1 John 5: 1-9 (links validated 4/9/24)

David Brooks has recently told the story of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman living in the Netherlands in the 1940's when Nazi Germany invaded and occupied her country. Although initially a non-observant Jew, Etty found herself compelled into prayer during this time. Her restless searching for God led her to read deeply from the Psalms and later from the Gospels. As she pressed into the presence of God in her life, she discovered how much beauty in the world around her she had been missing, from the radiance of the flowers in the fields to the textures of a friend’s clothing. She was surrounded by one of the most awful moments in Dutch history and yet she inexplicably found the joy of God welling up inside her. In 1942 when the Nazi incarceration of Jews reached the Netherlands, Etty refused to flee the country, instead going to work at Westerbork where she served Jewish prisoners in transit to Nazi concentration camps. She provided meals and medical care, assisted in squaring away affairs, and she mailed letters for her Jewish sisters and brothers before they were sent off. Those who survived the war and remembered her described her as a person of inexplicable warmth and compassion amidst a godforsaken scene. A year later, her own name came up for internment, and Etty was shipped off to Auschwitz. When she left, she wrote on a piece of paper, “The Lord is my high tower,” quoting Psalm 18. Those were her last recorded words. From a worldly perspective, it would seem that Etty had a terrible life that ended with her unjust murder as part of the Holocaust. Yet from the perspective of faith, Etty lived for that which rust and moth and Nazi executioners cannot destroy...

Frederick Buechner’s “Avarice” in his book, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith, may provide a properly provocative entrance ramp onto a proclamation of 1 John 5: “Avarice, greed, [lust], and so forth are all based on the mathematical truism that the more you get, the more you have. “The remark of Jesus that it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35) is based on the human truth that the more you give away in love, the more you are. It is not just for the sake of other people that Jesus tells us to give rather than get, but for our own sakes too.”

having worked with college students for over a decade now, one (of many) joys has been seeing some of the most beautiful examples of sincere generosity that has been mind-blowing to me. Like when on a Midnight Run where we were bringing food, clothing, and toiletries to homeless men and women a couple of years ago in New York City and seeing the students hugging and praying with these strangers was beautiful itself… but even going beyond that, this one night in particular when we happened to be on a stop in Midtown Manhattan and by that point had run out of some supplies… which often happens… we have no idea how many people we’ll encounter and so the objective is to do the best we can. This one homeless man very patiently was standing on line as those before him were being shown what was still available in terms of coats, sweaters, boots. One of our students saw him standing there and went over and asked was there anything in particular that he was looking for, and he simply asked for new socks. Of all the things that we had left at that point, that was the one thing we were out of… At that, this one student said “give me a minute, just stay here” and then bolted before I could stop him and ask what he was doing, where he was going, reminding him we had a schedule to follow and blah blah blah – before a word was out of my mouth, the kid ran down to a department store that was still open and bought a package of socks for this person. I think this is the first time I’ve ever shared that story, I was just blown away on so many levels by the whole experience...

In his Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis ponders this connection between being saved and being obedience/doing good and here are a few of his typically trenchant observations: “Only a bad person needs to repent; only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it . . . But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love him because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it . . . We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules; whereas what He really wants is people of a particular sort.”

we are, my friends, under a perpetual subpoena. We are called to testify in the whole of life. An essential part of what makes us disciples is our testimony. St. Francis' of Assisi once said, "Preach the gospel at all times. Use words when necessary." Certainly our actions are a significant form of testimony. The way we treat others, the justice we seek, the ministries we engage are all forms of testimony. But they're not the complete picture. Sometimes, perhaps a lot of the time, words are necessary...