The Lutheran Hour
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"Community and Conversation"
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Text: John 1:1
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In 2008 National Public Radio aired a story about a summer camp called “Camp Inquiry.” The camp program was managed by a secular humanist group, and it was designed to help teenage kids explore their doubts and to contemplate a universe without God. “Evangelicals have their camps, Catholics have their camps,” says one of the adult counselors. “We believe that there needs to be an alternative for students who are kind of exploring other options.” Because, he says that “people who believe in reason and not God are among the fastest growing groups in America today.”
Most of the youth at this camp describe themselves as either atheist or agnostic, but there was one 15-year-old boy at camp that week, a young man named Troy, who was in the minority. In one of the discussion groups, Troy admitted to his fellow campers. “I call myself a Christian, but if I get proof that there is no God, that Christianity is sort of like a wild goose chase in a way, then I would completely abandon it.”
A girl in the group named Bria rushes to assure him that there is no God. “I think if God really, really, really wanted us to know for sure that He existed, then He would make daily appearances like, oh, it’s 3:15, God time.” Some of the campers chuckle at this, but then the NPR interviewer breaks in and asks the group a question. She says, “One reason people believe in God is because they don’t like to think that when they die, it’s all over. Is this something that bothers you or you’re okay with?” Chloe, one of the girls in the group says that when she was nine, she started thinking about her own death. “It’s kind of scary,” she said. “I stayed up the whole night because that’s all I was thinking about.”
The group falls silent as Jared, one of the quieter but more confirmed atheists in the group speaks for the first time. “I’m terrified of not existing,” he says, “and I’m kind of stuck there. I don’t know what else to think.” There’s an awkward pause in the discussion. Then the adult leader breaks in. “But here you all are skeptical of the afterlife, but you’re not alone in a room just obsessed with it, you’re at Camp Inquiry, having fun.” His words hang in the air for a moment. “Until now, we were having fun,” says another teen.
I suppose it’s good to know that some things are the same in all youth summer camps. I also suppose it’s a strange way to start a Christmas Eve program, right? But what is Christmas, if not a response to this, a response to the very human desire for God to show up? What is Christmas, if not assurance that God is really there? What is Christmas about, if not the promise of God’s presence for us in Jesus Christ? If our Christmastime meditations can’t or won’t speak to real doubts, real questions that people have today, if it’s just a wild goose chase for brighter lights and better parties and trending gifts, if it’s just the way we cope with the cold and the dark through sentimental music and excessive alcohol, then we’re better off without it. We do just as well with a generic winter holiday that so many people settle for. But if you want something more, something grounded in a story that’s bigger than you, something engaged in a centuries-long conversation, something caught up in a community that transcends our current trends, I invite you to linger with me just a moment.
Listen to this ancient biblical text that speaks to the source of Christmas, to the point in time when God did show up. This week, this passage that we’re about to hear is going to be read in houses and sanctuaries, hospital rooms, jail cells, meeting places of every kind all around the world. It comes from a 2,000-year-old biography of the most talked about human in history, Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish Man who is said to be the long-awaited Messiah, the Christ, the Savior of the world. This account of His life was written by one of His first followers, a man named John.
Listen to these excerpts from the opening chapter: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him, all things came to be and nothing came to be without Him. What came to be in Him was life, and His life was the light of humankind.
“The light is shining in the darkness, but the darkness has not grasped it. The true light, the light who gives light to all people, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not know Him. He came to His own, but His own people did not receive Him. But to those who did receive Him, to those who believe, to those who are trusting in His Name, He gave them the right, the authority, to become children of God. Children born not by blood, not by a human decision, not by a husband’s will, but children born of God. And the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us, set up His tent among us, and we have seen His glory, the glory of the One and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. No one has ever seen God, but God, the One and only Son who is at the Father’s side, He has made Him known.”
This opening to the biography of Jesus, the Gospel of John, reveals important matters about God and humanity that may help explain why God doesn’t just appear in the sky at regular intervals to prove His existence to us. And that He doesn’t, isn’t proof of His non-existence, but only proof that He is not our pet, that He doesn’t heel at our command. See, God reveals Himself not as we demand, but as He chooses, first, because of His character, second, because of our human condition, and third, because of God’s calling for us.
Let’s talk through these three points in turn: God’s character, our condition, and God’s calling for us. First, God’s character. John 1 tells us that God is communal and conversational. What’s the opposite of that: isolated, withdrawn, solitary, recluse? God as revealed by Jesus is none of those. God is a conversational God. “The Word was with God in the beginning,” John says. God has never been a silent, solitary individual. God has always been in a lively conversation, in a relationship, an eternal community that Christians have called the Trinity.
Now, the word Trinity isn’t in the Bible, but it’s a helpful way to describe God as revealed by the Bible. It means that there is relationship in God the Father with the Son at His side and in the Spirit they share. God is a God of community and conversation. So we shouldn’t imagine God like a man who lives alone, who might draw back the curtains every so often and wrap on the window and say, “Hey guys, I’m here. Don’t forget to believe in Me.” God is more like the builder and owner of a large house, a mansion, called the universe. And He’s invited us, His human creatures, to come and live with Him and His Son in the life of His Spirit, to be adopted sons and daughters of God forever.
God doesn’t just want us to believe that He exists. God wants us to trust Him, to talk with Him, to live in Him. Because God is a God of community and conversation; that’s His essential character. But this raises a question about our human condition and relates to that question why God doesn’t just visibly appear on demand to prove His existence. Because when God has visibly appeared at key moments in history, it hasn’t gone well. The book of Genesis reports that when God showed up in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve hid from Him. Now, it wasn’t like that at first when He first created them. Genesis gives us a sense that God had been showing up regularly for them: going on walks, conversing with them, naming the animals, and so on. But then, something changed. This first pair of humans decided that they didn’t really need God. They didn’t want God. So God’s presence became a threat to them, haunted them with the consequence of their choice.
This comes up in chapter 3 of that biography of Jesus, the Gospel of John, which comments, “This is the verdict: The Light has come into the world, but people love darkness rather than the light.” See, when the light came, we ran and hid like frightened orphans, hiding in dark closets in a big, scary mansion. Somehow, and this is a mystery, the Bible doesn’t fully explain: humankind, all of us were seduced by the darkness, enslaved in it. So that even when God’s Word, God’s Son, became flesh and was born among us, even when God appeared visibly, the darkness in us could not grasp who He really was and why He was there. Hiding in the dark, we thought He was there to hurt us because His light is so bright, so truthful, so exposing that we just kept hiding. We killed the Light. We had Him crucified.
Of course, all this happened specifically in first-century Israel among ancient Jewish people and Roman people. But it concerns us, all of us, because we were there in a sense when Jesus was executed on a Roman cross. And in that moment, God met us in our deepest darkness to take it from us, to show us His heart, His love for us. He came to be truthful with us; He came to have hard conversations with us; He came to expose us, but not to hurt us. In His death, Jesus came to give us life, to invite us into His house, into His conversation, into His community.
John wrote this biography about Jesus for us to read 2,000 years later because after Jesus died, he and many others saw the light shining again. The darkness could not overcome it. Jesus had risen from the dead just as He promised to displace that darkness in us, to reconnect us to the light so that His light can shine on others.
To review, we’re talking about why God doesn’t just visibly appear like a supernatural spectacle in the sky every day at a set time like the light show at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. First, because it would be contrary to His character. God isn’t the kind of God who’s setting Himself up as a tourist attraction, but rather a loving Father who sends His Son and His Spirit to adopt us as His children. And second, the orphans that He wants to adopt in their current condition are afraid of Him. And for good reason, because in our distorted condition, God’s light is a threat to our existence. So God found a way to meet us where we are in the darkness, in His death on the cross.
And third, another reason why God doesn’t just visibly appear on schedule is because of our human calling. It’s always been God’s intention for us humans to be His visible image, His representatives on earth, and not primarily as individuals, but as a community of humans in conversation with Him and with each other. God’s Word Jesus entered our human community, brought us the light, brought us into the conversation because God wants to be found in human relationships, because He wants us to value relationships as much as He does. This has always been our calling. God wants His eternal light to shine through the human community connected to Jesus so that we together can give light and life to the whole creation forever.
We started this conversation with questions about God’s presence and apparent absence in the world. If you have questions like this, I can’t offer you an argument to win you over. But I can offer a conversation for you to be part of, a community you can join. God, as He has revealed Himself in Jesus, doesn’t want to be found up in the clouds or in a private spiritual experience or in a philosophical debate. God wants to be found in the human community, gathered in the Name of Jesus, and in the conversation connected with Him.
So what would it look like for you to be part of this?
To illustrate, I’ll close with a story about my friend Nathan. Nathan’s a single guy. He’s in his 30s, same generation as those young people we heard about earlier from the NPR program from 2008. I met Nathan years ago through a network of small churches in my city. I remember Nathan well because the children cheered the loudest when his name was called. It was at a Christmas party for a ministry I had just started serving with called “Christian Friends of New Americans.” The goal of the ministry is simple: It’s for followers of Jesus to connect with refugees and immigrants in our city by extending friendship to them in Jesus’ Name.
Nathan, when I met him, had already been volunteering with Christian Friends of New Americans for four years in their afterschool tutoring program. That means that once or twice a week for four years, Nathan was driving all over kingdom come to pick up these children from old brick apartment buildings and multifamily flats where refugee families tend to be resettled in our city.
For four years he’d been praying to God for patience, alongside a handful of other volunteers. Forty or fifty energetic children from eleven different birth nations were crammed into another old brick building, a dilapidated storefront they had purchased and renamed “The Peace Center for New Americans” to use as a space for free medical screenings, English classes, after afterschool tutoring, where Nathan along with others helped students focus on sounding out English syllables or remembering the steps of long division, even while a raucous game of soccer spontaneously started in the hallway.
Nathan had been invited into this ministry four years ago by Pastor Brad. Nathan had just graduated from college with a chemical engineering degree. He got a job at a local chemical plant and found an apartment in the city. He was exactly the demographic you’d expect to be doubtful about God. When Nathan was only nine, his dad had died of brain cancer. And his dad’s absence has left a void in his life that he still feels today. Because of this, he has every reason to doubt God, to believe that God is absent, non-existent. But Nathan’s mom kept them connected to their local church. And after his dad died, some men from their congregation connected with Nathan and his siblings to serve as surrogate fathers.
And so when he moved into the city to start his new job and saw that there was a church within walking distance from his apartment, he went one Sunday. And that’s where he met Pastor Brad. Pastor Brad talked to Gloria, an elderly woman in the congregation. He nudged her to sit with Nathan that morning, so he wouldn’t have to sit alone. Gloria became like an adopted grandmother to Nathan over the years. Thirteen years later, just this last month, Nathan attended Gloria’s funeral at that same church, which continues to be his home church, and the source of that connection with that ministry for refugee children, the ones who cheer for him when the volunteers are thanked and his name is called every year at the children’s Christmas party.
Nathan, getting to know the kids over the years, wonders if they’re cheering, partly because they’re just looking for an excuse to be loud and let off some energy. It’s probably true, but it’s also true that they cheer because they know Nathan. They have come to know him through brief exchanges over dinners at the Peace Center, on rides home after tutoring, or during an improvised soccer game in the hall, through this service offered by a network of local churches who gather each week to worship in the Name of Jesus, in this community and conversation where God loves to be found. And if for whatever reason you can’t or you’re not ready to join your local Christian community, we’ll be back here for you next week to continue the conversation. Merry Christmas! God bless you! We love you! Amen.
No Reflections for December 24, 2023
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“Son of God, Which Christmas Is It?” by Jaroslav Vajda & Carl Schalk. From The Marvel of This Night by the American Kantorei (© 1996 Concordia Publishing House)
“O Jesus Christ, Thy Manger Is” by Paul Gerhardt & Kenneth Kosche, performed by the Kammerchor of Concordia University-Wisconsin.
“Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.