John 1:1-18 "A Divine Balance" Scott Hoezee

In late-September, as some of you may recall, the Grand Rapids Press printed a Public Pulse letter-to-the-editor that I had submitted in response to the Rev. Jerry Falwell's snap announcement that what happened on September 11 was no more and no less than America deserved. We got what we had coming to us, Falwell declared, because America had turned its back on God by tolerating homosexuals and allowing abortions. Falwell made those comments on a cable show hosted by Pat Robertson. But as soon as there was an uproar of criticism against Falwell's remarks, Dr. Robertson quickly disavowed any agreement with Falwell's judgment, claiming that at the time of the interview, Robertson had simply "not understood" what Falwell was saying. (If you check the transcript of that particular installment of The 700 Club, however, you will discover that Robertson himself had said almost exactly the same thing even before his interview with Falwell began. When I pointed this out in an email that I sent to The 700 Club, I received nary a syllable of reply.)

In any event, after my letter was printed in the Press, a number of you expressed satisfaction that I had written something that needed saying in terms of pointing out that Rev. Falwell does not speak for all Christians. However, another result of that letter was my getting stuck onto the mailing list of a West Michigan man who has since then sent me several communications--mailings that are to the soul what anthrax can be to the lungs. In the first such delivery, I was assured by this pious-sounding man that "People who don't like Jerry Falwell do like homosexuals far too much. People who don't like Jerry Falwell do like that pervert Jesse Jackson." It went downhill from there.

Even an event as shattering as September 11 did little to change what, in America at least, has become a constant facet on our cultural and religious landscape: namely, the unhappy fact that many of the people who claim to love Jesus the most end up acting less charitably and less loving than those who claim not to believe in Jesus at all. Or as poet William Butler Yeats put it in his oft-quoted poem, "The Second Coming," "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." It's a kind of unhappy moral inversion: those who should have the best news to declare end up killing the good news by covering it over with screeds and diatribes that have a tendency to make non-religious people look like better, more loving, more broad-minded folks.

Of course, someone might well point out at this juncture that there is a real sense in which Christian people are not even supposed to be particularly tolerant or broad-minded. Our faith is quite specific and particular: every time we state the Apostles' Creed, as we will do again this evening, we set ourselves at odds with all those in the world who push for some squishy pluralism in which all faiths are said to be equally valid, equally in touch with some larger cosmic religious truth. To say, as we do, that Jesus is the only Son of God who alone is the way to salvation is to stake a claim that will cut against the grain of those who insist that everyone should adhere to a set of lightly held beliefs so that we can avoid all conflict and disagreements when it comes to ultimate matters of life, death, and salvation.

Those of you who came to church last Tuesday morning to celebrate again the birth of God's Christ did not come out through the snow and the cold because you thought the folks at Calvin Church have hold of a pretty good truth. No, you likely came here Tuesday, as you did today, because you believe in your heart that the Christian faith represents the truth--the truth of the gospel that brooks no rivals. This is the gospel truth that refuses to say to a person of another faith (or of no faith), "Yes, I'm sure that Mohammed or Shiva or whatever New Age angel you worship will do just as much for you as my Jesus will do for me." No, that's not the drill in traditional Christian churches such as Calvin.

At the same time, most (and I would hope actually that all) of us are also interested in avoiding a Taliban-like desire to persecute and wipe out those who recite different creeds from our own. Ever since September 11, President Bush and people like Mayor Gulianni have been bending over backwards to be inclusive at public events. The president has appeared at mosques and in the company of Muslim clerics as a way to demonstrate that Muslims are welcome in this country and that true Islam is not what Mr. Bin Laden makes of it. At a memorial service in Yankee Stadium some weeks back, Mayor Gulianni was flanked by clergy from every conceivable religion, each of whom delivered a carefully measured prayer or speech designed to make each faith appear as just one equally valid and true option among many. On the surface, one might conclude that there are virtually no differences worth talking about among those many different religious faiths.

This is a classic conundrum that is made the-more poignant in a society that guarantees freedom of religion. How can you stand up for your faith without compromising your beliefs through one of two equal but opposite extremes? Because on the one side you can diminish your beliefs by insisting on them so loudly and judgmentally as to eclipse the gospel's message of love and forgiveness. But you can also diminish your beliefs on the opposite extreme by being so politely inclusive as to make it appear that you don't have any ultimate truth worth talking about, much less proclaiming as the way all people should think.

How should we act as Christians? What kinds of things should we do and what kinds of things should we avoid as we attempt both to live the gospel and to proclaim it? Not surprisingly, the answer to that question is found in none other than the example of our Lord Jesus Christ. Twice in our passage for this morning the apostle John pegged Jesus as God's "One and Only" in that he came to this sinful world "full of grace and truth." Grace and truth. Now there's a divine balance we too rarely run across. Jesus is full of grace and truth, and apparently he's the only one--he's the One and Only who has ever pulled this off perfectly. But the rest of us find it difficult to get these two virtues up and running at the same time.

As I said in another sermon a few years ago (and even then I was borrowing heavily from Neal Plantinga), most of us tend to get stuck on either the grace part or the truth part of a combination that Jesus alone embodied perfectly. As my opening illustrations today have made clear, some people are passionately full of the truth, and we sometimes wish they weren't. They've got truth right down to their socks--so much so that in social circles as well as on religious matters, they will always tell you what they think even if it savages you. Some people don't care how you feel they just want to tell you what they think and if that brutally hurts your feelings, they respond, "Hey, I was just being truthful: her soup stinks!"

Others are radiant with grace, so much so that you can never get a straight answer from them--they're always hedging their bets, saying what they think you want to hear even if behind your back they may say something quite different. If you call them on this inconsistency, they'll throw up their hands and respond, "Hey, I was just trying to be kind and gracious, that's all. I don't want to offend anybody!"

In interpersonal relationships, these tendencies can be annoying and sometimes hurtful. But when you turn this loose onto the wider world, the failure to bring grace and truth together can have desperately bad consequences. In church history, those who have been fierce defenders of God's truth have used that ferocity to lead holy wars, crusades, and inquisitions in which they cut people's heads off if they so much as raised an eyebrow over the gospel's truth. One of the crusades in the Middle Ages wiped out a third of Europe's Jews, and all because the Jews would not embrace Christian truth.

Then again, there are others who seem to have grace all sewn up--people who would never shout a cross word at anyone. Yet these are people who hold God's truth so lightly you wonder if it has not slipped right through their fingers somewhere along the line.

A newspaper in Atlanta once reported that when a Catholic woman was marrying a Muslim man, they decided to split the religious difference and get married in a Methodist church, where the minister was only too happy to blend together Catholic Christianity with Islam to keep everyone happy. Similarly, a Christian ministerial association in Boston once welcomed a practicing witch into its fellowship since, as one Episcopal priest graciously put it, "We don't discriminate based on creed."

Again and again we see it these days: those who exude a grace unto forgiveness hedge the truth in order to be more inclusive. Meanwhile those who stand up the loudest for God's truth sometimes do it in such a mean-spirited, in your face, shrill tone of hellfire and brimstone that the very possibility of grace seems at best remote.

So what would it be like to be full of both grace and truth? What if you could stand like flint against falsehood and yet do it in such a way that the grace of God fairly leaked out of your every pore, thus drawing offenders to you instead of scaring them away? What would that be like? John 1 says it would be like God. But how difficult it is to display that rare combination of grace and truth! Yet Jesus did and through that, John says, we have seen God's glory, the glory of the One and Only genuine article!

Somehow it had to be this way. Think about it: if Jesus had come bearing only the truth of God's ways, then who could have withstood his advent? Just about everything in this world is shot-through with rank evil. If Jesus had come with just the sword of truth strapped onto his belt, he would have had to wipe out the lot of us. Then again, if he had come with only grace, he would have had to let everyone off the hook, but then there would have been no engagement with sin and evil and so no cosmic change for the better. There would have been no cross but then again no resurrection, either.

No, Jesus needed grace and truth to pull salvation off. But it was no mean trick. Even John sets us up to see how difficult this must have been when he sorrowfully reminds us that although the entire world was made through Jesus, when Jesus came down into this world, it did not recognize him. That's tough to take. The Creator of all life steps back onto the stage of his creation, and we know him not. "Who did you say you were?" the whole world asked of Jesus. And how that must have hurt. Had he been full of raw truth alone, he could have brought the whole crushing reality of God crashing down upon our heads. However, the world wouldn't get saved that way. Instead Jesus needed to bring the truth into our clueless hearts but with grace--a grace that could wipe away what is wrong to make room for what is right. It is grace that clears the space for truth.

It's something of a miracle that he pulled it off at all. Yet he did. But the miraculously difficult nature of this divine balance does not let us off the hook: we still need to work hard at incarnating grace and truth within ourselves, too. How can we do that? We need to admit that this is at best difficult. Still, we can list a few considerations of things to keep in mind if we are to treat others the way Jesus treated the world.

First, I think we need to stop being so surprised that we live in the midst of a sinful society. Perhaps that seems merely obvious, but time and again high profile Christian leaders seem just shocked, taken aback, aghast to find that there are people in this country who don't think along Christian lines. So when folks like this encounter sinful patterns of thought or activity, their shock and disdain sometimes cause them to lash out in an angry judgment fueled by surprise.

Jesus had no such delusions about the world into which he came--he was never startled over sin, though here and there he was astonished to encounter strong faith! But that's why Jesus was able to present the world God's truth with grace. Jesus knew up front that there would be no getting through to the world--and certainly no saving of it--unless the truth was so redolent of grace that people knew they could come to that truth and be forgiven at the same time. They could come to the fire of God's truth yet without getting burned up in that fire the way a moth disappears in a puff of smoke when it gets too close to a candle on your deck some summer evening.

Part of the way Jesus accomplished this was by telling parables that were far more often about the surprise of grace than about the fires of judgment. As I said in another sermon a while back, very few people accused Jesus of being too harsh. Quite the opposite: many thought Jesus was soft on sinners to the point that the legalistic morality police (the Pharisees) saw him as a threat. How often are Christians today accused of being too soft?

So first we should not be shocked to find sin all around us and second we should approach the world with both a grace-full truth and a truthful grace. But thirdly, and related to these, is a warning against politicizing the kingdom. As Philip Yancey has pointed out, some elements of the church have seized on politics as a way to bring the kingdom. But political clout, by its very nature, always runs the risk of smothering love and humility. As Christians, we can and we ought to be involved to promote goodness and truth in our wider society. However, if the methods by which we do that squelch the love of God, then we betray the kingdom instead of witnessing to it.

Fourth and finally, in our wider society but also here among us within the church community, we need to heed Neal Plantinga's advice and recover the lost art of rebuke. The Bible seems to assume that among God's people rebuking one another will be fairly common. However, the Bible does not envision this as a nasty, negative process but as a loving, upbuilding one. The difference, according to Scripture, is in one's approach. In our day of shouting matches and in-your-face confrontations, we need to recover the ability gently, quietly, lovingly, and privately of reminding one another of the truth.

Of course, we should recognize that we live in a society that has become so paranoid of moral absolutes, that even a whiff of our having a firm opinion will lead some to reject us outright as narrow-minded neo-puritans. We can't do much for folks like that, except perhaps to walk away quietly and hope that some day their eyes will be opened. The sheer fact that we are traditional Christians will be enough to offend some people. If so, that's not our fault. However, we still need to make certain that it is not our arrogant, ungracious presentation of the truth that causes the offense.

A saint, C.S. Lewis once wrote, is a person who makes God believable. But most saints do that not just by being nice or by mouthing a lot of sugary, pious-sounding phrases. No, we make God believable by living among our neighbors the way Jesus did. And according to John 1, the key way to do that is to display that miraculous blend of grace and truth. Then they will know we are Christians by our love but also by our loving proclamation of God's truth. Only then will this sin-sick world once more gain a glimpse of the full glory that comes from God's One and Only. Amen.