Walking in the Light

Beth Newman
April 23, 2006
I John 1:1-2:2
Walking in the Light

Ever-present God, who by the power of the Holy Spirit transforms us individually as a church to be your dwelling place, confront us here in the midst of our doubts, grant us your peace while we face our fears, and increase our trust that we may embrace life in all its fullness.  Speak to us now the word we need to hear, empowering us to be a unifying presence in our broken world.  Amen.

            When I was in the sixth grade, my two favorite things to do were to listen every Sunday after church to Kasey Kasem’s American Top Forty Countdown with my good friend Anne Blakely and to roller skate in my driveway.  I was a pretty good little skater. I could go forward and backwards, spin around, crouch down on one leg and stick out the other without falling over.  I fancied myself quite proficient, and I was not alone in that thinking.  Steven Elder, the cutest, smartest boy in the sixth grade class, lived right down the street from me, and so he would often drive by my house and see me in my driveway spinning and crouching and going backwards. He began calling me Miss Perfect.
            The thing to do at that time was to show up on Saturday mornings at the local skating rink. Everybody went and went, not so much to skate, but to see and be seen.  “Hey Miss Perfect!” called Steven Elder.  “Why don’t you come skating this Saturday?”  One would think I would have jumped at the chance.  I had the gear.  I had the skates that looked like a pair of sneakers, with the big fat toe stop at the tips.  I had the clothes, a pair of jeans and a bright blue T-Shirt with some kind of decal on the front, those really wide rainbow-colored suspenders, and a big, thick plastic comb for my back pocket.  I may have gone once or twice, but that was it.  There at the skating rink, other people were doing spins and crouches and sometimes even jumps. At the skating rink, there were older kids who skated better than I did.  In my driveway, by myself, I could be Miss Perfect.  But there, in the driveway, skating by myself, was the only place Miss Perfect existed.
            This passage from I John that we read this morning is the introductory portion of a letter, written to an early Christian community, and it seems that there were some in that community who thought they were perfect, who believed that they were without sin.  The letter really functions more like a sermon, written to a church living through some turmoil and even division.  The conflict, at the core, has to do with how that community understands who Jesus was, historically.  For it seems there is a large portion of believers who have been so captivated by the idea that Jesus was divine, that they have downplayed or even overlooked his humanity.  Jesus was divine, that’s all that mattered.  Any ounce of humanity he exhibited was nothing but an outer garment, like a layer of skin, that cloaked his divinity.  The author of this letter is intentional in countering these claims from the very first sentence.  “We declare to you what was from the beginning what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning this word of life.”  This Jesus was not some divine apparition wrapped in human clothing.  Jesus was real and even though divine, still just as human as you and me.
            Something happens when the focus is only on the divinity of Jesus, something that can be particularly harmful to the body of Christ.  When the church begins to believe that Christ was more divine than human, that he didn’t really suffer during the crucifixion, or that he wasn’t bodily raised during the resurrection, the church can easily make that same move as it looks at itself.  The church begins to see itself as sinless, beyond reproach, not in need of forgiveness.  We start living in our own little worlds of perfection.
            “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”   
These words of I John are often used as a call to confession.  The writer is doing some gentle reminding here, hoping to challenge the thinking that the people were pure and above sinning without alienating them.  “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 the 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.”
            Interesting.  Did you notice that the end result of this forgiveness we experience is not perfection, but rather fellowship?  Listen to the verse again: “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.”
God is the light.  We are called, not to perfection but simply to walk in that light, with one another, being honest about our own humanness, our own sinfulness.  In fact, this calling leads to some particularly grounded, one might say even ethical, conclusions.  As one writer puts it, “Those who believe that God is indeed light and who live in fellowship with God cannot possibly also live in darkness.  Their actions, in other words, must be consistent with the assertion that God is light. . . .  If fellowship has at its center the common affirmation that “God is light,” that affirmation must be one of action as well as intellect.  ‘God is light’ is not a theoretical claim, but a profoundly practical one.” 
            I wonder if I would have learned a lesson if I had made myself go to the roller skating rink more often.  I wonder if I would have figured out that it was much more important to be in fellowship with friends that to live with my allusions of perfection, all alone, in my driveway.  I wonder if these are some of the practical lessons we all learn when we come to church every Sunday, when we confess our sins, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday.  Even when we proclaim Jesus as Lord, even on the Sunday after we announce to the world that Christ is risen, we still must acknowledge our own darkness, our individual darkness and our corporate darkness, we also acknowledge the one who is light, and we, I pray, ultimately choose the relief of living with the truth instead of the stress of maintaining the illusion of perfection.
            Anne Lamott is a writer who lives in northern California.  She has written several novels, but she has also written autobiographically about her struggle with faith, her conversion, and what church has come to mean to her.  She grew up in California in the 60s and 70s, when it was cool to experiment with drugs bur uncool to believe in God.  In her early thirties she found herself struggling with an addiction and pregnant with a married man’s child.  She had already had one abortion.  She and the son she eventually had were embraced in a profound yet practical way by a St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Marin City, California.  In  her book “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith” she devotes a whole chapter to this subject: “Why I Make Sam Go To Church”
            Sam is the only kid he knows who goes to church—who is made to go to church two or three times a month.  He rarely wants to go.  This is not exactly true: the truth is he never wants to go. . . .  You might think that he was being made to sit through a six hour Latin mass.  Or you might wonder why I make this strapping, exuberant boy come with me most weeks, and if you were to ask, this is what I would say.  I make him go because I can.  I outweigh him by nearly seventy-five pounds.  But that is only part of it.  The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by. . . .  When I was at the end of my rope, the people at St. Andrew tied a knot in it for me and helped me hold on.  The church became my home in the old meaning of home—that it’s where, when you show up, that have to let you in.  They let me in.  They even said, ‘You come back now.’  My relatives live in the bay area and I adore them, but they are all as skittishly self-obsessed as I am, which I certainly mean in the nicest possible way.  Let’s just say that I do not leave family gatherings with the feeling that I have just received some kind of spiritual chemotherapy. But I do when I leave St. Andrew. . . . Sam was welcomed and prayed for at St. Andrew seven months before he was born.  When I announced I was pregnant, people cheered.  All those old people, raised in Bible-thumping homes in the Deep South, clapped.  Even the women whose grown-up boys had been or were doing time in jails or prisons rejoiced for me.  And then almost immediately they set about providing for us.  The brought clothes, they brought me casseroles to keep in the freezer, they brought me the assurance that this baby was going to be part of a family.  And they began slipping me money. . . . One of the most consistent donors was a very old woman named Mary Williams, who is in her mid-eighties now, so beautiful with her crushed hats and hallelujahs; she always brought me plastic Baggies full of dimes, nosed with little wire twists.  I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I’d remember that wonderful line of Blake’s—that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love—and  I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat, “Thank You.” 
            I have not even been at the church for three months yet, and I can already witness to how you all walk in the light in profoundly practical ways.  Children need to get to church, you go get them.  Seventy sandwiches need to me made for a luncheon, then you not only make them but wrap each individually so that people don’t get each other’s germs when handling them, need a donkey for Palm Sunday, get a donkey for Palm Sunday.  Trash needs taking out, pipes need fixing, bulletin needs typing.  All of this and many other unmentioned tasks, offerings in thanksgiving for the forgiveness we have received in Christ.  In all these ways we walk in the light of God.  Sometimes we trudge forward, sometimes we skip, sometimes we camp out by the side of the road until we get dosed up with enough spiritual chemotherapy to keep us going.  It’s harder, much harder, than hanging out at home skating away in our own proverbial driveways, because we show up and we can’t pretend that we are perfect, that we’ve got it all together, that we all aren’t somehow struggling with our demons and our darkness.  Eventually the truth about us will out.  And we will all be the better for telling it, confessing it, and realizing that it’s God’s job to be light, and our job to walk in it with each other. 
In a few minutes we will share in fellowship together around a meal.  When you go down stairs, and I hope you will stay even if you are visiting here, even if you didn’t bring anything to eat, when you go down there, take a look around.  That gathering, just like this one in this sanctuary, is not simply a social event, it is sacred Christian fellowship.  Here, in that common yet sacred fellowship, we are invited to live out our common humanity, not our illusions of perfection.  And not as strangers, not even as friends, but as family, brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus our Lord.  

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, Anne Lamott, pps. 99-101