Darkness and Hope 10/17/48
Scripture: John 1: 1-12
Text: John 1: 4,5; “In him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
You have seen a morning storm that turned the bright sunlight into darkness and tempest. The new day had started with its rosy tints and growing light, then had dawned in full brightness. Before long, black clouds, first catching the light of the sun, then covering it up, wiped out the colors of the morning sky. A new darkness fell over the earth as though the day had receded -- closed, rather than opened, at its beginning.
There have been other times when this has seemed to be true. Think how the friends of Jesus must have felt at the crucifixion, when the earth darkened and their hopes blacked out with the storm and with his last breath. It must have seemed that the promise of his new kingdom was completely ended. John’s word: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” is the more remarkable in the face of so many circumstances that seemed to deny it.
When Rome was sacked in 410 it must have seemed to many Christians like the end of a day of hope rather than any new dawning. Just as World War I was breaking over Britain, a prominent Englishman said, “The lights are going out all over Europe. They will not be relit in our time.”
There is a good deal of that feeling in our time. We can hardly comprehend the great gulf between the confident optimism at the beginning of this century and the characteristic pessimism as we approach the middle of this same century. Early in the 1900s people took improvement and progress for granted. Ministers preached with enthusiastic optimism. The day of brotherhood seemed dawning. The evangelizing of the world in our time was a missionary slogan uttered in confidence. Teachers and scientists generally took progress and improvement for granted and bent their efforts toward hastening it.
The brotherhood of mankind evaporated under the murderous impact of two desperate world wars. The evangelization of the world, more grimly urgent than ever, comes more slowly than had been hoped. Teachers know the urgency of the educational process, and scientists speak with some dread and anxiety over the state of people in a world where civilization has the obvious ability to destroy itself if it elects a policy of destruction. A few years ago, many scientists were among the most detached and coolest over moral issues. Now most scientists speak, with anxiety written across their brows, lest human character be found altogether inadequate to handle the inconceivable power coming into the hands of man. And political witch hunts among the scientists only add to the clouds of danger.
Brotherhood went into reverse with the Nazi atrocities against the Jews which shocked us all, at the same time revealing a terrifically wide-spread anti-Semitism in so-called democratic society. How many of us laugh at jokes which demean Hebrew character or use the expression, “Jew him down” in a trade? These almost unconscious references make their contribution to a deepening gulf between Gentile and Jew.
The future of our economic system, which has sometimes brought misery and often great prosperity to multitudes, fills thoughtful people with grave concern. Postwar problems -- inflation, inadequacy and uncertainty -- in this realm are so tremendous that many thoughtful people now understand Leslie Weatherhead when he remarked, before the war was over: “But do you not feel a little afraid of the hour of victory? I do.”
Yet one hundred years ago men would have supposed our problems would be solved in a generation with the tremendous productive power we of our day have. Clouds, storm, over the sunrise!
We are constantly shadowed by the threat of a determined Soviet Russia. Not many would deny that Russian communism terrifically endangers free democratic society. It is obviously a dangerous tyranny, quite ruthless for its own power. And I agree that America must stand against its expansion.
But, more than that, this ought to be said: Russia is no proper scapegoat upon which to blame the sins of democracy. Some of our gravest sins lie right here. Arnold Toynbee comments on our situation in these words: “Yet the fact that our adversary threatens us by showing up our defects, rather than by forcibly suppressing our virtues, is proof that the challenge he presents to us comes ultimately not from him but from ourselves. It comes in fact from the recent huge increase in western man’s technological command over non-human nature -- his stupendous progress in “know-how” -- which was just what gave our fathers the confidence to delude themselves into imagining that, for them, history was comfortably over.”
And one of the most uncomfortable aspects of Soviet threat is the dogged communist drive on our social inequalities, our race discrimination, our political stupidities. One reason they alarm and anger us so is that they hit us consistently exactly right where it hurts. They not only find our weaknesses, but they put a magnifying glass on them and pour pepper in the sores. My point, right here, is that our irritation and anger should never blind us to our own trouble spots - for they are serious and must have our sincere, unrelenting attention.
We stand under such a clouded morning (if that be the fair way to picture the situation in our day) with one great hopeful possibility. That is by a rededication of ourselves and our society to God. A recommittal of ourselves to Christianity and a reborn Christian power will be adequate to take us through the darkness and storm to the new day in the new kingdom.
We know that the Christian religion has lived in dark times before “and the darkness overcame it not.” Christianity has a realistic word for dark dawns. It may even be that Christianity will not be sufficiently believed and practiced to be the salvation of our civilization. It certainly did not save the Roman Empire. Rome elected to persecute the Christians rather than repent of its evils. And it perished. But Christianity, even through the suffering of the Christians, kept alive something vastly greater than that Empire. It kept alive the integrity of consecrated souls. It will do so again. Our great hope is that it may be so devotedly believed and practiced by all those who profess its faith that our modern society may be cleansed and dedicated and saved too.
Now this is true in our personal lives as well as in the leaven of civilization. The life that has become snarled up within in evil ways, and beset with evil without, can be redeemed, changed by the grace of Christ. I’ve known people who are bitter over personal opposition to themselves. So have you. But I remember vividly, the comment made of a fine Christian woman who had died leaving a heartbroken husband and four small children. The comment was this: to her friends, she was affectionate consideration itself; and for those who did not choose to go her way she had no comment or criticism. The serenity of her Christian spirit made her own life and her whole neighborhood a blessing and drew the teeth from all carping criticism that might otherwise have been made.
Good sportsmanship in the face of disappointment is rooted in the Christian spirit. The ability to live triumphant in the presence of pain, sorrow, frustration, is given those who have put their lives at the disposal of Christ as nowhere else.
We live in the presence of all sorts of compromise and laxity, as have people of other ages and circumstances. And we have to remind ourselves constantly that we live in a moral universe where evil does not go unpunished, nor is goodness by-passed. If we could have gone through the awful experience of the past decade without this reminder, then there would be cause for despair. The worst predictions of the religious prophets so resented in the days of optimism and prosperity are now seen as wise insights into the nature of a world where evil draws its inescapable consequences.
We see the self-destroying nature of evil. The Christian faith knows what the wages of sin are. And they have not all been collected yet! War is evil. I know that there is bravery, there is sacrifice, there is the unhappy choice of the lesser of evils. But the purposeful killing of human beings cannot escape consequences. Those consequences are immediately apparent to the loser. They are still, some of them, to rise against the victor. Save for the escape, for the time being, from the threat of Nazi slavery, the victor nations have lost more than gained, and the weed seeds for further hatred lie secreted everywhere.
We ought to proceed upon the surest foundation of right that we know how to lay. More than 100 years ago in 1830, William Ellery Channing, preaching on “Spiritual Freedom” used this quotation: “There is no foundation for the vulgar doctrine that a state may flourish by arts and crimes ... Nations and individuals are subjected to one law .... No calamity can befall a people so great as temporary success through a criminal policy.”
That goes not only for Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler, but for H. S. Minister and John Q. Layman; for everything from cheating in order to win at a game to stealing for a supposedly good cause. It goes deep into the kind of personal decisions we make.
Do we dare to be Christian enough to see that power is corrupting and self-destroying unless it is placed at the service of the moral laws of life?
Any person whose life is more than a passing emotion will be suspicious of quick successes based on immoral methods. So many people who have risen quickly by any means at hand fail to build any lasting meaning into their careers. It is worth the time it takes to build a life right.
Christianity holds in the lives of Christians and before the world One who was and is the “light of the world.” Neither the church nor the Christian person must dare hide that light under a bushel or box or anything else in these times. For He, the one rightful ruler of us all, is the one hope of this world for a renewed morning after the storm.
The Christian word for our lives and one world is not one of despair but of realism, of judgment, of promise and of faith.
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, October 17, 1948 (also at Faith Reformed Church, same date.)