Clearing the Way for Unity

When I was 9 and in third grade, my class went on a very special field trip. We went to Land Between the Lakes. It was there that I went spotlighting for the first time. The park rangers took us through the dark – we were miles down a dirt trail through the woods. Suddenly we stopped and they turned on the floodlight. I remember how the deer froze, his eyes shining, locked on the light. In the darkness just a second before, his pupils had been fully dilated – the blacks of his eyes were as big as they could get – so that he could take in all the sparse light there was from the night sky. But when the light appeared, the deer was momentarily blinded. His eyes had to adjust. He couldn’t walk in the light.

John is writing to a divided community, remember. Some of the people who have left are following a teaching called Gnosticism. “Gnosis” means “knowledge.” Followers of Gnosticism claimed to have a secret knowledge, an inward knowledge of God, a unity of spirits. They spoke of God as light and earth as dark. They saw the earth and all things earthly, including our bodies as evil. So, anything you did didn’t matter because you did it in your body. It was as if they claimed that they didn’t need to adjust their lives in response to the light of God. Gnostics didn’t care for their bodies or the earth because they saw them as evil traps. What really mattered was your spirit, not your body. So, since they were only concerned with their spirit, they were only concerned with their relationship with God and not with other people.

John responds. God is light. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. We may have been walking in darkness and suddenly been blinded by the light of God, but we don’t just stand there! Knowledge of God doesn’t freeze us in place. We walk in the light. Just like the deer’s eyes had to adjust when we shone the spotlight at him, when we know God, our lives adjust. If we know God, says John, then we obey God. We keep his commandments. If we know God, then we walk in the same way Jesus walked. Belief and action must go together.

Geoffrey Wainwright is a British theologian and teaches at Duke Divinity School. He tells an incredible story about belief and action. During the Armenian Genocide between 1915 and 1918, in three years, 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Turkish forces. Homes were raided, looted, adults were murdered, children were abducted and abused. One of the young Armenian girls escaped. An officer had raided her home and killed her parents. He gave her sisters to other soldiers, but he had kept her for himself. But she escaped. She trained as a nurse, and in time “found herself nursing in a ward of Turkish officers. One night, by the light of a lantern, she saw the face of the officer. He was so gravely ill that without exceptional nursing he would die. The days passed, and he recovered. One day, the doctor stood by the bed with her and said to him, “But for her devotion to you, you would be dead.” He looked at her and said, “We have met before, haven’t we?” “Yes,” she said, “we have met before.” “Why didn’t you kill me?” he asked. She replied, “I am a follower of him who said, ‘Love your enemies.’”

She chose to walk in the light. She let the light of God adjust her life. And the way was cleared for mercy, for grace, for love of enemies. She believed and her actions showed it. Walking in the light is not a private stroll with God through Bradford pear trees bearing Christmas lights. Walking in the light is like being spotlighted in the darkness – just as the deer’s eyes had to adjust, our lives have to adjust. Walking in the light is walking in fellowship with one another; you cannot love God and hate another person.

And we all walk in darkness. John writes these words that are familiar to Presbyterians because they are so often used at the Call to Confession, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. If we say our lives are light, we are the only ones who don’t acknowledge the darkness in ourselves. We all fall. Have you ever been walking along and caught your toe and turned around to find out what tripped you? There MUST be a hump in that floor. I know I didn’t just trip over nothing. We have a tendency to point out the hump in the road that made us fall. Yes, I did it, but… I didn’t love my enemy, but did you see what that guy did? Do you know what kind of person she is? Have you ever tried to reason with him?

C.S. Lewis writes this about confessing his sins, “I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different. I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing. Forgiveness says, “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.” But excusing says “I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it; you weren’t really to blame.” If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive. In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites…”

If we confess our sins, Jesus is our advocate with God. “By Jesus’ blood” says John, Jesus, who had a real body like ours. It wasn’t an evil body. Jesus had flesh and bones and blood. Jesus was born and lived in a human body with blood, he wasn’t just a spirit in a costume that looked like a body, by his blood we are cleansed from sin. The light shines and our eyes adjust and the way is cleared for unity – unity with God, unity with one another. The light no longer blinds us. We are able to see and to walk in the light. Thanks be to God. Amen.