What God Cares About, and Why it Matters
A sermon by Loren Crow preached in NCC Chapel on Friday, January 14, 2005
Epiphany is the season of the Church year, right after Christmas, in which the Church traditionally talks about our mission, the spreading of the light of the Gospel into the world, and looks forward in hope to the coming of the Kingdom of God. The image of light shining forth into the world is abundant in the Scripture readings from Epiphany. It is a hopeful season. But in the last several weeks I’ve had trouble finding cause for much hope. There was a brief moment when the election of Mahmoud Abbas seemed to offer the hope of peace between Israel and Palestine, but the very next day Israel bombed another Palestinian target. Not even one day’s rest. Anyway, I have this fire burning in my bones and I have to preach it. You will have to decide whether it was God who put it there.
The Gospel according to St. John begins with hopeful words. “The light,” says John, “shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” That light is the glory that we see in Jesus, the glory of the Father reflected in the Son, full of grace and Truth. As John’s account of Jesus goes on, it becomes apparent – and finally is crystal clear – that the light of which John speaks is most fully revealed at the cross. A strange, radical statement, if ever there was one. How can the cross, an image that would horrify anyone living at the time of the Roman Empire, possibly be a shining of God’s glory? If anything, it would seem to be the darkest of the dark. But not in John’s gospel. In the other gospels, the cross is the point at which Jesus is cruelly murdered by the forces of what was then the world’s only superpower, in collusion with the local aristocracy that profited by loyalty to that superpower. In the other gospels, Jesus feels abandoned by nearly all who love him, even by God. All this is missing in John’s telling.
In trying to puzzle all this out, we need to understand the opposing terms. Light shines in darkness, and darkness has not overcome it. Light symbolizes God’s truth, the truth manifest most fully in Jesus. It symbolizes the judgment that Truth always entails. But what is the darkness? In John’s gospel, darkness symbolizes the strongholds where lies and untruth are allowed to fester. The light has come into the world, but those who are evil, says John 3, do not come into the light; they hide in the shadows so that their deeds might stay hidden.
We might think that the darkness is Jesus’ death. In this reading, what you’re saying is that death didn’t overcome the light of God in Jesus because of the resurrection. Which is of course true. But I don’t think it’s what John means, because throughout John’s gospel Jesus’ death on the cross, his martyrdom, is the very means by which God “glorifies” his Son. Jesus’ crucifixion is at the same time his being lifted up from the earth. So the darkness that tried but could not overcome Jesus was not his death as such. That leaves us with the second possibility: the darkness that wasn’t able to overcome God’s light is the world’s evil.
The tenses of the verbs are instructive: the light shines (present tense), and the darkness has not overcome it (perfect tense). Seventy years later, when John wrote, and even two thousand years later, the darkness is still trying to defeat God’s self-sacrificing love. And it still hasn’t succeeded.
There’s a lot of darkness in our world, and – God help me – I am currently the source of a lot of it. I, individually, and the nation I love. We are like people walking in darkness, unable even to perceive most of the ways we purvey evil in the world – or, if we see it, unable to care.
The fact that we are engaged in the torture of thousands of human beings in our current war is no surprise: God save us, torture has always been a part of war. After a brief spurt of outrage about the pictures from Abu Ghraib, we no longer even care. The people we elected, and who represent us to the world, say in one breath that we promise not to torture, and then in the next breath say that the people in torture chambers don’t even have the basic protections of the Geneva Convention. The fact that we try at the highest levels to cover it up and pretend that it doesn’t happen is a lie. The attempt to re-define torture so that rape and maiming don’t count as torture is a damned lie. It is Satanic. And we hardly even object, we hardly even care.
The fact that we rich people greedily consume most of the world’s resources, and then put as much of the remainder into our stocks and bank accounts as we can manage, is no surprise: most people would do the same if they were in our shoes; the world suffers from no lack of greed. But when we clothe our greed in the sacred aura of individual liberty and the free market, that’s just a plain lie. Go talk about individual liberty and the free market to the millions of people dying in Africa while our drug companies fight to keep the prices of AIDS medications high. Or the farmers in Central America who are forced into producing cocaine because we demand such low prices for their legitimate crops that they can’t earn a living. We, the richest people in the world, demand that the poorest people in the world lower their prices. Go talk about the glories of the free market to those people. But then, unbelievably, we get on our moral high horse and blame them for our people’s drug problems. We invade them and kill them. And our people, in a desperate search to try and feel something, just go get their drugs elsewhere. We lie. We lie to them, we lie to ourselves. We lie to God. Jesus looks at us and calls us whitewashed sepulchers and hypocrites. God help us, we are the darkness of which John speaks.
Thank God, despite our best efforts to the contrary, we have not been able to twist, pervert, subdue, or stamp out the simple message of the Gospel. We failed when we tried to kill it on a cross, and we haven’t succeeded since. The light continues to shine in the world. It radiates from the cross. God so loved us – all of us torturers and liars and gluttons and … all of us – and here is the way in which God loved us: he sent his one-and-only son to suffer at our hands and die, so that we might have life. And then, John reports that Jesus said, “Just as the Father sent me, so I send you.” In other words, Jesus is sending us to suffer and die, so that other people might have life. At the very least, doesn’t this have to mean that we’ve got to stop dealing out death to protect our life? Doesn’t it mean that we should be using our wealth to give life, rather than stealing people’s life to increase our wealth?
I’ll tell you the truth. At this moment in history, I feel like I’m mostly part of the world’s darkness. Only the God who empties himself to give us life, and calls me to do the same for others, can save me from my wickedness. And so I take a lot of comfort from the fact that the light continues to shine in the darkness. It’s there, inside of me, and I’ve been praying with as much honesty as I can manage (it’s not easy; I’m so used to comforting myself with lies) that God would cause that light to completely take me over, and transform me into an agent of light in the world.
AMEN
