A Sermon

This is an expanded manuscript of the sermon I preached last Sunday at Wesley United Methodist Church, where my wife serves as minister of music. I’d never preached in a Methodist church before. It’s not that different, except the sermon is shorter and the pulpit sits off to one side. This gave me a slight sense of sermonic seasickness at first until I had the rather pleasant realization that it wasn’t all about me, since I’d been bumped by the Lord’s Supper table. Anyway, here’s the sermon.

Believing is Seeing
John 9.1-12

Introduction
In a dramatic scene in C. S. Lewis’ science fiction novel Perelandra, Elwin Ransom, Oxford professor of philology and inter-planetary explorer extraordinaire, finds himself trapped in subterranean caverns miles below the surface of the planet Venus, forced to grope his way in darkness up towards the surface. Describing the trek, Lewis writes,

He found himself thinking about light as a hungry man thinks about food – picturing April hillsides with milky clouds racing over them in blue skies or quiet circles of lamp-light on tables pleasantly littered with books and pipes. By a curious confusion of mind he found it impossible not to imagine that the slope he walked on was not merely dark, but black in its own right, as if with soot. He felt that his feet and hands must be blackened by touching it. Whenever he pictured himself arriving at any light, he also pictured that light revealing a world of soot all around him.

Two things: the hunger for light and the fear of what that light might reveal. I think most of us can relate to both. We know we grope our way upward in a dark world deprived of the light of God’s love and long for that blazing beam to brighten our blindness. We also know that all of our world is bleared and seared with sin, that it bears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell. We seek the light and flee the light at the same time. This story from the gospel of John is about both things: a blind man who sees and sighted people who don’t like what the light shows them.

The Light Shines on Us

We should start by realizing the radical claim that Jesus makes in the seemingly simple statement, “I am the light of the world” (v.5). We have grown so familiar with this language that it becomes like a once-jagged stone, so smoothed by the stream of time that it slides off the surface of our minds without the shocking, wounding impact that it had on the people of Jesus’ day. We should look both at the context of the statement and language he uses.
Look first at the context. Scholars believe that Jesus utters these words during the Festival of Dedication, also known as the Festival of Lights or, to us, Hanukkah. It commemorates a time, about a century and a half before the birth of Jesus, when the Jewish people regained control of their temple from pagan invaders. They had to perform an eight-day ceremony to cleanse the house of God. According to the Talmud, olive oil was needed for the menorah in the Temple, which was required to burn throughout the night every night. But there was only enough oil to burn for one day, yet miraculously, it burned for eight days. The Jewish sages an eight day festival to commemorate this miracle.
So in that setting, Jesus’ words become very bold: he claims to be the true light of God symbolized by the burning lampstand in the holy temple. He claims, in fact, to be God in the flesh.
Now look at Jesus’ language. This is the second time in this section of John that the Lord makes this claim. The first time (8.12), he uses some very specific Greek grammar that goes back to Moses’ experience at the burning bush. Moses asks God’s name, and God responds, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3.14). This becomes the YHWH name of God, the “I AM” that denotes his eternal, timeless existence. For Jesus to use that language about himself (and he does it seven times in John’s gospel, each of the “I AM” sayings), means that he claims equality with the Father. After this, the presence of God becomes associated throughout the Old Testament with the blazing light of his glory. This is the same thing John tells us when he rights, “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John 1.4-5).
That is the answer to the first thing we’ve mentioned: humanity’s yearning for God’s light in this darkened world. The light of the world is Jesus. This is good news! God is with us, and he is with us in and through the person of Christ. Jesus proves this claim by his resurrection from the dead. This is also shocking news! If Jesus is the light of the world, then there is no other. He makes a claim that refuses to share the spotlight with the gurus and gods of other religions because he is, himself, the source of all light.

What Does the Light Show Us?

When a spotlight stabs the gloom of a darkened stage, it always shines on the star. When God’s light illumines the darkened world, it shows us a beggar! The disciples, noticing the man born blind, start up a theological debate about whose fault it is. The common thinking of the day was that bad things only happened to bad people, so this man’s condition meant that someone’s muddy feet had polluted the religious gene pool. They saw a beggar whom they could use as an obhject lesson. Jesus saw a man in need of healing.When the disciples want to debate the cause of this man’s problem, Jesus says he would rather talk about the solution. “Why is he blind?” is, for Jesus, a less important quesiton than, “What can we do about it?”
Christians sometimes seek to avoid responsibility to help the needy by debating the extent to which it is their own fault. Jesus instead encourages us to avoid our own fault by taking responsibility. “How did they get themselves into this mess?” is not the Christian question. “how can we get them out of it?” is the question Christ calls us to ask.
I must admit, as a lifelong Baptist, that you Methodists are on the whole better at this than we are. This church operates a thrift store and a food closet designed for just this purpose: lighting up the needs of our community and doing something about them in the name of Jesus. This is important because our ability to see the needy ultimately bears witness to whether we have truly seen Christ. Whether or not we’ve seen the light depends on whether or not we’re seeing what that light claims to show us.

Conclusion

One final word: this shining of light in the darkness is not just work that Jesus does for us; it is also work that he does in us. Notice carefully how Jesus replies when the disciples ask him about the man born blind: “We must work the works of Him who sent me” (John 9.4). He includes us, you and me, the church in this business of being and bringing light. It is the same thing that Our Lord says in that famous figure of speech from the Sermon on the Mount:

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven. – Matthew 5.14-16.

And do you remember what I said about Jesus’ grammar in that “I am” statement? Well, he uses it in this passage when he says, “You are”. In other words, if our world is ever going to see the light of God they will see it in Jesus, and if they are ever going to see the light of Jesus they will see it in us . . . or not at all! They will care what we say when they see who we are. They will believe what we declare when they see what we do.
I like teaching seminary students because they don’t worry about asking tough questions. In fact, they live to play “stump the professor”! One of my students recently asked me if I had ever considered how conceited Paul was. After all, he orders the Corinthians to “be imitators of me” (1 Corinthians 4.16). The Greek word is the root of our word mimic, like the guys who do those great George Bush impersonations. But, as I told my student, Paul was writing to a church that did not have a New Testament; none of the gospels had even been written yet. The best – the only – hope they had of seeing what Jesus was like was by looking at one of his followers.
And that is true today in our postmodern melt-down of competing narratives. Our only hope to spread the gospel is to live it! What should shock us is not that Paul was willing to offer that challenge, but that we are not!
One of my favorite short stories is Ernest Hemingway’s story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” It tells the story of an old man, lonely and suicidal after the death of his beloved wife, who sits at the neighborhood café late into the night until the weary waiters finally force him to leave. He does this because, as one of the waiters explains to the other, it is the last clean, well-lighted place in the city’s darkness. “Each night,” the man explains to his colleague, “I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the café.”
I like to think of the church in those terms. In a sin-blackened world where lonely men and women wander friendless and aimless through the dark night of the soul, we are the last outpost of light, the clean, well-lighted place, the lamp burning on the lampstand, the city whose lights blaze against the skyline. Why does it matter that you give sacrificially so that Wesley United Methodist can meet its financial obligations? Why does it matter that you volunteer to teach Sunday school, or work with the children, or help with the food pantry, or serve on a committee? Because we must be reluctant to close up. There may be someone who needs the church, the last clean, well-lighted place in a lightless world.

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