Scripture: 1 Peter 4:8; Luke 23:34; Luke 23:43; John 4:1-26; Matthew 9:9; Luke 19:1-10; Exodus 20:2; Revelation 21:1-4 Series: 2021
Part of the Easter ‘Works of Love’ series, this sermon on 1 Peter 4:8 distinguishes love that genuinely covers and heals sin from merely hiding it (illustrated by the preacher’s festering Appalachian Trail blisters). Using the Greek wordplay of calypto/apocalypse and hamartia as missing the mark, it reframes sin as straying from relationship with God rather than a moralistic rule-list, and points to Jesus covering sin in the lives of Barabbas, the woman at the well, Matthew, and Zacchaeus. It calls hearers to admit their need for grace, receive sanctifying love at the table, and grow in holiness as children of God.
Illustrations: appalachian-trail-blisters, calypto-apocalypse-wordplay, hamartia-archery, first-commandment-i-am-the-lord, supporting-actors-metaphor, car-loan-forgiveness, admired-person-holiness
Love Covers a multitude of sins
May 2
Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. 1 Peter 4:8
I’ve shared a little bit about how I enjoy hiking. I hiked a lot during my life, but especially after college, when I took a bus from Austin to Maine to walk south on the Appalachian Trail. I had a lot of gear that first few week. One piece of gear I had was a pair of really good, solid hiking boots. They were good boots. I had worn them in. They were solid.They were designed for heavy duty trekking, carrying a lot of stuff on your back in low-mileage journeys. Whereas thru-hiking on the Appalachian trail needs to be very light. You want to stay light to allow for high mileage days, but I didn’t understand that yet. So I took my backpack full of gear and started hiking. In the first week, the trail goes through this area of Maine called the hundred mile wilderness. And it might as well have been called the hundred mile swamp. It was a swamp. I forded a few rivers and walked probably 20 miles on bog logs, which are logs on a bog: it’s a bog log. They keep you from sinking into mud, but they are as slick as ice. And so I slipped a lot and my feet fell in the water a lot. And you know, waterproof boots are great, they keep the water outside your boot. But if water gets in, they keep the water inside your boot as well. So a series of blisters developed over that first week on my heels. They were not comfortable. When I first noticed them, I was 50 miles away from any place I could go. There was nothing I could do. I only had a little food and a limited amount of water. I was able to walk with pain, but I could still walk, so I kept going and the blisters got bigger. You know, when you have a blister that’s bleeding or any kind of wound, there is an option to ignore it. I mean, if I had a cut on my arm, I could, completely ignore it and move on. I could, I could cover it up and ignore it. I could bandage it and try not to think about it, but it’s not going to get any better. What I ended up doing was switch to Chacos. I had some Chacos for camp shoes, which is also just like a really amateur mistake. Chacos are pretty heavy for sandals, but I started wearing Chacos, i was able to dry out the Chacos. They didn’t irritate the blister and my body healed. With time and care, the blisters scabbed over and then went away. So healing a bleeding, pussing, blister is one thing. How can we heal the sin in our life?
Series Intro
My brothers and sisters, we are continuing our series on the works of love. On looking at how we can respond to the miracle of Christ’s resurrection in this season of Easter in practical ways. This week we’re talking about how love covers a multitude of sins. Today’s passage comes from 1 Peter: For love covers a multitude of sin. Some translations say love hides a multitude. The word in Greek is literally cover, calypto. There’s a version of it that is very familiar to us: apocalypse Apocalypto. Apocalypto means to uncover something. The apocalypse of John is the uncovering of Christ’s true plan for all of creation. The apocalypse is not the four horsemen. It’s what happens at the end of the book of revelation. And behold. I saw a new heaven and a new earth and a new Jerusalem descending, and there was no more weeping nor crying nor gnashing of teeth. That’s the apocalypse. That is what is uncovered. Here in 1 Peter 4, the word is to cover. As well, the word for multitude is also another word for crowd, like a crowd of people. It is not a fixed amount but a large number that increases or decreases over time. Love covers a crowd of sin. How does that work?
What is a sin?
We need to start with what a sin is. And this is something I know our confirmation crew has talked about. And it’s one of those things that we need to clarify because sin is a word used in popular culture, but it’s also one of those words that we use in English in very different ways from its use in Greek or in Hebrew. Sin is commonly thought of as just bad things faults or things you don’t want to do or vices. The language of vice is very personal, it focuses on the things I do and the things I shouldn’t do. It’s all about me. A lot of societies are based around this. We have laws for individual behavior and action. The Ten commandments are often read in this fashion: do this, don’t do that. You know, honor your mother and father don’t bear false witness. Don’t kill, don’t steal. Don’t covet, don’t commit adultery. These kinds of things. But what that view of the commandments misses is what the first commandment is. The first commandment has nothing to do with me or you. God’s first commandment to Moses and to the people from Mount Sinai was not about their moral behavior. It was: I am the Lord your God. When we talk about sin, we need to start with who God is. Sin is not this list of legal parameters under which we can best live; it’s about our relationship with God. Hamartia is the Greek word for sin. It is an archery term, a term used when you miss the target. And so if you’re shooting an arrow and you don’t hit the target, you commit Hamartia. Here, it refers to ways in which we stray from the path of God. But it can only make sense in the context of who God is. There’s no such thing as a sin apart from relationship with God. In fact, one of the things Paul emphasizes is that we only know our sin because of our knowledge of God. After we become aware of God’s presence and existence, then we become aware of the distance between ourselves and God. And then we became aware that we cannot, on our own, bridge that gulf between ourselves and God. That’s why we need grace. In the early church and throughout history, there’s been different emphases on where grace impacts us. For instance, for many, what It means to say that I am saved, that you are saved, primarily has to do with what’s called justification, this is what Christ does in the atonement and how the resurrection functions for us. In the early part of the church, salvation had more to do with sanctification, which means being made holy, being made more Christ-like. Sanctification is about the transformation God continues to do in us. In this understanding, salvation is about this transformation of going from being a child of sin to a holy child of God. What it means to be a child of sin does not mean to be a person of debauchery or whatever cultural assumptions we may have. It’s primarily about our relationship with God.
Scripture
Now we get back to this issue for the scripture for today. Love covers a crowd of sins. Love covers it up. Unlike how I covered up my blister and tried to walk on it and forget about it, when love covers something up, instead of it continuing to fester, sin is healed. Love doesn’t just cover one sin at a time but a multitude, a crowd of sin. Sin and love do not mix. They are oil and water. If we are to understand that sin is straying from God, we should understand love as connecting with God; following God. Love is seeing as God sees. Having the eyes of God, the heart of God in our lives. To love someone truly is to see them as God sees them and loves them. Not as this object to be used for us and for our advantage. The fact that we are made in the image of God means that we are not objects to God nor should other be objects to us. Other people whom we love are not just supporting actors in the movie of our life. They are individual agents with will and purpose.
The Life of Jesus
And we see how love lives and what love does most purely when we look to the life of Jesus Christ. This is how love lives. The God who is love lives in this way. And we have many examples in the life of Jesus, of the love of Christ covering a multitude of sins. It’s not just forgiving them, but covering them, overwhelming them. Christ doesn’t just forgive sins like you forgive a car loan and move on with your life. Christ overwhelms sin. We see on the cross with Barrabas the thief. He asks Jesus to remember him and Jesus doesn’t just remember him, he says, today you shall be with me in paradise. To the people who crucify him, jesus says, father, forgive them for they don’t know what they do. When Jesus comes to the adulterous woman at the well, he doesn’t see her as an adulterous woman, but a woman at a well. His vision is not on her sin, but beyond sin. And in that Jesus covers sin. It happened when he is calling the disciples. He calls Matthew, the tax collector and covers his sin. It happens with Zacchaeus when he says , “today, I am going to your house.” That’s the thing about Jesus and about love. Love doesn’t just look past sin. Jesus literally loves the sin out of the people. We still need to understand sin, not in this moralistic way, but in the specific way of connection and relationship with God and the ways that people stray. And that sin is not just a thing that other people do, but it is the way that we turn and stretch from God. Sin is bad. Sin is not from God and it corrupts and wounds us. And if we refuse to admit it, if we refuse to admit those ways that we turn away from God, those ways that we miss the mark, we’ll not be able to receive the overwhelming love of Jesus Christ that covers the crowd of our sins. If we fixate on salvation as purely this thing that happened when we said we were saved, we’re going to miss out on the salvation that continues to be offered this day and each day to you and to me. To cover the multitude of our sins does not to leave us in the same place, but brings us to our destination with God. If I get lost on a trail but refuse to admit I am lost, things are only going to get worse. If we deny our need, if we say, “no, I’m fine. I’m good. I got it. No worries. I got it covered.” If we refuse to receive the help of God’s mercy, if we refuse to admit that we have missed the mark, we are the ones who suffer.
Conclusion
In the season of Easter, if we are going to accept God’s grace and God’s love, we must admit that we need God’s grace and God’s love. And then we can receive the love that covers a multitude of sins. Then we can receive the love that covers and smothers sin, that heals us and brings us back from the ways that we have strayed from God, so that we can see rightly and see God’s love rightly and see ourselves rightly as children of God, that we can be honest with ourselves, with others in humility and righteousness. And that is possible for us. It is possible for you to become more holy. It is possible for me to become more holy. This is not just for other people. It’s not just for people who were born holy. Think about someone in your life whom you admire and you respect, someone who’s shown courage and thoughtfulness and care. That is holiness. Holiness is not about being prim and proper or being boring and dull, but showing life and sharing love. What good they have points to the God who is love and what good they have comes from the God who is love. And the good that came to them can come to you because it is from God. Love covers a multitude of sins. Love surrounds you. Let us rejoice this day! Let us receive love at this table. You are not the worst things you have done. You are a child of God. You are loved. You have been made new. In the name of the father and the son and the Holy spirit. Amen.