Sermon: All About Love
1 John 3: 16
Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church
Overland Park, Kansas
April 18, 2018
Protestant Church of Le Chambon Sur Lignon, France
The French village of Le Chambon sur Lignon is nestled in the Cevennes Mountains south of Lyon. It is an isolated place far from the centers of population in France. Its Protestant roots go back to the sixteenth-century church reform movement inspired by John Calvin. Though its people were poor, its isolated location enabled the village to maintain its Protestant Huguenot identity through the persecutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the early 20th century the village became known as a place of refuge for people in need. Summer camps were organized for poor children from inner cities and mining communities. Refugees poured in from World War I and the Spanish Civil War. International aid organizations built dormitories to house refugees there.
During World War II, the village created a safe haven for Jewish children. Word spread all over France that Jews could send their children to Le Chambon where the villagers would protect them. The center for organizing this work was the Protestant Church of Le Chambon. The effort was led by the pastor, Andre Trocme, who called on his people to actively resist the oppression of the Nazis. But he wanted them to resist not with guns, but with weapons of the spirit. He taught that the hatred promoted by fascism must be defeated by love.
The Jewish children who made their way to the village lived in the dormitories, went to school and played in the open. When German troops began advancing up the mountain roads to search for Jews in the village, the alert was sounded and some of the villagers took the children into the woods for a campout. The children were having fun and never knew that these were moments of peril. By the time the war ended, the villagers of Le Chambon were protecting and caring for 5,000 Jewish children.
Some years after the war reporters and researchers came to the village to interview people about their heroic rescue of these children. The interviewers were always mystified by what the villagers said. Everyone said “We are not heroes. We just did what God expects everyone to do. That’s what the church has been teaching us to do all of our lives. When people are in need, we help. That’s just who we are.” What God expects is written over the main entrance to their church, words I saw etched in stone when I visited the village in 2005. “Aimez-Vous Les Uns Les Autres—Love One Another.” The people of Le Chambon understood what the biblical writer meant in 1 John 3:16. There we read, “We know love by this, that Jesus laid down his life for us —and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” A community formed by the resurrection of Jesus Christ is all about love.
This is exactly the conclusion that Peter draws in the fourth chapter of the Book of Acts. There we read that Peter encounters a homeless man on the streets of Jerusalem. The man is lame and has no choice but to beg those who pass by for a handout to meet his basic needs. Peter responds by giving the man the only thing he has. He reaches out in love to heal the lame man in the name of Jesus Christ. But this gift of love is so powerful it creates a major disturbance on the streets. Because the beggar is a fixture at the gate leading to the temple many people know how broken he has always been. Seeing him made whole galvanizes the crowd. When they find out Peter is responsible for the man’s healing they press hard for an explanation.
This is for Peter a preaching moment too good to pass up. A huge throng gathers to listen, blocking traffic and disrupting commerce in all the shops and stalls lining the route to the temple. When business owners complain to the authorities, Peter and his co-workers are arrested for disturbing the peace. They are hauled before the Sanhedrin—the governing council of Jerusalem. These leaders see Peter’s healing and preaching activities as a potential threat to their control of the city. The first question they ask is, “By what power or by what name did you do this?” They want to know where Peter got his license to hold a rally. They know he didn’t get it from them. To the power brokers of the city, Peter and his resurrection community look like a movement that can undermine their authority. For them, it is all about power.
Peter rejects the lens by which the officials of the Sanhedrin see the world. They see the world as a place where strong men get their way by maximizing their power and using it to generate fear. Peter sees the world in a profoundly different way. He sees the world through the life of Jesus who rejected the exercise of political power to pour out his life in love. Because Peter has been changed by that love, he is no longer susceptible to the fear that strong men use to manipulate others. He knows that love is stronger than fear. Peter is convinced that the love he has received in Jesus Christ is the most potent force in the world.
In 1685 a strong man named Louis XIV was the king of France and the most powerful ruler in Europe. He used his power to play on the fears of the nation’s majority Catholic population by blaming the minority Protestants for all the nation’s ills. “You can’t get a job? Blame the Protestants! Too much crime on the streets? Blame the Protestants!” He then destroyed every Protestant church in France and ordered the 800,000 followers of John Calvin to publicly renounce their faith. To bludgeon them into submission Louis decreed that Protestant men who refused to sign documents abjuring their faith would be condemned to the galleys and the women who resisted would be sent to prison. Some years ago I had the opportunity to visit one of those prisons in southern France. When I went inside, I saw on the wall of one cell a single word a woman had managed to carve into the stone. It was a word that means the same thing in English as it does in French. The word she carved was “resist!”
Resistance for her meant standing her ground and remaining in prison. All she had to do was sign the abjuration document rejecting her faith and she would be released. But in that prison there were hundreds of women who refused to sign and were incarcerated for decades. There was a logic that governed what they were doing. They knew that on the outside they were not really free. On the outside they would be watched—their every movement monitored. Protestant gatherings of every kind were strictly banned and punishable by death. But on the inside they were more free to be themselves. In prison, they could pray together and sing their beloved psalms. In prison they could read scripture together if they were lucky enough to smuggle in a bible. In prison, they could be a loving community—the resurrection community that Louis was determined to stamp out. By remaining in prison they offered a powerful witness to their friends on the outside who were living in fear. By choosing prison these women demonstrated that love is stronger than fear.
By choosing prison they did something that was even more important. They were teaching future generations how to use the weapons of the spirit to resist the evil that would assail them, too. That is the message that shaped communities like Le Chambon. That is the truth that remained a mystery to the journalists and researchers who couldn’t figure out how these simple people were so effective in resisting the Nazis.
When Peter was challenged to show his license—to give the name that could authorize what he was doing, he gave the name of Jesus. This was the name that taught him to resist the destructive forces of his time. This was the name that helped him conquer fear and become a force for healing in a broken world. This was the name that convinced him that the power brokers of our world have it wrong. It is not about power. It is about something else. The words carved over the entrance of the church in Le Chambon say it all: “Aimez-Vous Les Uns Les Autres.” It is all about love.
The Protestant Church of Le Chambon Sur Lignon
With Inscription Above the Entrance
“Aimez-Vous Les Uns Les Autres: Love One Another”
