John 8:12-20
12 Jesus spoke to the people again, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me won’t walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” 13 Then the Pharisees said to him, “Because you are testifying about yourself, your testimony isn’t valid.” 14 Jesus replied, “Even if I testify about myself, my testimony is true, since I know where I came from and where I’m going. You don’t know where I come from or where I’m going. 15 You judge according to human standards, but I judge no one. 16 Even if I do judge, my judgment is truthful, because I’m not alone. My judgments come from me and from the Father who sent me. 17 In your Law it is written that the witness of two people is true. 18 I am one witness concerning myself, and the Father who sent me is the other.”19 They asked him, “Where is your Father?” Jesus answered, “You don’t know me and you don’t know my Father. If you knew me, you would also know my Father.” 20 He spoke these words while he was teaching in the temple area known as the treasury. No one arrested him, because his time hadn’t yet come. (CEB)
“Ego
Eimi: The “I AM” Discourses of Jesus Christ,” Week Two
The
Christian author and theologian Diana Butler Bass is well-known on the lecture
and seminar circuit—just a few years ago, she came to speak to a regional
gathering of ministers here in Washington—and her big thing, as some of you
probably know, striving to ensure the vitality of the mainline church. In her books, she describes the rich,
wonderful spirituality of many such churches that are full of life and spirit,
but by the same token, she describes situations where spirituality falls flat
for her, and she wrote this about one such seminar she attended several years
ago:
“The day opened with the event chaplain,
an Episcopal priest, taking those attending through a spiritual exercise of
centering prayer. She directed us to
look around the room one last time as she turned down the lights; then she asked
us to close our eyes…she drew our attention to where our feet touched the floor
and had us listen to our own breath.
From the breath, she said, God would give us a sacred word on which to
meditate. Her words, she related, were “holy
and blessed.” “Breathe,” she told us, “breathe
your sacred words. About every ten seconds, she demonstrated centered
breathing by intoning her own words, “holy and blessed,” and inviting us to
breathe ours.
As I listened for a sacred word to arise
from my breath, I confess that I struggled.
Even in the quieting environment of the church parish hall, the only
word that came to my mind was “anxiety.”
I tried to banish it, reaching out for holy blessedness, but only
anxiety remained.
What caused my anxiety? The whole thing struck me as painfully
ironic. Many people probably think this
scenario aptly describes mainline Protestantism…churchgoers sitting around in
the dark with their eyes shut.”
Welcome
to week two brand-new sermon series for us—a series that will take us through
the month of August. A lot of Jesus’
most famous teachings are immortalized one-liners—turn the other cheek, do unto
others, love your neighbor, that sort of thing.
We’ve done a pretty good job of remembering the one-liners themselves,
but perhaps less of a good job remembering the contexts from which they
came. And the one-liners Jesus uses to
describe Himself fall into the same camp—we may remember that Jesus says He is
the Way, the Truth, and the Light, or that He is the Good Shepherd, but we may
not remember the circumstances in which He said those things. Well, all of those “I am” one-liners come
from the Gospel of John, and we’ll be walking through John’s Gospel to visit
almost all of these one-liners in turn, beginning with last week’s “I am”
statement: Jesus proclaiming that He is the bread of life; and continuing this
week with His second “I am” statement: Jesus proclaiming that He is the light
of the world.
To
be clear—there is nothing wrong praying with your eyes closed. I would do it myself during the pastoral
prayer if I wasn’t afraid of colliding with a pew or with one of y’all while
walking up and down the aisle. And I don’t
think it was just the sitting in the dark with the eyes closed that might have
been unnerving in the metaphor of that spiritual exercise as a description of
what the church is like today—it is that, while in the dark and with our eyes
closed, we are repeating the exact same thing, over and over and over. And I think that is the case because it is
very much not what Jesus would have done, or indeed did—He came to the world
with a brand-new message, one simultaneously radical and comforting, both challenging
and reassuring. And it is easy to lose
sight of that within the confines of the comfort zone of being church together.
Lest
we forget, this is emphatically not a comfortable time for Jesus, when he is
delivering this second discourse and says that He is the light of the
world. Immediately prior in John’s
Gospel, Jesus places himself between a vengeful crowd and a woman caught in the
act of adultery, and famously proclaims, “Whoever is without sin, throw the
first stone.” There are shades of that
exact same sentiment in verse 15 of today’s passage, where Jesus says, “You
judge by human standards, but I judge no person,” but it is verse 12, of following
Jesus as a way to receive the light of life, that we most often remember today.
Also
lost a bit in the mix is Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees who question Him right
after He makes such a preposterous statement.
“You say this about yourself,” they say, “so your testimony cannot be
valid.” Bear in mind that under the
Mosaic law which governed religious Israel at that time, multiple witnesses
were required to corroborate any testimony.
But Jesus’ reply is elegant in its simplicity, and powerful in its
truthfulness—Jesus does not testify alone because He is not alone. Yes, Jesus has the Father. But he also has all of you, and all of us.
Think
of what it takes to testify to something in a court of law—you’re examined and
cross-examined over sometimes the most minute and mundane details. It requires you to know exactly what you saw,
for you to have kept your eyes open, as it were. And this is why Jesus’ words about testimony
are actually a follow-up to His “light of the world” statement.
You
see, in Biblical Israel, the notion of external light, believe it or not, was
unheard of. People thought of their own
eyes as lamps—you close them—shutting them off, so to speak—and the lamp turns
off. You open them, and the lamp turns
on. To them, light quite literally came
from within; it was projected out through your eyes and came into contact with
everything you saw.
And
Jesus is saying not that we are able to provide our own light, but only that He
is—only He can provide the light of life.
It would be like somebody today saying that the earth is flat—except that
they would be right! And normally, our
own blinders would cause us to close our eyes to such a person, writing them
off as a nutjob, or at least as someone a few beans short of a full burrito.
Yet
Jesus Himself was one such person—a person that many in the mainstream likely
wrote off as a weirdo, a fanatic. While
immensely popular, Jesus also had many, many detractors. He was a polarizing figure precisely because
He went against the grain. He did not do
as we often do in church today—as, I have to admit, I often do in church today—going
up and proclaiming feel-good niceties that taste better going down. He came into a messy and broken world and in
some ways made it even messier because some people simply did not know what to
do with, or what to think about, this itinerant Jewish carpenter who would dare
to call Himself the light of the world!
As
is often the case, the medicine is often bitter initially, and it was so for
the Pharisees, and the Romans, and the men of power who heard Jesus’
words. Those who benefit from the status
quo are scarcely in any hurry to ever change it. But now that the church no longer benefits
from the status quo the way it used to, with our image taking the hits of the
scandals from the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and megachurch financial
improprieties, and even the simple fact that we are worse at our jobs than we
once were—an estimated 90% of Cowlitz County, after all, does not attend a house
of worship on any given week.
We
are worse at our jobs as Christians because, honestly, as we became more like
the Pharisees whom Jesus is talking to here in that we benefited from the
status quo, we stopped seeing fit to change it.
We stopped deciding to think outside the box, to color outside the
lines, to look outside the narrow scope and scale of what the church had done
to become successful.
Jesus
requires us to look elsewhere. If we are
to be competent witnesses today, we must keep our eyes, our sources of our own
light, open to seeing the unexpected, and more importantly, to seeing God in
the unexpected. After all, one is called
to testify as a witness because one has witnessed something worth testifying
to. If we miss it, if we allow ourselves
to go without seeing God in our lives in ways that we may not expect, in ways that
may even shock or scare us, our own testimony as the Church, as Christians,
even as human beings, weakens.
And
I do not just mean our verbal testimony, when we gleefully (or in my case,
mildly sarcastically) decide to make our friends, family, neighbors, whoever,
immensely uncomfortable by saying, “Can I talk to you about having a personal
relationship with my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?” As James writes in the first chapter of his
letter, we are to be doers of the Word, not merely hearers of the Word.
Testify
to Christ’s Word by witnessing the Word in action in your own life, and being a
doer of the Word, an agent of the Word, and I promise you, everything else
after that will take care of itself.
Will
you be so bold as to challenge the world that might otherwise benefit you with
your own testimony?
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
August
12, 2012
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