Sunday, July 11, 2010
“Walking in the Light:the importance of true belief”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Text: 1 John 2:18-29
I hate to say that it was 25 years ago but it was and I had just finished Seminary and a year's research at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. I arrived back in Toronto and began working at my first church. Sometime during the first few months there, a woman named Joan called me. She said that she was a missionary and asked if we could meet to talk about an ecumenical endeavour and theology. I was all interested. That was what I was trained for and loved to talk about. I looked forward to meeting her.
It was a Wednesday afternoon when Joan came to the church. I made some tea as we began to chat. It was interesting. She was knowledgeable. The discussion was cordial and Joan didn't overstay her welcome. After about three quarters of an hour, she left, asking as she went out the door, “Can we could meet again?” “Sure,” I replied, though I was beginning to feel that there was something a little fishy about this encounter.
We met the following week and it was then that my suspicions proved true. After about half an hour, Joan finally indicated that she was a missionary for The Unification Church, more popularly known as the Moonies. She and others had been sent out to pull a conference together of church leaders from all stripes, to find common ground, and things they could do together. I had the impression that it was all about bringing legitimacy to The Unification Church, that they might be seen as within the Christian fold rather than as being sectarian. But there was more. I was intrigued by this ploy and the whole set of beliefs of Joan's Church. I started asking her some basic theological questions and she answered willingly, though carefully. I figured that she didn't want to seem too outside of the Christian fold. It was all so interesting to me that I agreed to see her yet again and it was at that third meeting that the shoe really dropped. As I pushed her theologically, she finally admitted that Unification belief had it that Sun Myung Moon was the second coming of Jesus Christ. In other words, Sun Myung Moon was the messiah, the Son of God. I put my head in my hands, thanked Joan. Joan did stop and the church and left a book for me one day but we have never seen each other since.
The issue that I had with Joan is somewhat similar to one of the issues faced by John when he wrote the letter we know as 1John in our New Testaments. In my case, I was not willing to believe that Sun Myung Moon was the messiah, the Son of God. Back in the latter part of the first century, there were people that did not believe that Jesus was the messiah, the Son of God.
The church was growing around the city of Ephesus and tradition has it that Jesus' disciple John spent many years there building up the church. But the church was not without problems and one of the most severe was the problem of truth and who had it.
The church began within the Jewish movement and there were issues raised by the Jews about who this man Jesus was. Ephesus was a great centre within the Roman world and there were also many other religions and worldviews that converged on the city. Sometimes we tend to think of earliest Christianity as Christianity in its most pristine form. But when we really begin to dig, the early Christians struggled. They struggled against persecution. They struggled against alternate views and, we must remember, that they lived in a time when the NT did not exist. A religious community did not have a “Bible,” a foundational document, something they called, “the word of the Lord.” They were lucky if they had one, two, or three sacred books. Maybe a copy of Isaiah or a copy of Deuteronomy. They had little else but those and the good news about Jesus that was passed on simply by word of mouth. As you might imagine, they were subject to a multiplicity of ideas. Truth, lies, and heresy, could all mix … there were few controls except to get as close to Jesus as one possibly could through those who walked with him. That's why people like Peter and John and Matthew were so important in the ancient world. They had been close to Jesus.
People were questioning. They weren't just willing to accept anything. There were Jews who would only accept the old ways and there were others who found a so-called, higher way, or higher thought, that could not conceive of a pure God ever coming in contact with impure humanity. And so, they would say that Jesus could never be the Son of God. No one could. It's impossible. John had to take action. He had to defend truth. He wrote, “Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard that the antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come…They went out from us, but they did not belong to us…I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it, and you know that no lie comes from the truth. Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son (2:18-22).” People were questioning Jesus' divinity, and John had to step up to the plate to defend what he knew to be true, what he had seen and heard and touched with his hands (1:1).
As if it wasn't enough that some denied Jesus' divine origin and relationship with the Father, others denied that the Christ was human. Let me explain it this way. Perhaps you saw the popular film in 1999 entitled, The Sixth Sense, featuring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment. Willis played a child psychologist, Dr. Malcolm Crowe, who is confronted one night in his apartment by a former patient, Vincent, whom, as a young boy, Crowe had seen and attempted to help him deal with numerous hallucinations he had that frightened him. Standing in Crowe's bathroom, naked and brandishing a gun, a troubled Vincent says, “I don't want to be afraid any more.” He accused Dr. Crowe of failing him and shot him in the abdomen before turning the gun on himself.
The film moves to the following Fall when Dr. Crowe begins working with another young man, Cole Sear. Cole is not unlike Vincent and Crowe isn't sure he can help him but he commits himself to him and wins his trust. Eventually Cole tells him, in one of the film's memorable lines, “I see dead people that walk around like regular people and they frighten me.” At first, Crowe thinks that Cole is delusional, hallucinating like Vincent. But eventually he sees that there is something behind what Cole is saying and he suggests that Cole try to find a purpose for his gift by communicating with the ghosts and help them in their unfinished business on earth. Cole overcomes his fear and tries it. To make a long story short, Cole actually does help the ghosts and his gift saves and gives comfort to some of the living as well. He even offers help to Dr. Crowe, suggesting he talk to his wife while she is sleeping.
That very night, Crowe returned home where he found his wife asleep on a chair with the couple's wedding video in the background. As she sleeps, he sees her release his wedding band which he suddenly discovers he has not been wearing. And then there's the twist. Crowe and the audience realise that Crowe himself is one of the dead people that young Cole had seen. He had died when Vincent shot him. The whole time he had been working with Cole, he only appeared to be alive. He was working through his unfinished business on earth rectifying his failure to understand his former patient, Vincent. He's dead, he only appeared to be alive.
There's more to it that this, but the ending! The ending was a complete shock to me. I was so shocked that I had to go back and watch the whole thing again to find out why an intelligent being, so I assumed of myself, hadn't picked up that Crowe was dead the whole time. He only appeared to be a living person.
That aligns with the second problem that John's opponents had. There were those who said that Jesus, the Son of God, only appeared to be a living, human being. He wasn't real. He wasn't flesh and blood like you and I. Widespread in the Greco-Roman world was a worldview we call Gnosticism. Gnostics were dualists. They could not fathom how a pure God could ever come in contact with an impure earth or matter or flesh. Purity could only exist in the spiritual realm, if it entered the physical realm it would cease to be pure. The Gnostic could not fathom an incarnation, the holy entering unholy flesh, so some of them developed the thought that the Son of God only appeared to be alive. Like Dr. Crowe, Jesus only appeared to walk this earth. Jesus only appeared to be human. He only appeared to suffer on the cross. Pure God could never really come in contact with impure humanity.
I think that's why John says in his opening words of this letter, “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hand, concerning the world of life (1:1).” I always wondered what that word “touch” was in there for. I could understand John saying that he had seen Jesus, and that he had heard Jesus, but what was the “touch” all about? Among other things, it was a shot at those who thought that the Son of God only appeared to be human. He goes on in ch.4. “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist… they are from the world and what they say is from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God…(4:1-3, 5f.).”
So there were these two groups disrupting things in the church around Ephesus. One denied the divine side of Jesus, the other denied the human side of Christ. And what makes this of such import is that John ties right belief with the Christian's destiny, he ties our eternal futures to believing right things. “Keep on with what you have heard from the beginning,” he says. “If what you have heard from the beginning abides in you, then you abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is what he has promised us, eternal life (2:24, 25).” “God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life (5:11).”
That was an interesting thought for the church back in the first century. It is an interesting thought for the church in the 21st century. For years we have been working on things like: ecumenism, inter-faith discussions, practicing tolerance and embracing not just higher but hyper-critical approaches to the Bible. Nothing wrong with those things when done honestly but all too often, they have not been done with a thought for the wellbeing of the church and faith and truth. Theologians and biblical scholars have sometimes been more interested in the sensationalism that comes from hyper-criticism than building faith, seeking truth and evaluating the probabilities of their sensational claims. Tolerance, more often than not, that has morphed from a spirit of good will to total acceptance of thoughts, beliefs, and practices that are out of tune with the gospel. Ecumenism and inter-faith work, sometimes they have caused us to water down what we believe, such that the search for commonality has left us with very, very little to hold on to. It all filters down into the life of congregations and the fuzziness of belief isn't working for people. Nobody has to commit to anything so, “Why bother?” they say. There is no power in to this gospel. Little, other than being nice to one another, is taught. We even have church leaders questioning openly the deity of Christ, the incarnation, the need for atonement (sin), and the resurrection. Is it any wonder that a couple of generations have largely left the mainline churches. We have little of nothing to say or offer them.
John, however, writes. He draws a line in the sand. He says, this is what Christ is! “Whoever has the Son (as God actually revealed him &!150; divine and human), … whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” He has been telling us about walking in the light. Walking in the light involves being of good character and following God's ways. Walking in the light involves showing love to others and especially those of faith. Walking in the light also involves believing right things about God, believing the things that God has done through his Son, and, he says, your life, your eternity depend on it! That makes belief and particular beliefs of the utmost importance.
And the church has stood on these beliefs for generations. In these truths, the church throughout the ages stood and functioned. It was in that belief that they sent evangelists and missionaries out into the world. It was in that belief that the church grew. It is in that belief that the great creeds of the church were written. It was in that belief that the martyrs gave up everything.
Where are the people today who stand in that faith? Who will stand and today say with John that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God (2:22)? Who will say, “God was truly in Christ and dwelt among us (4:2)?” The familiar words come to us from John's Gospel. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” And, so the question goes out to you: With a multitude of beliefs out there: Who will you follow? What will you believe?