1 John 3:1-7
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.”
Sermon
Nice to be together. This beautiful Sunday feels like spring this Sunday. Last Sunday if you recall it, we weren’t sure, but here we are gathered again today in the Lord’s House to read and reflect on the words that have been given to us
One of the things that we spent a couple of minutes on last week was talking about symbols and I want to go back to that.
I could begin there because symbols are so important not just in the Christian life for which they are central. In life in general if you’re dealing about faith and issues about eternal life, knowing God when we’re talking about things like that, it’s hard to think about and practically impossible to talk about them because they’re just not adequate words. We’re not able to think in ways that will enable us to speak the truest things, the things that are the hardest ones, to give voice to that. Being the case then, we have to represent those things in symbols.
The greatest symbol of all time in all of human history is the cross. Even if you’re an enemy of Christ, if you’re an enemy of the cross, the cross is still the most significant thing as a symbol that there’s ever been and I’m sure ever will be because it captures everything about life now. If you’re familiar with philosophy and writings of the past and poetry certainly scripture, another very powerful image and a symbol is the idea of the road being on the road. We live life out on the road – that’s where things happen. I’m probably the only one here that can remember the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope movies on the road shows – you know the Road to Singapore and the Road toward Mandalay. They were so funny I laughed till my stomach hurt but they’re all about being on the road and things happened on the road. That was the point Willie Nelson sings about being on the road. It’s a theme that runs through all of literature, music, and history being on the road.
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