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Sermon
April 18, 2004
Dave Dustrud
Our Old Testament reading this morning, which I'll be reading from the NIV, is found in Psalm 105, verses 1 through 4.
Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done. Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell of all his wonderful acts. Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice. Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always.
And our New Testament lesson this morning from 1 John chapter 1, verses 1 through 7. Hear the Word of the Lord.
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched--this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.
This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God!
Have you noticed that it's an election year? It's starting earlier and earlier every time, isn't it? My earliest recollection of a presidential election was in third grade. You'll figure out what year in a minute. Third graders and other elementary school students arguing on the school bus on the way home. Precise, political arguments on the bus about who ought to be elected that fall. And after departing from the bus, we had the kids on one side of the street shouting against kids on the other side of the street, "Humphrey, Humphrey, he's our man. Nixon belongs in the garbage can." (Really profound stuff.) And on the other side of the street, "Nixon, Nixon, he's our man. Humphrey belongs in the garbage can." Now, I'm not going to tell you which side of the street I was on (but history proved my choice correct, probably).
What's amusing about it now to me, though, is that as seven- and eight-year-olds, clearly we hadn't done our own political research. We hadn't watched and evaluated the debates. We know what was going on in that scene. All of us were parroting the conversations that our parents had been having around the dinner table. Our allegiance to our family, to our parents, and what they thought had determined for us what we thought truth was. We like to think things have changed, and yet, in the current scheme, it's hard to be hopeful.
I was reading a couple weeks ago in Time magazine a political writer Bill Kline--he wrote Primary Colors and writes a short observation piece each week. He was discussing the effect of partisanship these days on our political culture, the political pattern for our country. In the beginning of this article he cites a CNN-Gallop poll that studied responses to the Richard Clarke testimony before the 9/11 Commission. It was not that long ago. You remember the debate that his testimony created in front of that commission. And the CNN-Gallop poll found that 81% of likely Bush voters did not believe Richard Clarke's testimony. Surprise, surprise--80% of likely Kerry voters did believe Richard Clarke's testimony. What kind of a bind does this put us in when our allegiance first shades our ability to listen, and look for truth, and hear one another?
Sometimes there's a tendency to begin with allegiance and then go to truth. It happens on the lighter side of life. As sports fans, how many times have we felt like the officiating was working against us? My gosh, we're in the heartland of it here in Minnesota. How many times do you still hear people talking about a call thirty years ago that Drew Pearson pushed off Dave Wright in the NFC championship game? "Those officials are out to get us!" It's a paranoia begins with our allegiance before we objectively look at truth.
And it's not always just on lighter matters. Sometimes on the deepest matters of the heart we find our alliances and allegiances can potentially shade our view of truth. Even within the Christian church, I believe there is a bit of an alarming trend. A trend which says, "I need to put some other name attached before or after my name 'Christian'--'Christ-one.' " It's not enough anymore in our culture to say, "I'm a Christian." People, for the most part, feel compelled to say, "I am this kind," or "I'm that kind." "I am a conservative Christian." "I am a liberal Christian." "I'm an evangelical Christian." "I'm a born-again Christian." "I'm from the Christian right." "I'm from the Christian wrong." (Oh, really?) We feel this need to distinguish from one another. What I think is one of the great ironies of 2004 is how divided our church can appear to those outside.
The big film of the year that everyone is seeing--its compassionate, good-hearted producer Mel Gibson is quoted in New Yorker magazine in September 2003 as saying, "There is no salvation outside the Church." And, friends, he doesn't mean Christianity. He means his Roman Catholic Church. And he goes on to say that even though his wife is a good, loving woman, a better person than him, she deserves it more than I do, but she's Episcopalian--and that means she is out. "I feel bad about it, but I have to go with the Chair." He means Rome. Isn't it ironic that millions and millions of evangelical Christians who have lined his bank account now are those people he doesn't believe will be with him at that final table.
There is division in our Christian community, and that makes us pine for a different time, for an earlier day that we imagine in the earliest moments of the Christian Church when it was all just about Jesus, and they were all just together, thinking the same thing. We have this tendency to view the early church as the golden age, as perhaps the honeymoon of Christianity, when we were blinded by love and there were no faults in anyone else. We were all brothers and sisters. It was all the same. In today's confused, chaotic, noisy world, it's tempting to pine back for an age like that.
Before we go to our specific Scripture this morning, I think it may be helpful to consider for just a moment what it is that Scripture is. And Carl Edwards tells us, "We've been told all our lives, 'Go to the Bible for answers. If you have a question, go to the Bible. It will tell you the answer. If you have a question, a doubt, a confusion, go to the Bible. It will tell you the answer.' " And so, we've come to view the Bible as the "answer book." And we make a presumption that it was written as some sort of systematic, exhaustive, exposition of Christianity. Starting with point A and finishing with point Z, we can find a nice, orderly layout of Christian principles. All we need to do is select a topic, go to the correct page, and we find our answer.
Friends, that is not what the New Testament is for us, and it never has been. There is truth. It is God's Word, but it comes to us in a different way. What the New Testament is is a window into the life of the Jesus-community in its earliest days. In fact, sometimes it's not even a window. Most of the time it's more of a knot-hole that we can just get one eye up against and look into the life of those earliest Christians. Truth pops out, and as we look at it, we find that it wasn't the panacea that we like to imagine it was. The earliest Christians were knee-deep in conflict. From the earliest, earliest days when all the Christians were Jews--it was only Jews--except there were the Aramaic-speaking Jews and the Greek-speaking Jews. Then Gentiles were added to the equation and they conflicted with the Jewish Christians. And Paul even says, "I opposed Peter to his face because he was wrong about this matter."
Virtually everything we find, as a matter of fact, in the New Testament is a polemic against some group or another, trying to protect what the community understood to be truth. We find Paul not just opposing Peter, but we find him chastising the Galatians for following after some other kind of teaching. He calls them "foolish" and "who has bewitched you?". He chastises the Corinthians for sexual immorality, for continuing in idolatry, for pigging-out at Communion, for stuffing themselves before everyone was there and for getting drunk rather than recognizing the sacrament for what Jesus had intended it to be. The early Church was no panacea of human agreement. There was something else going on.
As we see in our text, as we consider the letter called "First John," there was a community in the earliest church days that scholars call the "Johannine Community," named after John--the belief that was led by and started by what the fourth gospel refers to as the "beloved disciple." As you read that gospel, you see many times over (about six, actually), that the "beloved disciple" is placed in some way above Peter as the traditional head of the church. As they raced to the tomb, it is the "beloved disciple" that beats Peter to the empty tomb. In many other cases, the "beloved disciple" has to explain to Peter what it is that Jesus said or is about to do.
Scholars believe that this community, from which our fourth gospel and from which this letter arose, sat as a distinct community from the community of disciples, of the twelve in Jerusalem, and that it wasn't just those two, but there were other communities as well that accepted one another, related to one another, but viewed themselves as distinct. And in this community of John, started primarily by followers of John the Baptist who had gone on to become followers of Jesus, there was division and strife going on within that community. A group called "gnostics," "docetists," people who believed that Jesus hadn't really, really been flesh, but had only seemed to us to be flesh, were veering from the orthodox teaching of "fully God, fully man." Those people had left the community, and the writer of 1 John is telling his followers (the letter is addressed to his followers, those in his community, not outside of it), "I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray." We find division, we find allegiance, coming before truth. And to this early, early community of Christians, the writer says this: "The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father." We proclaim for one very specific reason: "We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ."
The word we find in English, "fellowship," comes from a Greek word many Christians are familiar with because it's used a lot. The word is "koinonia." The root of it is "koine," which in Greek means "common, ordinary." A community of koinonia--a koinonia community--was broader than just the common folk. It meant no matter where we came from, we are all equal. We are characterized by equality. We're characterized by sharing what we have with one another. We are characterized by love and we are characterized by service.
For the writer of this letter, the primary object of faith seems to be the creation of community. Evangelical Christianity has done marvelous things for reviving personal faith in God and calling individuals to new reflections on the direction of their lives and casting themselves into the loving and merciful hands of the Father. And yet, we much watch against the danger of becoming focused solely on our individual faith-experience--against thinking of church as a place where we occasionally sit alongside other individuals who are pursuing their personal faith-journey, and we throw our money together in the plate, and we sing some songs, and we go home to live out our personal faith-journey.
For the early Christians, it was unthinkable to separate personal salvation from belonging to the community. They were one and the same thing. You did not have "either/or." In fact, it was God's greatest mission not to just pluck individual sinners out of sin, but to create a people for Himself--a people who would be light for the world. Koinonia is God's promise to the world as well as for us.
How are we living out this promise? For us this promise is good news, I think, in two ways. For us in this sanctuary this morning, first of all, koinonia promises for us the freedom to be honest with one another. The freedom to drop our labels alongside "Christian" to say which kind we are--freedom to say exactly what we believe. What's happened here is that instead of beginning with allegiance and trying to verify truth, what God has done with this community is begun with truth, begun with life, in John--in John, "light," "truth," "life" are all synonymous. God is light and His truth has created community, has created allegiance. It turns the world's way of doing things on its head. Throughout history we find all kinds of groups who have brought along like-minded people, just like myself, and we will gather together and begin to work our agenda. Sometimes those groups even claim to have a certain amount of light, and that's a dangerous combination--when they claim to have truth and light, and think like-mindedly, but operate only from below. Our history is littered, is stained, with groups of people who felt like they had the same opinion and the truth, and destroyed justice.
What is there to guard us from doing the same thing? John turns the screws to us so that we can't just run away, claiming everything we think is light: "We must walk together in the light." He is very specific: "Whoever claims"--this is chapter 2, verse 6--"Whoever claims to live in him [that is, Jesus], must walk as Jesus did." If you claim to live in Him, we will know it because you walk like Him. And in verse 9: "Anyone who claims to be in the light, but hates his brother, is still in the darkness." The test of whether we are in true koinonia, whether we are in light that creates koinonia--the test is love. Have we become Jesus for one another?
The promise for us is the freedom to be honest. The promise for us is the joy of always having a place to belong. And the promise for the world is that God's invitation to love will be perpetuated, extended, through us.
How will you show your love? How will you be light?
Finishing with a short anecdote that you may have heard me say before. If so, I apologize, but I think it's fitting for this subject this morning. A mother (this was in the Star-Tribune a few years ago). A mother was preparing pancakes for her 5- and 3-year-old sons. As the first pancakes became ready to come off the griddle, she heard the boys arguing about who would get the first pancake. Seeing the opportunity to teach, the mom said, "You know, if Jesus were at the table, He would say, 'Let my brother have the first pancake.' " Immediately the older said to the younger, "Mike! You be Jesus!"
It's always more fun when someone is Jesus for us, isn't it? And yet, our call is to be Jesus for one another, and for all of us to be Jesus for the world. How will you live that call out? Amen.
Dave Dustrud Director of Youth Ministries Faith Presbyterian Church Minnetonka, Minnesota
[Transcribed from an audiotape of the 9:00 a.m. worship service on April 18, 2004.] |
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