First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

1John 4

“God First Loved Us”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

June 4, 2006

My grandfather told me many times that I came from the Indians. “Got you from the Indians kid and I can take you back.” I guess I heard this enough and my wife suggested to me recently it only takes a little for my imagination to do the rest; I guess I heard this claim of Indian ancestry enough that I convinced my first grade teacher to call my mother. Mrs. Dempewolfe called my mother to set up a time when she could come to the class and talk about our Native American traditions and she should feel free to bring any artifacts and other items that would exemplify our heritage as Native American Indians. Hence, there was a moment of confusion when my mother said, “we are not Native Americans.”

It took a while to put all the pieces together but basically I had taken the claims of my grandfather a bit too seriously. I hadn’t literally come from the Indians. This was just a way to say I was a being a bit too rambunctious for his taste. These kinds of things die hard. I knew I needed to clarify myself when I heard our eldest Joshua at the age of six trying to convince his sister Laura with all seriousness she needed to calm down or Dad would send her back to the Indians.

Someone asked me recently where I came from. After whittling down the pastorates and education we came to San Diego. For good or for ill I came from Good Karma Lane in Bonita. Bonita is a suburb in the foothills of San Diego and Good Karma is the name of a racehorse owned by the developer who built our house and 10,000 others. I came from a house of two parents who worked, grew up in a three bedroom ranch with a brother, an Irish Setter, a Labrador and a goldfish that lived as long as anyone could remember.

I come from the chaparral. This is the scrub brush and cactus and tumble weed that grows in the semi-arid temperatures in the thin soil that tries to cling to the hard clay below. I come from a place where people eat tacos and speak spanglish, a place where the word “dude” has many definitions which are all determined by inflection.

People not only come from places; they also come from circumstances. Some of us come from poverty. I loved it when Robert Frost said, “If only my grandchildren could know the poverty of my youth.” Some of us come from culture and others can watch the television show “Cops” and not know if we will see extended family. We come from different degrees of education as well as sophistication. Paul Simon said, “when say you ‘Dylan’, he thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas- whoever that was. I swear, the man ain’t got no culture.”

Yet we also come from different moments in life. Some of us are looking at life from grief; this is how we come at things. Everything in life is defined in loss: she is not here; I cannot hear his voice anymore. Some of us are defining the day by the fact that he is home, or, I am home at least until tomorrow.

Where we come from can be rather complex and layered. To this John adds two whole other layers. The first layer is when he says in effect, that you and I are from love. We are born of God and we live through this love as we live through Jesus Christ. John’s claims are a mystery because love is mysterious. Many people have tried to explain why they are who they are or do what they do. And all reasons, bar one, can be explained. All the reasons make sense, except one, love. When we abide in love and come at life from love, it cannot be explained.

There is a great moment in the movie Good Will Hunting. The story is about a mathematical genius or savant who has had a terrible life. The savant is placed in counseling as a way to keep him out of jail. In his first session with the counselor he sees a painting, a paint by numbers seascape. The savant is quick to see the pain and suffering the counselor poured into the painting. To hide his own pain he ridicules the man who is supposed to help him.

The next day the counselor meets with him. He tells the savant he is able to see amazing things in life; he can solve problems that have eluded generations of mathematicians. And, yet, even though he can see the pain in the painting and he can interpret the emotions in the painting, he cannot understand the love behind the loss. He can see the pain but he cannot explain the love.

He goes on to confess that the savant could see his grief and his fear and even his desire to die in the painting because he felt so lost without his wife who died of cancer. He can see these things, but what he cannot see is what it means to love the person who is dying. The counselor described the process of losing his wife and with each moment, each movement of the disease, the abiding place was love.

I don’t know if I have ever seen a moment where the idea that love is a place from which you come was shown as clearly as this one. You can from Poland or Greece. You can be rich or poor. You can have a Ph.D. or struggle to sign your name. All of these determine and describe the way we come to life, the path from which we come. Yet, the one, which changes them all, the one that cannot be explained is love.

John, in all his glory, says, you and I, we come from love. This is the first layer of mystery he adds. The second layer is the mystery of a sacrificial love that loved us first. John says we come from the love of God which is before we knew, before we chose, before we were. When John speaks of sacrifice and sins, when he speaks of how impossible it is to hate, he is talking about the love of God that comes first.

Today we baptized Ike. In years to come he will tell people from whence he came. He will talk about his brother Sam; he will talk about his mom and dad. He will talk about North Carolina and New York. He might talk about coming from a military family. I have all confidence he will talk about his education and athletics and one or more of the cultures we have in the panorama of Americana. And I also have all confidence, knowing Janine and Jeremy, that he will speak of being loved and nurtured; he will speak of coming from love. These I know, but for this I pray.

I pray that someday Ike will know the freedom in which we live, the freedom that knows I come from the love of God whose sacrificial love came first. This is what John is trying to say when he proclaims: God is love and we abide in love. We know we are going to love as we were loved first. God first loved us. God loved us first. This is a strange freedom, a glorious freedom, where you remember baptism as a moment where you were immersed in God’s sacrificial love that comes first. Not as a reward, not as the natural outcome, but before all else.

I can remember the first time I saw this. It wasn’t where you would expect it. I had just finished a 13 mile hike with a friend. We had hiked up the side of mountain to a pass and enjoyed our lunch gazing at the interior mountain range of the Olympics. The moment of love came after we drove home, when we sought to ease our aching joints in a cold beverage. It turns out that someone had asked my friend to be an elder, to serve on the session. He asked me what I thought. I talked about joy and service. I gave him my spiel that this should be his way of growing in faith and making a difference. He listened.

Then he said something that blew me away. He said, “I don’t want to do this. I can’t stand meetings and bureaucracy. But I love you. You’re my friend and so I will do it.”

I must tell you I panicked. I freaked out. You should do these things for duty, hope, service, or even solidarity of cause and concern. I was all for that. But I didn’t quite know what to do with love, especially a sacrificial love that comes first.

This is what John was trying to convey to us. God sees our need; God sees the world and for no other reason than love he has sacrificed everything. Not duty, not ideals, not even a plan to make it all right.

As a church we do a lot of things. We serve, we help, we give, we pray, and today we baptized. We do these things because they are good, because they are right, because people need them, but mostly we do them because of this love of God that is in us. We didn’t baptize Ike today because it is the right thing to do; we baptized him in the hope and glory of God’s love, a love choosing him while he was not even yet, when he was just a hope against hope.

We do a lot of things, but one of the things we need to start doing is telling people about this love. I know it will freak them out. I know it will cause panic, but its time. People need to know where we are coming from: we are coming from the love of God who loved us first. I know. I know. Yet something tells me the reason why John was saying this in his letter, why he was making such a point of telling this to people who obviously believe in the love of God like us, the reason why he made such a point of perfect love casting out fear is that people had grown afraid to speak of the love of God.

For truly what else are we afraid of? We are immersed in the goodness of life, the beauty of love, the hope of the kingdom of God. In all things, we are beyond need or want. We are afraid, perhaps, of only one thing: to speak of God’s love, to say from whence this perfection comes. That God loved us first.

Don’t be afraid. Let perfect love cast out fear. Tell people, God loved you first. Amen.