It has to be based loosely – partly because it’s hardly a preaching commentary, partly because it needs to be contextualised and partly because there’s the Holy Spirit factor. Looking at Smalley’s breakdown of the epistle it all seems quite simple – a nice series of sermons picking up themes of what it might mean to ‘Live in the Light’ and/or ‘Live as Children of God’ which are neatly laid out on the contents page. It never works out like that, of course, and now, around six weeks after we began, we are half way through a set of six sermons – things like Pentecost and united services make for a lot of interruptions - and I have to confess to wondering how much anyone apart from me sees how they connect together.
So far, though, I have enjoyed working with the themes and allowing them to pose questions that take us beyond a nice superficial kind of Christian doctrine to wondering what does it actually mean to ‘renounce sin’, ‘’be obedient’ or ‘reject worldliness’? For example, just what is sin? Who or what should be obeyed and why? What (if anything) is wrong with the things of the world?
One recurring pair of words, or ideas, as we’ve gone along has been ‘attitudes’ and ‘actions’. It seems to me far too easy for those in the Christian ghetto to say ‘I believe X, Y, Z’ when our attitudes and actions indicate otherwise.
Each week, we’ve begun our exploration with some kind of interactive activity – thought showering ideas about the theme or, this week, I got people to arrange a whole list of things in order of priority. The answers were fascinating, and I wish I’d written them down before someone removed the slips of paper to use with a youth group elsewhere (though I guess that was some kind of compliment!). We compared things in pairs before endeavouring to fit them into an overall list. Which is more important - clothes or hairstyle? House or car? Fame or wealth? To be loved or to be happy? Friends or success? To be beautiful or to be healthy? My rights or justice? The planet or our comfort? Employment or holidays? Helping myself or helping others?
We did not all agree on the order, but it was an interesting (and enlightening!) way in to thinking about the reality of what we claim or believe ought to be our priorities and what we actually devote our time and energy to. Seemingly the good folk of Dibley think the planet is the most important priority with clothes, hairstyles and cars a long way down the list. Hmm, I wonder, given how many drive under a mile to attend worship and the corporate hair dye bill for the women!!!
Working with 1 John has been challenging and has made me look hard at my own double standards (that’s polite speak for hypocrisy I guess) and think again about my priorities. As I reminded my people, God is not a killjoy, but rather an extravagant giver who declared creation good and commissioned it to flourish, but sometimes our attitudes are so skewed that either we deny the implicit value of the material world or we exploit it, or maybe, I suppose, both. I also made no pretence that real life and our own ideals ever quite match up: it’s amazing how often the urgent ousts the important, and how we need to keep reviewing our attitudes and actions to see how they match up with our aims.
1 John has not turned out to be the break from tough stuff I rather naively imagined it would be; instead it has served as an important reminder of the real challenges that lie behind some of our Christian jargon. It’s relatively easy to come up with headings for a commentary or a sermon series, much harder to get underneath the waffle words to the questions and challenges they pose.