John 1:6-18
January 5, 2014
There was a
man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the
light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but
he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was
coming into the world.
He
was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did
not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept
him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to
become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh
or of the will of man, but of God.
And
the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory
as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and
cried out, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of
me because he was before me.” ’) From his fullness we have all received, grace
upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came
through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is
close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
I have two weird obsessions. I realize that most of us
have some strange obsessions. With it being the New Year and all, I decided
that I should confess some of mine.
My first obsession is with pens. I love pens. I love all
sorts of pens. I think that my obsession with pens has to do with the fact that
I’m a cartoonist (something most of you don’t know) and a writer (most of you
know). As a result, I have special pens for everything. I have a pen that I use
for balancing my checkbook—one that won’t bleed through the other side of the
register. I have a special pen on my desk that I write with that was handmade
by a member who moved away, Rick Steadham. I have a special Cross gel pen that
I carry in my jacket pocket that clicks open from the middle, not the bottom or
top end. I have a space pen that I carry in my pocket in the summers. And I
have a very special fountain pen that I write my deepest thoughts down with.
This is a really special pen that I bought after publishing my first book. It’s
one that I’ve outlined all my other books with.
I also have an obsession with flashlights. I have them
all over our house. I have a small LED one that I carry with me when I take the
garbage out at night or get the paper in the morning. We kind of live in the
country, and there are some critters around. This light lets them know I’m
coming. I also have a small Maglite that I use when my dog is with me so that I
can see where she’s gone. This is especially necessary in the winter because
she’s a little white dog who blends in with the snow. There’s also a large
Maglite that I carry outside at times, especially when the farmer has put
manure down in the cornfield next to our house. Unfortunately, our dog loves to
sniff and eat manure. This Maglite shines brightly for a half a mile. It helps
me find her in the field so that I can grab her out of the manure.
I own two other special flashlights. One is an
ultraviolet light, and it helps me find where our dog has peed (apparently half
my flashlights are dog-oriented). In the winter she doesn’t like to pee
outside, so occasionally she’ll pee in a hidden spot. I need this flashlight to
find what I normally couldn’t see under normal light. I also have a very
special flashlight that’s attached to a nightscope. I mentioned before that we
have a lot of critters in the field and woods next to our house, and this helps
me to find them. It especially helps me to see coyotes when they are wandering
around outside. I don’t see them very often, but they are there, and the
nightscope light, which you can’t see with your naked eye, lights up the nighttime
woods and fields.
When I think of Christ being the light, I think about my
flashlights, but not just my regular flashlights. I think about my ultraviolet
and nightscope flashlights. They help me to see and recognize things that are
already there, but that I can’t see on my own.
Our passage says that Jesus is the light of the world,
and that John testified to him being the light. It says, “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a
witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He
himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light,
which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” Christ helps us to
see what we would otherwise miss out of ignorance, indifference, or insolence.
For me, learning to look by the light of Christ
began in seminary, and continued in graduate school. When I first went to
seminary, I didn’t really look at the world by Christ’s light. Even though I
had joined a church and declared myself to be a Christian, I really looked at
the world through the light of the culture I grew up in. I grew up on the
Mainline of Philadelphia and in Sewickley, both very wealthy areas that looked
at the world by the light of massive wealth. As a result, the light I looked at
the world by a very Republican light.
I don’t mean that as a criticism of Republicans. I mean
it as an indication that neither the Republican nor Democratic lights are
Christ’s lights. My light was very much a conservative, Republican light. I voted
for Ronald Reagan twice, and for George H.W. Bush. I followed a Republican
mantra.
I also was a serious Ayn Rand disciple. You may not know
who she is, but if you have paid attention to politics in the last election you
would know that she was the guru for much of the Tea Party, and the guiding
light for vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s economic ideas. Ayn Rand is
dead now, but in the 1940s she wrote The
Fountainhead, a book about self-sufficient ideals, and in the 1950s she
wrote her most famous novel, Atlas
Shrugged, a massive novel about the pursuit of a pure capitalistic society
free of socialism’s decay. Both books
became my bibles—almost like an Old Testament and a New Testament. They were
the lights by which I looked at the world through, advocating a rugged
self-sufficiency, a la The Fountainhead, and
an uncompromising, unsentimental, purely free-market Capitalism, a la Atlas Shrugged. My capitalism had little
room for compassion and concern for those who couldn’t survive in a survival-of-the-fittest
world.
Then I went to seminary. And I struggled there
because having to read the Bible, and especially the gospels, forced me to
rethink everything I had thought. It forced me to look at the world by Christ’s
compassionate light, not Ayn Rand’s socially darwinistic light. And Christ’s light
is a VERY different light. Christ’s light is a light of love, compassion, and self-sacrifice
for the poor, the marginalized, the outcast, and the misfit—all people who
don’t fit well in Rand’s world.
This process continued for me when I was in graduate
school working on my Ph.D. Those studies forced me to take a step even deeper.
Seminary helped me look at life through the lens of the gospels and the
prophets. Grad school helped me to begin asking the question, “How is Christ calling me to think? What is
Christ calling me to pay attention to? What is Christ calling me to do?” These
are active questions. They forced me to look at every situation and ask, “God, how are you calling me to respond?”
Both seminary and grad school both pushed me to begin
looking at life by Christ’s light, and to intentionally ask what Christ wants.
And that light led me to change the way I thought and acted.
I recognized that Christ’s light in the gospels and in
prayer call on us to focus on the poor, not the rich. That’s a tough light for
those of us committed to a robust Capitalism. In fact the message of the whole
Bible, from the law through the prophets, the gospels, and the epistles is one
of sacrificial compassion for the poor, the marginalized, and the outcast. Think
about what the Bible says. It tells us that it’s easier for a camel to walk
through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.
Why? Because too much wealth makes us insensitive to the plight of the poor.
Jesus says that where our treasure is, there our heart is, too. If our treasure
is in treasure, then our heart will be in treasure. But if our treasure is in
God, then our heart will be in God. These kinds of teachings are all throughout
the gospels.
The light of Christ also calls on to focus our attention
on the outcast, not the incast (if that’s even a word). Virtually Jesus’ entire
ministry was reaching out to the rejected and sinners. Read the gospels for
yourself and see who Jesus focuses on. He is with the lame, the sick, those
with leprosy, and with hemorrhages. These are people who are shunned because of
their infirmities, which the people believed were evidence of their sin, or of
their parents’ sin. Jesus ate and spent time with those considered to be deep
sinners such as prostitutes, slaves, centurions, Syro-Phonecians, Canaanites,
and so many others cast out of Jewish society.
A great example of his willingness to care for the
outcast comes in the story of Jesus with the woman by the well. It is midday,
and he comes to a well where a woman is drawing water. He asks her to give him
a drink. Do you know how many taboos he broke in that one moment? First, she
was a Samaritan woman, meaning that she was part of a religion that was partly
Jewish, but also partly an amalgamation of other religions. True Jews
considered them to be the utmost of sinners. Second, she was at the well at
midday, meaning that she was shunned by her own society. Women drew water in
the morning and evening when it was cooler. She had to draw water at another
time, meaning that she was possibly a prostitute. Also, she had been married
six times and was living with a man who was not her husband. Again, sin, sin,
sin. Jesus asked her to give him water. Men did not talk openly to women. That
was taboo. The fact that he would have taken the cup of water from her defiled
hands would have made him unclean for a week. Jesus broke many taboos to reach
out this outcast, but he looked at life by a different light.
Jesus also managed to cross the divide between
conservatives and liberals, a divide that is so fixed in our modern, American culture.
Most don’t think about the biblical groups as being conservative or liberal,
but just as today there were people of both persuasions, the different parties
Jesus dealt with were liberal and conservative. The Sadducees were the
conservatives. They believed in the old ways of the Temple and in sacrifice for
expiation for sins. They believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible and
the law. The Pharisees were the liberals. They were liberal with the Law,
interpreting it in ways that allowed for a belief in resurrection (the
Sadducees did not believe in the afterlife), allowed an easing of restrictions
against divorce, and allowed for worship of God in synagogues, which were the
contemporary worship of those days. Jesus had a special talent because he
united both the conservatives and the liberals in one mission: to get rid of him.
Basically, Jesus was against “isms”—legalism,
Jewishism, exclusivism, conservatism, liberalism, in-betweenism, and all other
isms. He believed in looking at life by God’s light, not by the light of a
fixed ideology.
In our culture right now we have a hard time seeing by Christ’s
light because we tend to follow political or cultural ideologies, not Christ. I’m
about to irritate a number of you (if I haven’t already), and maybe even all of
you. I’m doing it because I think part of my role is to push you as I’ve been
pushed. As someone once said about the role of preachers, we are to “comfort
the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I’m supposed to get you to wonder
whether you are looking at life by Christ’s light or another.
The problem is that half of our culture follows a capitalistic
form of Christianity that wasn’t what Jesus advocated. A great example recently
comes in the criticisms of the new pope, Pope Francis. There are a significant
number of media types who have been critical of Pope Francis, saying that he is
a socialist or a Marxist. As you can tell what I’ve said so far, it’s obvious
to me that these people have little willingness to look at the world by
Christ’s light. I like this new pope, but I’m not wowed by what he is saying
because he is just saying and doing what the Bible says to say and do. I think
he is saying and doing what a pope should say and do. Still he is a GREAT
example of looking by Christ’s light, but he stands out simply because not all
popes or people in religious authority choose the full brightness of Christ’s
light in the same way he has.
The people who criticize the pope are false prophets.
They want the world to look by the light of their world, not the light of
Christ. If you aren’t sure how to tell a false prophet from a true prophet, let
me give you this simple test. A false prophet is one who profits from his or
her prophecy. True prophets don’t seek profit. They seek God’s way.
Traditionally most prophets were somewhat poor. I’m not sure if there ever was
a wealthy prophet, although Amos may have been… I’m not sure. The key is that
these people who criticize Pope Francis are people whose prophecy is profit,
not God.
I see this same problem of shining a worldly light in the
rise of a new, uniquely American form of the gospel, which is the “Prosperity
Gospel.” You’ve heard me talk about it before. It is the gospel promoted by
many of the megachurches across the country, and by people like Joel Osteen.
Now I don’t want to overstate my case. I do recognize that these pastors and
churches really do help people tremendously, and I think Joel Osteen is a good
guy with a commitment to helping people. These prosperity gospel pastors do
help people lift themselves up. But they also promote a gospel that is heavy on
an Old Testament idea that was pretty much jettisoned by Jesus. This is the
idea that if we are faithful and good, God will bless us with material
things—with bling. And if we are unfaithful and bad, we will be punished or
cursed or suffer bad things. That is not Jesus’ gospel. It is not the light
Jesus shines. Jesus’ gospel is the gospel of telling the rich young man to sell
all he has to follow him, of telling his followers that we will be judged by
how we treat the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned, the naked, the lonely, and
the sick.
I don’t want to make it out like the light of Christ
shines against the light of wealth that much of our culture shines on the
world. The other half of our culture follows a humanistic light that
increasingly puts God at the margins, and seems to be all about personal
indulgence. It follows a more liberal agenda that might be more caring to the
poor, but that lets everything else go. This is a light that promotes a gospel
of promiscuity, self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement, and so much more. This is
the gospel of sex and violence that our entertainment culture promotes. It is
the gospel of nihilism and indifference that much of our literary culture
promotes. It is the gospel of atheism and agnosticism that much of our
intellectual culture promotes.
This is the gospel that promotes sleeping with anyone so
that we can find pleasure, but that ignores the true gospel saying that our
sexuality should be an expression of love, and that commitment to each other is
what brings meaning to sex. It is a culture that thinks that gambling is good
if it raises taxes to fund services for the elderly, while failing to recognize
that people are losing their homes, families, and lives from gambling. Recently
I was connected with a woman in dire financial need because she gambled away
$30,000 in one weekend at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. Somehow that’s not
the part about the goodness of gambling that gets presented in our culture.
This false, self-indulgent gospel promotes things like
the legalization of pot, which, to me, is the dumbest idea. I understand all
the arguments for it, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how its
legalization makes life better. Having spent time as a drug and alcohol
counselor, I’ve seen how destructive all drugs can be. I do recognize the
destructiveness of the one legal drug out there already, which is alcohol. Yet
there is a major difference between it and every other drug. There are millions
of people who will drink one drink because they like the taste and never, ever
get drunk. They don’t want their mind and mood to be drastically altered. To
them it’s a taste thing, not a mind/mood-altering thing. The Bible suggests
that drinking wine is a gift, but that drunkenness never is (I realize that we
also live in a culture that promotes drunkenness). The Bible sees the inability
to control one’s drinking to be a problem. So what’s wrong with pot? The
problem is that no one smokes it for the enjoyment of taste. No one says, “I
want just one puff because it tastes so good, but I don’t want to get high.”
The fact is that you smoke it for one reason—to get high. It’s designed to fuzz
us out for self-indulgent reasons.
Now, I’m not going to get all cranky about it or thump my
pulpit over things like it that I have no control over. The legalization of pot
will be opening a door to all sorts of other problems, and I’ll do what I
always do, which is to try to be someone who can help people overcome those
problems as they arise. That’s one reason I was trained as a drug and alcohol
therapist.
The point I’m making is that we are called to look at
life by Christ’s light, a light that is clicked on when we make seeking what
God wants our priority. This isn’t just following an ideal. It is an active
asking of God, “how are you calling me to see, think, be, act, and do?” We are
called to use this light when making decisions. For example, when it comes to
issues like gun control, it’s a prayerful asking, “What kind of glock does God want me to own? How many guns does God
want me to possess? What does God even think about guns? When it comes to
things like pot it is asking, “How much
pot does God want me to smoke?” With gambling, “How much money does to gamble on red 29?” When it comes to money,
“How much money does God want me to have,
and what does God want me to do with it?” The more ridiculous questions seem
when asking them of God reveals how little of the light of Christ we tend to
shine on our lives.
There is a simple test of the how much of Christ’s light
we look by: does the light we follow lead us toward or away from love?
Amen.
