People Love Darkness

John 3:14-21

March 22, 2009

Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.

Our Gospel this morning is good news: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…God did not send his Son in the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

Can there be any better news among us than that God loves the world, that God doesn’t want to condemn the world, and that God desires to save the world? The Light of God has dawned upon us in Jesus Christ.

And yet today’s Gospel also proclaims the sad truth that “the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light.” Here we have the truthful tension that is at the heart of the good news/bad news that is Jesus Christ. The season of Lent is that season when the church tries to do justice to both sides of that good news/bad news. God loves the world, yet, for its part, the world loves darkness rather than light.

On my sabbatical to Israel last summer, I visited the Israel Museum in Jerusalem where they have the Dead Sea scrolls on exhibit. The book of Isaiah that is prominently displayed talks about the children of light and the children of darkness. To symbolize the children of light, there’s a large white dome with streams of water jetting on it, but to contrast the children of light with the children of darkness, there’s this stark dark, black wall. We may want to be children of light, but we somehow always end up being the children of darkness.

We can’t really see the light that dawns upon us until we are truthful about our love of the dark. We’ve got to be honest about the whole story. Remember that the story of Jesus’ relationship with us ended not with him being proclaimed the greatest teacher or a best friend, or a life-saving healer but rather with Jesus being condemned as a common criminal who had earned a humiliating death on the cross.

I know that it’s not particularly popular to put matters between us and God in this way. For most of you, this is not the kind of message you came to church for. And yet today’s Gospel lesson flatly declares that we love darkness rather than light. Though Jesus called us to live in the light, something deep within us hides from the clear light of the truth of the gospel and flees into the safe secrecy of the dark.

Lent, these seven-weeks before Easter is a time when the church talks about sin, death, and our human problem. We are people who love the darkness. We are the people who have just lived through history’s most bloody century. There has not been a generation that didn’t have to face the threat of war. Bernard Madoff is only today’s criminal who cheated thousands of people of their money; there will be more selfish people in the future. People are being scammed when they are facing the foreclosure of their homes—even when one is down and out, there’ll be some people out there who just love the darkness.

In this season of Lent, it is also the time when the church turns on a strong searchlight on our lives and exposes our true situation. We admit who we really are. We love darkness rather than light. We have this propensity to feed on the forbidden fruit and we are more comfortable at night.

God’s Searchlight

Contained in the lesson for today is one of the most familiar verses in the Bible, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” If you drive down a highway for a couple of hours, you might see the reference, “John 3:16.” We see it at football stadiums, printed on T-shirts and baseball caps. We don’t need the full quotation to know what the verse is. People have called this verse, a “mini-gospel.”

This verse has become emblematic of Christian salvation as a beacon in the night. It is a light shining for all to see. When I see all those quotations on banners or T-shirts at large sporting events, it is something like a wild array of lights, all dotted throughout the stadium, sparkling brightly for the camera and for everyone to see. As people who like the darkness, John 3:16 is the searchlight to find us in the darkness of the night.

The church’s notion of sin that which keeps us in darkness, like that of Israel before it, is peculiar. It is derived, not from speculation about the universal or general state of humanity, but rather from a peculiar, quite specific account of what God is up to in the world and how we respond to that. What God is up to is to have “covenant” with his people and for us, Christians, the covenant is the “cross of Jesus,” and the “Light” coming into a darkened world.

Christians believe that the only means of understanding our sin with appropriate seriousness and without despair is our knowledge of a God who manages to be both gracious and truthful. The light comes into the darkness and nothing the darkness can do to overcome the light.

Our situation is that we see our lives through a set of lies about ourselves, false stories of who we are and are meant to be, never getting an accurate picture of ourselves. But through the “lens” of the story of Jesus, we are able to see ourselves truthfully and call things by their proper names. Only through the story of the cross of Christ do we see the utter depth and seriousness of our sin. Only through this story that combines cross and resurrection do we see the utter resourcefulness and love of a God who is determined to save sinners.

Because of God’s peculiar thing for sinners, it is possible for us to confess our sin and still live in faith, hope, and love, knowing that even in our sin we are able to believe that “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37).

John 3:16, the mini-gospel reminds us that God loves this world that has been thrown into darkness by our unwillingness to respond to him so much that he sent his only Son to save us from the darkness. God’s Son came into the world for everyone who sees the light and believes may not perish anymore in darkness but may have eternal life with God.

John 3:16 is a bright circle of fire that sears through the muddy darkness and brings us clarity about the love of God and the saving work of Christ. If ever we are tempted to fall into the confusion of darkness—and this really means thinking that God does not love the world and the people in it—then this verse is our floodlight, a reminder of the unconquerable love of God.

Our Christian faith is reinforced by the dominance of the importance of light. We like it when we come to church on a Sunday and it’s actually sunny outside. We see God’s light in the world when our days are getting longer as we move toward Easter morning. The Christian community is like a group of travelers lost in the woods that sees the friendly burning of a fireplace in the distance. The believer is something like a ship at sea that occasionally finds himself or herself on tossed waters and suddenly spots a lighthouse through the fog. When the electricity goes out and we think there is no power, John 3:16 is the power switch. We echo Isaiah when we say that the “people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

John 3:16 is an expression of how we have received this God who has come to redeem the world. Lent and Easter also mirror this passageway from darkness to light. We make our journey through Lent to the light dawning at Easter. The disciples who gathered around Jesus to hear him teach fled into the night during his passion. They were nowhere to be seen when the sky turned dark and the sun turned black in the middle of the day. But within a few days, the rising of the Son would bring about another radiant dawn, a new faith, a new beginning, a new hope.

Are you ready to come toward the light of Jesus in his resurrection as you sit in darkness and the shadow of death?

Saving Light

How many of you watch Dr. Phil? Why do you think this Texas-direct, blunt-to-the-point-of-cruel talk got him such an audience? People are ready to be told the truth about themselves on national television, even when it hurts, because they know that, without getting to the truth, they won’t get life. Even if we don’t enjoy having the truth told directly to us, we do enjoy listening in as Dr. Phil tells the truth to someone else. Are you ready to tell the truth, honestly face up to the reality that you are still living in the world of darkness and you want God’s searchlight in Christ to find you?

Isn’t it curious that when we think of “evil,” we almost never think of anything within us? Evil is always depicted by us as an impersonal source outside ourselves—tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, and sickness. “The Devil made me do it.” Sometimes people say, “With all the suffering and evil in the world, how can I believe in God,” implicating God in our experience of evil. Yet Genesis depicts a world that was pleasant, innocent, sinless until that day when we arrived. Evil arises with the advent of humanity, not with God’s creation of the world. Jesus said that evil arose, not from the way the world is set up, but from what comes up out of the human heart (Mark 7:20).

Every year on the Thursday before Easter, we have our Maundy Thursday Tenebrae Service upstairs in the Fellowship Hall. Tenebrae means “a service of darkness.” We arrange the tables in the shape of a large cross and as each person reads one of the passion events of Jesus, a candle is extinguished until all the candles in the room are put out. What we did to Jesus was like being children of darkness. We sit in the darkness for a moment until one candle that was lit before the service began but hidden from sight is taken out to symbolize the Light of Christ. While we love darkness, the good news is that the Light of Christ shines in the darkness and the darkness will never overcome it.

When you came to church this morning you probably didn’t expect to hear about how bad we are. Church is about more than sin, but, by the grace of God, it ought not to be less than this. When we shine the light of Jesus Christ, shining upon us, we expose our great love of darkness.

The prophetic message of the church is to teach people that we are sinners. Think of the church as life-long learning in how to be a sinner. Sin is more to us than a periodic slipup. Sin is a problem we have between us and God. It is rebellion against the true sovereign, an offense against the way the Creator has created us to be. But as we honestly recognize our sinfulness of wanting to live in darkness, we are able to more fully understand and accept the grace of God captured in John 3:16.

Whenever Christians consider sin, we always begin with and ought always to be connected to the Christ who comes to seek and to save, to share meals and to heal the sick, to die and to redeem sinners.

The good news today is this—God loves the world, loves the world so much that God refuses to let our darkness stifle or overcome the divinely given light. The light shines in the darkness, our darkness. The light of God in Jesus Christ will finally bring us home to God.

Let us pray.