200621 Trinity 2 Bulletin 200621 Trinity 2 Divine Service 200621 Sermon on 1 John 3:13 Sermon manuscript: The apostle John says at the beginning of our reading: “Do not be surprised, brothers, if the world hates you.” Let’s first understand who he is talking about. There are two groups of people here: “brothers” and “the world.” When John says, “brothers,” he is referring to Christians. He is not excluding women when he says “brothers,” as it might seem. He uses the word “brothers” because all Christians receive the adoption of sonship when they are baptized into Jesus. Baptism is a union with Jesus whereby all Christians, male and female, receive Jesus’s status before God. The only way that anybody can be a child of God is by being born again with the water and the word of Baptism. All Christians are one in Christ, God’s Son. Therefore, when John says, “brothers,” he is not excluding women or girls. He is referring to all those who are baptized into Christ and through their relationship with Jesus have become children of God. The other group of people that the apostle John refers to is “the world.” This word has a special meaning in Scripture that isn’t exactly the same as how the word might be used by someone who is unfamiliar with the Scriptures. What is meant by “the world” are those people who remain in their original sin, who are not converted, and who therefore retain all the traits that come naturally to us all according to our sinful flesh. These traits would be selfishness, fear, suspicion, cynicism, lying, sneaking,  and so on. Christians, as well as unbelievers, have to contend with these traits, because all people are born in sin. However, in those who believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit does not let these traits of the flesh go on unhindered. The Holy Spirit fights against these evil natural impulses. He draws us towards the opposite of these traits, such as faith, hope, love, honesty, kindness, and so on. Those who do not have the Holy Spirit, those who do not believe, are left to themselves with their sinful flesh. These are the people John refers to as being “the world.” So another way that you could say what John says here is: “Do not be surprised, Christians, when those who are unconverted hate you.” Here we have something to chew on. Whenever something strikes us as strange in the Scriptures we do well to stop and consider it. What John says here is something that our modern church culture does not understand. Those who are unconverted will hate those who are converted. The world will hate us if we are indeed converted, if we are indeed Jesus’s brothers. The standard operating procedure for practically all Christian churches for a very long time has been that we want to make it impossible for anyone to hate us. We want everybody in the community to say that we are the best church in town, and that only a fool would say anything bad about us. How different this is from the way that Jesus’s closest disciple, John, speaks. It’s as though he wants to comfort us with our troubles by saying that we shouldn’t be surprised—this is just how it goes—the world hates Christians. Since the common understanding among us is so different from what John says, we have a lot to learn here. I’d like to start to get at it by trying to answer two questions with this sermon today: (1) why does the world hate us Christians? and (2) what should we Christians do about it? For answering the question of why the world hates us Christians, it is helpful to hear what John says just before our reading today. Our reading began with verse 13. Here is verse 11 and following: “This is the message you have heard from the beginning: Love one another. Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the Evil One, and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own works were evil, while those of his brother were righteous.” Then we have the verse that we are especially considering today: “Do not be surprised, brothers, if the world hates