I know that every generation thinks that the music of its high school and college years was particularly important, but as someone who was in college in the early 1990s, I feel a particularly strong claim to that. In those years, the alternative rock movement that had been bubbling underground in the 1980s exploded into the mainstream with the volcanic arrival of the grunge rock movement from Seattle. Almost overnight, all of the “hair metal” bands went from dominating the charts to being laughingstocks, their over-produced music, images, and performances withering in the onslaught of authentically raw emotion and intensity wrapped in shades of grey and gloom.
In the midst of that tectonic shift in rock music, an unusual song 
became a massive though unlikely hit. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but when I read this passage from John’s first letter, it started playing in the back of my head. The song was an almost shockingly earnest ballad called “More Than Words.” It was just an acoustic guitar accompanying two singers in harmony, and it began with an almost aggressively unpoetic verse leading into the chorus:
Saying “I love you” is not the words I want to hear from you
It’s not that I want you not to say it but if you only knew
How easy it would be to show me how you feel
More than words is all you have to do to make it real
Then you wouldn’t have to say that you love me
‘Cause I’d already know
On weekends in college, I’d often get together with a group of friends who all played guitar and we would play and sing songs for hours to the group that gathered around to listen to us, and “More Than Words” was a song that often cropped up later in the evening as a kind of joke. Somebody would start fingerpicking the opening in a moment of silence and the rest of us and the crowd would join in, dramatically overacting the lyrics as we sang them as if to say, how could anybody take this stuff seriously?
And yet, at least part of that ridicule was understanding that the beautiful simplicity of the song really did have its own power, and the unapologetic earnestness of it was part of that. Now, if there’s anything that my generation, Generation X, does poorly, it’s earnestness; there’s a reason that our unique musical contributions were grunge rock and gangsta rap. Our main languages are irony and sarcasm; our defining mood is mild to moderate despondency masked by fatalistic indifference. But that doesn’t mean we don’t recognize the power of earnestness. It’s because we understand the possibility of that power that we fear it so much; we’re just afraid to believe in it and then be disappointed.
I think that’s partially why the so-called Johannine literature in the Bible, the writings of the person and/or school of John, especially the gospel and the three letters of John, have never been my favorites. Outside of some good stories in the gospel and the bizarre imagery and energy of the book of Revelation, the rest of John’s writing tends to sound like repetitive earnestness: “Beloved, we need to love one another, because God loves us, and love is from God, because God is love, and if we abide in God we abide in love, and love abides in us, and God abides in us, because we abide in God, and…” so on and so on.
If you’re anything like me, you start off nodding along in agreement, but as those discourses continue to spiral around, it’s easy to start nodding off. Or rolling our eyes. Maybe not in disdain or ridicule, but in the sense of knowing exactly what’s being said and that it would be great if we all accepted it and lived up to it, but… does anybody take this stuff seriously? I mean, maybe people did back when this was written, and they were just better or more committed or more faithful or whatever, but not now.
Well, as to that, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the early church was no better at this than anybody else; the bad news is the early church was no better at this than anybody else. Why do you think that John and his community needed a gospel, three letters, and an apocalyptic conclusion that still contained so much repetition about loving one another and abiding in love and so on? If they were so good at it, they wouldn’t have needed so much reminding that now we’re like, “yes, love and abide, we’ve got it already.” As you may know, many preachers these days choose the Sunday Scripture lesson from what’s known as the Lectionary; it’s a weekly cycle of readings that takes you through most of the Bible over the course of three years before it repeats. Today’s lesson is one of those assigned in the Lectionary for this Sunday, but it starts in an odd place, about halfway through a paragraph.
One of the things I’ve learned as a preacher is that it’s always a good idea to double-check where a lesson selected by the lectionary starts and ends, because sometimes there’s an important reason why. This was one of those times. Today’s passage from first John really begins in verse 11, not 16, when the author starts ruminating on Jesus’ new command to his disciples on the night of his arrest, that they should love one another just as Jesus has loved them. He mentions that we should not be like Cain, the son of Adam and Eve in the Creation Story in Genesis who murders his brother out of jealousy. This commandment is so important, he goes on to say, that “we know we have passed from death to life because we love the brothers and sisters.” And then he makes this startling statement right before the lectionary passage begins: “Whoever does not love abides in death.” Whoa! That wakes you up, doesn’t it?
Aside from being somewhat shocking in terms of tone, it’s also surprising in terms of meaning. If I asked you what the opposite of love is, you would probably say one of the familiar answers. The most obvious one is hate; if love is overwhelming devotion to someone, then hate is overwhelming rejection of someone. Others would argue that fear is really the opposite of love; hate is usually a manifestation of fear, and it is fear that makes us want to fight or flee from someone rather than understanding and caring for them. Still others would say that that indifference is the true opposite of love.
One of the best scenes in the entire run of the now-classic television show Mad Men is when Don Draper, the charismatic, self-centered advertising superman is standing in an elevator with a young upstart who’s been challenging him for growing out of touch in his work. The young executive is standing at Draper’s side, staring holes into him while angrily berating him, concluding with a disdainful, “I feel sorry for you.” Draper, ignoring the younger man while his eyes track the elevator ascending from one floor to the next, responds, “I don’t think about you at all.” The elevator dings like the bell at the end of a prizefight, and Draper steps out, the younger man staring confused after him like a dazed boxer who’s just lost the fight. Indifference knocks out hate as the opposite of love, because hate is still deeply involved emotionally in the other, while indifference doesn’t care enough about the other to even hate them.
Which, honestly, is a lot closer to what John is saying. Death sometimes gets characterized in terms of hate, an enemy that pursues us ravenously and relentlessly because it is so committed to destroying us. But when you think about it, death is more like the ultimate in indifference, completely unconcerned not just with the wellbeing of the other, but even their basic existence. “Whoever does not love abides in death,” abides in the ultimate indifference to the other. Love is generative, compassionate, nurturing, committed to the other; death is degenerative, dispassionate, supremely apathetic. One of the most basic truths about living things is that they are either growing or dying, there is no in between, and growth always requires love in the sense of nurture, protection, and cultivation.
“Whoever does not love abides in death.” This is the crucial truth that gives what John says in the actual lectionary passage its true power. It kind sound pretty threatening in modern ears: if I don’t love others, I’m abiding in death? Even people for whom we feel fear, or hate, or indifference? Not exactly. Listen to the passage again: “We know love by this – that he (Jesus) laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers and sisters. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a sister or brother in need and yet refuses help? Little children let us love not in word or speech, but in deed or truth.”
Or, as the song puts it: “more than words is all you have to do to make it real.” Love in Scripture is always, always, about action, not emotion. How you feel about someone is totally irrelevant to whether you love them or not, because you love or not based on how you treat them, how you act towards them and for them (or against them). It doesn’t matter how you feel unless your feelings dictate your actions. And in this case, John is worried about his audience using the words and speech of love towards others without any of the actions; it is love in deeds that is love indeed, love in truth.
This week, a few of our neighbors around this church property put up signs urging others to oppose high-density development here at First Presbyterian, referring presumably to our unfolding exploration of how we might use this property to love our neighbors not simply in word and speech, but in deed and truth; how we might build affordable housing units to help address the affordable housing crisis that is threatening to swallow the poor and middle class not just in this neighborhood, but across the Lehigh Valley. The allegation that our plans include anything even approaching high density development are, as you hopefully already know, completely false.
But it provoked us to respond with the signs on the church property that you hopefully saw coming in today, which are both a lighthearted response and a, well…very earnest statement of the question that is and should be driving us in anything we do as church: “what would Jesus do?” By definition, given Jesus’ commandments, that question always includes the idea of what would Jesus do to love others; in this case, that is in the contexts of an onerous housing crisis afflicting our Bethlehem neighbors and us sitting on 32 acres of land, most of which is lying fallow rather than being used as a resource to serve, to love, anybody. There is a long, long way to go with those ideas and potential plans about how to mobilize our physical resources for mission, which is by definition our sense of what Jesus would do and, in fact, what Jesus is already doing. But the important thing is we are asking and trying to answer that question.
Let me be very clear here: this isn’t a binary of “support this project or you don’t love Jesus.” There have been and always will be many potential answers for how to do that as faithfully and effectively as we can. But all of these attempts, our strategic mission project and others, are meant to answer in deed and in truth the question of what would Jesus do: how to respond to Jesus’ commandment to love others with all that we are and all that we have, as Jesus has loved us.
This project, as it adapts and unfolds, is an attempt by this congregation to answer that question. The real problem would not be to say, “I’m not sure this is the answer,” though; the real problem would be to say, “I don’t think we need to worry about this question.” Because to refuse the question altogether of how to love others as Jesus commanded us to do, to love not in word but in deed, particularly in terms of the world’s goods that we have, would be, in fact, to choose death instead of love, because to do nothing, regardless of the words and speech we use, would be to show supreme indifference to both Jesus and our neighbors. But to wrestle with and come up with at least some kind of answer, enough of an answer to act upon, is to love in deed, to love indeed, to incarnate Christ’s love by loving others as he has loved us, because he abides in us through that love and Spirit.