University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

WHAT KIND OF WITNESS?

John 1:29-42

A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time          January 20, 2008

(This sermon draws upon several sources, in particular: Ted Wardlaw’s sermon, "Pointing to the Lamb," preached January 17, 1993, at the Central Presbyterian Church of Atlanta; the preparatory work done on this text by Tom Are for the January 1993 meeting of the Moveable Feast in Malibu, California, and by conversations at that meeting.)

          Some of you have heard me tell of that autumn day during my junior year in college when the school chaplain asked me to stop by his office. He told me there were two small, rural churches not far from the college that needed someone to supply their pulpits, and he was wondering, if he could line up another student to help, if I would be willing to split the preaching responsibilities at those two churches.  I had been thinking about going to seminary at that point, and being clueless about all that such responsibility entailed, said sure.  He called back to say that my friend Frank had also agreed, and it was set.  But before Frank and I could begin, he said, we had to be interviewed by the Sessions of those two churches in a joint meeting.

            So we drove about forty-five minutes north of the college one brisk October evening to meet with the elders of the two churches. The conversation went fairly well for a while, as we talked about our families, our church backgrounds, our coursework.  Then one of them said, “Would you boys mind giving us your testimonies?”  I have to confess that, at that point in my life, I had no idea what he was talking about.  Fortunately, Frank understood, and he volunteered and went first, talking about his Christian upbringing, about his experience of God’s grace, and about what he believed.  And that bought me some time to get a few thoughts together before it was my turn.  I guess it went fairly well in the end, or else they were really desperate, because at the end of the meeting they gave two greenhorn undergraduates the task of proclaiming the Gospel to their little corner of the Kingdom.

            Living most of my subsequent adult life in the South I’ve come to know a good bit more about testimonies since that night. I’ve heard some pretty good ones over the years, and some that seemed a bit overdone.  A while back I came across Ellen Whitmore, the twelve-year-old narrator in Lynna Williams’ touching and hilarious short story, “Personal Testimony.”  Ellen Whitmore is a preacher’s kid at a Southern Baptist summer camp who earns hundreds of dollars from her fellow campers by running a ghost-writing service. Each night at vespers campers were expected to offer their personal testimonies, intimate stories of their own conversions and acts of repentance; many were terrified about doing so, but Ellen turned it into a entrepreneurial venture, writing for her friends gripping and moving stories of their personal experiences with the Lord, all of them fictional.[1] 

The story plays off the anxiety of many Christians that we lack the words to describe our experience in public, that we need someone else to create the language. Better leave that to the professional talkers, the preachers and the evangelists [or Ellen Whitmore]. We reassure ourselves that our reticence is for the best by quoting Edgar Guest’s poem: “I’d rather see a sermon than hear one any day.” Or as the comedian Flip Wilson used to reply when asked about his religious preference, “I’m a Jehovah’s Bystander. They wanted me to become a Jehovah’s Witness, but I didn’t want to get involved.” [2]

            Having grown up as I did in a fairly traditional mainline church, I've never grown overly comfortable with the notion of personal testimony, except maybe when watching "Law and Order" or the ubiquitous reruns of Tom Cruise’s interrogation of Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men. But “testimony” and “witness” are also very appropriate words for us, because the Christian life is a life that is governed by trials.  The idea of providing "testimony" or "witnessing" to our faith is very important, even if we feel inadequate to the task much of the time.  The Christian believer is called to account for the faith that inhabits his or her life.  The writer of First Peter reminds us that we must always be prepared to make a defense of the faith that is in us. (1 Pet. 3:15)  And though we tend to forget it, we live in a world in which every day there is a trial going on... a world in which there are forces in contention with each other, in which it is not always apparent, at any given moment, which force is going to win and which is going to lose.^[3] 

            I have wondered from time to time over the course of my life what kind of witness I would be in such a trial... how faithful I would be to what I believe... how forceful and persuasive my testimony would be.  But, of course, such pondering misses the point, which is that the trial occurs every day in countless venues… and we know all too well how faithful or unfaithful our witness has been. 

            We're not the first people to wonder about such trials, of course.  John apparently thought about them a great deal as he composed his gospel.  Sitting down in the first century of the Church's life to set out his account of the meaning of the life of Jesus, John chose as one of his themes the trial of Jesus.  He wrote not just of the actual trial in those final days of Jesus' life, but of the trial that loomed throughout Jesus' ministry.  That latter kind of trial of Jesus is to be found on almost every page of John's gospel as a major organizing theme.  His hope, it seems, was that the readers of his gospel might get the point that the whole of Jesus' life – and, if we think about it for a moment, the whole life of faith – is a life that, in the ultimate sense, is lived on trial.  So it is that the Gospel of John is literally filled with legal terminology – the language one uses during a trial.

            Right up front in the first chapter, for example, John the Baptist is placed in a sort of trial by the gatekeepers of traditional religion, and is described as "a witness to testify to the light... He himself was not the light, but came," says John, "to testify to the light." (John 1:7-8)  That is the language of trial.

            And testify he did!  Right there in the first chapter, already a trial.  “Who are you?” the gatekeepers asked, as though they were prosecuting attorneys.  “He confessed,” writes John, “and did not deny it, but confessed, ‘I am not the Messiah.’  And they asked him, ‘What, then?  Are you Elijah?'  He said, ‘I am not.'  ‘Are you the prophet?'  He answered, ‘No.’ Then they said to him, ‘Then who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us.  What do you say about yourself?’  And he said, ‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord.”’”

            Just a few verses later, in the first part of this morning's text, John the Baptist did what any good witness would do in a court of law.  He pointed to the one on trial, and he told the truth.  “Here is the Lamb of God,” he said, “who takes away the sins of the world.”  The next day he did the same thing.  This time he was with a couple of disciples, and, pointing to Jesus, he said, “Look, here is the Lamb of God.”  And before that day was over, they, too, were pointing to the Lamb.^[4]

            Of course, that's not the end of the Gospel; it is only its beginning.  But over and over throughout these pages John will continue to write of this legal struggle and the need for more testimony and the call for more witnesses.  The scenes change, the characters change, but what is at stake does not change.  What's at stake, of course, for John's world and ours, is that the Good News embodied by this Lamb is perpetually being placed on trial by a hostile world that does not understand it, and thus is always in need of people who can point to the Lamb and tell the truth about Him.                    

            It has been a while now since Communist domination in Eastern Europe ended, and you may not remember that spring day of 1991 when Czechoslovakia's government made the shift from Communist rule.  On that Sunday, all of the churches in Prague began to ring their bells at 8 a.m., a ringing that lasted all day long. Crowds of people gathered in the center of the city to celebrate as the bells rang joyously.  All day long the crowds lingered.  The pastor of one of the larger churches in Prague took his turn ringing the bells in the church tower, and then went to join the crowd.  Everywhere he looked, he found himself surrounded by throngs of cheerful people.  But on a hilltop, above the crowds, his eyes caught the most moving sight of that entire day.  A group of boys were holding a banner, a huge banner, up on that hill, which bore in large letters the epitaph of it all: “The Lamb has won!”^[5]  It didn't say, “We won!” or “The people won!”  It said, “The Lamb has won!”  The boys were witnesses, and that was their testimony.

            Now, how should we read that kind of banner in a world such as ours?  Surely it did not mean that Prague was out of danger, because, of course, it was not.  Nor did it mean that God loved some countries more than God loves others, because, of course, God is no nationalist.  Nor did it mean that the trials had ended for this world, for certainly they had not.  So, from one perspective, at the surface of things, the message of the banner seemed absurd.  But let me tell you something: ultimately, from the vantage-point of that dimension of life that matters most, the banner was absolutely true.  Though the trial continues, the Lamb has won.

            The Lamb has won!  On this weekend when we are most particularly mindful of the legacy of Martin King, we are surely aware both of the progress that has been made toward racial equality in this country and the long road that yet lies ahead of us.   But those of us who remember the march on Washington in the summer of 1963 and Dr. King's address on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, those of us who heard the now well-rehearsed words of his “I Have a Dream” speech, remember well his call to “let freedom ring” for all of God's children in this land, and the power of his closing words: “When this happens... we will be able to speed that day when all God's children, black … and white …, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last!  Free at last!  Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.’”^[6]   In that moment, one could have raised a banner that said, “The Lamb has won!”  And it would have testified to the truth.  Not to a truth that would always be apparent in subsequent years, but to an ultimate truth that the world has not yet fully claimed.

            The trial isn't over yet, but the Lamb has won!  The witnesses haven't all testified yet, but the Lamb has won!  The case isn't closed yet, but the Lamb has won!

            Will you join in the list of witnesses yet to testify?  You will be called, you know.  At some time or another, you will be called.  Who knows when or where, for the trial shifts its venue from place to place; it appears in one moment in a dormitory room, the next in an office somewhere, then in a classroom or a store.  It pops up in conversations around the family dinner table, in interactions with sales clerks and sanitation workers and teachers and counselors.  It occurs in the sometimes deep conversations between a care giver and a care receiver. The trial sometimes takes the form of a casual conversation, or a staff meeting, or a scholarship interview, or a classroom quiz.  But the trial goes on, and you will be called as a witness.

            Will you be a reliable witness? Do you know yet what you will say, what you will do, how you will act, when the time of trial comes for you?  It’s a bit unnerving to consider.  There are lots of words we could speak, I suppose, lots of defenses we could make, if only we could think of them at the right time. It would help if we knew the story, of course… and we can help with that. But John the Baptist is also helpful here, for he sets before us the first and cardinal rule of thumb, and the best example: point to the Lamb.  Point to the Lamb!  Remember that, in the end, it is not just to your own capacities that you must look, but to the promises of the Lamb of God, the promises of Christ.  He will provide you with what you need to be an effective witness.  Point to him.  Point to the Christ.  Point to the Lamb.

            Karl Barth was one of the most important theologians and church leaders in the history of Protestant Christian thought as he worked and taught at the University of Basel in Switzerland in the middle decades of the twentieth century.  But Barth's study was, quite modest, and his desk, at which he composed much of his thought, was small by most standards; indeed, he preferred to work in simplicity.  The dominant item in his working space was a reproduction of a sixteenth-century painting by the German master Matthias Grünewald, “The Crucifixion” panel from the Isenheim Altarpiece.

            The painting, which was hung directly above Barth's study desk, is a graphic crucifixion scene set in the contrast of darkness and light.  To one side of the cross stand the mournful friends and family of Jesus.  To the other side are a lamb, and John the Baptist.  While the agonizing Christ on the cross is the clear focal point of the painting, a secondary focus is the outstretched arm of John the Baptist, pointing with a grotesquely elongated index finger to the cross.  Above the Baptist's extended arm Grünewald inscribed words from our lesson this morning from John's Gospel: “He must increase; I must decrease.”

            It was to that painting, and particularly to that inscription, that Barth turned each day as he began his work in Basel.  It served as a daily reminder to the theologian of the task before him: the task of calling attention not to his own prodigious scholarship, but to the crucified Christ... the task of pointing always to the Lamb. “He must increase; I must decrease.”

            Therein is both the definition of Christian life and the hope for us as we seek to be faithful and reliable witnesses in the trials of our lives.  “He must increase; I must decrease.”  He, after all, is the most reliable witness. Remember that, and you will be well equipped for the trials that await you in this still new year.  Remember that, and you will find also cause for great joy, for you will know the Lamb is on trial with you, and as you know already, “The Lamb has won.”