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A sermon about love. It’s hard to preach about love without getting cheesy. Love-talk is cheap. But the lectionary made me preach about love when it assigned First John 4:7-21. Hopefully I didn’t fall into the trap of cliches and abstractions. If anyone has the time or energy or patience, please let me know what you thought about the sermon. If you want, you can read some of my preparation notes for this sermon.
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No one has seen God

Prayer: Lord Christ, faithful one, come to us again through your Holy Spirit. In your grace, accept my feeble words and our wandering thoughts as our prayer—a prayer for your kingdom to come. Amen

How do you see something that’s invisible? Is it just a matter of looking harder, more carefully? Or maybe it’s a matter of getting a microscope, or some good binoculars, or maybe a telescope—so we can point it up into the sky on a clear night and see up into heaven.

Maybe we could take some notes from Ghostbusters. At the beginning of the movie Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray go into the New York public library with all their fancy equipment so they can try to see that invisible ghost—so they can see it and get a hold of it. For them, seeing the invisible is just a matter of getting your technology tuned right.

Now, I don’t want to take our desires to see invisible stuff too lightly, because it’s actually pretty important to our faith. Think about that passage at the beginning of Hebrews 11—“faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Faith is seeing the unseen. And seeing invisible stuff is central to our faith if we take First John seriously: I John 4:12 says, “No one has ever seen God.”

But that’s a depressing message for those among us who might be like Job, raging against a world turned upside, where injustice is given free reign. Job wants an audience with God so he can advise God (Job 19:26). But, as First John says, “No one has seen God.” No one can look God in the face and tell God how to make the world come out right. Job never sees God; at the end of the book, God calls down to Job out of a cloud, a dark cloud, a mysterious cloud that defies our desires for certainty (38:1f). An invisible God is no reason for hope, at this point.

But maybe the Job example doesn’t register for all of us. We don’t go to bed every night raging against injustice. Instead, some of us are just plan bored. Life feels like one thing right after another. It’s tedious. And we want something exciting to happen; we’re waiting for God to appear in a lightning flash to save us from our mundane, ordinary lives. Add some sparkles to our plain life. Well, it’s hard then to figure out how an invisible God is reason for hope.

Now, those are just two reasons I came up with. I’m sure each of us have many other reasons deep down inside, in those secret places that haunt you when you go to bed—anxieties that cry out for remedies, for salvation, for redemption. We all have questions we want answered, or problems we want solved. We want to see God, capture him in our vision, hold onto him with our eyes, so we can direct his powerful gaze toward our issues, those issues that are, most of the time, quite legitimate. But the trouble is, as First John tells us, “No one has ever seen God.”

At this point it’s important to notice some links between my sermon and the one last week. Preaching on I John 3:16-24 and John 10:11-18 last week, Alex said that Jesus is the shepherd, not part of the flock, not one of us. His love comes from elsewhere, beyond what we can conjure up in ourselves. Christ’s love, his grace, his kind care for us—his flock—is alien. It’s an alien invasion: something coming to us from outside of us, from outer space, the outer spaces—above, below…beyond the reach of telescopes, microscopes, or Dan Aykroyd’s instruments from Ghostbusters.

God is invisible. That’s a tough word to hear, I think. It works against all those images we create of God. I mean, try something with me. If you close your eyes, and think about God, what do you see with your mind’s eye, with your imagination? Try it. A little experiment. I won’t put anyone on the spot by asking you to share with all of us what you see… What I see is that picture of Jesus my grandmother had in her living room. A pristine, white Jesus of course. With flowing light brown hair. A nicely trimmed beard. A serene smile. And, most striking of all, I can’t forget this last bit—it’s haunting—the light blue eyes. After going over to her house all the time during those early, formative years, I can’t forget Jesus’ eyes. They are unforgettable not because they were so loving, or so inviting, or anything warm and fuzzy. They freaked me out because they followed me across the room. The eyes were made out of some special 3-D material. That face hanging up on the wall, completely still, framed, dead, but with eyes that moved, that followed me. Like those pictures hanging in the haunted house in Disneyland.

Ok, that’s one image. The other is just three big letters: G O D. That’s it. Nothing else. Abstract letters. Ok, so what’s the point of all this. Here it is: we always already have images, pictures, through which we try to think about God. That’s just how our spirituality works. And the gospel-word from First John cuts against this impulse, and points us in a different direction. The claim that “No one has seen God” is a message of hope, the hope of Easter, the hope of Pentecost, the hope of the risen Christ made present through the Spirit of God.

Immanuel—God with us. Through the Holy Spirit, God is present to us and in us. That’s what First John says in verse 13: “We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.” Jesus is God with us. But how? How do we see him? How do we sense that overflow of love, the loving embrace of God?

One way is what I’ll call Joan Osborne christology. Jesus as Emmanuel sung in the tune of that Joan Osborne song. It’s a pop song that came out in the late 90s, I think. It was one of those songs that would be playing every time you tuned the radio to the local pop station. And I still hear it from time to time. It’s called “One of us.” Let me quote the first bit of the song that gets repeated throughout:

If God had a name, what would it be / And would you call it to his face / If you were faced with him in all his glory / What would you ask if you had just one question / Yeah, God is great / Yeah, God is good / Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah / What if God was one of us / Just a slob like one of us / Just a stranger on the bus / Trying to make his way home.

God as a slob just like us… just another one of us. Nothing special. One among many.

For that Joan Osborne song, we can say that Jesus is Immanuel—God with us—but that isn’t any reason to hope. That kind of Jesus, that kind of incarnation, of christology, is just the embodiment and justification of all the stuff we already do, of all the good and bad stuff that we happen to call human. Jesus is just one of the flock, as Alex said last week. We can’t look to Jesus for any help because he’s stuck in the same old human mess. And when we do try to look at Jesus, we end up looking at some variation of that framed picture in my grandmother’s living room. Something we can think up on our own, a projection of our endlessly creative imaginations.

And that’s why it is good news when we read in First John that God is invisible. But for First John, God’s invisibility cuts against the ways we want to see, only to open up new modes of sense, new ways of feeling Jesus, God with us. Let me read I John 4:7— “Beloved, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.” The text links knowing God to the way we love. Now skipping down to verse 12— “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is perfected in us.” God is not visible to our normal senses, our imaginations, our projections, the reaches of our technologies—whether the Ghostbuster types or some arrangement of magnifying glasses. God isn’t just another piece of material in our universe, another piece of cosmic furniture.

But First John tells us of another way of knowing God—if we love one another, the text says. Love as a mode of knowing; love as a way to know, a knowledge. But what does love know? Let me read verse 13: “We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.” Love is given to us of the Spirit. Love is God’s presence in and through us by the gift of the Spirit. The invitation to love is an invitation to abide, or live, in the Spirit. The Spirit, and the Spirit’s work of love, is our way of knowing God, our mode of feeling Immanuel, Jesus Christ, God with us. Let me quote a passage of a sermon on this same text by Cornelius Ernst, a British theologian—he puts the gospel message of this passage wonderfully:

We see God without seeing him, by entering into a communion of love with Jesus Christ… But the presence manifested by the visible Jesus is withdrawn: the substance of that presence—the communication of resurrected life—is to be manifested by the Spirit of life in the mutual love of those who have received the Word of life. The God whom no one has ever seen is to become tangible, felt, as a presence of love; for God is love…. We feel our way into God whom no one has ever seen, who is the ultimate sense of our personal lives, who is so deeply personal himself that we must refer to him by the abstract, Love. (Multiple Echo, 203-204)

What Ernst says so nicely, better than I can say it, is that God is something more than personal, more than another person we can relate to, more than the person sitting next to you, more than the God of that Joan Osborne song—a slob like one of us. God is so much more. God is love, a love that passes through us, but that not one of us can claim as a possession. Immanuel, God with us, Jesus Christ withdrawals from our normal senses, only to be discovered in our love for one another, a love made available to us through the Spirit.

There’s a line from an old Anabaptist hymn, composed and sung in the castle dungeon in Passau, that makes this point about Jesus’ absence clear:

Although we for a time knew Jesus Christ according to the flesh, we now know him no longer in the flesh. Rather, only in the Spirit is he Lord. (PANPRESS”>Ausbund 81.18)

Jesus’ body is gone, withdrawn, but now he is made know to us by the Spirit—in the Spirit he is Lord, it says. And we live in the Holy Spirit, as First John tells us, when our love follows in the way of Jesus, the love displayed in Jesus’ life and death for us.

This call to love is a struggle. The gospel of Christ’s love for us, made present in this gathered congregation, doesn’t mean that just anything we do counts as love. That’s the danger of love, the danger of our conceptions of love. We so readily assume that all the things we do for one another is already loving, that everything done in our church for others must qualify as Christ’s love, that we already know the sorts of things that count as living in the Spirit, abiding in the God who is love. But that’s not the gospel. That’s Joan Osborne’s Jesus. The God who is love, rather, judges what we think counts as love. The God who is love is also invisible, beyond the certainty of our ways of knowing. But that is not reason for doubt, for pre-determined failure, for pessimism, for hopelessness.

God’s self-giving love revealed in Jesus and made present through the Spirit is a judgment of our feeble loves. But this judgment of love is at the same time an invitation into a strange new world, into new loves, the wonder of God’s love. And this new love follows Jesus toward the crucifixion where we give up control over our love—where we learn to love without producing results. This is a love that does not seek any other ends—it doesn’t look forward to another goal, another reason. It’s a love that gives gifts without any hope of receiving. A love that invests without desiring a return, without looking for a future payoff, without hoping for dividends.

“Beloved.” That’s how this passage, this word from God, addresses us at the very beginning, in verse 7. Beloved. We are already loved. We are God’s beloved. We don’t have to earn it, work for it. We don’t have to prove God’s love for us to anyone. It’s already here. That’s what grace is. God is here. Immanuel. Our lives are already embraced by the God who is love.

But this is just the beginning—“Beloved” is the first word in our passage. And now we live as a response to this love. The church, this feeble congregation, is an experiment of God’s love where we learn together what it means to abide in the Spirit. The church as our experiment of love, our unceasing discovery of God’s love. And the Spirit leads us into the mysteries of God; we come to feel the face of God as we shape our loves to the form revealed to us in the death of Jesus—a life who loved others without returns. Without expectations. Without stipulations. Without anticipations. Without manipulation. Without control. A life that continues to risk love in the face of a history of disappointment. A love that is uncertain about results. The God who is love invites us into a life of love, to abide in the Spirit, by loving one another for the sheer joy of love, with an eye to the present that resists calculations, predictions, predeterminations.

And we cannot live in this love without the invisible gift, without the invasion of something alien. We come here every Sunday to wait with each other for the Holy Spirit of Love to move in our midst, to stir the restless waters of our souls, that we may receive God’s presence in Christ, the faithful one, Immanuel. So, all we can do is pray—and prayer is the way we give our self away to a God who invites us into a strange new world of love, a foreign land that offers unspeakable mysteries. So, this sermon is merely a prelude to a prayer, a prayer in the back of our hymnals that invites us into the disorienting embrace of a God who is Love—an embrace that teaches us how to let go and follow in the love of Christ. It’s a prayer for grace. Please pray with me:

O God, you withdraw from our sight that you may be known by our love. Help us to enter the cloud where you are hidden and surrender all our certainty to the darkness of faith in Jesus Christ. (The Mennonite Hymnal, #676)