"Not Alone" (Second Sunday of Easter)

1 John 1:1-2:2

1 We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2 this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— 3 we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 4 We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. 5 This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. 6 If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; 7 but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. 8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. 1 My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; 2 and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

             “I don’t need any help: I can do it all by myself.” When we’re kids such a sentiment can be rather cute: you hear the toilet flush, then your child comes into the kitchen to announce, “I don’t need any help; I went to the bathroom all by myself!” Or when they come walking into the living room on Sunday morning in their Halloween costume, rainbow-striped socks, one rubber boot, and one baseball cleat saying, “I don’t need any help getting ready for church; I got dressed all by myself!” As we get older, it becomes a sort of expectation: our parents don’t wake us up to get ready for school anymore; they don’t (or can’t) help us with our homework; we can drive ourselves to sports practices, club meetings, and friends’ houses—we don’t need any help to do those things when we’re teenagers. Then, as adults, we’re expected to depend less and less on others. We don’t need help from our parents, from our friends, from our neighbors, and we had better not need any help from the government! We’re taught that “pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps” is an admirable trait, that being successful, self-sufficient adults is the ultimate goal in life. We perpetuate the myth of the “self-made man,” because our culture has taught us that to need help, to rely on someone—anyone—else is a sure sign of weakness. “I don’t need any help: I can do it all by myself,” becomes the mantra of our existence.

You know how I know this is true? Think about it: how many of you, right now, have an aging parent or grandparent who refuses to admit they are getting old? How many of us have a relative who refuses to give up driving, to depend on someone else to take them to the store, the doctor, or to church?  How many of us would rather try to tackle a job ourselves without ever asking for help, even if it means we wind up with a bigger mess than when we started? Our culture has hard-wired us into thinking that total independence is the true mark of a well-rounded, successful person, and this way of thinking has even leaked into our understanding of God and what it means to have faith.

One of the most quoted verses of Scripture in our culture is “God helps those who helps themselves.” It’s the perfect Bible verse for bumper stickers, Facebook statuses, tweets, and discounted wall art from Hobby Lobby, but here’s the thing—it’s not a Bible verse at all! It’s nowhere in scripture! And I would be so bold as to say the very sentiment runs contrary to the bulk of the Bible’s message. Somehow, somewhere along the way we began believing that faith was something we ought to do alone. We started talking about a “personal Lord and Savior” (another expression that isn’t found in Scripture), individual faith, and the “private practice of religion.” We became convinced that being a Christian was something we can do on our own, without the need for the trappings of corporate worship and communal living. Is it any wonder we now live in an age where “spiritual but not religious” is a common identifier for so many people—even Christians?

As we formed this individualistic faith, we ignored the full reality of who Jesus is; we turned him into a spiritual superman, a mystical deity that only exists as a way for us to go to heaven after we die. We celebrated Easter as if it were little more than another holiday for which to buy new clothes and decorations. We ignored the realities of our own faults and sins, choosing instead to point out the sins of others so we could retreat further into our singular, individualized religions, and in the process of creating this isolated faith, we may have compromised the full truth of the Good News by watering it down to some customized contract of comfort, a personal promise of paradise.

In many ways, that was the conflict corroding the community to whom John writes this first epistle. It’s early in the history of the Church, and as doctrines and confessions of faith are yet to be formed, all manner of sects and groups were emerging. Some of the most notable were the Gnostics and the Docetics. The Gnostics believed that existence was divided between the material realm and the spiritual realm, and the goal of existence was to be freed from the material realm. They believed the body (along with all of creation) was evil. Therefore, for Gnostic Christians, Jesus showed the way to be freed from the body and the physical realm through some “secret knowledge.” The Docetics believed that Jesus was never really human, that he only appeared to be human, and therefore, he only appeared to actually die. (Both Gnosticism and Docetism have been renounced as heresies, even though Gnosticism still sneaks back into the popular beliefs of many Christians even today).

It’s likely that these two movements (possibly along with others) were gaining traction in the community, and their teachings were causing disunity and leading believers astray. That’s why this epistle is lacking the customary greeting and just gets right down to business with the declaration of verses 1-4. Theses verses are a declaration of the nature of Christ—a declaration of an eye witness. Jesus wasn’t an illusion; he wasn’t a corrupted shell encasing a knowledge-wielding spirit. He was real! He was flesh and blood and bone; he had a voice, a real presence among his friends. Christ’s real presence brings joy among those who have fellowship with him and each other. If he an illusion, a hollow body, then we couldn’t have real fellowship with him; we couldn’t trust that he knows how we feel. That’s why the author says in verse 4, “We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.” He wants the community to know and understand that faith in the real Christ is a faith of fellowship and joy, not individualism and a longing for escape.

This notion that we don’t need any help, that we can do things on our own, that the point of all of this is to one day be freed from it, can lead us to a place where we believe we may not even need God! It can bring us to a place where we’re so convinced of our own power to free ourselves (with the right words, prayers, or knowledge) that we may even begin to think that we can free ourselves from sin’s corruption. But surely we know better…don’t we? Sometimes I’m not so sure. Sometimes it seems that we’ve become so positive of our own power, of our own ability to “do what’s right” (especially in light of the wrong we point out in others) that we treat Christ as nothing more than a ticket, a proof-of-purchase that we can show to the one manning the door to get in to wherever it is we hope we’re going. We treat sin as if it’s something those people do, like something we did once, but now we’ve outgrown it and we can do the right thing all by ourselves—we don’t need any help.

That’s why I think we need to listen again to these words before in, the words of verse 5-10: These are not words that testify to the customized faith of one who says, “I can worship God on my own.” These are not words that testify to the individualized idolatry of one who worships at the altar of their own achievements and proclaims that they are worthy of the rewards of heaven. These are not words that testify to the stubborn pride and self-righteousness of those who declare their worth in the light of others’ shortcomings, sins, and failures. When we walk alone, we walk in the dark, because we walk without God, because God is light. To say we don’t need help, to say we can do it on our own, to say “it’s all about me!” is the very definition of sin! It is to rebel against the very nature of God!

If we say we don’t sin, that we don’t have sin, what we’re really saying is that we don’t need God anyhow, that we don’t need a God in Christ whose love has overcome such sin. We declare that we don’t need love itself! “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” This confession, however, isn’t an act we do to ensure that when the day arrives we’ll be free from the judgement of damnation. No, it is something we do in order to live in relationship with God—and each other! “[I]f we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”

This life of faith isn’t something we do on our own. It isn’t something we do on our own, because we can’t do it on our own. We need Christ. We need each other. Are any of us perfect? No, of course not. We’ll make mistakes. We’ll hurt each other. We’ll sin, even against each other. “But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” We need each other; we can’t do this all by ourselves. Maybe you’ve been trying to do it alone. Maybe you’ve been coaxed by the belief that self-sufficiency is the ultimate sign of perfection. Maybe you’ve been walking in the dark alone for so long you’ve forgotten what the light of God looks like in the midst of even a flawed fellowship. I invite you today to step out of the lonely darkness and into the light of God’s love and the fellowship of the Church. May we all confess our sins, our sins of selfishness, of self-righteousness, our sins of believing we can do this all by ourselves. May we confess our sins together and walk in the light of God’s love and fellowship here and now as Christ is here among us even today, because we need help—God’s help; we need each other, because we can’t do this—life, faith—alone. Amen.