Poolesville Presbyterian Church
04.12.15; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: 1 John 1:1 - 2:2
Man, it’s been a while since I was confirmed. Having spent weeks with these four, sharing and listening and exploring the faith, it was hard to miss just how much the world has changed since I was their age and making this choice.
I can say to them, yeah, I had a computer when I was your age, and you could connect it to the outside world! I’m, like, totally hip to this groovy interwebs thing, man! Only the fastest connection speed was three hundred baud, which translates into 300 bits per second. Not bytes. Bits.
Which means, for example, that if you wanted to download something….let’s choose something totally at random….Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, at that download speed it would take you just slightly less than thirty three years.
Meaning, you’d start the download now, and you’d be as old as I am when you could finally play it.
But what if you wanted to stream a Vine of a French Bulldog puppy doing something totally adorabl...wait, let me translate...that’s...um... “totes adorbs?” Well, those six point five seconds of video would only take three days of buffering. Well worth the wait, I’d say.
We live in a strangely connected age, a time when we are so awash in information that it becomes really immensely difficult to tell where reality lies. You’d think, given where we are and how much we can know about our world, that things would have gotten easier. We can know so very much, about almost anything.
I can clack away at my keyboard and trackpad, and before me on a little screen I can watch storm-fronts sweeping across the mid-Atlantic, telling me that once again, I’m going to have to take the minivan rather than my bike. I can watch panda cubs squirming around in real time, and anything that humanity has ever known ever will be know to me. I never have to be lost, not for a moment, not for an instant, so long as I’ve got at least a couple of them little circley doohickeys showin’ on my smartphone signal meter.
We can know anything, at any moment, in any place. And yet, with all of that impossibly vast amount of information available to us, we struggle with how to manage it. “Truth” seems something that becomes more and more subjective, as we carefully pick our facts to match the things that we already know.
Confirmation bias, it’s called. We have a particular way of understanding something, and we carefully assemble all of the facts that reinforce what we already believe. Let’s say, for example, that you are seven years old, and you do not want to have water with dinner instead of the delicious and life-giving glass of chocolate milk that is the birthright of every redblooded American child. You can choose facts that support your position, like, say, that 100% of people exposed to water will die. And that water is the leading cause of drowning. And that water is a primary ingredient in commercial herbicides and pesticides. And that consuming too much water has been proven to cause significant health impacts, up to and including death.
All of these things are true, and they are all “facts,” in that they are not made up and really do describe reality.
It is remarkably easy to fall into this pattern of thinking, to affirm what we affirm because of all of the facts that affirm our affirmations. And in this age, when we can easily seek out only those things that confirm what we already know, surrounding ourselves with an endless stream of carefully hand-picked information, we can lose our ability to really test and challenge what we’re encountering.
But it means we never really take a hard look at what we believe and how that belief makes us live. It means we carefully choose to filter out every last bit of countervailing or negative information. It means we never allow our understanding to grow or deepen or embrace newness, and that we just stagnate away.
Engaging in real confirmation, really checking the truth of something that you hold to be true, is at the heart of the journey we reaffirm every Easter. Does this Jesus-thing really matter to us? Does what we encounter in Christ really make any difference in how we experience this brief butterfly-wing-flutter of life that we’re given?
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. Unlike the letters from the Apostle Paul, there is no community to which this “letter” is directed. Not only that, but it doesn’t end at all like the letters that Paul wrote, back a couple of thousand years ago when human beings actually wrote letters to one another.
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 short talk to the reader, saying, Little Children, don’t worship idols. And...what? Nothing else. It’s more like an essay than a letter, more a treatise than a communication from one human being to another. Heck, it’s not even an essay. There’s no, “In conclusion, let me summarize the three points I’ve tried to carefully make so that the computer that grades my writing will notice my summary.” None of that.
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 source 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, like the Gospel of John, is a peculiar blending of the powerfully mystic and the deeply practical. It is soaring and beautiful and spiritual on the one hand, and remarkably practical and straightforward on the other, all at the same time.
Take, for instance, the intense focus on the tangibility of the Gospel in the passage we’ve just encountered. This isn’t strange esoteric language about some theological idea. It isn’t abstract or distant or intellectualized. It doesn’t talk about wild dreams or strange visions. “Here is this deep and transforming truth,” the author tells us. “I have heard it with my own ears, seen it with my own eyes, touched it with my own hands.”
What’s reported are some pretty intense claims, a set of truths that place significant demands on those who listened and heard.
The claims made directly speak to how lives are changed in encounter with the reality of Jesus of Nazareth, and they remind us, no matter what we say or claim, to always test our statement of faith against the confirmation of the reality immediately around us.
Does this way of living change us? Does it shape us? Can we see it reflected in the way we choose to relate to other human beings?
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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