Witness

John 1.43- end

Preached Canberra Baptist Church 22 January 2006

Witness. There was a time when this work made some Christians quite excited, and made others feel a little uncomfortable. “Witnessing’ was what we were meant to do in the church. To some it became a passion. Others found it rather forced and unnatural. Being ‘religious’ in a zealous and proselytizing way did not sit well with our Aussie culture but it was something in the church that you were meant to do!

Bearing ‘Witness’ in the evangelical Christian sense was something of a bundle of expectations. Good ‘witnessers’ were able to blend personal testimony, an ability to quote Scripture, a rudimentary grasp of apologetics (that is being able to answer people’s objections to faith) and a readiness to be able to lead someone in a life-changing prayer of commitment. Some of the most enthusiastic exponents of this were a little objectionable: I have vivid memories of being accosted in lifts by earnest Christians eager to ensure I was one of the saved. I’m not surprised that many of the Christians I know find this kind of Christian presence very uncomfortable.

And this is not just because we’re lacking in commitment. Part of the reason for the discomfort is that, as we explored two weeks ago, we believe that the mystery of Christ, and consequent faith in Christ, is revealed by God through the work of the Spirit. Faith can only really come in response to that work of God. What then can human beings do? Perhaps we should just leave it all to God? There have been times when parts of the church felt very clearly that this was appropriate. To be openly evangelistic was to be a very coarse kind of Christian, who didn’t have the high and exalted view of the sovereignty of God who alone could bring about the obedience of faith.

I drew my text on ‘Revelation’ (8 th January) from John’s gospel: of all the New Testament John emphasizes the role of Jesus as the Revealer. Throughout the gospel you find little markers that say ‘this was the first (second…) sign that Jesus performed and thus revealed his glory’.

And yet, although John above all the NT writers holds up the centrality of revelation, he also holds a clear and powerful presentation of the importance of witness, of human testimony to what has been revealed. What does John tell us about witness? The story of Philip and Nathanael gives us a little window into his theology of witness.

This story is part John’s early narrative in which the disciples are called to follow Jesus. The classical form of the call narrative is Jesus addressing someone “Follow me”. In John’s gospel this happens first to Philip, who comes from the same town as Andrew and Peter who have already been called through a different form of words. Philip shares the news with Nathanael – “We have found him about whom Moses and the prophets wrote, Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth”. Here is the essence of witness: Philip reports what he’s found in terms that link it with the spiritual expectations of his people. It’s a simple report, linking a man (Jesus) and an expectation but not overly burdened with argument, or attempts to convince.

What follows is a dialogue that teaches us about the nature of witness. It is a simple tale in three parts: Nathanael’s response, Philip’s reply and the conversation between Jesus and Nathanael.

The first part of the dialogue is a question that has passed into the treasury of English proverbs. Nathanael’s cynical reply to Philip is “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” Rivalry between towns is not new, but this is cynicism as pure as it comes. Nathanael thinks Nazareth is ‘the pits’, a place entirely devoid of promise, incapable of fostering anything positive or of any value. It is completely without potential, a blot upon the geography of Palestine, and a black-hole in the moral landscape of Israel.

Whatever Philip is trying to communicate is met with almost total cynicism. Here is a key fact of experience: Witness usually occurs in a context of cynicism and distrust.

The Nathanaels of today wearily mutter “Can any good thing come out of the church?” We live in a society with a strong skepticism about the Christian church. The media project Jesus: All about Life is built on market research that says Australian people don’t want have anything to do with the church, but they are interested in Jesus. This shouldn’t surprise us. I think Nathanael was quite prophetic: perhaps wherever Jesus lives, whatever human shape is taken by the community that carries word Jim, will be treated with suspicion and cynicism.

Certainly the community that owns the name of Jesus is a community of sinners. There are many who have grown up in the church with strong personal experiences - experiences that have been good and bad! You don’t have to look far among your work colleagues, or even some of those you grew up with in the church, to see this kind of disillusion.

But it goes deeper than this. As stated in my induction to this pastorate, the church is ministering today in a field of blood (Acts 1.19), in a context of well publicized incidents of abuse. We have been so surrounded by scandal the world around us tends to say: “Can any good thing come out of the church?”

We must take this seriously and respectfully. There are many, many people who have been hurt by the Christian church and by her ministers! It is very easy to disappoint people and to wound them. In my work in welfare I came across so many people who were carrying baggage from their times in the church.

We cannot overlook the impacts of abuse by clergy and Christian carers in our institutions in the past. We have to live with the periodic pronouncements of some of our more colourful colleagues, such as brother Pat Robertson, who has recently said that Ariel Sharon’s stroke is the punishment of God because he was seeking peace with the Palestinians. He’s since apologized, but these snippets of news stories, and the occasional silliness that many of us religious people are capable of, does inform the context into which we speak. We cannot ignore it or avoid it.

This can all be depressing and disempowering. I am reminded of the man who woke up and said to his wife, “O I can’t face church this morning, let’s stay in bed” His wife said, “Why what’s wrong with church?” “The pews are hard and it’s full of hypocrites and the sermons are long and boring!” “But darling”, said his wife, “you’re the minister!” We can all get a bit like that, but knowing that this cynicism, this wariness confronted even Jesus can be very empowering! He laboured too in stony and unreceptive ground, dealing with the glib put-downs of jaded young men. He did not wait for the perfect context, for the convenient time, but engaged in his important ministry – and so should we!

The second element of this story is the response of Philip to Nathanael’s negative attitude. He doesn’t buy into the cynicism, he doesn’t defend Nazareth or Jesus, he doesn’t go into any theological exploration of the issues involved. In the face of “Can any good thing come our of Nazareth?”, Philip simply says: “Come and see!”. The essence of the work of witness is simply to tell people about your experience and invite them to come and see. In John’s gospel Jesus does the work of revealing God and the meaning of faith and life. What the disciples do is testify to their experience and invite others to draw near to it.

In John chapter 9 we see this in action. One Sabbath day Jesus takes spittle and mud and heals a man who has been blind since birth. The serious theologians amongst the Pharisees try to understand how the healing fits in with their understanding of reality. They ask the man who was healed what happened and he tells them the simple facts. They have heard his testimony, but what has happened to him does not fit within their categories about God and faithfulness. They call him back again and tried to get him to affirm their theology: “Give glory to God. We know this man is a sinner.” In other words: let this event be understood and framed by our theories about the nature of God and the ordering of the human community into sinners and the holy. The man answers: “I don’t know whether he’s a sinner or not. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” This man bears witness, in the truest sense – he tells of his own experience. He refuses to be drawn into theories but simply tells it as it is for him.

The essence of witness for John is not about elaborate theorizing or putting theological propositions, it is testifying as to your own experience. This is confirmed in the opening of the first letter of John:

“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 the word of life – this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us.” 1 John 1.1-2

Sometimes our misguided and complicated approach to Christian witness is about makes it difficult for us to access the actual experience of Christian faith. We get so tied up in the theology of it, in the religious forms and language, that we lose touch with our actual spiritual experience. If we are people of faith, what actually happened to bring us to that commitment? What does it mean now, and how do we experience God day by day?

If we are going to say “come and see”, there has to be something to see. IS there anything worth seeing in the church, in our church?

I once made a serious mistake: preaching in the heart of a great city: prayed for all the people involved in the exciting things that happen by night in a great city – theatre goers drawn into the wonder of a great show, lovers enjoying a romantic dinner in the fine restaurants, the kids crowding the amusement centres, the night tennis matches going on at the Tennis centre, a day night cricket match attended by tens of thousands. The prayer then rather lamely ended with a kind of apology that we weren’t doing exciting things but we were here praying for them!

A worshipper rebuked me afterward in the porch. “How can you possibly say such things? Don’t you realize that all the other people in the city are just playing games, diverting themselves, avoiding reality. It’s HERE that the truly exciting and marvelous things are happening! Here, people are being reborn, completely made over. Where hope is dead and lives are devastated, hope is coming to life and people are finding healing and wholeness. Here relationships that have been broken, seemingly irretrievably, are being knitted back together in love. Here death is being faced, and worked through, and integrated into the fabric of life. Here the future of the world is being quietly revealed in the hope and faith of a community of people. The rest of the city, every single activity that’s going on our there, can’t hold a candle to the wonder of what is going on in here!”

And that man is right. These are the things happening in the church. They happen daily in different ways – people discovering life, finding the courage to face death, people being forgiven and reconciled, others sensing that in the life of the people of God in some mysterious way the future of the world is to be encountered and enacted. Since last August when I arrived I’ve seen all that. Come and see! Said Philip. We don’t have spin doctors trumpeting it to the world or advertising hoardings shouting it to all and sundry. It is quiet and private work, but its there, and if you have eyes to see you can see it, and if you listen carefully to the stories of those around you, you will hear it. The essence of witness is simply telling it like it is, getting in touch with what’s happening around you and sharing it.

Then comes the third and last movement of this little vignette about witness, that strange and enigmatic discussion about an Israelite in whom there is no deceit, about Jesus having seen him under the fig tree and then Nathanael’s dramatic conversion and confession. What sense can we make of this? I would suggest “not much”! It is a very private conversation and we are not given enough information to interpret it. Was Nathanael a particularly honest man? We have no evidence for any conclusion! What happened under the fig tree? How did Jesus see what happened under the fig tree? We have absolutely no idea. But in the hiddenness of these circumstances a great truth, a wonderful reality is disclosed.

That reality is that Jesus meets us in the uniqueness, the particularity of our personal experience and history. Whatever happened under the fig tree, Nathanael knew about it, and Jesus knew about it. The moment when faith crystallizes, when we sense the reality of grace and the presence of Jesus though the Spirit, is always intensely personal. God connects with us in ways that nobody else can understand. One of the mysteries of faith is why do we come to it now, why here? For CS Lewis it was while traveling on a London bus, for Charles Wesley it was worshipping with Moravian brethren. For one of my heroes in faith it came while listening to a sermon when a particular phrase shifted the universe on its axis and he was tipped over into faith: the preacher talked about how we enthrone Christ in our hearts “amid tears and struggle and great laughter”. It was the “and great laughter” that did it.

Nobody knows exactly why – that’s the mystery and the grace of revelation. But it is intensely and uniquely personal. I think that faith probably starts there for most of us. The wonderful end of this story is the reassurance of Jesus: “do you believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these. I tell you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the son of Man”. Faith might begin in the familiar and unique circumstances of your life and personal history but it will lead on into the wonders of the spirit and the deep things of God.

Witness. Owing our own experience and being honest about it. Telling what we have seen and what we have heard. Inviting the skeptics and cynics to ‘come and see’, ‘have a look’, ‘check it out’. It’s so simple. And yet it is so profound, because it brings together the weary cynicism of a wounded world with the word of Christ that can touch a person’s history, name their vulnerability and draw them into the mystery of God’s love and healing.