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The God Who Chooses To Be Known Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 11, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 49:1-6 John 1:19-34
“Last Wednesday [the Atheist Bus Campaign] unveiled its advertising campaign on 800 buses across Britain. ‘THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD,’ the advertisements declare in capital letters. ‘NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.’” Soon 1000 ads will be placed in the subway system “featuring enthusiastic quotations from Emily Dickenson, Albert Einstein, Douglas Adams and Katharine Hepburn” designed to communicate the same. Not to be outdone, the American Humanist Association began its own campaign in the nation’s capital this past November. “‘Why believe in a god?’ the ad read (small “g”), over a picture of a man in a Santa suit. ‘Just be good for goodness’ sake.’” What caught my attention in the first instance was the word “probably,” a word “more suited to an Agnostic Bus Campaign than to an atheistic one,” opined the reporter. When she looked into the reason for the wording, she was told by the managing director of the advertising firm that an element of doubt had to be acknowledged. “You have to acknowledge,” Tim Bleakly told her [probably bleakly?], “that there is a gray area.” God knows a good number of people who slid into these pews on Christmas Eve as well as a significant number who wind up in churches week in and week out are, at most, able to acknowledge the gray area. For similar reasons of truth in advertising, their counter claim might be, “There probably is a God.” Both claims presume that the truth of Christmas is a truth we may arrive at [or not] through our usual ways of knowing. To add “probably” simply hedges all human bets concerning what we can know for sure about the meaning and purpose of this fleeting existence-running-toward-the-grave. Some, of course, have quit betting on God’s existence all together. In my mailbox this week I found, thanks to Barbara Spaeth, a remarkable excerpt from P.D. James’ Death in Holy Orders that is “of the moment” in more ways than one. To a question raised concerning the belief of church-goers in God, James’ character replies that such belief has become irrelevant. “I don’t mean the moral teaching: the Judaeo-Christian heritage has created Western civilization and we should be grateful to it. But the Church they serve is dying. When I look at the Doom (the painting of the Last Judgment common in most Medieval parish churches that separates the chancel from the nave), I try to have some understanding of what it meant to fifteenth-century men and women. If life is hard and short and full of pain, you need the hope of heaven; if there is no effective law, you need the deterrent of hell. The Church gave them comfort and light and pictures and stories and the hope of everlasting life. The twenty-first century has other compensations. Football for one. There you have ritual, colour, drama, the sense of belonging; football has its high priests, even its martyrs [Andy Reid, perhaps?]. And then there’s shopping, art and music, travel, alcohol, drugs. We all have our own resources for staving off those two horrors of human life, boredom and the knowledge that we die.” “THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD,” the Atheist Bus Campaign ad might read if it could afford to buy an ad on Superbowl Sunday, “SO SETTLE BACK AND ROOT FOR THE HOME TEAM.” But concerning the probability of God’s existence, the author of the fourth gospel thinks otherwise—literally! His witness is that truth, light and life have come to us in Jesus Christ who was received by some and rejected by others. “Probably” was not in John’s vocabulary. So with the fourth gospel before us—not only this Sunday but throughout the year ahead--the question that inevitably lingers after “the tree has been dismantled and the decorations put back in their cardboard boxes” is “Did the God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ shine in your heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ?” Or have you taken up residence once again this year in the gray area of bleak probability? At issue is not the Christmas spirit but the Holy Spirit…not human reason, but divine revelation…not proof, but the doubt that is nothing less than the astonishment known to all who receive him. Following the prologue, John’s gospel tells of the Baptist who came as a witness to testify to the light. “Why are you baptizing” the religious experts ask the Baptist, “if you are not the Messiah or Elijah or the prophet?” To this delegation that thinks it knows all there is to know about God, the Baptist simply replies, “Among you stands one whom you do not know.” He does not mean this “as a reproach to the audience for its blindness,” says preeminent Johannine scholar Raymond Brown, “for John the Baptist freely admits that he himself could not recognize Jesus without help from God.” “I myself did not know him,” he admits. “How” asks Karl Barth “do [any of us] really know…that Jesus Christ was and is and will be the eternal Word of God in our flesh…?” Perhaps, he goes on in so many words, we have created a myth. Perhaps the claims of the church and her councils rest on an enormous fiction. We do have the Scriptures but “perhaps the Church misunderstood Scripture….And above all, even if we grant the biblical authors really did bear this witness, how did they come to it…” and how might it happen that we should come to it too? What caused the Baptist to recognize Jesus…to receive him as God’s Word made flesh? First there is the light that actually has come into the world in Jesus…or not. In him either God has come to us or the gospel is a lie; “probably” is not an option. “John stands,” says another interpreter of the fourth gospel, Edwyn Hoskyns, “where the ultimate problem of human knowledge has become unescapable.” This is the beginning, says John, and there is no other ground or starting point for our knowing the God who chooses to be known. The light which enlightens everyone was in the world. Second the light that has come into the world shines in our hearts—if this is not the case, God’s coming is of no consequence to us between birth and death. This shining is occasioned neither by our leap of faith nor by our studied belief. It is not our doing but is as though a mystery of unknowable proportions has taken us by surprise and found us. In a word, God caused the light to shine in the Baptist’s heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The God who chooses to be known through Christ’s coming into the world, says Barth in the second place, “creates the possibility of a seeing and hearing and understanding of [revelation]. Or rather, creates eyes to see it and ears to hear it and a mind to understand it.” The Baptist’s sight is “no human deduction from his previous knowledge; it is sight in faith, in spirit, by revelation. But faith,” Hoskyns goes on to say, “is no irrelevant leap in the dark, for it is that which makes sense of the man Jesus, it is the meaning of the dove in the story of his baptism….” According to the Baptist, he recognized Jesus because God’s Spirit gave him eyes to see and ears to hear and a mind to understand. “No one has ever seen God,” John had just reminded us on Christmas Eve. “It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known”…God’s Spirit who has created in us the possibility of knowing…of seeing…of hearing. We can only imagine ourselves left to wait for an anonymous, formless spiritual experience that few of us will ever have or trust if we do. Instead, says Barth, imagine this: “When Jesus Christ encounters and approaches men [and women] who are far from Him, who cannot see and hear Him, but live somewhere and somehow in the world in isolation from Him; when He is recognized by them not merely as an acquaintance but as their Neighbour, their elder Brother…this means that He has given [them] the Holy Spirit.” Put another way, when we receive the other who is unknown to us, who is a stranger, as our Neighbor, our brother, our sister, it is because the light that is God’s Spirit has illumined the world from an eternal perspective and allowed us to glimpse in the other the One God sent into the world that we might live through him. The seriously religious of every age mistake the gift, of course, for a possession. Knowledge of God becomes a knowledge transmitted by religion or communicated inwardly such that a select few are chosen to know. Ironically the experts sent to check out the Baptist’s theological credentials had shut their eyes to the Light, had stopped their ears to the Truth and so closed their minds to the Life of one standing among them whom they did not know. He came to his own, wrote John, and his own [meaning in our time, the church] received him not. “If [revelation] is not new every morning,” said Barth, “if it is not newly received…with empty hands, as a new gift, it is not this knowledge [of God] at all.” God’s freedom to come to us as God wills and not as we want…to come to us hidden in one among us whom we do not know until God’s Spirit descends…to come to us in a manger and on a cross…works in all who receive Him with empty hands a humility and resoluteness. We wait with patience, with expectation, with gratitude: knowing yet “continually…confess[ing] that [we] do not know, and must always sigh and pray: Veni, Creator Spiritus.” Then finally as we will hear next Sunday, this one unknown who comes to us and gives us eyes to see him and ears to hear his address “draws us into his work as those who know him, making us…witnesses.” “He speaks to us the same words, ‘Follow me’” wrote Albert Schweitzer at the conclusion of his Quest for the Historical Jesus, “and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time….And to those who [receive] him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings they shall pass through in his fellowship and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who he is.” Before you board the bus of probability, my fellow travelers, learn of him who has chosen to be known by you, follow him in this year ahead, that the God who said let light shine out of darkness, may shine in your heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God. |