remember her words when the second tower was hit: “We’re under attack!”

That evening we gathered here in the sanctuary, and I was surprised at how quickly the word spread and how many people assembled to pray. The following Sunday’s worship attendance spiked dramatically, up about 50% in the 11:00 service.

Ten years later, we join pastors, politicians, and others all over our nation and the world asking about the meaning of 9/11. My perspective, of course, is rooted in Scripture and pastoral concerns. I can’t help but reflect on questions like the one e-mailed to me on Friday: “Did God cause 9/11?” I can’t help but think about people in my biological family and in my church family who are in pain of body, soul, wallet, or heart. I can’t help but filter my thoughts through the reality of traveling tomorrow to one of the places in the world that seems to defy attempts to bring a lasting peace.

Today our quest is how to live in a post-9/11 world. What have we learned?

For some biblical perspective, I turn to the shortest book in the Bible: 2 John. Only 13 verses, this is the second of four September sermons at Corinth on the one-chapter books of the New Testament. Pastor Bill will preach on 3 John next Sunday. 2 John and 3 John are both personal letters with similar occasion and theme to the more general letter of 1 John. When John writes to “the chosen lady and her children,” he is apparently writing to a congregation. The word for “church” in Greek is feminine.

It’s not difficult to find the twin towers of his letter: truth and love. These are under constant assault for the believer, but neither has ever fallen. If you get truth and love in balance, you get the essence of our faith.

It is so hard to get truth and love in balance. Remembering 9/11 helps. Three words connect 9/11 and 2 John: discernment, sacrifice, and boundaries.

Discernment

The last decade has given Americans much to ponder about truth. In our zeal to bring stability to a post-9/11 world, we went to war in Iraq, convinced that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. We turned out to be wrong; it wasn’t the truth.

I do not share a cynicism that President Bush deliberately lied to the American people. My personal view is that it’s still too early to declare the verdict of history whether the Iraq War was worth the cost of lives and dollars. But we’ve all been made more painfully aware that just because an erratic dictator claims to have WMDs, and acts like he has them, just because the intelligence lines up, doesn’t mean he does.

Seeking truth requires discernment. John assumes that truth is a core passion of the Christian faith. Before he writes 30 words on his one-page papyrus, he has used the word “truth” three times. “To the chosen lady and her children, whom I love in the truth – and not I only, but also all who know the truth – because of the truth, which lives in us and will be with us forever” (1-2, emphasis added).

Truth is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge, the accumulation of facts, can actually distort truth, can blind you to the truth.

People in John’s day were being enticed by knowledge without truth. The beginnings of what would become a full-blown philosophy known as Gnosticism decades later were infiltrating Christian circles, and John was very concerned.

Gnosis means knowledge in Greek. The Gnostics believed they had a secret knowledge that trumped the Christian gospel – advanced beyond it. Their motto may well have been “Go beyond,” meaning “Don’t get mired in old ideas. Get progressive.” Their secret knowledge sounded good. God is too holy, too distant, too good to get entangled in things of the flesh. Matter doesn’t matter to him.

Don’t get caught up in the latest knowledge-fad, John pleads. Walk in the truth you have been given.

That requires discernment. Discernment says, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t.” If somebody claims advance on truth that everyone else in the whole world for thousands of years has missed, that’s arrogance. If there’s a group that operates in secret to manipulate minds, don’t get drawn in. Truth is open, truth can be tested, truth is what was “from the beginning.” More on truth shortly.

Sacrifice

If Christians are to be truth-seekers, they are equally to be lovers. In verses 5-6, John repeats a theme from his gospel and his first letter: “I am not writing you a new command but one we have had from the beginning. I ask that we love one another. And this is love: hat we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.”

Reliving 9/11 has reminded all of us of what love looks like. At the Shanksville memorial yesterday, former President Bush quoted the words of Jesus, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” We remember the fire fighters who ran up the stairs of the World Trade Center while everyone else was running down. We recall hundreds of medical personnel who returned to the Pentagon when called to do so. And who can ever forget Todd Beamer’s “Let’s roll” rallying cry on Flight 93 that cost his life and those of others on the plane, but saved countless others on whatever was the intended target? What moved us in the days following 9/11 was the self-sacrificing heroism. I hope when we say, “We will never forget,” that this is what we will never forget.

Christian love has no greater model than the sacrifice of Jesus. Jesus was paying for our sins, yes, but he was also modeling for us what love looks like – you lay down your life, you lay down your pride, you lay down your need to be vindicated, you lay down your drive for self-fulfillment, you lay down your desires, you lay down your defenses, you lay down even your need to survive if it means you have the chance to love.

We do forget, don’t we? In an impatient world, such sacrifice is short-lived because it is not efficient. We would rather fight for control, convincing ourselves that we will then use that power for good. We may or may not, but neither John nor Jesus nor Paul taught us that the heart of a Christian is to seek greater power to do greater good. It is to love as Jesus commanded.

Boundaries

Sometimes the values of love and truth collide. Certainly we Americans have been learning that tension in the last decade. I for one will certainly be glad when I get on a plane tomorrow with my wife, mother, and other family members and fellow Christians that the government doesn’t take everyone at face value when they try to blend in with the crowd. I don’t want the FAA to trust everyone who gets on a plane.

We’ve been wrestling with the tensions of our boundaries the last decade. Is it fair to presume suspicion for Middle eastern Muslims? Is it wise not to? It’s the balance of truth and love. We do think there must be boundaries.

In a different time and situation, John wrestles with the same tension. Christian love presumes hospitality, especially in an age where what we have come to call the “hospitality industry” was greatly underdeveloped. Inns hardly provided a “clean, comfortable” bed in a secure place. Christians made it their duty to welcome those who needed rest or food, especially other Christians, but even strangers.

But what if those seeking this hospitality not only deny truth but spread lies? What if, in the name of secret knowledge, they deny that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh (v. 7) because they believe God and flesh cannot touch? What if they are deceivers, anti-Christs? What if they are among those who are arrogantly progressive (v. 9), running ahead to the point of denying the teaching of Christ?

John insists there must be boundaries. “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching (that Jesus is God in the flesh), do not take him into your house or welcome him. Anyone who welcomes him shares in his wicked work” (10-11).

This from the Apostle of love? Yes. Because love doesn’t mean naïveté. Love recognizes that it is not always an act of love to allow truth to go unchecked or lies to be perpetrated.

I learned that lesson painfully a couple of weeks ago when a woman showed up on a Sunday seeking help for food and gas. She was smart enough to know that pastors on Sundays don’t have the same access to information as we do other days of the week, and that those who ask for help don’t have to go through proper channels. So I sent her to the gas station to get gas, ostensibly to get to work, and to the grocery store to buy food. Later I learned that she is a charlatan who has used this tactic in many area churches and has gained a reputation for deceit. I also learned that she didn’t buy food at the grocery store; she bought minutes for her phone.

Because she contacts so many churches, she apparently doesn’t even track her own trail, and called my cell phone on Friday, probably with the minutes she bought deceitfully, asking for more help to buy gas and food. Let’s just say she didn’t get it.

But the tension I had on that Sunday two weeks ago was one we all face more often than we would like. We are conditioned (I hope) to love and to give the benefit of the doubt. I hope we never lose that. I hope the charlatans of this world don’t make us so cynical that we close our hearts. I for one would rather be taken occasionally than use a bad experience as justification for hard heart.

John gives us some principles for balancing love and truth.

Choose your battles. Not every truth is equally worth fighting for. For John, the crucial test in this circumstance is the central tenet of our faith – that Jesus Christ is God in human form. Sometimes we think any personal opinion or conviction deserves ardent advocacy. To reiterate a core value of Corinth you heard in the Pastor’s Class – discern essentials from non-essentials.
Make love your first instinct. These charlatans became a pattern, preying on hospitable Christians. The believers were right to give the benefit of the doubt to hospitality. False teachers who repeated their devious ways had stripped themselves of their presumption of innocence.
Don’t ever close your heart. Knowing exactly where he was going in this letter, a warning against gullible hospitality, John nevertheless started his letter reminding these believers that love is still the flag under which we fly. Jesus hasn’t rescinded that first and greatest command.
Give preference to face to face interaction. John writes at the end of his letter that the reason this letter was so short was that he wanted to visit the congregation personally. Especially when you’re dealing with the tension between love and truth, a face to face conversation is better. I have learned this lesson the hard way, unfortunately many times.

Post-9/11 Prayer

I thought it might be appropriate today to close this sermon with the prayer I wrote for the Sunday following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Ten years later, it still expresses my heart. I have removed the names of individuals, such as government leaders and military personnel, but other than that have left the prayer as I wrote it ten years ago. Let us pray.

O God, in the face of a vast enemy who would destroy our people, we come to you in the words of King Jehoshaphat of old: “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon you” (2 Chronicles 20:12).

Thank you for turning our eyes toward you. We would never, ever say that what happened on 9/11 was a good thing. But having you brought back into our national consciousness surely is a good result. We have needed you all along; forgive us for forgetting how much that is true.

Your word tells us, “Do not take revenge…but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19). Help us to remember that ultimately, justice is your right and responsibility. We believe that you will at the end hold all people accountable. That is a faith statement, because it’s hard to see sometimes. Oh, how those words remind us again to thank you for your grace through Jesus Christ which covers us lest we, too, have to answer for our sins, for they are many.

But your Word also gives to our governing authorities the responsibility to punish wrongdoers and to provide for the security of the nation. We pray today for President and Vice-president, for leaders and members of Congress, the President’s cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the brave men and women of our armed forces, including those from our own church family. Protect them and guide them at this critical moment of history. May they know your presence and courage. Help them to respond in ways that will accomplish your purposes in our world. Give them clarity of thought and unity of purpose.

Most of us, O God, possess neither the role of ultimate Judge, which belongs to you, nor of national leadership. We are individual citizens, we are families, we are workers, we are church members. We have felt so many things in recent days – sadness, horror, anger, fear, and confusion. Heavenly Father, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

In our sadness, deliver us from desperation.

In our horror, deliver us from despair.

In our anger, deliver us from prejudice.

In our fear, deliver us from hate.

In our confusion, deliver us from hopelessness.

We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.