WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW

May 1, 1988
13:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago
Scripture

John 15:5-10
1 John 4:7-12

"Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another."
-1John 4:11 (RSV)

The title could have been Famous Last Words because that is what
this is: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another."

Last words of the final survivor are important. There is a wonderful
Hasidic story about the very wise and very old rabbi on his death bed. His
disciples gathered around him waiting for his last words. Hours passed,
then days — he said nothing. By now the community was involved. A line
stretched from his bedside, out into the hall, down two flights of stairs
and out into the street; men waiting quietly, reverently, to hear the wise
one's last words. Finally, he gestured to his nearest disciple who leaned

over and the old rabbi whispered into his ear: “Life is a river.” Down
the message went, whispered into each ear and then passed along; "Life is a
river," - till it reached the very end of the line, to a young man — who,

it

when he heard, “Life is a river,” said, “What's that supposed to mean?" Sa
back up the line the whispered question went, man to man, to the closest
disciple who leaned down and said - “What's that supposed to mean?" Again,
silence, hours; finally the wise one summoned his strength and gestured to
his nearest disciple, and whispered and again, the words were passed along
the line, all the way down the stairs, out into the street, to the last man
- "So maybe life isn't a river."

I am always moved to read in the paper thet the last survivor has
died; the last veteran of the war, that famous World War I brigade that
gathers each year in France to pass on a bottle of cognac - ta be drunk by
the last survivor, or member of the championship team. I always find
myself wondering if the story has been told enough to Jive on after the
last participant is gone. And so I have always been particularly intrigued
by that moment in time - near the end of the First Century. It must have
been when time began to run ont for the original Christians; when the young
people who followed Jesus - in their twenties - were eighty.

By the year 90 A.D., for instance, people who had actually seen
Jesus, heard him speak, or touched his hand, were getting along in years.
I calculated this week that they represented the same percentage of the
population as those of us here this morning who voted for Herbert Hoover.
In fact, there weren't many of them left, and those who were, must have
been revered and respected and loved very deeply.

One of the oldest and dearest Christian traditions is that the last
of them, the last person alive to have walked and talked with Jesus was
hone other than John, the beloved disciple. He was, we have reason to
believe, a young man, perhaps the youngest of the twelve. The tradition is
that he wrote the Fourth Gospel and three brief letters near the end of the
New Testament. Literary scholars tel] us that probably isn't the case,
What is true is that the Gospel of John and the three letters of John
reflect the same kind of thinking, use a similar vocabulary, and appear to
have been written quite late. When exactly and by whom we don't know. But
it does appear that they were written in the middle of that time I think is
so intriguing and important.

In fact, Robert Browning used it as the setting for a poem, "A Death
in the Desert." In the poem, the elderly John is failing quickly and is
attended by younger Christians who are facing an increasingly hostile and
dangerous world. And the old disciple says -

"..Phere is left on earth no one alive who knew
(consider this)

Saw with his eyes and handled with his hands
That which was from the first, the Word of life.
How will it be when none more saith, ‘I saw?'"

And so the content of these brief letters, among the last to be
written, is very important because there is something of the final words of
the last survivor about them. We ought to lean in and listen carefully,
that is to say.

Al that very point in time, prospects did not look encouraging for
the Christian enterprise, or for that matter, for anyone brave or foolish
enough to claim Jesus Christ and affirm Christian faith. There were two
very significant threats: one external and the other internal. Roman
persecution was beginning in earnest. After an initial flurry of activity
by the first Christians with missionary success in many cities, Imperial
Rome began to sense a threat to its autonomy and authority and decided
simply to rid itself of this internal nuisance. And there began more than
200 years of on-again, off-again persecution: some of it simply
harassment, some of it incredibly cruel. [It didn't work. Persecution
never does,

Even more threatening, we now know, was a Greek religious philosophy
called Gnosticism - from the Greek word for “knowledge.” The Gnostics were
intellectuals: they were very reasonable. Christians were glad to make
common cause with them. The Gnostics taught that God is truth and that
right religion is knowing the truth. That was, and always has been, a very
appealing idea. It always has been close to what Judaism and Christianity
also affirm about God. God is ullimate truth.

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The problem with Gnosticism is that it doesn't say enough. If God is
truth, then the pathway to God is understanding, learning, comprehending
the secrets. Gnostic religion looks like a secret society in which one
progresses through a series of degrees, steps or circles of knowledge,
characterized by secret codes, and words and concepts, until one attains
the highest degree or inner cirele, knowledge of God. There is a sense in
which that kind of thinking has always lived comfortably within
Christianity. There is a sense in which Christian faith is really a matter
of approaching the ultimate truth of God, and that growing in the Lord is a
matter of increasing in knowledge and understanding.

The threat from that kind of thinking is that it misses, by a
significant margin, the essence ofthe Gospel. If Christianity had
succumbed to that way of thinking it would very shortly have become just
another school of Greek philosophy.

The difference, those early Christians realized, the critical
difference, is that God is not only ultimate truth. God is redeeming power
and reconciling love. So the author uses the language of Gnostocism, images
of darkness and light, and adds an intriguing and revolutionary new concept.
"God is love." Human experience of God, he preposed, happens not only when
we understand ideas about God, but when we love.

That, frankly, was an incredible proposition. It still is. That set
Christianity apart from the religions of the ancient world. And it still
does. It isn't simply a matter of understanding. It isn't a matter of
getting the words right, repeating the sacred formulas or IRagic mantras of
popular religion. It is a matter of love.

This writer, by the way, can be embarrassingly blunt. He wrote: “If
a person says he loves God but hates his brother or sister, he's a liar."

That's the bottom line. When you're about to die and you have to get
the essence of it down in a sentence or two, this is what it sounds like ~

"Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God.
Everyone who loves is a child of God and knows God, but the unloving know
nothing of God." [John 4:7-8, NEB]

There is an important point here that Christianity is always tempted
to forget. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not simply a new set of ideas
about God, It is about God's love which gets itself lived in a Christian
community. {t's not that the ideas are unimportant. It's just Chat the
essence of it is love, not understanding.

Old heresies never die; they keep showing up in new forms. So the
appeal of Gnosticism remains strong. In fact, ove of the more intriguing
propositions from academia recently is that ancient Gnosticism has found a
new home in American Protestant Evangelicalism, where once again the
emphasis is on knowing, saying the right words, the appropriate phrases,
having a personal experience of salvation that feels good and warm and
satisfying... and exclusive. You are a Christiav because you know
something no one else knows and your lask is te get them lo know it boo.
That's Guusticism in a new wrapping.

2
Ped

The essence of it - elderly John knew and wrote is this: “Everyone
who loves is a child of Gad and knows God."

Now that does nol mean that Christianity is a philosophy of social
betterment only, nor that the Christian enterprise can be reduced to a
social service agency, or an Esalen Institute Love-In. In fact, the love
we are talking about is net human affection. It is the incarnation, the
love of God revealed in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. "In this is love," John wrote ~ “that God sent his son." It is
net an amorphous sentiment. It is, for us, strong love that lived and
bravely died. It is not sweet sentimentality, but tough love, realistic
love, love that knows about evil and sin and death. The love we are
talking about is love that participates in the human situation, love that
forgives a prostitute, stands for the outcast, and opens its arms to a
returning prodigal. This is whole, human, healing love... Without it
Christianity is empty... Without it life is empty. Without this love
churches are like harsh clanging cymbals, full of noise, or worse yet, like
exclusive clubs.

The evangelicals are right to remind us that Christianity is not a
theory of social welfare nor an agenda for civic do-gooders. But if we
were, should it not be on the side of unconditional love and service?
Isn't a greater danger, a religion of empty slogans, and no love? Isn't a
greater temptation the Gnostic suggestion that once we have the secret,

once we've said - "I know Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior," the matter
is closed? If we are going to be guilty of something less than theological
perfection, may it be on the side of this bold proposition: “Everyone who

loves is a child of God.'

It was more than a decade ago I suppose, but the pop seng suggested
that what the world needs now is love. Probably because some young piano
students in our household played it over and over, that song is always near
the surface of my mind. But it's also because the further along I progress
in my own journey of faith, the more I believe it. “What the world needs
now is love" - not Dione Warwick's "love, sweet love," although some of
that helps too. What the world needs is God's kind of love... the love
that is the essence of our religion... the love you and I have been
mandated to express to each other so the world can see what it looks like.

The most “intensely suppressed" fact in the New Testament, someone
wrote recently, is the consistent and thorough mandate to believers to love
their brothers and sisters in Christ.

The early Christians understood that. It was a matter of life and
death for them. They were bound together in small, counter-culture
communities that sometimes had to pool all their resources in order to
survive, To be a Christian in a city where that could get you thrown to
the lions, made you dependent on other Christians in a very real way. The
person beside you at prayers might be an informer, or might simply not know
how to be discreet. It could cost you your Jife. Soe they knew how urgent
love for one another was.

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They also made a happy discovery that their love for one another and
for the world ~ communicated the Gospel of Christ better than all the
sermons they preached.

1 would propose that that has not changed either. Our situation, of
course, could not be more dramatically different. They were an intimate
community of friends. We are a loose knit congregation of mostly
strangers, some of whom know one another but by no means all. They
depended on one another for security and life itself. Our relationships
here do not have to be different from our relationships with neighbors,
club members, symphony attendees. And yet - the vital difference remains -
we are under mandate to love one another because love is of God.

That doesn't mean, by the way, that we have to like each other.
We're called to love each other which, according to our teacher, means
accepting and forgiving and serving and supporting.

It means, I think, that the life of the institution conveys a quality
of love which is visible to the world. Our world is different from those
early Christians. Their's was hostile to Christianity; ours has become
indifferent. Their world threw Christians to the lions; ours invites
Christians into the halls of power because they pose no threat to the
status quo. Their world burned Christians to death; ours watches
television and sees an insidious individualism and materialism wrapped in
the cloak of exclusive piety - and laughs. What this world needs is love.
What this world needs from the church is a vigorous and creative counter-
culture: a place where individuals are respected and honored without
regard to the classifications and stratifications which the world uses: a
place where justice is practiced, where race, sex and worldly conditions
do not exclude: a place where love is honored, practiced, expressed and put
into action.

It means that the life of this institution reflects that same
unconditional love for the world, in ministries with those who have no
where else to turn. It means that God's love is expressed not only in
sermons from the pulpit, but in the Tutoring Program, and clothing, food
and shelter provided to the needy. It means that the Gospel is celebrated
and witnessed, not simply verbally, but in an array of programs from CROP
Walks to endiess solicitations of money for. missions.

I believe the world needs the services we provide, but more
importantly, the lave which the services express.

i believe the culture needs the church - and the love the church
represents. What a gorgeous illustration the Russian Orthodox Church has
given to the world. For seventy years the church in the Soviet Unien has
withstood the most determined persecution since the Roman Empire. And this
year that church celebrates a thousand-year anniversary, forty million
strong, ready once again to fill the air with the sound of its ehurch bells
ringing.

We are jusl one church, of course, but I believe all Che conmet ion
about Landmarks designalLion is evidence that the city needs Chis church.
City people of all persussions, know intuitively the community's need for

the love this church represents. So please help us tell the city: We're
not moving. That rumor is absolutely wrong and without any foundation.
We decline the honor of Landmarking, but we love the world: we love this
city: and we are not moving from here.

What the world needs now is love. It would appear that our nation
and the Soviet Union are realizing that the only thing another generation
of nuclear weapons will accomplish is a decrease in our security and an
increase in our vulnerability. And so, slowly, but surely, we seem to be
moving toward accord.

What the world needs now is love. Aurellio Peccei, founder of the
Club of Rome, pointed out that each person in the world sits on the
equivalent of ten tons of explosives; that 40% of the world's scientists
are working on new military systems; that 150 nation states continue to
act on the basis of national self interest only - in the name of patriotism.
So the scientists and economists sound more and more like Old Testament
prophets.

Frank Feathers, a banker, editor of Business Tomorrow, wrote: "We
are all living on a tiny mudball which is spiralling through space. The
sooner we accept this simple but soberingly powerful reality, the better
will be the future for the mudball and its various inhabitants... we have
to view each other as members of the same human family - we are one
people... We must recognize the need for an embracing acceptance of the
oneness of the race." [Through The Eighties, The World Future Society, p.
430]

What the world needs now is love.

God, I believe, keeps trying to teach us... that love is the only
hope for survival; that the only real hope for a human future is some
renaissance of caring, accepting, sacrificing love.

God, I believe, keeps showing it to us, little incarnations of
hopeful leve, in the midst of some of the worst and harshest and cruelest
dilemmas we make for ourselves...

Do you know about Janusz Korczak, a Polish Jew, a physician, educator
and author of many popular children's books? As the Nazis slowly and
relentlessly closed in on the Warsaw Jewish community, Korezak decided to
go to work protecting abandoned and orphaned children as long as possible.
He established an orphanage in the Ghetto. He taught them, loved them and
got them to dream and hope and sing.

And then August 6, 1942... their turn came. They were lined up, all
of them, and put into wagons and taken to Treblinka... Old Dr. Korczak,
carrying a little girl, holding a little boy's hand, walked with them, and
the children sang... [See “Tribune Books," Chicago Tribune, (May 1, 1988},
p. 1]

God shows us what the world needs iu tbat Jewish doctor's love...
{the one who loves knows God) And God shows us what the love the world
needs Pooks like - in w cross - on which God's only child died.

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What the world needs now is love... The way you and I connect
with that universal need, instead of wringing our hands and becoming
depressed, is to particularize it. What you need now - what IT need now -
is love, We are created for it.

Our earliest stories tell about people created for life together,
living in a paradise of harmony with one another, with nature and with God.
That same story suggests that the source of all tragedy is our inability to
live together. The harmony is lost. The people leave the garden paradise.
And then they start to live and to learn the necessity of loving.

Estrangement and isolation and loneliness don't “feel" right to us,
the Bible maintains, because we have been created for love. I think you
and I know that. I think we have learned that without love we don't have
very much. Those of us who have achieved a modest degree of success in our
professions have discovered, along with the satisfaction of success, that
without love, it is a hollow accomplishment. in the stress of getting
ahead, staying ahead, keeping up... I think everyone of us knows that at a
level deep in our souls, we need something more.

It begins here -— this vast enterprise of connecting God's love with
the need of the world. It begins herc -- in your soul, where you know your

need.

So this day - acknowledge it: and hear both the mandate and the
good news. In Jesus Christ - hear God say - “I love you." And hear that
old man, the last living witness, pass it on, down across the centuries.

"Beloved, if God so loved us,
we also ought to love one another.”