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Grace Received
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 7, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 17:1-8 John 1:10-28
“Once again/” wrote W. H. Auden, “As in previous years we have seen the actual vision and failed/To do more than entertain it as an agreeable/Possibility, once again we have sent him away,/Begging to remain His disobedient servant,/The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.” In our defense, His word is a word that is humanly impossible to keep, to conjure, to comprehend. Nevertheless, He is the Word God has spoken to us; His grace the grace we are destined to receive even though we seem doomed to reject it this side of the grave. Therefore in the less sentimental light of Epiphany, we would do well to begin again, at the beginning, with the gospel that is more interested in the life and light of the incarnation than with the details of an infant’s birth. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” John wrote, as though a mere mortal could speak of the Word that is God’s alone to say. How can John proclaim this first sentence with any authority? How does he know? And yet in the light of Jesus Christ, how can he keep silent? Like the Baptist sent from God of whom John writes, John also must testify. And his testimony is that God speaks. John has heard God’s speech in Jesus Christ and what he has heard is, from the beginning God is a God who speaks. God has intended, since the beginning as it turns out, to have a Word with us! We were made to live in relation to him, to engage in a holy conversation, to quit the distance we cannot help but keep. And because we will not, in the fullness of time God in Christ does. Hence a few thick verses later, John revisits his first sentence saying that the same Word that was above and apart and prior is now in and with and for the world that was made through him. Now in Christ, says John, God has taken up residence with the world. Specifically, he has taken up residence with those to whom God said, from the beginning: I will be your God and you will be my people. The sort of Word God speaks—that God spoke to Noah and Abraham and Moses and David--is a word of promise. Promises literally punctuate the sweep of salvation history, the sort of history we will be reading together in the year ahead. Scripture is the story of promises uttered out loud by God. “By myself I have sworn,” God says in public oaths, swearing to give, to deliver, to secure the land; or to bless, which is to say, to give a future where there had been no future: barren women have babies, the hungry are fed in the wilderness, light is bestowed on them that walk in darkness. (Most of these stories, you will remember, were written down when God’s people were in captivity, the temple in ruins, faith at the null point.) How do we know that God made these promises? In a sense, the claim is as wild as John’s first sentence. We have only the words of those who heard and received God’s address. We have their insistence that God’s promises alone gave them power to make it through the wilderness or conquer the Canaanites or establish a nation or endure the darkness of exile. Sometimes the promises were fulfilled—the land given, the child born, the exile ended; more often than not, the promise marked God’s people as a people who waited in hope and expectation. In either case, God’s promises were not matters of idle speculation but were specific actions experienced or expected by a people that had to be remembered and told to succeeding generations. The promises, on one hand, were prophetic and so had to do with the political and public life of God’s people. On the basis of God’s promises, God’s people lived in the hope that power politics would finally be conformed to God’s purposes through human agency, through human beings cast by God in the drama of God’s redeeming purposes. On the other hand and “at the edge of the Old Testament,” says Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann, “promises of Yahweh also take an apocalyptic form, so that the newness Yahweh intends does not emerge within present public processes or through effective human agency. Rather by the sovereign incursion of Yahweh, whose newness is not extrapolated from the present, something utterly new will be given.” Well, all of that is a long way of saying that John takes up the story and addresses the people to whom God has made promises, a people that still wait in hope for a human agent who will reorder the world by way of God’s purposes…or who wait, perhaps a little less expectantly, for God to do an entirely new thing. Like those who had heard God’s address before him, John bears witness to God’s utterance…except that God’s utterance has now become God’s presence! God has spoken in flesh! You get the sense that John is reaching for a word that will contain the news:--light, say…or life!—a word that will, at most, point us in the direction of what God alone is saying in the entirely-new-not-extrapolated-from-the-present event of the Word become flesh. He was in the world, John says, and the world came into being through him (this is not just another prophet!)…yet the world knew him not. Specifically, the old translations say, “He came to his own home,” (not that he had a home but rather that in love he chooses to belong with us) “and his own people received him not.” Most take John’s statement historically to mean that Jesus was rejected by Israel. But two millennia later, we know better than not to include ourselves in the number who receive him not. “I can see the light out there in the world,” said a patient of the famed psychiatrist Joseph Schildkraut, “but the light doesn’t get into my brain. My mind remains dark—it is black.” How could we know, I wonder, living as we do in a world that refuses to entertain strangers unawares? How could we know when our knowing inclines toward the kitchen table that exists because we scrub it? How can we who have “banished promise from our world” know him? For “when the promise is banished and circumstance governs,” says Brueggemann, “we are most likely left with nothing but despair, whether the despair of the self-sufficient or of the disempowered.” We perhaps see the light out there in the world, but we cannot, of ourselves, get it into our heart, our mind, our soul, our strength…cannot do more than entertain it as an agreeable/Possibility. In a world governed by circumstance, how shall we receive Him who promises to be with us and for us? John does not answer except to say that there are those in the world who do receive him, who belong to him, who are given new life through him, who are enlightened by a light that is the light of all people. Mostly, if we read ahead, they seem to be those in whose circumstances he especially came to dwell: the thirsty in need of living water, the sick in need of a physician, the hungry with hands outstretched for the bread of heaven, the sinner astonished by his mercy, the lost in need of a shepherd. These whose despair was born of disempowerment could only wait and hope for God to do something entirely-new-not-extrapolated-from-the-present given their circumstances; whereas those apparently in charge of circumstances—politically, economically, socially, religiously—those whose despair was born of self-sufficiency had no need of Him who had come to save them too. Yet John’s testimony is that we are children of God not because we figure out how to get the light out there into our heads and hearts, but we are God’s children because, from the beginning, God in Christ has received us into the light and life of his love. From his fullness, John therefore proclaims, we have all received grace upon grace. Now the sign and seal of grace received, of our being chosen from the foundation of the world as Paul put it, is our baptism. What is visible outwardly is a bit of water splashed on an infant or an infidel’s head. But the utterly-new-not-extrapolated-from-the-present event witnessed by the Baptist in the baptism that warrants our own was the invisible work of God’s Spirit bearing those made through Him anew into the world as children who live not by circumstance—the circumstance of despair and death, of darkness and no future, of disempowerment and self-sufficiency—but by promise, the promise of God with us. And though we may still think that the light we vaguely see out there will never get into our heads, the truth is that God who said ‘Let light shine in the darkness’ has shone in our hearts by grace to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We too are witnesses who may yet live to insist that God’s promises alone have given us power to make it through the wilderness or conquer kingdoms or establish justice or endure the darkness of exile. Sometimes the promises will be fulfilled—the land given, the child born, the exile ended; more often than not, the promise will mark us as a people who wait in hope and expectation. Therefore on this first Sunday of the already not-so-new year, as the world is resolving to do what the world cannot of itself ever accomplish, we are invited to reaffirm that the God who has promised to be with us is the God we intend to follow. We follow, in part, by following along together, by rereading the story of our salvation, by taking these often disturbing characters who heard God’s Word as companions day by day, by inhabiting the plot whose meaning just might be like the star that led three kings to the place where Christ was to be born. “In the end,” says Brueggemann, “our consideration of these promissory statements is as it always was for Israel: a massive assurance grounded in the flimsy evidence of the witnesses.” In the end, we can only return to the beginning and leap with all our lives to believe that the Word that was in the beginning has pitched a tent with us, even here on the Hill. Thanks be to God! |