The six-and-a-half week season of Lent offers the Christian Church an opportunity to prepare for Good Friday and Easter, when we remember the death and resurrection of Jesus. Our preparation includes hearing the words of people who were eye-witnesses to those events, and, as is the case this morning, reflecting on what Jesus himself had to say.
I am sometimes asked, especially by people of other faiths or of no faith, what is so special about Jesus. Why do we in the Christian Church pay so much attention to this man who lived almost two thousand years ago in a somewhat remote part of the Roman Empire? There is widespread agreement among historians that a person named Jesus (or something close to that) lived in the region of Jerusalem and Galilee during the time when Roman governors, including one Pontius Pilate, ruled the provinces on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. The open question is the nature of his identity and the claims made about him in the written records preserved by his followers.
It is not my intention this morning to give a history lesson, although that is something I could enjoy. Instead, I would like to talk about the way Jesus has shaped my understanding of reality and my sense of what the Christian Church exists to do. My thoughts are based primarily on the few verses I read from the fourth Gospel, the Gospel According to John. As usual, I invite you to consider what I say, then take what you like and leave the rest.
The reading from John's Gospel begins with some Greeks wanting to see Jesus. His reputation had spread, and people beyond the pale of Judaism sought to meet him. Two members of the inner circle told Jesus about the request for contact. The record doesn't say whether Jesus agreed to meet the inquiring Greeks. It gives us Jesus' reminder to the two go-betweens that he sensed disaster looming on his personal horizon. He spoke of his coming glorification, and he used the imagery of a seed falling into the ground and dying so that new life could spring out of it. He went on to speak of himself as the light, as he had done earlier when he called himself the light of the world. A little later he said of himself, "I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who trusts in me should not remain in darkness."
When I thought about that, I remembered going into a stadium for either a rock concert with my daughter or a religious revival with some seminary friends. (I don't remember which it was.) What I recall clearly is that at some point the bright lights in the stadium were turned off, and everyone in the audience was asked to strike one of the matches we had been given when we entered. The glow was memorable. Then we were asked to blow out our matches while ushers in each aisle held lighted candles they had lit with their matches. The amount of light was still impressive. Then the ushers were asked to extinguish their candles while only the person presiding down on the platform in the middle of the field held a lighted candle. That one little light was visible all over the stadium. The darkness was not complete. I gained a profound understanding of what Jesus meant when he said he was the light of the world and that people who trusted him did not have to remain in darkness.
What I take from that is the awareness that this unpretentious carpenter/teacher shifted the spiritual awareness of the world when he cast God in the imagery of love. That was so central in his message that his followers circulated the startlingly simple but ground-breaking statement "God is love." The good news that God is love has been, over the centuries, light for people living in the darkness of shame and fear based on an understanding of God as angry judge or punishing sovereign. The awareness of God's love is light in the world, sometimes shining like all those matches in the stadium and sometimes like the solitary candle down on the field. But it keeps on shining. And the darkness cannot be complete.
I see the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus through the lens of unconditional love. I don't think of those events so much in the classical explanations of them, which say that Jesus somehow appeased God by becoming a perfect sacrifice to purify human sinfulness or paid a ransom to rescue us from eternal punishment. I see the Cross and Empty Tomb as an expression of the length to which God will go to love and keep on loving the world and everything in it—human and otherwise. The seed falls into the ground and new life emerges, all in the warming, life-giving light of God's love.
In the last two verses of the Gospel reading, Jesus invites his followers to walk in the light and to be children of light. Theologians have called that the ethical imperative. I call it the ethical opportunity. If the light of God's love is really going to illuminate the world, it needs to be lived out in human lives. Remember that Jesus summed up ethical living with two commandments: Love God wholeheartedly, and love other people the way you love yourself.
The Christian Church at its best has let those two commandments shape its life and teaching. It has left the fine tuning of the two commandments open to application with space for discussion and even disagreement. It has followed the example of Jesus, who left no lengthy rule books or comprehensive law codes as his legacy. He was clear about the primacy of love and fluid about its interpretation.
The Christian Church at its worst has departed from that fluidity and freedom, and has reverted to a rigid legalism. Too often such legalism reflects the values of a culture rather than the teachings of Jesus. For the last thirty years the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has been wrestling with the question of ordaining gay and lesbian people as ministers, elders, and deacons. Other Christian bodies have been struggling with similar matters related to sexual orientation. The stand of this congregation and my personal stand on the issue of gay ordination is very clear: we support it enthusiastically.
What I want to say this morning, and I have said this before, is that the issue of full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered people in the life of the church is not a matter of Biblical authority. It is a matter of cultural conditioning.
When I and other people have spoken on this subject in forums or governing bodies, we have made the point that the Bible and the Book of Confessions of our Church say far more about greed, the abuse of the poor by the rich, and the lending of money at exorbitant interest rates than they say about sex between people of the same gender. But because many churches, many Presbyterian churches, are careful not to offend their wealthy members, we have said next to nothing for a long period of time about the disparity of wealth in this country and in the world.
And now people outside the church are saying, are shouting, what we should have been saying all along—that there is something inherently wrong with a system where a relatively small group of people operate a national economy, indeed a world economy, in such a way that they get very rich while other people doing equally important work struggle to make ends meet. We need to keep shining the light of God's love on that subject as the banking and investment industries try to tell us they did nothing wrong.
Last Wednesday the New York Times published a letter from an executive vice-president to the CEO of the American International Group, or AIG. It was a letter of resignation from his position and a declaration of his intent to give his entire retention bonus, which he called his "retention payment," to charities assisting people suffering because of the global downturn. He gave a little of his personal background, stating that he had been raised by two school teachers who worked multiple jobs. He said, "My hard work earned me acceptance to M.I.T., and the institute's generous financial aid enabled me to attend. I had fulfilled the American dream." Not any mention of the many people who helped him along the way—like those who taught him in elementary and high school.
I found one of his later sentences to be fascinating. He said, "I know that because of hard work I have benefited more than most during the economic boom and have saved enough that my family is unlikely to suffer devastating losses during the current bust." Does he really believe that his hard work was more worthy than the hard work of his teacher parents, or the hard work of millions of other people who put in long hours as librarians, or nurses, or guidance counselors, or physical therapists, or musicians and artists?
There was one almost redeeming sentence in the long and self-pitying letter. He wrote, "Some might argue that members of my profession have been overpaid, and I wouldn't disagree." He was preparing us to learn that on March 16 he received a bonus from AIG amounting to $742,000 after taxes. What was not said in the letter was that the financial system that paid him that kind of money was and still is tied to a network in which banks charge 29 and 32 percent interest on credit card balances carried by hard-working people who don't have the connections to get into MIT and land jobs often parceled out to the family members and friends of insiders. The whole system needs to be looked at in the light of "Love and care for your neighbor as you love and care for yourself."
I am indebted to Dr. Fred Turpin, a clinical psychologist with past ties to this congregation, for this story, which I have adapted. It is about "walking in the light," and the way it gets distorted.
A woman was being tailgated by a stressed out man on a busy
boulevard. Suddenly, the light turned yellow, just in front of her. She did the right thing, stopping at the crosswalk, even though she could have beaten the red light by accelerating through the intersection.
The tailgating man was furious and honked his horn, screaming in frustration, as he missed his chance to get through the intersection, dropping his cell phone.
As he was still in mid-rant, he heard a tap on his window and looked up into the face of a very serious police officer. The officer ordered him to exit her car with his hands up.
The officer took the man to the police station where he was searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in a holding cell. After a couple of hours, a policeman approached the cell and opened the door. He was escorted back to the booking desk where the arresting officer was waiting with his personal effects.
The officer said, 'I'm very sorry for this mistake. You see, I pulled up behind your car while you were blowing your horn, flipping off the woman in front of you, and cussing a blue streak at her.' I noticed the 'What Would Jesus Do' bumper sticker, the 'Follow Me to Sunday-School' bumper sticker, and the chrome-plated Christian fish emblem on the trunk; naturally ...I assumed you had stolen the car.'
The way we handle ourselves in everyday situations makes a difference. We can walk in the light and share it, or we can hide our light and live in the shadows. What do people who interact with us assume about us, about you, about me—that we are children of light? May it be so.