Revelation

John 1.12-13

Preached Canberra Baptist Church, 8th January 2006

But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

Shopping! For some people the mere mention of the word is exciting. Wandering through the bright and glamorous spaces of the malls – or the welcoming and intimate favourite shops you may have. Feeling the power in your pocket of those crisp new notes or the well-worn plastic card. Finding a bargain and coming away thinking that you may be one-up on Myers or DJ’s. For some people it is ‘retail therapy’ for others its the most efficient way of making decisions and distributing goods: price and value are weighed up in the mind of the customer and a rational choice is made. It’s just the best way of running an economy. Whatever the case, shopping is one of the pervasive experiences of modern life and the process of shopping, the principle of the market, is spreading through much of our public policy and into many areas of everyday life. “User-pays”, and “freedom of choice” have as much to do with life as they do with economics.

Falling in love! Some of us might be in love now: not just ‘loving’ – that gentle and sustaining commitment that many couples in this church share. I’m not talking about that. Being IN love, the first, fine, careless rapture of desire, that ‘can’t sleep at night’ sort of lovesickness, that sense of wonder that I could feel this way about someone else and that they can feel the same about me. You feel that this is something more wonderful than anything you have previously experienced but also feeling that you don’t quite deserve it. There is a sense of floating mysteriously above the level of everyday. A glimpse of the beloved, or a phone call can make everything seem different. Things are slightly out of control, and you in the grip of something greater than yourself, and oh-so-vulnerable to the feelings and actions of the other.

A diagnosis of a life-threatening illness! Being told that you have some disease for which there is no cure and which may at some point in the near or distant future take your life. From the world of the shopping mall where you compute the price and choose the product, and get a guarantee, you move into the world of hospital where instead of a product you have to assess probabilities. You make choices without knowing what the price will be and there are no guarantees. All of life changes in a twenty minute consultation.

Mastering a subject or a skill! The sudden ‘aha!’ experience in a lecture or reading a book when a flash of insight brings new understanding. The slow and steady accumulation of skill until you graduate or get admitted or whatever the ritual is and come to feel that you really do know the field in which you’ve been training: that you have got the skills or the qualification that you needed and can now get on with the job.

Winning the lottery! Your numbers drop from one of the ingenious machines that manages life’s brighter chances. With a puff of air and the tiny force of gravity on a ping pong ball you are suddenly a multi-millionaire and life changes in ways you cannot begin to imagine. Tattslotto is run by the Estate of George Adams: one of their advertising slogans is “George, take me out of here!” Winning the lottery is about leaving an old life and beginning something radically new, full of possibilities that were unthinkable only a minute ago.

Five experiences, common or rare, that might affect any ordinary Australian: shopping, falling love, becoming sick, mastering a skill, winning a lottery. Five different ways of living really, of encountering reality, making decisions, experiencing oneself and the world. Let us think about a sixth one.

Coming to faith!

There are many ways of describing it: ‘Believing in Christ’, ‘Finding God’, ‘Conversion’, ‘Making a decision’, ‘Following the Way’. All these descriptions connect with different aspects of Christian experience and the theology that explains or explores that experience.

The New Testament asserts that faith comes through the action of God. As the prophet Isaiah proclaimed, God purpose for his servant is to be a light to the nations, to the Gentiles. Knowledge about God is not to be confined to the ‘chosen people’, to any form of religious club. It is not something for the initiated to pass on to their children. It is for ALL people and God will be the prime mover in revealing knowledge of God-self.

The gospel of John explores this in the prologue: the ‘light’ which reveals God to humankind has come in Jesus. Many reject him (even those who are ‘his own’) but to those who receive this ‘revelation’, who ‘believe in his name’ he gives the power to become children of God, ‘born not of blood, or the will of flesh, or of the will of man, but of God’.

This is the initiative and the work of God! It doesn’t come about through human cleverness, or intellect, or desire, or discipline. It is God’s work and people are invited to respond to it.

It is almost completely alien to a society like ours which is so influenced by the paradigms of the market (or shopping) and competency (or learning). John says we come to faith through ‘revelation’, through God showing us something we could never have worked out for ourselves. It is not in response to our choice, or our will, or our thinking. It comes through grace, a ‘revelation’ of how much we and the world are loved, and what shape the ‘ kingdom of God’ is taking in human affairs.

Thanks to the ‘decision’ spirituality that we evangelicals have been exposed to, it does look superficially almost like a consumer choice: something that we ‘buy into’. The pervasiveness of ‘market’ metaphors in our society can affect the way we see our ‘coming to faith’. In the ways churches ‘compete’ for members, and ‘offer’ their message there is much of the marketing approach. This is death to any real understanding of the gospel. Coming to faith is a matter of encountering a revelation from God and responding, NOT making a consumer choice among various options. Consumers are empowered and the initiators in any sale: believers are overwhelmed by grace and are respondents to a powerful and loving God. The market is about balanced transactions and a fair price: the revelation of God in the gospel is about a gift beyond our deserving and our capacity to pay.

We can also be tempted to try to think our way into faith, a bit like learning a skill or a subject. Certainly the church has massive investment in education from Sunday Schools and baptismal classes to theological colleges. But these are aimed at forming us, and preparing us for encountering the revelation of a loving and active God, or helping us understand the wonder of what has happened in the encounter with God. All our social conditioning about education and competency can mislead us here. It is not so important to learn about religion as to experience grace. It is not so important to master theology as to encounter the God theology seeks to describe. Our worship together is not about education but about celebration: of experiencing celebrating God’s revelation in Christ. Theology comes after the event: “faith seeking understanding” as the classical formula expresses it.

Strangely enough, the other three experiences I described are in some ways similar to encountering the revelation of God. It is something like falling in love – finding oneself suddenly and undeservedly the object of a powerful love with all the associated feelings of being newly alive.

It is something like a life shaking diagnosis, in that one’s life is changed for ever by forces outside of oneself (although you have to say ‘yes’ to it). Old ways of experiencing life are suddenly stale and empty and new questions and priorities arise. It liberates joy, rather than dread, but the totality of a changed experience of life is there.

Experiencing a revelation of God is something like winning the lottery. There are new possibilities in life. You might feel like leaving work and doing something totally different. There is a sense of discovering a great treasure, something infinitely valuable that is going to change life forever.

This reality called ‘revelation’, of faith coming from God and us responding to it, is not one consumer option among many but the only option. It is not learned or laid hold of through our thinking processes. But this insight that faith is grounded in revelation also has some risks. It can sometimes twist and distort faith. In all our thinking about faith and our talking about faith with others we need to be aware of these distortions.

The first is the distortion that God only reveals God’s love and purpose for us in the language or the thought forms of the Biblical writers. Now the Bible is foundational for faith and it is our authority for discerning the revelation of God, but this does not mean that God speaks only in King James English as some think. It does not mean that God wants to annihilate Canaanite towns as the theology of some parts of the Old Testament asserted. It does not mean that God’s revealed will for the place of women in marriage or the church was fixed in the rules that were current in first century Asia Minor.

The second is the distortion that I (or we) have the definitive version of God’s revelation and the truth rests only with us. There are people who will say “the Lord has told me (or revealed to me) …” and proceed to persuade us to their point of view. This familiarity with the Lord sometimes masks a bid for power. HA Williams, the Anglican theologian has described the ladies prayer circle which met each week in his mother’s lounge room. They sat in a circle and gossiped over tea and cake and then rose and turned around and knelt down to pray. There, says Williams, “with their faces in the cushions and their bottoms in the air, they proceeded to give the Deity his instructions, as anyone felt led!” This kind of sad certainty can affect individuals and prayer groups and even whole denominations. But it is a distortion. Part of the wonder of glimpsing the revelation of God is that we know God is infinitely bigger than our pictures and concepts, and we can never own or control God or his word. God is never fully addressed nor encompassed by our prayers. “We limit not the truth of God to our poor reach of mind …”

The third distortion is the view that revelation and the faith it engenders has got nothing to do with thinking. We cannot think our way to faith in God since faith all comes from God’s initiative. Therefore thinking is useless, rationality doesn’t matter and faith is essentially irrational and taken on trust. Don’t ask questions – just have faith. If it doesn’t make sense – just believe. Especially don’t get side-tracked into theology. This is a distortion because we have been created as rational questioning beings. We can acknowledge that something beyond rationality is involved in God revealing the truth of things to us, without giving up the habit of thought. If God is wisdom and truth, then the ideas of truth and wisdom held in the human mind should be able to be conformed to that divine template.

Just how revelation and rationality intersect is a complex issue, but the main point is that they do intersect, they are related.

I’ve been talking about the structure of revelation, how it relates to coming to faith and how it confronts and conflicts with some of our cultural patterns. We are preparing to be a little more upfront about our faith, to talk about it with those around us. It’s important for us to understand some of the dynamics around faith and how it happens.

I haven’t spoken about the content of revelation. If faith is response to the revelation of God, and if it is God’s initiative and power that brings this about, why do we need to do anything at all? There were times in Christian history when this view was strongly held. God would save those who were destined to be elected – how dare we interfere or think we could do anything to be part of this process?

Yet what is the revelation? John says “The word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. … From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”

The revelation is something that we share, that we all participate in, that we have all received. Yes, it is God’s work, but it is work in which we have a place. The gospel is not just about things that must be revealed, it is also about things that must be witnessed, and it is to witness that we will turn to explore the human action in this story of grace.