Göttinger Predigten im Internet
ed. by U. Nembach, J. Neukirch, C. Dinkel, I. Karle

Lent 4, March 26, 2006
A sermon based on John 3: 14-21 (RCL) by David Zersen
(->current sermons )


“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”(NIV)

I WANT TO WALK AS A CHILD OF THE LIGHT

There is so much interest in darkness and light, in shades of gray or splashes of sunshine. The filmmaker, the artist, and the prosecuting attorney all love to play with these themes. When is night, really night, or darkness not fully day? When is evil truly evil and not mistaken identity, or guilt by reason of insanity? Our world is filled with nuances.

Art historians have long known that Rembrandt’s masterpiece, The Night Watch, was not a night scene at all. It simply acquired that name because a century after it was painted, soot so covered the dressed-up military types that they seemed mysterious in their grimy environs.

This week, Andrea Yates, a mother of five, claiming to be distraught from post-partum depression, who drowned her five children in the bathtub, will seek a new trial in Houston. A jury may again deliberate whether she is guilty, guilty by reason of insanity, or even innocent because the first trial was judicially mishandled.

At times, I have found myself in another part of the world, waking up in the middle of the night, and checking the clock, only to remember that it is midday in my hometown, and, then, I fall asleep happy.

Sometimes, things are not what they seem, and we are happy that they are not. Sometimes things are exactly what they seem to be. Sometimes light is not darkness, yet, just as importantly, sometimes darkness is surely not light.

This past Sunday, I heard a presentation by a rabbi whom I had invited to speak at a series of lectures on the 100 th Anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Since I hadn’t heard from him in the days prior to the lecture, I was worried that the title of the Harry Kemmelman mystery novel, Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home, might be repeating itself! He did, however, arrive, and said, among other things, that if he could be permitted to be honest, from a Jewish perspective, Bonhoeffer seemed to him to be morally ambiguous. On the one hand, he stood up for his brother-in-law, married to Bohhoeffer’s twin sister, when the charge came about von Dohnanyi’s Jewishness. Of course, said the rabbi, the man had converted to Christianity, so, from some Christian perspectives, he was hardly a candidate for anti-Semitism, no longer being a Jew!

On the other hand, he felt, Bonhoeffer, vacillated a great deal as he tried to decide what position he was going to take on this issue of genocide, the extermination of the Jews. “How could he not have known,” the rabbi asked, “where all this was leading? The publications of the Nazis and Hitler’s own racial attacks made it perfectly clear!” In other words, didn’t they know the difference between darkness and light?

I. Knowing about me

This is a profound accusation and it takes us right to the heart of our own understanding of ourselves as human beings and as Christians. On the one hand, when it comes to what can be known about another’s viewpoints or actions, hindsight is often for us as accurate as foresight. When someone does something evil, in retrospect, we often find it easy to say, “I would have known better than that” or “I knew it all along.” How many are those who said, “I saw the Michael Jackson thing coming.” Or “It was just a matter of time before Enron or some other corporate kings were caught playing fast and loose with our money!” Or “I never believed that Lance Armstrong was having all that success without some support from drugs.” We are quick to recognize guilt or find fault when other people are involved. Their presumed darkness always appears more profound over against our light.

On the other hand, when the darkness is covering our own actions, we often have greater trouble trying to recognize darkness as darkness. Sometimes we simply don’t recognize problems as belonging to us. Other people are responsible. “It simply wasn’t my fault!” we say. To some degree, our judicial system thrives on misplaced guilt. We leave it to judges or juries to find out who’s wrong. In marital conflict, we leave it to counselors. Why do you think it is so hard for us to accept our own complicity or guilt?

Use, for a moment, an example from the medical world. Many people hate to go to see the doctor or to the hospital. What is the reason for this? I’ve heard it said that people don’t like the smell of hospitals, or they don’t want to feel like hypochondriacs, or they don’t know what to say to people who are seriously ill. The real issue, psychiatrists and theologians will tell us, is that we are afraid of confronting our own mortality. If we have constant headaches, for example, we don’t want to see the doctor because we fear it might be a brain tumor. We are our own worst enemies in this regard because if we would deal with symptoms when they first arise, there is a much better chance that a problem can be corrected or cured.

Consider the same analogy with respect to personal guilt. At a superficial level, we may not wish to explore an issue because it may mean there is something wrong with our marriage relationship, or that we have a personality problem or that we might need to unburden ourselves in front of a perfect stranger. At a more profound level, however, the text has it quite right. Bluntly and dramatically, Jesus says: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” In other words, people like darkness because it covers the underlying realities. It’s not other people’s realties about which we need to worry, but our own, deep-seated evil. And here is where we find it difficult to tackle the real issues. Here is where the rabbis’s question should be raised again: “How could they not have known what was going on?” Here is where it is also true that the sooner we deal with a problem, the better off we will be.

I found it interesting to read that during Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s time, specifically in 1933, roughly 2,500 of the Protestant clergy sided with Hitler, about 2,500 opposed him, and roughly 15,000 took no stand at all. Fifteen thousand said, “there’s not yet enough evidence to convince me that this situation implicates me!” I ask myself which issues in our own time require me to notice that there is darkness around me, that my feet are standing in the miry clay. When over 30,000 innocent people in Iraq have been killed by bombs and misdirected gunfire, am I in any way involved? When thousands of children lost their parents in the Tusnami, does this speak to me? When large numbers of people in New Orleans lost their homes and their jobs, what can I do about this? When my relationship with colleagues at work or with my spouse is fragmenting, when do I start looking at myself? When I no longer hurt for others, can I still hurt over my own sin?

Hanging over the fireplace in our home is a painting I had to buy when I first understood what it meant. It is a picture of a foot staggering into the darkness. Calligraphy in the darkness spells, “Men loved darkness instead of light.“ A man standing next to the artist at the opening night of the show, said to her, “Well, are you going to paint another one that shows a person walking into the light?” “Sir,” said the artist in her typical quiet way, “only God can make us do that, not me!” I was so moved by her biblical answer that I had to buy the painting.

What the artist was saying, our text said before her. Some may think it’s a neurosis to have feelings of guilt, to be concerned about the shadowy areas in our lives. It is, however, quite realistic to know that there are serious issues in our lives with which we need to deal. It is neurotic not to deal with them, especially if we are Christians who have seen the light.

II. Knowing about the light

Jesus says, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” It is God’s choice to bring light where there is darkness, to change the circumstances in our human condition. If our deeds are evil, the light comes to embrace us in our darkness and to save us. This word "save" in an interesting one because the Greek is translating a Hebrew word meaning “bring into a large open space.” That is unique concept of salvation. Jean Paul Sartre, the great French existentialist philosopher and author of a play, entitled No Exit, claimed that the human condition was like being trapped in a room from which there was no escape. It can be like that for us when we prefer to hide those aspects of our lives with which we aren’t ready to deal. Our text wants to assure us, however, that God so loved the world that he takes us, one by one, into a wide and emancipating space, where there are new alternatives to our dead ends in addition to a boundless future. The Christian conviction is not that life has No Exit, but that it has an open door.

If you and I understand that grace means that God claims you and me, that he makes our darkness light, where then is the role of judgement? If God takes the initiative to overwhelm our darkness, to make us new through his love alone, who stands condemned? A story is told about an unwilling teen who accompanied his class members on a visit to one of Europe’s great art museums during a summer vacation trip. When the tour was over, the young man said to the guide, just to make sure others knew where he was coming from, “I didn’t think it was so great. Just a lot of old pictures.” Quickly, the guide responded. “The works of art in this museum are no longer on trial, but those who come here to see them are.” That’s surely also true for us who are confronted by God’s love in Christ. If we see no hope in the promise of our text that whoever believes in Jesus has eternal life, then our judgement comes from ourselves, not from God. As Jesus says, “whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”

I don’t think I ever understood the meaning of Frederick Faber’s old hymn, “there’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea,” until I thought of the Hebrew meaning of salvation. To be saved through that love in which Jesus lived and died for us is to be freed from narrow strictures, confined attitudes, entrapments of our own making. The love which Jesus shows frees us to be open about who we are, what we have done, and what we are afraid to do. God does not limit our lives and possibilities; rather he opens doors and tears down walls.

Of course, when we are embraced by a love so wide and broad and high as God’s own mercy, we will look for ways to share this love. When the overwhelming brightness of his light claims us in the midst of our darkness, then we know we have no choice but to be light. There are people everywhere right now-- marginalized groups, targeted religions and alienated extremists—who need our love. We do not always agree with all their perspectives and orientations, but, then, to disassociate ourselves from people whom God loves, because we do not agree with them, is not possible for us either. As Steve Martin likes to say, “Oooooooooooooh, I feel happy feet coming on…..,” as he springs into a dance. It’s the kind of joy which belongs to children of the light who can’t help get rhythm as they sing,

“I want to walk as a child of the Light; I want to follow Jesus.
In him there is no darkness at all; shine in my heart, Lord Jesus.”

 

Prof. Dr. Dr. David Zersen, President Emeritus
Concordia University at Austin
Austin , Texas
djzersen@aol.com

 


(top)

 
 
?>