Light and Dark

 

A Sermon preached on Lent IV March 19, 2023 at St. Augustine’s, WI and St. Christoph, MZ

1 Samuel 16:1-13, Ephesians 5:8-14, and John 9:1-41

This is the third week in succession, in which we have had a passage from John as our Gospel reading, and they have been getting successively longer! First, we had Nicodemus ‘s encounter with Jesus, then the encounter of the Samaritan woman with Jesus at Jacob’s Well, this week the story of the man born blind, and next week we will hear how Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. Why are we getting all these passages from John’s Gospel and why are they so long? Well, as we have a three-year lectionary cycle and four gospels, we have to fit John in somehow and so episodes from his account of Jesus ‘s life and teaching and of the meaning of his life and death are spread over the three years. In fact, we read about 1/3 of his Gospel each year, particularly in the Lent and Easter seasons.

And why are they so long? Johns’ gospel is the last to be written. We could call it the most literary of the gospels, the most carefully composed. By the time it was written, Christianity had begun to split off from Judaism, which is one reason for some of the problematic statements about “the Jews” that I’ll talk about more in a moment. The members of John’s community, his audience, will have known the other gospels so John does not need to cover the same ground. Instead, he takes just a few of the events from Jesus ‘s life and death and resurrection, some held in common with the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), some unique to him, and puts them into a theological context, surrounds them with teaching. He uses them to tell his readers about God, Jesus, and the Spirit, about life and light, about word and witness. We call the first part of the Gospel the Book of Signs, as each miracle points towards a greater truth.

This Gospel is full of long speeches and monologues and other literary devices. Today’s story reminds me of a play in five acts. You might have found it easier to listen to if we had staged it as one!

In Act One, Jesus sees and heals the man blind from birth. This is important for two reasons. It makes it a very significant miracle. “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind,” the man himself will say later (9:32) And it allows Jesus to teach that the man’s condition is not caused by sin, neither his nor his parents. God does not work or punish that way. In Act Two the neighbours bring the man to the pharisees. I expect they thought the pharisees would be pleased and amazed …. Some were, but the majority only sees a challenge to their authority. In Act Three, the man’s parents are cited to the tribunal and questioned. They confirm that he was really blind – it’s not a scam – but won’t explain why and here we get that problematic statement “His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.” (John 9:22) This is a dangerous anachronism. No one was being excluded from the Jewish community during Jesus’ ministry, only much later as what we now call Christianity was no longer considered compatible with the Jewish faith. Here it is a rhetorical device that seems intended to create or reinforce fear of the Jews. And we know what that lead to.

In Act Four the man who had been blind is recalled to the tribunal and questioned again – but now in a much more hostile manner. The questioners want him to denounce Jesus as a sinner. But in a lovely little speech, full of irony, that man turns the tables on them “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” (9:33) (see also 3:2 Nicodemus: “No one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”)

At the end of a play, in the final act, we usually have what is called the denoument in which the strands of the plot are drawn together, and matters are explained or resolved. And that is exactly what happens in the fifth and final Act. Jesus looks for and finds the man – acting just like a good shepherd. The man acknowledges Jesus not just as a prophet as he did in Act One, or as someone sent from God, as he told the pharisees in Act Four, but as God: “He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshipped him.” (9:38) I am reminded of the episode with the 10 lepers in Luke’s Gospel (17:11-19) when only one returns praising God, to prostrate himself at Jesus’ feet and to thank him. In Act One, the man born blind had been physically healed and was able to see daylight for the first time. Now he has also been spiritually healed and sees and knows and believes in the light of the world.

For Jesus healing is always both a physical as well as a spiritual act, and a sign. The Gospel passage opened with the message that physical blindness – and other sicknesses – are not caused by sin and ends with the message that spiritual blindness, wilfully ignoring the truth, is. In the prologue to John’s Gospel, we were already told (1:9) that Jesus “the true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” That not everyone, including some of his own people, will accept him as such. “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God,” (1:12) just like the man born blind.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus says: “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” (9:5) And what happens then? Is the work of God no longer possible?

The Letter to the Ephesians, which further develops the theme of light and dark, gives us one answer. Christ did not take that light with him. Those who truly follow Christ live as children of light, radiating the light and love of God that is within us, and that grows in strength and power as we grow in faith. Anything we do that is good and right and true is a fruit of the light of Christ. It is only dark in the metaphorical sense of a time of evil and deceit, when we let it be dark.

Another answer comes from the Episcopal priest and author, Barbara Brown Taylor. She was uncomfortable with our tendency to associate all that is good with lightness and all that is evil and dangerous with darkness and wrote a book, “Learning to Walk in the Dark” to counteract that tendency. It reminds us that physical darkness and night are necessary, and also that God works in the night time as well, to quote:

“Even when light fades and darkness falls--as it does every single day, in every single life--God does not turn the world over to some other deity...Here is the testimony of faith; darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.”[1]

Amen.

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[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark

God's Gift of New Life

A Sermon preached on Lent II March 5, 2023 at St. Augustine’s, WI and St. Christoph, MZ

Genesis 12:1-4a, John 3:1-17

The story of the encounter between Nicodemus and Jesus is quite a complex one, it is full of misunderstandings, such as when Nicodemus asks, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” (John 3:4) and somewhat confusing metaphors “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8) And at times, Jesus does not even seem to be talking to Nicodemus at all! No wonder then that Nicodemus asks, “How can these things be?” (3:9)

So, I went looking for a suitable commentary, and found this! [The very hungry Caterpillar/Die kleine Raupe Nimmersatt] Who knows this book? Who has read it to their children, or had it read to them? If you haven’t, it is about a caterpillar who eats his way through an apple, 2 pears, 3 plums, 4 strawberries, 5 oranges, finally a cake, ice cream, cheese, salami, a lollipop, a pie, a sausage, a cupcake and a slice of watermelon and always remains hungry until in the end, now as big fat caterpillar, he builds a cocoon around himself and after 2 weeks comes out as a beautiful butterfly! It’s a lovely story and beautifully illustrated by the late Eric Carle. But what on earth has this got to do with Nicodemus?

Well, Nicodemus came to Jesus late at night, because he was hungry. Not for food, not for a midnight snack, but for spiritual food. Nothing he had learned or studied so far had filled him completely. He was still hungry for the truth about God and God’s kingdom and so he came to Jesus with his questions because he was sure that Jesus would have answers for him. Jesus was clearly a teacher who had come from God, for no one can do the signs that Jesus did unless God was with him.

He ends up getting lots of answers from Jesus, some amazing and some plain confusing: Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above/born anew.” "What do you mean?" exclaimed Nicodemus. "How can anyone be born again?" And Jesus goes on to explain to Nicodemus that a person is "born again" through water – Baptism – and through the Spirit of God. The Spirit gives birth to a new life, one we share not with our family members but with everyone who is baptised and who shares in God’s Spirit.

Coming back to "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," when he was full and had come out of his cocoon, he had also been born anew as a butterfly, in a sense he had been recreated. In 2 Corinthians (5:17) Paul makes a similar promise: “So if anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, everything has become new.”

Of course, this book is not a complete explanation of today’s Gospel passage, nor do we become as beautiful as butterflies when we follow Christ (though I’m sure we are in God’s eyes). But we can expect a profound and life-changing transformation if we let the Spirit move us. In our first reading (Genesis 12:1-4) we heard how Abram left his previous identity behind – his country, his kindred, his father’s house – to start afresh in a new land. God’s promises of countless descendants must have sounded as unrealistic to Abram – at this point already 75 years old (as verse 4b would tell us) - as being born anew, “after having grown old,” did to Nicodemus. And yet it happened. We are just a few of Abraham’s countless descendants.

This sort of transformation is open to anyone, it is not restricted to caterpillars, to a particular nation, gender, social status. The wind blows – and the spirit goes – where it chooses. It can blow in the most unexpected places and will often surprise us with the people it reaches. And wind – in both Hebrew and Greek wind/spirit/breath are the same word – is a good metaphor for the spirit. We can’t see the wind, only its effects and we can’t see the Spirit, but we can see how what effect it has on us, how it changes us, and unites us.

In the second half of the Gospel reading, when Jesus no longer seems to be speaking just to Nicodemus, we move from the (Holy) Spirit to the Son and to God the Father. Nicodemus is a teacher of Israel, someone who knows Holy Scripture inside and out, and so Jesus puts his mission, what he has done and what he will do into the context of Scripture. He is the Son of Man of Daniel’s vision (Daniel 7:13-14) “coming with the clouds of heaven. …  To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.” He is the one who connects heaven and earth like Jacob’s vision of “a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” (Genesis 28:12) And when finally, when he is lifted up on the Cross, seeing and believing in him will bring eternal life, just as the bonze serpent Moses put on a pole saved people from dying from snake bites. (Numbers 21:8-9)

And what about God the Father? God gives and sends love in a person: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” If you are looking for a commentary on the limits of love, then I recommend this book: “Guess How Much I Love You.” (Weißt du eigentlich, wie lieb ich dich hab?)  There are no limits to the Spirit’s reach, there are no limits to the Son’s power, and there are certainly no limits to God’s love.

I think this convinced Nicodemus and that he was transformed by this encounter and by what Jesus had to say. He became a follower, and we will meet Nicodemus two more times in John’s gospel, once defending Jesus in the Sanhedrin (John 7:50-51) and then assisting Joseph of Arimathea in preparing Jesus’ body for burial (John 19:39–42).

God’s breath gave life to the first human being, God’s Spirit gives new life to the faithful – it allows us to see and to enter, that is live by the values of the kingdom of God, and God’s Son connects earth and heaven and shares of his eternal life so that we may never be separated from him. Amen.