John 1: 1-14
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
Sermon
In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela has a chapter entitled “Robben Island: The Dark Years.” For Mandela, the dark years were most of the 27 years he spent in prison. That’s almost as long as I have been alive, and that’s just one chapter of his life. In this chapter on the dark years, he speaks of how “prison is designed to break one’s spirit and destroy one’s resolve.” He says, “To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality—all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.” For the human soul, prison can be a nighttime situation, a struggle to survive “intact” and emerge “undiminished.”
The community from which the gospel of John comes was in its own nighttime situation. In the turmoil that followed the destruction of the Temple by the Romans and the rise of the Pharisees as the dominant religious group, this community found itself increasingly ostracized, ridiculed, and persecuted as a result of proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah. For the community of John, the world was in a nighttime state, and the night was trying to suffocate and extinguish their faith.
So what does one do when one must confront a nighttime situation? To echo Howard Thurman, what does one do when one’s back is against the wall? In his autobiography, Mandela outlines how he survived prison and emerged undiminished after all those years. The first key Mandela says is to know one’s enemy. For Christians such as ourselves who might not be fond of talking about the devil or berating sinners, the idea of calling someone an enemy might seem rather foreign. Do we have an enemy? If so, who or what is it?
If we do indeed have enemies, I am not so sure all of us would even agree on who they are. To be honest, I am not a fan of naming specific people as enemies. There is a common tendency in our society to blame particular politicians for our problems. Sure, politicians are morally responsible for their actions, but I think often politicians are really just figureheads at the top of a larger system.
This past week I recall a member saying to me that it seemed like our country was always at war. Is this simply because we happen to have presidents with an inclination for war? In fact, I think President Eisenhower named the problem the best when he coined the phrase the “military-industrial complex” to describe the interlocking colossus of the military establishment and the arms industry. In 1961, Eisenhower declared that this complex had insinuated itself economically, politically, and even spiritually “in every city, every State house, [and] every office of the Federal government.” He warned of the grave danger of misplaced power that this complex represented.
A lot of problems today can be examined in a similar way. In recent times, our country has developed a prison industrial complex with companies and whole towns with a financial interest in the building of more and more prisons. The prison population in our country has increased eightfold since 1970 so that we now have over 2.2 million prisoners. Ultimately, whether one is talking about such complexes, one is talking about massive and pervasive phenomena. These complexes reach into all of our lives, especially through our pocketbooks when we pay our taxes. Given the span and scope of these complexes, does it make sense to blame any one politician for creating the nighttime situation we face today? That would be like John lamenting, “If only Pontius Pilate had been replaced by some other Roman.”
Our scripture reading for today tells us that the light has come into the world and this light serves to enlighten us. The text is full of illusions to Greek and Hebrew ideas about reason and wisdom. John was something of a grassroots intellectual and provocateur. In John’s gospel, Jesus is always telling riddles to get people to think, to raise their consciousness, and empower them to face a nighttime world. So it is that we have asked ourselves some questions in trying to understand the present nighttime situation of world. What next? Mandela says that for him and his fellow prisoners their survival depended on learning and acting as a collective group. He says:
It would be very hard if not impossible for one man alone to resist. I do not know that I could have done it had I been alone. But the authorities’ greatest mistake was keeping us together, for together our determination was reinforced. We supported each other and gained strength from each other. Whatever we knew, whatever we learned, we shared, and by sharing we multiplied whatever courage we had individually.
In the gospel of John, we are told that those who aligned themselves with Jesus were empowered to become children of God. John didn’t say empowered to become a child of God. Back then, that wouldn’t have been a concept. Back then, they thought collectively as children of God. According to John, Jesus was lifting an entire people up to his level as children of God. Jesus lived in solidarity with humanity, dwelt among us, so that as a people we might have knowledge of the truth about God and God’s love. John’s gospel tells us this love can be neither suppressed nor denied. It can’t be overcome by the night.
Another prisoner, a Jesuit priest named Alfred Delp, poignantly wrote of this truth as he awaited his execution by the Nazis in 1945. In an essay entitled, “The Shaking Reality of Advent,” Delp called on Christians to live “in today’s Advent, for it is the time of promise.” He declared, “To eyes that do not see, it still seems that the final dice are being cast down in these valleys, on these battlefields, in those camps and prisons and bomb shelters. Those who are awake sense the working of the other powers and can await the coming of their hour.” Delp proclaimed:
There shines on us the first mild light of the radiant fulfillment to come. From afar sound the first notes as of pipes and singing boys, not yet discernable as a song or melody. It is all far off still, and only just announced and foretold. But it is happening. This is today. And tomorrow the angels will tell what has happened with loud rejoicing voices, and we shall know it and be glad, if we have believed and trusted in Advent.
How might we think of advent in our own lives, in our own situation? This past year I became a novice photographer. I am one of those photographers who has little knowledge of what is required to get a good picture. I am clueless about shutter speeds, photo flashes, and good light versus bad light. Some of my best photos come when the sun is glaring in my eyes, and I have no idea what I am taking a picture of. Much to the consternation of my girlfriend, this past weekend I was obsessed with getting a good picture of a two and half inch Santa. He is a gold-colored Santa who smiles with a waved hand while he hangs from my three-foot-tall Christmas tree. I took about 100 pictures of the thing as I tried to get the right lighting and keep the Santa from getting fuzzy. I had my girlfriend holding the floor lamp in my apartment at different angles as I tried to get the lighting just so. I was on a mission, unfortunately at the expense of my girlfriend’s exasperation.
After awhile of doing this, I finally opened up my owner’s manual for the camera, which I had hardly ever read. As I read it, I saw that it kept using the word “aperture.” I had a vague idea what this meant, but I decided to look up the definition in a dictionary. There I learned that an aperture refers to the opening in the camera lens that regulates how much light passes inside the camera at the exact moment the shutter opens. Then, it occurred to me… All those years the Israelites were reading the scriptures and waiting for the Messiah, all those years they were looking for an opening in the night sky. And, every now and then there would be an opening and some light would come through and people would get a glimpse, a picture of what God is all about.
In advent, we reenact that experience of looking at the night sky. At first, we spot an opening. Then, gradually it gets wider and wider, wider and wider, until finally on Christmas day the flood lamps of heaven are in full glow, and, finally, at long last we can celebrate the arrival of a God who came in the form of a human. At long last, we can celebrate the arrival of a God who lived and dwelt among us in stunning brilliance and glory, full of grace and truth. At long last, we realize the perfect portrait of a love that cannot be diminished or reduced by the night. It is the opening in the sky that expands and reveals the light. It is the opening in the sky that gives us the hope we need to survive the night. Amen.