John 1:29-42
Good News, Total Depravity, and the Lamb of God
January 19, 2020 James
Sledge
The
vaccine was life-altering, front page news. Its developer, Jonas Salk, was a
national hero. I have vague recollections of mass immunization drives at
schools with public service announcements encouraging anyone who’d not yet been
vaccinated to show up, but by the time I was a teenager, you rarely heard
anything about polio. It became part of the normal routine, a required
vaccination, and there wasn’t a lot of need to get the news out anymore.
Our
gospel reading for today contains big, life-altering news from John the
Baptist. At least it’s front page news for Andrew, Simon Peter and others. “Here
is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John tells
Andrew and he tells Simon Peter. If you keep reading more people get told, and
it won’t be long before crowds start to appear.
Sharing
good news is central to the biblical story of Jesus and the first Christians, so
much so that the our word “gospel” is simply an archaic synonym for “good
news.” And the word “evangelism” is just an anglicized version of the Greek
word meaning gospel or good news.
When
people met Jesus, when people encountered early Christian missionaries, were
baptized and received the Holy Spirit, they told others. It was life changing
news. How could they not. And so what started out a small, apocalyptic Jewish
movement swept over the entire Mediterranean world in short order, drawing in
both Jews and non-Jews.
But
eventually, Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire. And then it
came to be expected, even required. Before long, Jesus wasn’t front page
news anymore. It was just one of those things you acquired by being a part of
the empire.
Even
after the Roman Empire fell, Christianity remained enmeshed in the empires and
states that followed. For much of the Western world, this Christendom persisted
into the 20th century. With a few exceptions, being Italian or
French or American meant you were expected to be Christian. And baptism was
often seen as a bit like a vaccination given to children. It was on the
checklist. Whooping cough, polio, measles, baptism.
A
lot of people lament the demise of this Christendom, but I’m not one of them.
In Christendom, faith often became just background noise. People blissfully
imagined that faith and nation were perfectly compatible. Not surprisingly,
this Christendom faith made wealth a virtue, supported slavery, was not much
troubled by the genocide of indigenous Americans, and thought God created Africans
inferior to serve whites.
Tomorrow
we honor Martin Luther King, Jr. who challenged the vapid faith of Christendom.
As part of the commemoration of his life and work, the television will show old,
black and white news footage from the Civil Rights movement. We’ll see police
dogs and fire hoses turned on peaceful marchers, and we’ll see police brutally,
sometimes gleefully, beating them, police who were upstanding members of their
local churches.
Occasionally when such events are being
discussed, people – always white people – will explain such behavior as “a product
of the time.” Similar arguments are made in opposition to removing statues of
southern, Civil War generals. They weren’t bad people. They were good people.
They were simply of their time. That was the problem. Not them, the time.
“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of
the world!” I
recently read an article in the magazine, The
Christian Century entitled, “Thoroughly Sinful,” but I prefer the title of
the online version, “How I learned to
love the doctrine of total depravity.”[1]
Total depravity is one of the central components of Calvinism, and so
Presbyterianism, but you don’t hear a lot of about it nowadays. It sounds so
awful.
It’s not quite as awful as it sounds. The idea that
humans are totally depraved or corrupted doesn’t mean completely worthless. “Total”
refers to sin impacting all aspects of our humanity. There aren’t parts of us
that are immune. Our intellect isn’t somehow spared. Our nobler impulses aren’t
unaffected by self-interest. Even our best efforts are tainted by the problem
of sin. Not as awful as it first sounds, but hardly uplifting.
“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of
the world!” I don’t know if it’s something we inherited from
Christendom, or if we picked it up somewhere else, but many modern Christians
are profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of being sinners. Maybe that’s a
reason people prefer to blame “the times” for Robert E. Lee fighting a war to
preserve slavery. He did seem like a pretty decent guy in a lot of ways,
certainly not totally depraved.
But as that article on depravity points out, our
preferred doctrine of “good people who sometimes mess up” just doesn’t hold up.
It can’t account for how easily we are manipulated into fearing we’re not thin enough,
smart enough. accomplished enough, cool enough, pretty enough, and on and on. It
can’t account for Nazi Germany or neo-Nazis now. It can’t make sense of
systemic racism, the persistence of what Dr. King called “the evil of poverty,”
a resurgence of hate, an unwillingness to address climate change, or our
willingness to tolerate exploitation and child labor to produce cheap clothes,
food, and smartphones.
In a recent column, Michael Gerson wrote, “(Martin
Luther) King was not optimistic about human nature. He strongly rejected the
false idealism of white liberals who thought that education and economic
development could overcome racial divisions under the guidance of benevolent
experts. ‘This particular sort of optimism,’ King said, ‘has
been discredited by the brutal logic of events. Instead of assured progress in
wisdom and decency man faces the ever present possibility of swift relapse not
merely to animalism but to such calculated cruelty as no other animal can
practice.’ ”[2]
Wow, sounds like Dr. King might have believed in
total depravity. This doesn’t seem terribly helpful. If I’m feeling bad about
the state of the world, if I’m feeling like anything I do won’t be nearly
enough, if I’m feeling like I’m not enough, this only seems to confirm it.
Yet both Dr. King and John Calvin were filled with
hope, even optimism. But their hope was not rooted in human capacities, however
impressive those may be. It was not a hope in the inevitability of progress.
Their hope and optimism was founded on the assurance that God does not simply
leave us to our own devices, on the certainty that God refuses to give up on
humanity. “Here
is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
In
Jesus, we see the depth of God’s love for us, God’s commitment to humanity. The
moral arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice. As Dr. King wrote, “Evil
may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but
that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that
even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name.”[3]
In
Christ, God is at work in the world to bend the arc of history, and we are
invited to join him. We need not be good enough or strong enough or smart
enough. We’re are not required to have all the answers or know just how to fix
things. We are required simply to recognize The One who knows the way, and then
to follow him.
“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of
the world!”
Thanks be to God!
[1]
Heidi Haverkamp, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/first-person/how-i-learned-love-doctrine-total-depravity,
October 2, 2019
[2]
Michael Gerson, “A trend threatening to become a tragedy,” The Washington Post, January 14, 2020, p.A21
[3]
Matt Lewis, “Obama Loves Martin Luther
King’s Great Quote—But He Uses It Incorrectly,” Daily Beast, Jan16, 2017,
https://www.thedailybeast.com/obama-loves-martin-luther-kings-great-quotebut-he-uses-it-incorrectly?ref=scroll
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