What the Darkness Really Hides

a Sermon for Lent 4B
Text: John 3:14-21

First things first—today’s gospel contains perhaps the Bible’s most famous line. Or at least the verse most commonly referenced. In ballparks and stadiums—the man with the rainbow wig would hold up a sign that said simply “John 3:16”. Passing by Vinnagrette’s here on Elmwood, you can usually see it on their billboard on Sunday mornings. “John 3:16”. The verse itself, so readily familiar:

“For 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.”

These words are attributed to Jesus.

As the hallmark for Christian ministry, these words seem a bit…difficult. Let me rephrase it:

God loves us so much that he had his son killed—but don’t worry—if you believe hard enough, you won’t die like him.

Not the cheeriest of lines. Those in the advertising business might suggest that we stay away from that as our tag line, don’t you think?

But in this gospel, Jesus is finishing up this conversation with Nicodemus here, and he’s been trying to explain life and death, and Nicodemus just can’t seem to get it. He keeps trying to take Jesus literally—to him, being born from above means being re-born or born again—meaning literally passing through the womb a second time. What Jesus argues for is a spiritual birth.

I mention this as a reminder of Jesus’s context. Reading Jesus’s arguments here, he seems to be setting up a structure of relating concepts—the spiritual and the physical, salvation and condemnation, good and evil, light and dark. He seems to be setting up a structure of in and out and God, through the Son of Man, has given us a way in. This should be good news. Except that it seems to imply that some will be out. That some will be condemned—that some are already condemned.

And if we know anything about Jesus, we know that he isn’t a big fan of pride and boastfulness, right, so let me connect the dots here…

1. he says “those who believe in him are not condemned”. OK, check.
2. “But those who do not believe are condemned already”. They remain condemned. Starting out behind the eight ball, right? Tough stuff here.
3. He explains that “because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” So he’s declaring who’s in and who’s out.

But right before this, Jesus supposed that “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Jesus kind of comes off like a bad boss—like Michael Scott on The Office here. “Hey, I’m not here to rat on you, except that you’re a rat. Hey, it’s not my fault; don’t blame me. I’m just telling it like it is.”

You know that I don’t see Jesus this way, and I’m pretty sure that you don’t either. But the Jesus of this gospel is a bit troubling. Made worse by the way we use these words to exclude. To judge. To condemn. To be the ones that say to all the others out there that they are wrong, they are condemned, they are out. We can sit back in our ivory towers, shouting down to the ground “don’t blame me—these aren’t my words—they’re Jesus’. I’m not keeping you out, he is.” Like the bully that grabs another kid’s wrist, then forceing the child’s hand into his own shoulder saying “stop hitting yourself”. We can easily hijack the situation for our own ideological abuse.

But Jesus gives us an interesting motif here. He describes truth, salvation, and condemnation with the images of light and darkness. He presupposes the darkness, right? He presupposes that we are in darkness and that a light—Jesus, right?—has come into the world.

Imagine for a moment the solitude of darkness—Imagine getting up in the middle of the night. Your eyes adjust to twilight pretty easily now. You get out of bed and head for the bathroom. Your muscle memory tells you to turn on the light but you remember that sudden light kind of hurts, so you head to the toilet in darkness. In this darkness, you can see shapes and you’re familiar enough with your surroundings that you know what’s there. The big blob to the left is the counter with the sink, right? The lighter thing to the right is the shower. In this darkness, you can see the rugs and the soap dispenser and the toothbrushes, and all of the stuff in the room, even though everything is draped in darkness. You wander back to bed, pull the covers up, and drift back to sleep.

Now imagine living in that world permanently. Imagine the darkness as normal. Imagine that you have to do all of your business, love your friends, cook and eat dinner, do everything in the dark. Now think about that light switch. Think about that flood of light that suddenly blinds you. That you can’t keep your eyes open. We’d avoid it, right? We avoid routine pains, don’t we? So we actually like living in the dark.

Jesus also points out that “all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.” But to Jesus, we all do evil—we all screw up. And out of shame or guilt or whatever, we keep ourselves and our loved ones in the dark. We don’t want our secrets exposed, we don’t want our faces to be seen, right? We don’t want to have to look each other in the eyes.

Jesus offers us an option. He says “But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” The point is that we aren’t the light—aren’t living in light, aren’t people of light—Jesus is the light. But we can “come to the light,” we can move ourselves to the light. We can flip on that switch and see all that is there—the shower that needs to be cleaned, the towels that need to be washed, the garbage can that is full, the Q-tips and toilet paper need to be restocked—and we are different people. We can look in the mirror and recognize that we could use a little more sleep, our eyes still don’t like the light, but they’re getting used to it, and all of this stuff will be here tomorrow waiting for us. And then, when we go to bed in total darkness, we no longer see with dark eyes, but light ones.

The harsh Jesus I described earlier isn’t the real Jesus—it isn’t the Jesus that came to save the world. Jesus isn’t excluding (or encouraging us to condemn our neighbors), but offering us salvation and truth. Offering us the choice to live a life of honesty—physically and spiritually. To be the people we believe ourselves to be.

Our great festive night, The Great Vigil of Easter, begins with a fire built in darkness, which is used to light the Paschal Candle. We follow that candle into a dark church, following the light of Christ in the midst of darkness. That light doesn’t just reveal the room and make us feel safe, it reveals each of us. So that we might look each other in the eye. To see and be seen.

The Temple and Change

a Sermon for Lent 3B
Texts: Exodus 20:1-17 and Mark 9:2-9

In our first reading from Exodus, God gives a list of rules to the Israelites. Eight do-nots and two dos: don’t worship another God, don’t make an idol, don’t use God’s name in a wrong way, do remember the Sabbath, and so on. We know these rules. We recognize them. They have informed the way people have lived their lives for over three thousand years—a pretty remarkable feat.

The character of the rules themselves is pretty remarkable. They direct behavior and action. Do this, don’t do that. Here are the proper rules for life; for the way we live together. Don’t steal or kill or lust after someone else’s property. These rules direct action.

But the rules themselves have a life of their own, don’t they. They have a proper name (capitalized and everything): The Ten Commandments. And they served, and continue to serve, as the basis for not only individual behavior, but collective behavior and our institutions. The Sabbath is kept holy, the worship of God and no one else, for instance, serve as the principle instructions for the Israelite people themselves, and the Jewish faith.

When Jesus turns toward Jerusalem in this morning’s gospel, he’s following the rules. He is heading to the Temple for Passover. But he doesn’t seem to act like a good Jew when he gets there, does he? Instead of taking an animal into the temple for sacrifice, he fashions a whip and drives the livestock out of the place. He throws over the tables of the money changers. His actions are not only loud—but they are violent and destructive. Jesus expresses a righteous anger that many of us may find troubling or difficult to deal with.

So what do we do? We refer to this passage as “The Cleansing of the Temple”. We justify his anger as being in the right place and that money changers themselves must be the problem—that they were the 30’s CE equivalent of lawyers—‘have you heard the one about the moneychangers…’ And yet, the people in the Temple were following the rules. The moneychangers and those selling livestock enabled the people to make their sacrifices in the Temple—they facilitated a proper practice. Everyone there was following the rules.

It is no doubt hard for us to deal with this arrangement—let’s be honest. Our freedom fighter is their terrorist. For those that work in customer service fields—or anybody that deals with people—you no doubt know what its like to get yelled at; to be chastised for following the rules. For not only following your boss’s orders, but the rules outlined in the employee manual. My wife and I both worked in bookstores for years and dealt with angry customers with threats and sometimes reasonable arguments. All we could do is say “no, I’ve never thought about that before” or “Let me speak to my manager.” When we were the manager, we would simply say “I’m sorry, but company policy says…” The righteous customer never likes to hear that.

But we can’t really compare Jesus to an angry customer, can we? We can’t separate what we know about Him from this action. But this anger, this action does seem at least a little out of character, doesn’t it? Even if he were truly surprised by what he saw—I can’t imagine he was—it still wouldn’t condone this action. It isn’t the moneychangers that have any say in what they do—it’s the Temple authorities. It’s like responding to a telemarketer at dinnertime as if he or she really had any say in when your phone rings when the company employs them to do just that. It seems like misplaced rage.

The problem with this reading of Jesus is that we think we know who Jesus really is—not just the parts with which we are often familiar, but all of Him. Our experience of Him, our knowledge of Him, our belief in Him—all of it. As Brian McLaren suggests, Jesus isn’t simply an answer man—in fact, he often responds to questions with more questions. He also doesn’t only speak in words—but actions. This great big action in the Temple was a visual parable. His driving out the animals and throwing the money to the floor and flipping over the table were an incredible visual statement about our relationship with God.

The Gospel begins by referring to the location of this passage as being the Temple, but Jesus refers to it as “my Father’s house,” a distinction that Jesus intends to make a severe statement about. It’s identity, purpose, and reason for being is about to change. The notion of worship is about to shift from the indirect worship that is temple sacrifice to the direct worship of God—wherever one may be. Jesus’s radical theology here is matched by his radical action of flipping over tables.

The implication of this change isn’t simple, though. It means dealing with hard questions about practice—and worse—dealing with their underlying understanding of the rules. Those governing rules. In Mark, this same passage is linked with Jesus’s final teachings, including his declaration of the Great Commandment and its companion: to love God and one’s neighbor. Jesus is asking these people to not only deal with change—but change that seems fundamentally wrong to them.

But isn’t what Jesus asking of them freeing them? He is freeing them from more than this simple obligation, but the hierarchical nature of the practice: spending more money on a “purer” animal in order to incur more favor from God.

And doesn’t Jesus free God from that narrow relationship, allowing God to love every one of his creations?

I think He does. I think Jesus wasn’t freeing a couple of sheep and cattle from a horrible ending, but us. Jesus loves those rules as we do. Jesus loves the faiths that have grown out of those rules as we do this faith. Jesus loves His Father’s house and all of the people there—visiting or working. But to love them and us—change had to come.

This congregation has had to deal with change. A changing city, a changing membership, and a changing world beyond these doors: St. David's knows change. It knows the pain and worry that comes from it. But it also knows hope. It knows what kind of place it can be, a mirror for the changing and diversifying culture around it.

In revealing to us the freeing power of change, Jesus offers God’s grace as the strength, as the means of making the impossible, possible. That undeserved, freely-offered, unbeatable grace. We don’t have to go to the store to pick it up and we don’t have to make more money to earn a better share: God just gives it to us. “Here you go,” God says. “You look like you could use it.”