There is an old story about a family consisting of mother, father, and small son who went into a restaurant. As they were seated at the table, the waitress sailed up. You know, the particular kind of waitress who moves as though she were the captain of a ship. She sailed up, pad in efficient hand, looked, and waited. The parents ordered. Then the boy looked up and said plaintively, “I want a hot dog.” “No hot dog!” said the mother. “Bring him potatoes, beef, and a vegetable.” The waitress paused for a moment, and then looked at the boy squarely and said, “Yes, sir. What do you want on your hot dog?” “Ketchup - lots of ketchup - and a glass of milk.” “One hot dog, coming up,” said the waitress and sailed off toward the kitchen. The boy turned to his parents said, “Gee, Mom, she thinks I’m real!”
Well, our children are real. Sometimes they are real headaches, but always a real responsibility, and always worth considering as real persons with real lives of their own. One reason that we are real is because God thinks we are real. He created all of us to be His children. We are made “in God’s image” as Genesis so quaintly puts it. However, over the centuries that image has become somewhat tarnished. Our original resemblance to God has become overlaid with all sorts of accretions across the centuries and that is why God saw fit to issue a new edition of what it means to be truly human. We call that new edition Jesus, the Christ. And Christ called upon us to become what we really and truly are: children of God. That process of becoming may be for us as radical as being born anew, as Jesus told Nicodemus, but it is precisely that for which we were created. And so we must move beyond Jesus’ words to Nicodemus, “You must be born from above,” to consider further words of our Lord in the third chapter of John’s Gospel. After telling Nicodemus about his absolute dependence upon the Spirit of God who moves about where He wills, bringing new life out of old, new light into darkness, Jesus says “those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” (John 3:21)
“Those who do what is true.” That’s a very peculiar use of words, isn’t it? We often think of a person doing what is right, but we don’t usually think of one doing what is true. For most of us truth is something which we believe, not something which we do. But this is a peculiar insistence of the Fourth gospel. The action word is “believing” not belief. Truth is what the whole Christian revelation is all about, but it is first and foremost a call to action. When Peter preached his first sermon at Pentecost, his audience did not say at the close of the sermon, “That was a nice sermon, pastor.” What did they say? They asked what they should do, now that they have heard the Word proclaimed. In the Fourth Gospel truth is not something which we believe, it is something upon which we act. And a truth which does not find its way into action is not a truth at all. The German language has a fascinating compound for the English word “fact.” They speak of the “Tat-wort,” or the “deed-word.” That is a good expression for Christians because for the Christian Faith deeds and words are inextricably entwined. It all began when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and it continues when that Word continues to become flesh and dwell within us. The reality is that fact is fact and truth is true only insofar as both are done. As St. Francis once said, a person “has only so much knowledge as he puts to work.”
Believing, in the Fourth Gospel is an act, an operation, something which is done not just with our minds, but with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength. Those who have seen the Light, John says, do the truth. One of the major mistakes the Church has made down through the centuries is making Christianity merely a matter of correct beliefs. Now, correct beliefs are important. It is a good idea to have as clear an understanding of our Christian Faith as possible. We are not asked to park our brains in the narthex when we come to church. But faith in the New Testament is not a matter of believing certain propositions about God and Jesus which may or may not be true. Faith really means “trust,” which implies a commitment of the whole self. This emphasis is also found in a remarkable passage in the First letter of St. John, “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” (I John 1:5-7)
Truth, then, according to the Fourth Gospel is something which is to be done. One of the finest books on Christian ethics ever written was penned by the ill-fated Bishop James Pike of he Episcopal Church, titled, Doing the Truth. Toward the end of his life Bishop Pike went off on some odd tangents, but in this little book, long out of print, he was right on target. Truth is something which is to be done, not merely to be believed. Martin Luther once said, “There is a believing in God which means I put my trust in Him, give myself up to thinking that I can have dealings with Him...such faith which throws itself upon God, whether in life or in death, alone makes a Christian.” In other words, our creeds must be backed by our deeds - else, what good are they?
During the terrible winter at Valley Forge attending the birth-pangs of our country, a government official arrived on the scene to obtain a firsthand report of the field situation from General George Washington. Entering into Washington’s tent the government man immediately began complimenting him on his ability to hold the army together under such difficult circumstances. “General Washington,” he said, “You are a great man, and an inspiration to us all.” Then, like Jesus who cut through all of the flattery of Nicodemus who came to Him by night telling Him what a great teacher He was, Washington, standing in the midst of his suffering troops, cut through the flowery words of the government functionary with one biting question: “Never mind all of that. Just tell me where you stand in relation to the cause which I represent.” Isn’t that just what Jesus said to Nicodemus on that night so long ago? Isn’t that what Jesus asks of each of us as we gather to worship and to sing His praises in our churches week by week? “Never mind all of that. I have but one question to ask you: Where do you stand in relation to the cause which I represent?’” “...this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” (John 3:19-21 NRSV) You see, there really are just two kinds of people, according to Jesus. There are those who believe, which means those who live according to the truth revealed to the world in Him; and those who do not believe, that is, who do not live according to that truth.
In the Fourth Gospel, “judgment” is not something which God does to us, but rather something we do to our ourselves. It is not something external, imposed upon us from without, but internal, exposed from within. John does not speak so much of an apocalyptic judgment which comes at the end of days, but rather of an ever-present judgment which is going on every day. We judge ourselves by the attitude which we take toward the Light which has come into the world in Jesus Christ. When light comes, it makes shadows. The imagery of light is provocative. Light reveals what is true and what is false. That which may look genuine in semi-darkness may be revealed as a forgery under the harshness of a bright light. Truth itself is a great divider of persons. We cannot be like the fabled college professor who once said that “Some people say that there is a God; others say there is not. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.” The Fourth gospel tells us that there can be no “mugwumps” when it comes to the Gospel. That strange term “mugwump” was coined to refer to the Republicans who bolted the party when James G. Blaine became its candidate for president in 1884. They were described as “mugwumps”; strange creatures who sat forever on the fence, as a college history professor of mine once said, “with their mugs on one side and their wumps on the other.” John says that we are either on the side of light or on the side of darkness. We were not created to live in the twilight zone between the two.
Our judgment, says John, is based upon our reaction to the Light which has come into the world. Jesus’ presence among us, in our world, is itself the judgment of God upon the world. God does not have to judge us; we judge ourselves by our reaction to Him. Our forebears in the faith usually pictured judgment as a Cosmic Courtroom with an anthropomorphic God sitting on a judgment seat at the end of time. The Fourth Gospel would have us see judgment not as something we happens at the end of time, but as something which is going on all of the time. Our reaction to Jesus is what judges us. There is the old story of the visitor to a famous art gallery who said to the attendant, after a cursory tour through the gallery, “Sir, I don’t think much of your pictures.” To which the attendant replied, very courteously, “Madam, the pictures are not on trial!” St. John reminds us that “....God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already...” (John 3:17-18) They condemn themselves. If, when we are confronted with Jesus, we see nothing lovely, nothing which attracts us to Him, nothing which bids us to become willing to forsake all else rather than Him, then, as William Barclay put it in his Daily Study Bible commentary on this passage, “that which was sent in love becomes a condemnation. It is not God who condemns...God only loves...we condemn ourselves.”
From time to time people in our churches become upset when church groups or pastors speak out against the sins of society: greed, racism, poverty, or war. I suppose that our proper response to them ought to be, “Can you tell me just where in the Gospels we are told that what we do is out of harmony with what our Lord told us to do?” Those persons who react in hostility toward Christ or toward those who are sincerely trying to follow Christ, are those persons whom John describes as being in love with the darkness rather than the light. Again to quote Barclay: “The terrible thing about a really good person is that he (sic) always has a certain element of condemnation in him.” Now, I am not talking about those self-righteous folks who make a hobby of pointing their fingers at other people and pointing out all of the sins and shortcomings of the world. The truly Christian person has no need to do that. By his or her very presence, the rest of us stand condemned. And our quick criticisms of such persons may well stem from our own sense of guilt about how far short we have fallen from the standard of Christ. Alcibiades, the spoilt Athenian genius who was a companion of Socrates, would say to his teacher, “Socrates, I hate you, for every time I meet you, you let me see what I am!” The person who is engaged in evil deeds, says John, does not much appreciate having a floodlight shine upon him. But, on the other hand, says John, “those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” (John 3:21)
In a previous sermon I dealt with the subject of being “born again.” I suppose the really big question which needs to be addressed to those who profess the new birth is, “What did you do the next day?” The new birth is supposed to be a prelude to a new life. I once heard the great Presbyterian preacher Ernest Campbell talk about the Prodigal Son who had returned home to be embraced by his father and returned to the family. The next day he walked out to the field and said to the hired hands, “I have been born again!” “Great,” said the puzzled listeners, and went on with their work. After a few days of this performance, repeated again and again, one of the hired hands might get tired of the whole thing and make a suggestion: “As long as you are home, would you mind helping out a little with the work that needs to be done about the place?” The late professor Umphrey Lee of Texas once preached a sermon titled “Saints Wanted.” He said that of course we should work hard at getting more people “born again,” and brought into the kingdom of God. But we are also faced with an even more difficult task, he said, “I incline to think that so far as our troubled world is concerned, the greatest thing that could happen would be for some of the babes in Christ’ to grow up.” He reminded his listeners, who happened to be Methodists, that one of the distinctive messages of the movement known as Methodism is not the new birth, but the “going on to perfection”...that is, growing up in Christ, living the new life we have professed to receive. Then he said, “When times are difficult as they are now, the church needs mature Christians, men and women who have come to full stature. Many churches waste their strength coddling their own members. Instead of being an army of the living God, they are simply divisions of a spiritual nursery. Ministers and officials have little time for extending the tents of Israel for they are kept busy chuckling religious babes under their spiritual chins to keep them amused.” Those words, spoken several decades ago, still make us squirm.
One problem with the word “truth” in Western Civilization is that the word is capable of at least two different meanings. There are at least two different kinds of truth. One meaning comes from the Latin veritas and means discursive truth, that which is discovered and verified by imagination, analysis, and thought. That is what Plato and Aristotle meant by “truth.” That is what the Enlightenment and the Renaissance meant by “truth.” But that is not what the Fourth Gospel means by truth. The Greek word is aletheia, literally, without a lethin, i.e., a veil. Truth is an “unveiled mystery.” Truth is Reality. That is what Jesus was talking about in the text we have under consideration. Truth is not merely something which one believes, but something which one is. Truth is not something to be believed. It is something to be done. It means being Real. At the beginning of this sermon I suggested that God, like the waitress in the restaurant, thinks we are real. God created us to be real. God called us to shuck off all of the accumulations and accretions of centuries of unfaithfulness, centuries of living in darkness, and become open and transparent to the light of God’s love as revealed in Jesus Christ. It isn’t easy, but that is our calling and our challenge.
Many people’s favorite children’s story is “The Velveteen Rabbit,” by Margery Williams. It is a children’s story - but vastly more than that. The hero is the Skin Horse. We are told that he had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. “He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed his seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces.” His wisdom came from having seen a long succession of mechanical toys that had passed through the nursery. They would come in all bright and shiny, and for a while would be the center of attention. Then in time the paint would fade and the mainsprings would break, and they would be tossed in the corner.The Skin Horse knew all along that they were just toys.
In a conversation with the Rabbit who was seeking to be Real, he says, “Real isn’t how you are made. It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you a long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.” “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse... for he was always truthful. “When you are real you don’t mind being hurt... generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints, and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real, you can’t be ugly, except to those who don’t understand.”
For Christians, to be real, is to allow ourselves to be loved by God, and to love God in return, which, according to St. John, means doing the truth. Then we can’t ever be ugly, except to those who don’t understand. Amen.