Witness to the Light

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"He was not the light but came to bear witness to the light."

-- John 1:8

When you are in our elegant New England style Chapel of the Redeemer you must surely be struck by how light it is in there. The windows are of clear glass and there are many of them, the walls are white and magnify the light, and the simple architecture leaves few corners where shadows can hide. You might think that such features are fortuitous but you would be wrong. They are aesthetically pleasing to be sure but before that, they are theologically correct. Enlightened architecture grew out of enlightened religion, and our Congregational, Puritan forebears who gave us this architecture, were in the vanguard of that theological enlightenment.

Let me name only two: Cotton Mather (1663-1728) and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). Cotton Mather served alongside his father Increase Mather as associate pastor of the Old North Church in Boston and at the height of his career wrote a quarter to a third of all the theological works published each year in the colonies. He was an admirer and proponent of what was then called the “new science” based on the works of Isaac Newton (1643-1727), believing with Newton and Galileo, that there could be no conflict between the Bible and the laws of nature. Jonathan Edwards, minister of the Congregational Church in Northampton Massachusetts, is described as “relentlessly intellectual” (Mark A. Noll, America’s God (2002) p. 23), and a friend said of him, “many theorems, that appeared hard and barren to others, were to him pleasant and fruitful fields, where his mind would expatiate with peculiar ease, profit, and entertainment” (ibid.). Edwards was central to two revivals of faith in New England in 1734-35 and 1740-42, his first book was entitled, Narrative of Surprising Conversions (1736), and that period of our history is known as the “First Great Awakening.” Why am I not surprised that shortly thereafter he was dismissed from his pulpit in Northampton because he “disrupted long-established community practices,” and went off in great poverty to preach to the Indians? He died shortly after becoming the first president of what later became Princeton University, of the effects of a smallpox vaccination!

Edwards described his own conversion, which happened in 1720 shortly after his graduation from Yale, as follows: “…there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the divine being.” Now glory in the Bible is light, so Edwards is telling us that he saw the light. Mark Noll, whose book, America’s God I am following here, describes the hub of Edward’s theology as “…the Glory of God depicted as an active, harmonious, ever-unfolding source of absolutely perfect Being marked by supernal beauty and love (ibid.).”

Why have I spent this precious time on Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards? They had their faults, and were children of their time. (Mather, for instance, believed in witches and as a young man of 30 wrote in support of the persecution of the victims of Salem in 1692-3). I have spent this time because they are our own Congregational tradition and attest the classic enlightened impulse of our particular quest for God and truth, our eagerness before the truth of science, our thirst to know, to love God with the mind, and to enjoy the beauty of the divine deployed in all things, inanimate, animate and human. I confess also that I wish to encourage a revival of intellect in the Congregational pulpit by calling up these giants, or at least to cultivate some lay support for such clergy, but mostly I want Mather and Edwards to help us open ourselves, mind and heart to Jesus Christ who is the one true light of the world, and for that purpose I must begin by putting in context our lessons for today.

“He was not the light, but he came to bear witness to the light,” says our Gospel (1:8) concerning John the Baptist. “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you,” says the prophet (Isaiah 61:1).  As we have seen in the last two sermons, the NT interprets the OT prophecies by putting them in a new context. Isaiah speaks to exiles, who have just heard the news that they are going home. No wonder they get up and shine with the light of liberation, as the Glory of God arises over them. (Rise and shine and give God the glory!). The Gospel puts that moment in a new and far more ambitious context; this light, this Glory of God, is not merely the light of liberation, marvelous as that may be, it is the light of life; it shows the way not to Jerusalem but to the bosom of God, not to an earthly but to a heavenly home.

Four verses prior to the one we are considering, the Gospel says of this light, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it (vs. 4-5).” So this light that John attests is my life. Try this, “Arise, shine, for your life has come!” That gets the attention does it not?  So we might recast our title as “Witness to life,” as in “How to ‘get a life’.” Now we are getting serious. We have moved from metaphor – Jesus is like a light – to literality.  “In him is life,” means, my life is literally and profoundly in him, and the corollary, “not in myself.” So now we know why the Gospel insists so stridently that John is not the light, only a witness to the light, and why John keeps denying to his many interlocutors that he is anything other than a voice bearing witness.

A voice, and what does it say? Look out there for your life! There, where Jesus comes! Life comes from outside of our self. We are emphatically not the source of our own life, but rather pathetically dependent from our birth on people and things outside of ourselves. Since this is our sate is it not marvelous that Jesus is there, the light and the life, and that our dependency is ultimately our opportunity to rest in the embrace of the source of life. Once we understand this (light) we re-enter a right relation with God, (life).

Where shall we go from here? We are at the limit of the general and must become particular even personal if we are to continue. So let me say that I understand Jonathan Edwards’ description of his conversion quite well; I have had an experience like that. What should one say when one finds long after the event, that one’s own most powerful experience has been described by an 18th century New England Puritan? That I am out of date, or that in every generation  God enlightens the mind to perceive, albeit it dimly and distantly, His glory and supernal beauty, and warms the heart to feel the immortal love? The latter of course is what one should say, and then arise and shine and give God the glory.

There is, however, a danger in holding up one kind of experience of God, even if it is as fruitful as Edwards’ experience of the Divine Light, as the one and only standard. That is why perhaps the second most important thing in our Gospel reading is the repeated protest of John the Baptist, “I am not the one.” My experience is not a law binding your experience. God deals with each of us according to our temperaments. “I am not the one”: I have no power in myself to give life to myself, let alone you. Life comes from the light to whom I can only bear witness. If you are clear that you are not the one you are at least there where you can discover who is the one. “Prepare the way!” is another of John’s characteristic cries. Prepare by making room in yourself for life; make room by confessing, “I am not the one.”  Who is the one? “You are the one, Lord Jesus, your are the light and you are the life.”

Amen.