Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, July 7, 2024
by Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Love is not all sunshine and roses. The call to love compels us to do a serious self-inventory and confront the ways in which we have not loved as we ought.
Once at a wedding, the couple selected 1 John 4:11-21 as a reading. They wanted the passage read out of an heirloom bible belonging to a family member, and the reader obliged. The bible being old and small, the verses and chapter numbers were hard to make out, and so the reader accidentally began reading at 1 John 3:11, continuing dutifully until the end of the chapter. Few things will match the confusion on the face of the couple and those gathered as the reader joyfully admonished the couple not to murder one another as Cain did his brother Abel and to obey God’s commandments. Somehow the sermon still came together, and a good laugh was had by all at the reception.
Long after the wedding was over, the discomfort caused by the reading continued to sit with me. It was still a picture of love, just not the picture we like to focus on, especially at a wedding. On a celebratory day most of all, we like to focus on the joy of love. But 1 John 3 forces us to face the challenge that love presents to us. The simple question in verse 17 drives it home: “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and yet sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” From the beginning, the message we have heard has been to love one another (3:11), and yet we have so often failed in that love. Our failure to love robs us of the assurance our hearts desire, leaving us feeling timid before the God who is greater than our hearts and knows everything.
It is important to sit with the sting of these passages, lest we let our discourse about love become too romantic and detached from the reality of love as we experience it. Just like in a wedding, we have a habit of dressing up what it means to love so as to ignore how it can weigh down on us. But sitting in the pews of your congregation—as in the pews of any wedding—there will be plenty of people whose experience of love does not look like the show put on by the betrothed. They will be sitting with experiences of divorce, fraying marriages, unrequited love, and judgments from others about their relationships in general. This passage gives us space to acknowledge the ways in which love or the lack of it keeps us up at night.
It’s not all gloom in 1 John 3. We see hints of the good news that is coming in the next chapter with verse 16a: “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us,” and while we know we are not always or even often up to laying down our lives for one another, we are reminded that God’s love for us is not a reward for our success at loving one another but a remedy for our failure. Even as you sit with the challenge of this chapter, hold out that glimmer of hope.
