Today, we’re wrapping up our three-week series introducing and diving deep into Parkwood’s mission statement. If you’ve missed the last two weeks, I encourage you to check out our YouTube channel to catch up – this will make more sense in context, I promise.
Our Mission is this:
Rooted in Christ’s love, Parkwood Presbyterian Church seeks to grow in love for God and neighbor.
This love is the work of our hearts, to care and be cared for;
of our souls, to know and be known,
of our minds, to learn and to teach,
and our strength, to do justice and sow hope.
Today, we’re going to dive into the third part of that mission statement – growing in love for our neighbors.
Scripture: 1 John 4:7-21
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 Saviour 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 judgement, 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. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.
In these 14 verses alone, the writer uses the word ‘love’ twenty-nine times. In English composition classes, we’re often taught not to use the same word over and over and over again – we like to use synonyms, to explain our idea or thought process in different ways.
In ancient Greek, however, repetition of the same word or phrase creates emphasis. They didn’t have italics or bold print, or even punctuation, so to drive a point home, they said it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
We love because Christ first loved us.
It’s all the same word, for the language scholars out there – there are a multitude of different words for different kinds of love in Greek, and all twenty-nine instances in this passage are exactly the same: agape. Self-sacrificial love.
Before we get too far into this, let me acknowledge that this is an especially interesting week to be diving into this particular subject. We’re nine days out from election day, and our collective and individual anxiety buckets are FULL.
But when we started this series two weeks ago, I reminded us that this mission and this call are not just for fair weather and blue skies. Whatever comes, from small changes to a zombie apocalypse, this is who we are, and what we are called to do. How we do it might change – the nuts and bolts will look different in different seasons. But the core of who we are and what we are called to do does not.
Unfortunately, I also need to say this clearly:
It is a basic requirement of the Christian faith that we care about the well-being of other people. This is not some sort of new radicalism or secret political agenda – it’s right here in scripture, in black and white, as a commandment from Jesus himself and repeated hundreds of times, and at least twenty-nine times in 1 John alone. “Those who say they love God but hate their brothers or sisters are liars,” he says. The commandment that we care about people other than ourselves is fundamental to following Jesus.
Anyone who tells you otherwise or tries to qualify that commandment or find ways around it is not speaking for Jesus.
Now that we’ve established that foundation, let’s think about the how – how do we practice love, and how do we grow in it?
There are four core values – four core spiritual practices – embedded in our mission statement. They are connection, compassion, curiosity, and justice.
We are here to connect – to know and be known.
I want to give you a little bit of insight into how the elders developed this mission statement back in 2021.
The very first question that I asked the elders in our first strategic planning session was this:
What brought you to Parkwood, and why have you stayed?
Everyone had different reasons for showing up that first time – a neighbor invited them, they looked for a PCUSA church, their kids got involved in the youth group – but nearly everyone, when asked why they were still here, said: “because this is my home and these are my people.”
Parkwood is where we come to experience beloved community. To care and be cared for, to know and be known. We come here not just to share space or have a shared entertainment experience. It’s not a movie theater, and I am not that entertaining. We come to share our lives with one another, to connect. This is the joy of a smaller-scale church.
We’re not Fair Haven, we’re not Chapel Pointe, and we’re not trying to be. Our goal is to create a space where you can come and build deep, caring relationships—not necessarily just with like-minded people, or even people in the same stage of life, but where you can learn to know and love and care for all of God’s beloved people, in all of their complexity and differences.
Where else do we get to do that? Truly, where else do we intentionally spend time with people who are different ages, different backgrounds, different occupations, different personalities and even different values?
Our prayer time in worship is a particularly good example of that – because we have the opportunity to act out our love for God and our neighbors in real time. We carry one another’s burdens and share one another’s joys. Whether we are laughing or crying or hoping, we do it together, as one community.
In this space, we become more than individuals who love Jesus: we are a church family, bound together in God’s love and care and this common calling.
The ‘work’ part comes in when we don’t necessarily feel like that loving, harmonious community. Conflict is part of being human. Conflicts of values, of traditions, of the ways we would like things done – this is inevitable for every family and community on earth. At some point, each and every one of us is going to be upset.
What matters is how we deal with that conflict. We can choose to be curious – to try to understand the other perspectives in the room and why that person arrived there, even if we still disagree with where they landed. We can work to communicate more honestly and more clearly, and set expectations early. We can compromise in small ways and agree to disagree when we need to.
But the most important work we do in caring for one another and knowing one another is in practicing compassion. Compassion is not just a feeling, but a feeling that leads to action – in this case, actively seeking the well-being of another person.
The Sixth Commandment tells us: “thou shalt not kill.”
But the Heidelberg Catechism, which is one of our denominational confessions that guides our theology and practice, expands on that commandment, saying:
“What is God’s will for you in the sixth commandment? I am not to belittle, insult, or kill my neighbor—not by my thoughts, my words, my look or gesture, and certainly not by actual deeds. …
Is it enough, then, that we do not murder our neighbor in any such way?
No. By condemning envy, hatred, and anger God wants us to love our neighbors as ourselves, to be patient, peace-loving, gentle, merciful, and friendly toward them, to protect them from harm as much as we can, and to do good even to our enemies.”
This requires us to go beyond “don’t be a jerk” and pushes us to consider what others needahead of what we want, and to place whatever we may feel about another person in the context of God’s unchanging, never-ending, gracious and merciful love for them.
I think we can all agree that this is not how most of our society functions – but that’s part of the point. We gather here to be reminded who we are called to be, to hear again the voice of God asking us to be a different kind of people.
To grow in love, we also have to be able to practice curiosity –and a core part of practicing curiosity is humility. We cannot know everything and have all the answers and be right all the time and still be curious.
This is especially hard for those of us who might have grown up in more strict theological traditions, where there was one right answer to every question and questioning that answer would land you in trouble with the folks in charge.
But just as our curiosity can help us grow closer to God, like we worked through last week, it can also help us love our neighbors better and more deeply.
This is the beauty of the Parkwood Stories events the Outreach Team has hosted this fall – we’ve been able to hear the stories of people we might not otherwise be able to sit down with, to get to know in that deep and lasting way.
Part of cultivating that curiosity is deciding that everyone has something to teach us – which means you have something to teach, too. We each have a story, a history, skills and gifts and talents that someone is longing to know.
From ‘how to use your smartphone’ to ‘how to can tomatoes’ to ‘this is the history of this particular town in the UP’ to ‘how to do this trendy dance move’ – everyone, at every age, of every ability or disability, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, culture – because we are all created in the image of God, everyone has something to learn, and everyone has something to teach.
This brings us to our last core value – justice. The last line in our statement of call says we love God with our strength by doing justice and sowing hope.
We talked quite a bit about this last week, but this is one of the core ways we demonstrate our love for God and neighbor – by working towards right relationship in all things. By choosing what is right over what is easy. By being honest about where we are and what we’re doing, and pushing ourselves and our communities ever closer to what life in God’s kingdom would look like.
Justice is not something we achieve – not with a court case or the passage of a law or even a really good speech. It’s something we work on every day, something we practice as we grow in faith and faithfulness. It is standing against injustice – racism, homophobia, sexism, and every other ism you can imagine. But even moreso than opposing what’s wrong, to do justice is to seek a way to live that encourages the flourishing of every person, and the planet as a whole – and in the process to sow the seeds of hope that these present circumstances will not last forever.
I know I just spent the last 15 minutes making ‘love your neighbor’ sound incredibly complex – and in some ways, it is. We are constantly trying to figure this whole ‘love God and neighbor’ thing out in new ways, in new circumstances, with new people.
But I want to leave you with a quote that’s been floating around for quite some time – it’s a quote from the Mishnah – a collection of commentary on the Jewish law – that I think speaks to us in this moment rather perfectly:
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justice now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
What do we do when all the world’s chaos and grief threaten to overwhelm us?
We show up one more time, seeking to love our neighbors well. We do one thing. We encourage one person.
We love, because Christ first loved us. Amen.
