Poolesville Presbyterian Church
04.29.12; Rev. David Williams
As we get deeper and deeper into yet another election year, things are starting to heat up. In either corner of the ring, the contenders are stretching and bouncing and sucking on a mentholated lozenge, as their coaches carefully massage their voiceboxes and whisper an endless stream of alarming poll data into their ears.
Candidate X will get up on that stump, and as the teleprompters spool up, they’ll begin to speak. What will that sound like? Well, for your convenience, I’ve read stump speeches from candidates in the last several elections, and have endeavored to assemble a speech that should just about capture everything you might possibly hear in three minutes or less.
Candidate X will tell you about how much they believe in America, how we all deeply believe in America, and about the importance of defending the fundamentally American freedoms that make the You Ess of Ay such a beacon of liberty and promise and hope. We’ll hear about how the God-given liberties enshrined by the wisdom of our founding fathers in our constitution stand as a great bulwark against the forces of oppression and injustice, and about how patriotic Americans should look hopefully towards a hopeful future filled with jobs and opportunity, a shining city on a hill called Hope, where our children and our children’s children can look forward to a life of liberty and safety, peace and prosperity, in which they will live free together in just and hopeful and hardworking American freedom. This is the time to stand proud and free on the liberties won by the patriots of yesterday, to look beyond the challenges of today and on to our bright and hopeful tomorrow, fearlessly moving forward into the joyful promise of the American dream.
Unless we vote for Candidate Y, in which case we all are totally doomed. The American dream will go straight to hell in a handbasket, because every single thing Candidate Y believes in will completely destroy America, and we’ll all be jobless and living in the trunk of a burnt out 1993 Hyundai and eating scraps of roadkill squirrel jerky. Is that the America we want for our children? Candidate Y’s abandoned-Hyundai-trunk-squirrel-jerky-America is not the America we believe in!
If we just vote for Candidate X, we’ll be taking that next fearless step towards that bright, free and liberty-filled future of proud prosperous and promising hope, hope for all our children, and oh how we love our children, our American children, with their bright shining dimpled American faces and their big American eyes filled with hope for the change we need to bring about the promising future that is the birthright of every hard-working freedom-loving American. Their future, the future of our children, that future is filled with opportunity, as together Americans work to make our beloved America the America we all know God meant America to be.
That sound vaguely familiar? It should, except for the squirrel-jerky part. That never polled well in the key battleground states.
The tension between rhetoric and reality is the greatest challenge of any political season. And I say that as someone who uses rhetoric all the time, like, say, right now. A sermon is rhetoric, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Rhetoric is just the classical art of using speech to persuade, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Well-crafted words and soaring purple prose are staples of all political speech, as is the need to present a clear contrast between your position and others. But the realities of living together as a people are often far removed from the binary rhetoric of ideology and the buzzword-filled red-meat stump speech. The challenges of actually governing require us to be grounded in the world around us.
That’s true of our life together as a nation, but it is also particularly true of our lives together as followers of Jesus. We get a sense of what that life looks like from the First Letter of John this morning, which is an interesting letter for a variety of reasons.
First and foremost, First John isn’t actually a letter. If you scan back to the beginning of it in 1 John 1:1, you’ll find that it doesn’t have any greetings or salutations. If you scan to the end at 1 John 5:12, you find that it ends abruptly. No “Goodbye,” no “Look forward to seeing you soon, please send money.” There’s just a sentence about not worshipping idols and then the letter just...stops. It’s more like a portion of an essay than a letter, more a treatise than a communication from one person to another.
Secondly, First John is, like the other Epistles of John, remarkably similar to the Gospel of John. The language used is almost identical to the language of that Gospel, with the same circling, elegantly simple writing. It is so closely linked that it clearly either comes from the same author or from someone in the same community who was so steeped in that style and theology that they couldn’t help but write that way.
Finally, First John is a letter that has clearly been written from out of a context of conflict. From earlier chapters of this...um...essay...there is some wrestling going on in the early church. What exactly that’s about is a bit hard to say, but it seems to have something to do with the very same struggle that we heard a bit about last week from Luke’s Gospel.
Both the community that first received this writing and the community that received Luke’s Gospel and Acts were likely Greek-speaking congregations, and from context bible scholars believe these texts were written around the turn of the first century. From that understanding, it appears that both Luke and John were responding to the same Christian movement. That movement, in case for some reason last week’s sermon has slipped your minds, was called Gnosticism.
Rather than just repeat what I said last week about this peculiar strain of Christian faith, I’ll introduce a new word. Many of you knew some of the key details about Gnosticism, but the theological vocabulary word of the day is Docetism.
That’s Docetism, as in “Doe,” as in “Doe, a Deer, A female deer” or “Doh,” as in the sound that Homer Simpson makes. Add that to “Set,” as in “down, set, hike,” and “ism,” as in, well... “ism,” and you have some idea how to pronounce it.
It comes from the Greek word dokein, which means “to appear,” or dokesis, which means a phantom or an apparition. This was a key theological concept for some of the Gnostics, and essentially meant that the physical existence of Jesus wasn’t really important. Instead, what mattered was the Christ spirit, which was totally different from the man.
Docetic faith rejected the flesh as weak, and rejected suffering as something that only weak people did. The true, the powerful, and the spiritually strong did not have to deal with such things. It’s for that reason that 1 John 4:2 suggests that those who reject Jesus as having come in the flesh were dangerous.
Why? Because this way of thinking suggested that the point of faith was personal spiritual power, and from that foundation, there was little motivation to be connected to those who lacked the secret knowledge of the spiritual elite. There was also little motivation to care for them. Why bother? They were spiritual inferiors, weaker and less powerful.
From the texts of 1 John, we hear that for all of the high-sounding and important words that came out of the mouths of the Gnostics, one of the things they may not have been so good at was caring for those around them. Their beautiful speeches and complex symbolic theologies were utterly disconnected from the reality in which they found themselves.
As last week’s passage from Luke indicated, that reality demands that we live out our faith in a way that can be touched. Today’s passage argues that in order to be able to call yourself a disciple of Jesus, the way you express yourself in this reality must be...must be...radically defined by God’s love. That didn’t mean talking about God’s love, no matter how pretty those words might be. It meant living it in the flesh, as radically as Jesus lived it in the flesh. In 1 John 3:16, we hear that we’re to lay down our lives for one another, just as Jesus laid down his life for us. This is an intentional echo of a passage in John 15:13, when Jesus tells us that “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
That means that talk about the love of Jesus has to go beyond being “just words.” It has to be talk that is embodied, visibly and actively witnessed in the life of those who claim to follow him. In our everyday lives, that means manifesting grace and kindness to those who oppose us, showing forbearance and mercy. It means being willing to forgive, and to move past the sense of superiority over others that comes from self-righteousness. It means being very careful around ideologies and theologies that seem to encourage that behavior in us, because they’re moving us away from the essence of the Gospel.
If we can do that, then we can talk meaningfully...and, hopefully, persuasively...about our faith. Because there’s nothing wrong with rhetoric, so long as it is not empty rhetoric. There’s nothing wrong with words, so long as they describe the reality into which we are called as Christians to live.
As we live, and as we speak, let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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