1 John 4:7-20
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.
Before you start reading this sermon I want you do to something for me. If you have a CD of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, put on the song “All You Need Is Love” and listen to it. If you don’t have it, then go to your computer and google “All You Need Is Love.” If you can’t do that, then find some way to sit down and listen to the song. Think about the words of the song, and what they are telling you. Go ahead. Do it. Don’t be cynical, thinking that you don’t need to. Go and listen to the song, then come back to this sermon….
Listen to the Song
So, if all you need is love, why isn’t love more dominant in the world? Back when this song came out in 1967, there was such hope for the power of love. It was the “summer of love,” when the youth of the world thought that love was everywhere. So many thought that love would transform the world, but the summer of 1967 was followed by the summer of 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were shot, the Vietnam War escalated after the Tet Offensive, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and violence erupted at the 1968 Democratic Convention. It’s as if the world could only handle so much love before it exploded back into violence. Since then, the world has descended into a period of pandemic violence. Guns, bombs, and arms have proliferated around the world. Violence in this country has increased, and although it has decreased compared to 1990s levels, it is clearly way over what the rates were before the 1960s.
Why doesn’t the world love more? What’s our problem? When I look around the world I don’t see much love. I see a lot of fear, a lot of violence, a lot of people acting out of selfishness and self-interest, and people thinking that the answer to the world’s problems is to “get them before they get me.” But I don’t see much love.
What all this really tells me is that despite the fact that the majority of the world’s people are religious, and that they proclaim their faith passionately, perhaps their openness to God is questionable. Why do I say this? Simply because of our passage. Remember what John said: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” If the test of knowing God is our ability to love, and our love is tested by our actions, then many religious people fail the test because we often promote agendas that have little love. I’m not trying to let the non-religious off the hook. I certainly don’t look around and see a greater preponderance of love among the non-religious. I see less among them than among the religious. It’s one thing to be religious. It’s another to be religious and to be open to God, and therefore to love.
What the Beatles sang may be true, that all we need is love, but what John wrote is even truer. If we are going to love, we have to start with our relationship with God because God is love. And the less God is in our lives, the less love is in our lives.
I don’t think it takes much mental energy to prove my point. Take a look at the world around us. Notice which people have the most love. What I’ve noticed is that the people who generally have the most love are also the people with the most God. Now, don’t think that I’m being biased or foolish here. I know that not all Christians are loving. There are many, many Christians who seem to lack a sense of love. But the question isn’t whether being religious somehow kills love. The question is the degree of love these people would have without religion and faith. Related to this, I’ve also noticed that there seems to be a definite lack of God among messed up people. I’ve spent most of my life as a counselor working with people who struggle in life. I’ve met very few messed up people who are deeply faithful, but I’ve met a lot of messed up people who have no faith, no religion, and little or no belief in God. Think about the people you know who are chronically messed up. How important a role does God play in their lives? Think about how much they care about God, and then reflect on how much love plays a role in their lives. A lack of love tends to reveal an overabundance of self-focus, and an overabundance of self-focus tends to reveal a lack of God-focus.
The people I know who are the most loving also tend to be the most God-ful. Let me give you an example of what I mean by telling you about one of my heroes, a man named Father Arseny. In his life he showed how both God and love could be alive, even in the Siberian gulags of the Soviet Union under Stalin. I spoke about Father Arseny back in December on the Sunday after Christmas, but since so few were in worship on that day, I thought I’d talk about him again this morning. I came across his name after giving a talk to about 250 Methodist pastors in North Carolina. During my talk I spoke about how God seems to work through coincidence (or providence), and how many people of faith experience God in this way. While sitting outside with several pastors during our lunch break, one of them said to me, “What you are saying reminds me of Father Arseny.”
I asked him who Father Arseny was. He said, “He’s an Orthodox priest who survived a Soviet Siberian gulag for 20 or more years. During that time he had an amazing faith and cared for others in the camp, transforming their lives and opening them to God.” As I often do when people suggest books to me, I wrote down the information and, when I got home, ordered the book. It took me a while to work through my stack of other books, but once I read this book I realized that this man may have been one of the truly great Christians of the 20th century. And he was a man others dismissed.
Father Arseny was originally an art scholar who became an Orthodox priest. He ended up being sentenced to the gulag after writing several articles about the importance of faith even among communists. In Stalinist Russia, where atheism was the official religion and Christians were persecuted aggressively, to write pro-Christian articles in public papers and magazines was to speak out politically against the government. During Stalin’s reign, Christians were considered to be the worst of all political agitators because belief in God was a threat to the supreme rule of Stalin. As a result, about 44,000 priests were killed during his reign, and over 150,000 monks and nuns. By the time Stalin died, only 200 priests remained alive serving in churches. Remember that statistic the next time someone says that Christianity is responsible for more deaths than anything else. Under Stalin’s atheistic reign, over 25 million people were killed, and millions of them for being Christian. A significant number of them died in the gulags.
The gulags were designed to kill people slowly and with a lot of pain. In the winter, the temperature generally hovered around -15 or -20, and dipping at times to -30. During the summer, the water from the frozen ground was released, making it extremely humid, creating an Eden for mosquitoes, which spread disease. Either way, the majority of people sent to the camps did not return.
The camps were filled with both political prisoners (often highly educated scholars, artists, and reporters) and common criminals (thieves, murderers, psychopath). Both had nothing but disdain for people who were religious. The atheistic political prisoners hated Christians because they saw religious people as being willfully stupid and superstitious. The criminals hated them because they hated anyone with a sense of morality. The result was that both groups treated Father Arseny with contempt and brutality. Yet Father Arseny always responded with love, even when they abused and beat him. And I don’t mean that he responded with a weak-kneed love, but with a genuine love. He was a man who cared about people, and often his love brought about miracles.
Father Arseny was easily dismissed by others, especially by those who were smart, powerful, or just wanted to fit in. But being dismissed by others never seemed to bother him. All he cared about was serving God. After he died in 1973, stories about him were collected from those who knew him either in the gulag or elsewhere. That’s what makes this book so fascinating. They tell the stories of Father Arseny from the perspective of those who were transformed by him.
I want to share one particular story with you this morning that was written by two people who were cared for by Father Arseny: Ivan Alexandrovich Sazikov and Alexander Pavlovich Avsenkov. Both were living in a barrack with Father Arseny, and both became deathly ill. There was no room for them in the medical building of the gulag, so they remained in the barrack, where they got no medical attention. Father Arseny took it upon himself to care for them. Arseny was responsible in the barracks for keeping the stoves lit while the men worked outside, breaking ice and chopping down trees for firewood, which were the only source of heat. Even at full-blast the stoves only heated the barracks to about 55 degrees.
Arseny carefully cared for them while both remained mostly delirious and oblivious to the care they were receiving. At one point Arseny decided to bring the stoves up full-blast, realizing that the two men were close to death and needed heat. When a guard came in and felt the heat, he beat Arseny for wasting state-owned wood. But Arseny continued to fill the stove with more and more wood.
One day, when Sazikov started to get better, he saw Arseny hovering over him, praying for Christ to heal him. Instead of thanking Arseny, Sazikov said to him, “What do you want from me with your God! What do you hope to get from me? You hope I will die so you can take my belongings. I have nothing, so don’t even try!” Father Arseny’s response? He carefully covered the man and tenderly gave him more to drink.
Another time, when Arseny was praying over Sazikov, Sazikov said to him, “Your praying, eh, priest? You pray to get forgiveness of your sins and this is why you help us! You’re afraid of God! Why’s that? Have you ever seen Him?” Arseny calmly said, “How could I not have seen him? He is here among us and unites you and me!... I see his presence. I see that your soul is black with sin, but there is room in it for light. Light will come to you, Sazikov, light and your Saint. Saint Seraphim of Sarov will not abandon you.” Sazikov screamed at him, yelling, “I’ll kill you, you silly priest, I’ll kill you—I don’t know how you know things. I hate the way you think.” The interesting thing, though, is that through Arseny’s love, Sazikov slowly became transformed, eventually becoming a Christian and remaining dear friends with Arseny for the rest of his life.
The other patient, Avsenkov, was more receptive to Arseny, but he was also stunned by Arseny’s love. He also became transformed by God through Father Arseny, especially after the following conversation. He said to Arseny, “You have a soul, I can see that, but I am a true Communist, while you serve your God; you are a priest. We have different points of view. In theory, I should be fighting you.” Avsenkov was a committed Communist. In fact, he was in the gulag for political reasons. He had been a judge in Moscow, defending the Communist regime of Stalin against all potential threats. He had sentenced thousands to the gulags. He ended up in the gulag himself only because a rising star wanted him out of the way so that he, himself, could become a powerful judge. False charges were fabricated against Avsenkov in order to take over his position, and so Avsenkov was sentenced to the gulags himself. Yet he remained a committed Communist.
Arseny responded, “Hey, dear friend. Why would you want to fight? You fought as much as you could and where did your ideology get you? It took you to this camp, which swallowed you! As far as I am concerned I had my faith in Christ out there in freedom and I have it here within myself. God is the same everywhere and helps everyone! I trust and believe that He will help you too!” He continued, “We have known each other for a long time. God brought us together a long time ago, and planned our meeting in this camp.”
Avsenkov replied, “What are you saying? How could I have known you?” Arseny calmly and lovingly said, “Oh yes, you know me, Alexander Pavlovich. In 1933 when Communism was trying to eradicate religion, hundreds of thousands of believers were exiled, hundreds of churches were closed and this is when, for the first time, I was sent away to camp on your instructions. In 1939, I was in your jurisdiction again. I wrote an article. As soon as it was published, you arrested me again and convicted me to be shot. But, thank you—you commuted the sentence to exile in camp. Since then I have been living in various camps and all along I’ve been expecting to see you. So finally we meet!” How would you respond to the judge who unjustly sentenced you to a gulag?
This is an amazing testimony to love, and how God is love. By loving Avsenkov, Arseny not only forgave him, but he opened Avsenkov to God’s presence everywhere. Like Sazikov, Avsenkov became a Christian and devoted his life to God and love.
You don’t have to be great to love. Father Arseny was not great in any worldly way. He was simply a man who knew that we need to love. To be like him you don’t have to be great. You just have to want to share God and love
Do you know what made Arseny so remarkable? He understood that the only thing that stands between us and love is us. He understood that God is love, and that each time he loved he was bearing Christ to another. He understood something that the Beatles didn’t. It may be true that all we need is love, but to live in that love we need God.
Amen.
