Staying In The Box

1^st John 3:16-24[1]

(For this sermon, I had a large empty appliance box sitting in the front of the sanctuary where the pulpit normally sits.)

One thing we do a lot of around our house these days is play in one of these boxes. Workers in the appliance department of Lowe’s and Home Depot used to get excited when they saw me – they thought, “Alright, here’s a customer who wants to buy appliances!” Now that they know me, and what I’m after, their greeting is a less-than-enthusiastic, “So you need another box, eh?” Tell me some things you can do with this box. (Invite the congregation to offer ideas about what to do with the box.)

These days, when someone asks you for ideas about something, they are usually looking for ideas that are “outside of the box.” Creativity, fresh ideas, inventive strategies, and ingenuity are all wanted commodities these days. If you are a person who thinks outside of the box, you’re one of the most wanted people in corporate America today. Churches sometimes like those who think “outside of the box” too. When a new pastor comes to a church, “out-of-the-box” thinking can be welcomed or resisted. A few weeks ago on Masterpiece Theatre on Sunday night, I watched an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel Under the Greenwood Tree.[2] Part of the plot was about the struggle the church went through when the fiddle and choir were replaced with a harmonium – an instrument like an organ. Believe it or not, the organ was once considered to be an “out-of-the-box” idea in the church.

What happens when ideas get too far outside the box? A recent issue of Fast Company magazine[3] looked at companies who seemed to go too far outside the box and forgot their core identity.

Consider Volkswagen. The name means, “people’s cars” and in the decades after the Second World War millions of people fell in love with these cars. They were low price, high quality, and affordable. Nowadays, it seems that Volkswagen has stepped away from the niche. If you look at the lineup of cars from Volkswagen these days, they include luxury sedans and SUVs. Oh, they still offer a beetle, but the simple, solid, and small market is now dominated by a car from … get this … BMW! The Mini Cooper is the beetle of the new millennium.

A while back, the fast-food chain Hardees did an ad where an attractive model ate a burger while washing her car. If you saw these ads it’s not hard to see the inconsistencies here! In our culture of super-thin models, how many do you think eat burgers? And have you ever seen anyone washing their car and eating a hamburger at the same time!? Sales didn’t improve for Hardees with this ad campaign. Perhaps they should have focused on building a better hamburger.

The lesson to be learned is: it’s okay to step outside the box, but don’t lose the box. Don’t forget what you do well…and keep doing it! When I got my Master’s Degree in counseling I spent two years…and thousands of dollars…learning to tell people this one thing: figure out what’s working and then keep doing it!

Our text today is a portion of a letter to a church that seems to be like Volkswagen and Hardees. They seem to have strayed away too far from the box. They forgot what they were called to do, and what the church does best.

How did they get too far out of the box? It seems they forgot how to love one another. You have to work pretty hard to ignore the focus of this passage: the Easter story is about Jesus’ love for us. Our call in life is to love one another and the recipients of this letter lost sight of this. It seems a church split over doctrinal issues was the cause of their problems.[4] Some had ideas that distorted the Gospel. They got away from Jesus offered himself because he loved us. We are to love one another.

I would suspect that this is not a new word for anyone here today. Even if you’ve never been in the Church before this moment, you’ve probably heard: Jesus loves us. We are to love one another. When most of us here this, our minds immediately think of love as an emotion. But the writer of 1^st John is thinking about love as a decision, something one decides to do with determination.[5] We are commanded to love…even those who mistreat us.

Think for a moment about those that are the hardest for you to love. Chances are, they are hard to love because they have hurt you in some way. Someone said something untrue about you. Someone who didn’t like you for whatever reason blocked your professional advancement. There was that “incident” and now you don’t speak to that person, and they don’t speak to you. We’ve all got those people that are hard to love. And yes, we are commanded to love them…all.

Have you ever noticed that when someone has hurt us, we do everything we can to keep that hurt alive? We talk about that person who has hurt us. In great detail, we reiterate the ways they offended us…sometimes embellishing the story as we imagine what surely are that person’s evil and despicable ways. A lot of times, we even employ some “out of the box” thinking as we imagine the stuff we’d like to see happen to that person.

I looked at this text over the last couple of weeks in hopes that I might find some wiggle room in text for translating this passage differently. It would be easier if there was an option reading for the text that said, “Learn to live with each other, despite your differences,” or “Let bygones by bygones” or maybe even, “Can I just use the words, ‘I love you,’ without much action?”

Soren Kierkegaard told a parable about a man walking down the street one day who saw a sign in a shop that said, “Pants pressed here.” Delighted to see the sign, he went home and gathered up all his wrinkled laundry. He carried them to the shop, dumped the laundry on the counter, and received a very curious look from the shopkeeper. “What are you doing?” the shopkeeper asked. “I brought my clothes here to be pressed,” said the man, “just like your sign says.” “Oh, you’ve got it all wrong,” the shopkeeper said, “we don’t do that here. We’re in the business of making signs. We don’t do things here, we simply talk about them.”[6] Is that how we are in the church? Do we simply talk about love?

Most of us can get to the point with most who have hurt us where we can say we love them. But this text says we are to actively love others…all others. One scholar puts it this way, “Kind and comforting words are not condemned in verse 18. We need to speak with soft and sympathetic words, but such words should be accompanied by helpful and heart-warming deeds.”[7]

When the church gets away from loving one another in words and actions, then that church has gotten too far out of the box and needs to get back in. So, I invite you to join me in getting back in the box. Just as Jesus overcame our sins on the cross, Jesus can overcome the hurdles we face in loving those hard to love. Let’s surrender ourselves right now to Jesus and rely on his power so we can love one another.

Amen.

[1] The shape of this sermon and the moves follow an article I read, “Get In The Box,” in Homiletics, Volume 18, Number 3, May-June 2006, pp. 11-15.

[3] Douglas Rushkoff, “Back In The Box,” Fast Company, November 2005, pp. 37-38.

[4] Thomas F. Johnson, New International Biblical Commentary, 1, 2, and 3 John (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993), p. 5.

[5] William H. Willimon, “Determined to Love,” Pulpit Resource, Volume 34, Number 2, April-June 2006, p. 30.

[6] This Kierkegaard parable was told by Samuel Lloyd in a sermon, “Word and Deed,” preached at Washington National Cathedral on September 25, 2005.

[7] D. Edmond Hiebert, “An Exposition of 1 John 3:13-24,” Bibliotheca Sacra 146, July-September, 1989, p. 310.