Sermon: Walk in the Light

Texts:

1 John 1:1-2:14

Date: April 23, 2006

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

            This is a story told by Disciples of Christ preacher Fred Craddock.  He writes, “First little church I served was in the eastern Tennessee hills, not too far from Oak Ridge.  When Oak Ridge began to boom with the atomic energy, that little bitty town became a booming city just overnight.  Every hill and every valley and every shady grove had recreational vehicles and trucks and things like that.  People came in from everywhere and pitched tents, lived in wagons.  Hard hats from everywhere, with their families and children paddling around in the mud in those trailer parks, lived in everything temporarily to work.  Our church was not far away.  We had a beautiful little church—white frame building, one hundred and twelve years old.  The church had an organ in the corner, which one of the young fellows had to pump while Mrs. Lois played it.  Boy, she could play the songs just as slow as anybody.

            “The organ was a little slow.  The church had beautifully decorated chimneys, kerosene lamps all around the walls, and every pew in this little church was hewn, hand hewn, from a giant poplar tree.  After church one Sunday morning I asked the leaders to stay.  I said to them, ‘Now we need to launch a calling campaign and an invitational campaign in all those trailer parks to invite those people to church.’

            “’O, I don’t know.  I don’t think they’d fit in here,’ one of them said.  ‘They’re just here temporarily, just construction people.  They’ll be leaving pretty soon.’

            “’Well, we ought to invite them, make them feel at home,’ I said.  We argued about it, time ran out, and we said we’d vote next Sunday.  Next Sunday, we all sat down after service.  ‘I move,’ said one of them, ‘I move that in order to be a member of this church, you must own property in the county.’

            “Someone else said, ‘I second that.’  It passed.  I voted against it, but they reminded me that I was just a kid preacher and I didn’t have a vote.  It passed.  When we moved back to these parts, I took my wife to see that little church, because I had told her that painful, painful story.  The roads have changed.  The interstate goes through that part of the country, so I had a hard time finding it, but I finally did.  I found the state road, the county road, and the little gravel road.   Then there, back among the pines, was that building shining white.  It was different.  The parking lot was full—motorcycles and trucks and cars packed in there.  And out front, a great big sign: Barbecue, all you can eat.  It’s a restaurant, so we went inside.  The pews are against a wall.  They have electric lights now, and the organ pushed over into the corner.  There are all these aluminum and plastic tables, and people sitting there eating barbecued pork and chicken and ribs—all kinds of people.  Parthians and Medes and Edomites and dwellers of Mesopotamia, all kins of people.  I said to Nettie, ‘It’s a good thing this is still not a church, otherwise these people couldn’t be in here.’”

            “Whoever says, ‘I am in the light,’ while hating a brother or sister, is still in darkness.” [1 John 2:9] 

            As you hear that story, what do you feel for the people who were the members of that little church in Tennessee?  Anger?  Disdain?  How could they close their doors to their neighbors like that?  Shocking!

            Or do you feel pity stirring?  Those poor, misguided folks.  They couldn’t open their hearts or their doors, and it looks like they may have lost their church because of it.  There’s a flavor of pity in what the elder who wrote 1 John said: “Whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has brought on blindness.” [1 John 2:11]  Disdain is not appropriate for someone who is blind; feeling sorry for a person who is stumbling in darkness is more fitting. 

            Perhaps we empathize with those Tennessee Christians, worshiping in their 112-year old white frame church.  And that is most fitting of all, because we’re in the same family.  Not the family of stewards of old white churches, but in the much broader family of…sinners.  Yup.  Perhaps you’ve heard the saying that “The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners.”  And that’s what that church in Tennessee was, and that’s what we are, a hospital for sinners.

            Oh, it’s a hard thing to own up to, isn’t it, this whole sinner business?  We don’t really much like calling ourselves sinners.  And maybe there is good reason to resist the label of sinner.  Marcus Borg, who was one of the teachers in the “Living The Questions” DVD series we used during Lent, talks about how the Christian church may have overemphasized sin as the basic human problem during the last millennium or two.  He points out that there are other biblical stories that can help us frame the basic human problem that have been neglected.  The story of the Exodus defines the human problem as bondage or oppression, and the solution as liberation.  The story of the Exile defines the human problem as being a stranger in a strange land, and the solution as homecoming.  Borg rightly notes that not all human problems can be simply defined by personal sinfulness.  Some of our interfaith friends are rather puzzled by a Christian obsession with sin—in many churches the first order of business in worship is to confess, and has everyone been so awful by 9:30 in the morning already?

            He may be right that we lose some of the richness of our faith tradition if we are only, always about sin and the need for forgiveness.  On the other hand, the teaching that we are sinners is part of the rich tradition of our faith, and we’d lose something essential if we did not acknowledge our sin and seek the healing of forgiveness.  The philosopher Pascal once wrote, “There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who believe themselves sinners; the rest, sinners who believe themselves righteous.”

            Robert Short, who analyzed Charles Schultz’s characters in The Gospel According to Peanuts, suggests that Lucy Van Pelt has a tendency to think of herself as one of the righteous ones.  We can be grateful to her for playing this role, because self-delusion can produce some hilarious comedy.  Lucy and her brother Linus are standing around talking in one Peanuts comic strip.  Linus asks Lucy, “When you get big, do you want to be somebody great?”  She answers, “That’s an insult!”  “An insult?” he asks, puzzled, while she scowls.  And she says, “I feel that I’m great already.”

            “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” [1 John 1:8]  Of course, on one level, Lucy is right; she is great already.  We are made in the image of God, and we are precious.  But we are flawed.  We are, at least on the inside, like another of the Peanuts characters, Pig Pen.  You know Pig Pen?  He’s the kid who is always grimy, and everywhere he goes he kicks up a little cloud of dust and dirt.  We may look like Lucy on the outside, clean and smug, but on the in our hearts we harbor Pig Pen, permanently filthy.  That is one of the key insights of the Christian faith. 

            I love the way Schultz drew Pig Pen because he always had that little cloud of dust and dirt around him, even when he was standing still.  It’s a good image for personal sinfulness, because our own sin not only sticks to us but whirls and swirls around us, clouding our vision.  If you’ve ever been in a dusty place on a windy day you know what it’s like to get dirt in your eye—you can’t see a thing until your tears wash it out.  Our sinfulness obstructs our view of the world.  The good church folk in Tennessee probably let fear of strangers, or pride in their tidy sanctuary, get in their eyes when they voted to keep transients out of the church.  They couldn’t see them as the neighbors Jesus called them to love as much as they loved themselves. 

            Sin has more than a personal scale as well.  All these little Pig Pens walking around kicking up clouds of dirt create some big clouds as well.  I remember as a young adult learning one of the most horrifying lessons I’ve ever heard.  This was back in the day when the big thing we worried about was the possibility of nuclear war.  Carl Sagan and some colleagues in the scientific field did some computer modeling on what would happen after a nuclear war, and they coined the phrase “nuclear winter.”  Do you remember that?  Briefly, they theorized that the dust from ground detonation of nuclear weapons and the smoke from above-ground detonations would create a cloud of particulates in the atmosphere that would endure for months after a nuclear explosion.  The cloud would be so thick that the sun wouldn’t be able to penetrate it, and the earth below would be plunged into nuclear winter, with temperatures below zero for a long period of time freezing crops and other living beings on the surface. 

            This came to mind when I was thinking about the effect of social sin, the sins of human culture that we are enmeshed in.  Racism, for example, is a kind of atmospheric cloud that hovers over the human community, causing darkness, causing blindness in whole populations of people. Maybe racism was a cloud of sin over the church in Tennessee who didn’t want people who wouldn’t “fit in.” Sin is personal and it is more than personal.  A culture’s sin can block out the clear light of God’s love just as much as a personal and private cloud of sin can.    These cultural clouds of sin are vexing because we are born into them, we inherit them from our forbears. 

            Violet chews out Pig Pen in one classic Peanuts cartoon.  “Pig Pen, you’re a disgrace!” she says, hands on hips.  “Here it is, springtime, and the world is bright and fresh and new…and here you are with the same dirty old face!”  Pig Pen answers her with great dignity: “I look upon myself as a connecting-link with the past.”  They both make a good point.  Our sin, both personal and corporate, is a connecting-link with the past.  We inherited a lot of the dirt and dust that clings so closely to our souls.  Past sins and wounds help create the little clouds of dirt we kick up personally, as well as the thick clouds of darkness that hover over the human race.  It’s not just what we inherited, however--we keep on kicking up the dirt, every single day, both personally and as a human conglomerate.

            Violet’s assertion is equally true: “Here it is, springtime, and the world is bright and fresh and new.”  Newness is always a potential in the world God is continually creating.  And to what Violet observed I’ll add what the elder who wrote 1 John proclaims: “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all…the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining.” [1 John 1:5b, 2:8b]  The elder wants to assure the congregation he addresses that it is actually possible to walk in the light.  We do not need to allow the sin we inherit and the sin we create to come between us and the warm, strong light of God’s love.  God’s light is stronger than the dirty little clouds of darkness we so often stumble around in.  Listen: “If we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  Cleanse us.  Cleanse us.  I believe this promise is not only for the individual but for the community that confesses as well, be it a church or a nation.

            The church, this hospital for sinners, has a role to play in God’s effort to cleanse and redeem us.  By teaching that we are all sinners, the way is actually cleared for healing.  We do have to acknowledge to ourselves and each other that we have the same old dirty face that Pig Pen has.  But once that confession is made, we may hear the invitation to come clean.  We can encourage each other to notice the ways we are still stumbling in darkness, and point each other to the light, to the freshness and newness that are continually offered in God’s greening springtime.

            Here’s an image that expresses one of my hopes for the church.  Picture a kitchen in an old farmhouse.  It’s suppertime, and it has grown dark outside.  A bright golden light spills out from the kitchen window into the backyard.  The dinner bell rings.  The kid—that’s you and me, and all the friends we have yet to meet—comes in from where he’s been messing around outside.  Hands and face streaked and grimy, muddy feet leaving a trail across the linoleum.   Mama—that’s us, church—turns around, flour on her apron, cuz she’s been baking bread for dinner.  She looks at the little Pig Pen standing there.  But she doesn’t scream, “You are a mess!  What in the world have you been up to, you little scoundrel?”  Instead, she takes those grimy hands in hers, and gently turns them over, topside, bottom side, seeing the dirt under the nails.  And she says, “Why don’t you go clean up, son?  There’s plenty of hot water.  There’s a fresh towel by the basin.  And when you come back, we’ll light the candles and sit down at the table together and say Grace.”       

Craddock, Fred B. Craddock Stories Mike Graves and Richard F. Ward, ed.  St Louis: Chalice Press, 2001, p. 28-29