Sermon — April 7, 2024
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us, from God the Father
and from Jesus Christ the Father’s Son, in truth and love.”
(2 John 3)
(A greeting from the Second Letter of John. More on that in a moment.)
I love this Second Sunday of Easter. Not just because of Doubting Thomas, whose faith I admire. But because it’s “Low Sunday,” when all the detailed preparations of Holy Week are over and the bells of Easter have stopped ringing in our ears; when the crowds of Easter Day have come and gone, and now a smaller group of us are left asking: “Alleluia, Christ is risen—Now what?”
On these Sundays after Easter, our readings begin to explore what it means to be an “Easter people,” what it means to live as a community in light of the Resurrection. Our first reading each week is drawn from the early chapters of the Book of Acts, following along with the community of the disciples in the days immediately following Easter. Our second readings come from 1 John, written a little less than a hundred years later, from an early church leader to a community of Christian believers. And since we only get 1 John once every three years, and because it’s one of my favorite books, and because this is after all, Saint John’s, this Easter, I’m going to preach my way through 1 John, asking every week, “What does it mean to be people of the Resurrection according to the First Letter of John?”
Although — It’s not really a letter, and it might not be by John.
We read the beginning today; there’s no greeting, and no signature. It’s more of a sermon than a letter. And 1 John doesn’t claim to be by a person named John, nor do 2nd or 3rd John. Nor does the Gospel of John, for that matter. 2 and 3 John are addressed from “The Elder” to “The Elect Lady” and “To Gaius” respectively. The Gospel of John talks about a “Beloved Disciple,” but it doesn’t say he’s the author and he’s not named John. So Scholars sometimes distinguish between John the Apostle, the brother of James and son of Zebedee; the Beloved Disciple (who may or may not be John); “John” the Evangelist (author of the Gospel); “John” the Elder (author of the letters); and John of Patmos (who wrote the Book of Revelation, and who does call himself John). Ancient church traditions say the Evangelist and the Elder are both the Apostle, who’s the Beloved Disciple, and even then they argued about whether Revelation was written by the same John—and we haven’t stopped arguing about it since, such that you can make a Biblical case for the existence of one, two, three, four, or five different Johns.
By the way, this is why, when people occasionally ask me who this church is named after, I either sound really pedantic or woefully uninformed. “Oh, which Saint John?” Uhhh…I don’t know.
So it’s not clear who wrote 1 John; I’ll just say “the Elder.” But it’s very clear that 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John come from the same tradition or the same community as the Gospel of John. The letters and the Gospel share themes, and imagery, and even sentence structure, and you can hear it from the very first words of the letter we heard today: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life… God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” If you know the Gospel of John well enough, you hear echoes of it constantly in the letter. And this shared tradition is sometimes called the “Johannine tradition” or “Johannine community.” We can only speculate, but you can easily imagine for example that 2 and 3 John are cover letters, addressed to the leaders of Johannine churches in two different cities along with a copy of the First Letter of John, warning against wandering prophets who’re preaching in a way the Elder doesn’t like, and reminding them of the ideas and the faith that they share, and which we have received in the form of the Gospel of John.
So to shift gears a little and with my apologies for the extended preface, here—What are those ideas? What is the Johannine answer to the question, “What does it mean for a community to live in the light of the Resurrection?”
I can’t help but notice that the first thing John wants to do, after his introduction, is to ask people to take a real, hard look at their lives. “If we say that we have no sin,” the Elder writes, “we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:8-9) It’s a little ironic that we read this during Easter, when we traditionally omit the confession of sin on Sunday mornings.
But for the Elder, an honest reckoning with sin is inextricably linked to the hope of the Resurrection. He wants to hold these two sides together. By our Lenten human nature, we are imperfect. By God’s Easter action, we are forgiven. If we say we have no sin, we’re only deceiving ourselves; but if we confess our sins, he will forgive us our sin. The Elder is writing these things to us so that we may not sin; but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with God in Jesus Christ. (2:1) (Advocate—Paraclete—there’s another good Johannine word.)
The Elder closes the letter: “I write these things to you who believe…so that you may know that you have eternal life.” (5:13) Not so that you repent and change your ways. Not so that you come to believe. But so that you know that you have eternal life. To talk about sin, in other words, is not to condemn ourselves, or condemn someone else; it’s to acknowledge that we might actually need forgiveness, so that we can remember that God has already forgive us. And that’s just the beginning of the path into the abundant and eternal life that God is already inviting us to live, in this world.
The Elder will go on to offer some of the most beautiful words that the Bible has about the gifts of love that we’ve received from God and the spiritual journey of transformation that we all share. But if we as human beings are going to aspire to love, we have to be honest about the ways in which we’ve failed to love, so that we can make amends with one another and grow together toward God.
It’s easy to think that this is an individual or a moralistic thing. But it’s not. It’s a letter about the life of a community, written to a community. And we read it today as part of a community that’s starting to do some real reckoning with its own sins in the past, and how they’ve shaped our life in the present, and that’s where I want to close, today.
Last month, our diocese published a historical study of the ways in which our parishes and the Diocese as a whole profited financially from the kidnapping and enslavement of people from Africa, entitled “‘And You Will Know the Truth, and the Truth Will Make You Free’”—another quote from John, by the way—“A Historical Framework (1620-1840) for Understanding How the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts Benefits Today from Chattel Slavery and Its Legacy.” The level of historical detail is astounding. The founding of every one of our colonial-era parishes was in some way funded by practices of enslavement. Dozens of clergy and founding members of parishes enslaved Africans, or made their livings through human trafficking. The booming Massachusetts economy that funded the Episcopal resurgence in the early 19th century was fueled by processing cotton grown by slaves in our mills, selling food and supplies to slaveholding plantations, and building the ships that made the Triangle Trade work. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which existed to strengthen the Church in North America, actually owned plantations, extracting revenue from unpaid enslaved Africans in Barbados and using it to fund preachers in Boston and around New England. Without a doubt, some fraction of the endowment of our Diocese of Massachusetts, and of many of our parishes, ultimately derives from the profits of the system of chattel slavery, one of the greatest sins human beings have ever committed.
“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves…”
This is one part of what it means for us, as Episcopalians, to be an Easter people today. To accept and acknowledge the sins of our past, and to ask how we can turn them into love in the present. The promise of the Resurrection is that our sin can be transformed, and that God is inviting us together into a new life of love. The promise of the Resurrection is not only eternal life in the future; it’s a new kind of community in the present.
After all: “If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie… but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.” (1 John 6-7)
In the name of the God who is faithful and just: Amen.