(Isaiah 6:8-13; 1 John 2:1-11)

I wanted to let you know that as you go out, you’ll find copies of another sermon preached from this passage. One of the good times in my association with the Presbytery of Wabash Valley came at the February 2008 assembly, when the Rev. Dr. Paul Detterman preached. Dr. Detterman is the Executive Director of Presbyterians for Renewal, a position which at that time he’d only just taken; I knew him primarily as a church musician and theologian of worship, and in particular for his work on the editorial staff of the quarterly Reformed Worship, and so I was delighted to meet him and thank him for his writing. I appreciated his sermon, too, which used 1 John as a lens with which to examine the state of the PC(USA) and the various ways in which its darkness has held us back from the gospel ministry to which Christ calls us. Circumstances have changed in the 43 months since, and not for the better, but his message that day still sounds clear.

In part that’s because Dr. Detterman chose his text well. It was a good time for me, but not for that denomination, and this is a passage which speaks particularly clearly in bad times. At least, that’s the conclusion I came to this past week, which wasn’t a good one for me. Partly, I just haven’t been well; I started feeling sick during the wedding rehearsal the other Friday, and I’ve been up and down since. I wasn’t completely out of it, but whatever it was really took the stuffing out of me. More than that, though, to be honest, I was angry a lot of this past week. Nothing you need to be worried about, I’m not unhappy with the church; y’all aren’t perfect, to be sure, but you do well and I’m proud of you. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot going on, and I came away angry.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because anger is not necessarily sinful; it may be selfish, to be sure, but it can also be perfectly righteous, coming in response to injustice and evil. What matters is why we’re angry and how we handle it—and in particular, that we do not allow anger to curdle into bitterness and hatred toward others. If we let it, as the Jedi Master Yoda always insisted, will pull us out of the light and into the darkness. I’m no great fan of the spirituality of Star Wars on the whole, but George Lucas had the right idea there; and he was right to note that people can draw great power from hatred and bitterness toward other people—but only power for destruction, not for good, not for truth.

It is right to be angry at evil and injustice; it is even right to hate evil and injustice—but not to hate the evil and the unjust, whom God loves even as he hates what they do. If we cross that line, we step out of his light and into the darkness, and we cease to be able to see truly. Hatred, bitterness, all such things cloud our minds and distort our perception: of others, of ourselves, and ultimately of God, because God is love.

Here we see the answer to the question we considered last week, “What does it mean to walk in the light?” It means that we love those around us. And how do we do that, and how do we know that we’re doing that? We follow Jesus, we live as he lived, we keep his commandments. This is the key: Jesus is our reference point, and our only reference point. It’s not enough to look holier than our neighbors, our friends, our family, our fellow churchgoers, because they aren’t the standard by which we’ll be measured: Jesus is. Nor is there any room for bending our understanding of God’s holiness to match what those around us, or the prevailing voices of our culture, value and believe to be right, because they aren’t the ones who determine what is right: Jesus is. Voices of compromise with the world come from the world—they are voices from the darkness asking us to turn down the light, or even turn it off altogether. Jesus calls us to walk in the light, whether anyone around us likes the light or not.

Of course, there are a lot of folks who try to argue in the name of Jesus that God really doesn’t want them to do what his word tells them to do, but to that, John’s response is pointed: anyone who claims to know Jesus but doesn’t keep his commandments is a liar, because their life doesn’t match their words. Biblically speaking, the fruit of knowledge is action; true knowledge is knowledge which is lived out. “Head knowledge” isn’t a biblical category—if you claim to know something but it has no effect on how you live, you might be able to repeat the words, but you don’t really know it.

The late physicist Richard Feynman caught this well in an account of his time lecturing in Brazil.

I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question—the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell—they couldn’t answer it at all! . . .

After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” was the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. . . .

So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and “learn” all this stuff, and not know anything at all.

True knowledge changes how we act because it changes how we understand ourselves and the world around us. The light of God shines, and by that very fact it changes us. The light shines, and we see what we could not see before, and we understand what we did not understand before, and so we live differently—not out of a sense of duty, not because of what others will think of us, not in the hope of reward, but simply because you don’t walk into things when you can see to avoid them.

At least, you don’t if you’re paying attention. Sometimes we get distracted; sometimes we’re looking the wrong way, focusing on something other than where we’re going. Some of us are prone to woolgather; when my sister-in-law’s older brother was a student at Michigan State, he was walking along thinking about something, and looked up to realize he was out in the middle of one of the fountains on campus. He’d walked right into it without even noticing. (Being in his own way a very practical person, Jim just kept on walking until he’d walked out the other side.) And of course, some of us are just clumsy. Even when we can see where we’re going, none of us walks perfectly, and some of us less so than others.

This is why John gives us this assurance: “My little children, I am writing these things to you to light your way to guide you out of sin. But if anyone does sin”—and we all know John is being tactful here, because he’s already said that none of us can claim not to sin at all—“if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous One. When he gave himself up as a sacrifice for sin, he solved the sin problem for good—not only ours, but the whole world’s.” The light of God shines, but though it’s the light of truth, it isn’t cold, hard, dispassionate, and pitiless, as we sometimes imagine truth to be; rather, it is the light of grace, because the one who is truth is the one who is love, and his truth is his love, and vice versa. The greatest truth in which we walk is the truth that God loved the world in this way, that we don’t have to be good enough because he is good enough for us; the light that shows us our path is the love of God in which we walk entirely by grace, knowing that it’s all by his power, not our own.

(Psalm 14:1-3, Micah 7:18-20; 1 John 1:1-2:2)

There’s a common assumption in Western culture that faith is blind—that it’s a matter of wilfully closing one’s eyes to the reality of the world and choosing to believe in something else. This is a charge hurled at Christians by atheists—thus, for instance, we’ve seen a number of prominent folks on the anti-Christian left dub themselves the “reality-based community,” in distinction to the “faith-based community.” That doesn’t bother me, but more worrisome is the fact that many who consider themselves believers have a similar view of faith; they seem to think that what matters is not what their faith is in but simply that they have faith. Power, for them, is in faith itself—which is to say, really, that it’s in them, and faith is just a means of unlocking it. Either way, both groups agree that Christian faith is not about understanding things as they really are.

John has no time for that nonsense. The point is Jesus Christ; and yes, we follow him by faith, but faith in Christ isn’t about closing our eyes to the world, it’s about seeing truly. It’s about coming out of the darkness of the world to walk in the light. It’s about exchanging deception for truth. It’s not about believing what we want to believe, it’s not about choosing to believe for the psychological or emotional or spiritual benefits, it’s not about religion as a coping mechanism or self-help strategy or organizing principle; he doesn’t offer any of these things as reasons to follow Jesus. Instead, he says, believe this because this is reality, because we know this is true, because we’ve seen it for ourselves.

Now, here as in most cases, we have to be careful of the equal and opposite error; there are certainly those who treat Christian faith as a matter of intellectual assent to ideas which can be proven by rational argument. That’s not the point here at all. But John does clearly assert that our faith is based on evidence, beginning with his own testimony and that of his fellow disciples. What he says here is much like the beginning of his gospel: “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes”—in other words, no metaphor here, we literally physically saw this—“what our hands have touched—the word of life—was revealed, and we testify to you that we saw it, and so we proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father”—he’s breathlessly piling up words here, trying to somehow capture a reality that’s almost beyond words: the eternal God, the source of all life, the one who is life, became a human being, he’s saying, and I saw him. I saw him, I touched him, I knew him, he was my friend; and I want you to understand this so that you can fully share in what I have.

Note that: “that you may have fellowship with us—a fellowship which we have with the Father, and with Jesus Christ his Son.” That’s the goal. And remember, we’ve talked about this, that this word is much stronger than “fellowship” makes it sound; it comes from the word “common” and means to have or to be in common—one commentator translates it “joint ownership.” This isn’t just getting together once in a while in a friendly way, it’s a matter of living life together with Christ, and thus all of us together in Christ, sharing each other’s lives, being in joint partnership in life with each other and the Lord. It’s a deep union, and a deep unity, that is supposed to be the fruit of our faith in Jesus. That’s why John is writing this letter, so that we will truly be captured by and filled with the life of Christ and so live together as his body in this way.

Now, if you know anything at all about 1 John, you probably know that it talks a lot about love; that theme is right here in sum in verse 3, and as we explore this book together in the next couple months, we’ll spend a lot of time unpacking it. But John doesn’t go there right away, because he has some other things he needs to say first; it’s not until chapter 4 that he makes the famous declaration, “God is love.” The reality is that it can be a dangerous thing to just tell people that without taking the time to tell them what it means. The word “love” might not be the most misused word in the English language—but it might be, as people keep twisting it and redefining it to try to push their own agendas. “God is love” does not mean that therefore I should be able to go out and sleep with anyone I want, or that God wants me to do whatever I think will make me happy, or that we have no right to tell anyone anything they don’t want to hear; but if that’s so, then what does it mean?

The answer to that question begins with John’s statement in verse 5: God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. That might seem like an odd statement at first blush, but follow me on this. If God is love, then true love is an expression of the character of God. Our understanding of what love is must be defined by, and must arise out of, our understanding of who God is, because to act in love is to act in a way which is in accordance with the character of God. It’s not about what we find pleasurable, or what makes us happy, or what another person tells us we would do if we really loved them—it’s about what pleases God.

Of course, that raises the question: how do we go about living in a way that’s pleasing to God? Unfortunately, we tend to mentally frame that question purely in terms of morality, and thus to answer it moralistically, and so this part of 1 John gets read in that way, as a bunch of commands and threats; and that’s not quite right, because the focus is off. John isn’t commanding us to walk in the light, as if that’s purely a matter of our own effort; he is, rather, making a simple observation. There is light, and there is darkness. The light is from God alone; the darkness is not from him, and there is no darkness in him. You can walk in one or the other, but not both at the same time.

Which points us to a few key truths. First, consider the obvious: when there is light, we can see what is around us, where it is, what’s happening, where it’s safe to walk, where we can sit and rest. When there is no light, we can only guess and feel our way, and construct our own version of things in our heads. Do you ever get up in the middle of the night and move around with the lights off? It works fine as long as everything’s where you think it is; but if you don’t know the laundry basket is there—or if there are toys on the floor over here—then walking becomes a painful experience. Walking with God is about seeing things differently from the rest of the world, not because we close our eyes to how things are, but because God is light, and in his light we see truly.

Second, everything else flows from that. If our culture looks at our faith, if it looks at how the Scriptures say we are supposed to live, and objects, that isn’t a reason to change our faith or how we read the Scriptures—it’s just reality; those who do not walk in the light are not going to be able to see in this world’s darkness what we see by faith in Christ. No amount of argument on our part can change that; God may use our argument to bring others into his light, but it’s only as he gives light that anyone can see.

And it’s only as we begin to see differently, only as the truth of God lights up our lives, that our lives begin to change as he desires. We tend to focus on controlling our behavior—or the behavior of our children—at the output end: reminders, restrictions, laws, punishments, limiting options, keeping busy. Nothing wrong with any of those things, but they leave the root of the matter—the self which acts, the desires that drive us, the ways of thinking that frame and shape our decisions—untouched. God changes us by changing us right at that level, by shining his light right into the heart of that darkness. When you turn the light on in a dark room, it changes how you walk through it, and how you behave in it; when God turns his light on in a dark heart, it does much the same. That’s where true change of life comes from.

Of course, that doesn’t happen all at once; lasting change, whether in a person, a church, or a nation, is a process, which takes the time it needs to take. Part of the effect of walking in the light of Christ is to show us just how much darkness is in our hearts, and just how sinful we are; it’s a lot easier to imagine ourselves free of sin when we’re standing in the darkness, with no light to show us we’re wrong. It’s been my observation that the holiest people I know are the ones most humbly conscious of their own unholi-ness—not obsessed with it, trusting in God’s grace in Jesus Christ, but keenly aware of their absolute dependence on that grace. Indeed, more than that, rejoicing in that depen-dence, desiring nothing more than for the light of God to fill their hearts, driving out the darkness. May the same be said of us.