Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 17, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The author of the First Letter of John says that our faith in Jesus Christ conquers the world. He says that the one who has faith in Jesus Christ conquers the world. Now, I know that those lines were written in and for a very small, powerless community of counter-cultural people in the late first or early second century CE in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. But I also know that within 250 years of the writing of those lines the faith of that small, powerless, counter-cultural community had become the official, established religion of the power that ruled the world, the Roman Empire. And I know what became of that faith in the succeeding centuries. It truly did conquer the world. Sometimes preceding the forces of empire, sometimes following in their wake, Christianity spread around the world. It converted people all over the world, sometimes by the power of its message but more often and more significantly by force. Christianity conquered the indigenous faiths of native peoples especially here in the Americas but in other parts of the world too. Christianity was so successful at conquering the world that today it is by far the largest religion in the world. The author of 1 John sure seems to have been prescient, doesn’t he. A reel seer, able to predict the future centuries before that future became a reality.

So, we’re supposed to keep on conquering the world, right? That’s what 1 John says. That’s what happened. So that must be what God wants, right? And it must be what 1 John means, right? Well, not so fast. Many Christians see that march of the faith around the world as the triumph of the Holy Spirit, as God’s victory, as an unmitigated good thing. But some of us aren’t so sure. Some of us—like me—see something different in the way Christianity conquered the world. We—I—see imperialism. We—I—see power and even force used by people with a dominant technology to violate the rights of other people around the world. I see the coerced stamping out of indigenous faiths that had served well to connect people to God. Our Congregationalist forbears did exactly that in Hawaii. I see the fact that the Hawaii Conference is one of the largest in the UCC as a mixed blessing. I don’t doubt the faith of the good Christian people of that Conference, but I also see the plethora of Congregational UCC churches in Hawaii as a vestige of American cultural, economic, political, and religious imperialism. So if 1 John’s apparent sanction of the Christian faith conquering the world is really sanction for that kind of conquering, I don’t want to have anything to do with it.

So I have to ask: Do these lines from 1 John have no positive meaning for us? I suppose that by now most of you can discern my answer to that question, the kind of question I ask so often about Scripture passages that can have a negative meaning for us. I believe that this passage does have a positive meaning for us, but to get at that meaning we have to rethink what the author means by conquer the world, or at least to ask what other meaning “conquer the world” might have for us.

The other, more positive meaning that “conquer the world” can have for us, I think, has to do with one of the principal dynamics of the life of faith. That dynamic is the tension between the ways of the world in which we live and the ways of the God Whom we seek to follow. The Judeo-Christian tradition has been aware of that tension for a very long time. At Isaiah 55:8 the prophet has God say “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” The tension between God’s ways and the ways of the world was central to the theology of the Apostle Paul. He expressed it as the conflict between the flesh and the Spirit, or sometimes as the conflict between the powers of this age and the Spirit. In the theology of John, some of which we heard this morning, this central dynamic of the life of faith is expressed as the dichotomy between God and the world. The reality behind these various ways of expressing the matter is that, for the most part, the world simply does not live the way God would have us live. We Christians see that truth personified in Jesus Christ. The way he taught us to live is radically different from the ways of the world. The world’s way is the way of violence, teaching us that violence can redeem us, violence can save us. Jesus taught us to renounce violence and to resist evil with creative, assertive nonviolence. The world’s way is the way of power, teaching us to look up to and to obey those in positions of power. Jesus said blessed are the meek. The world’s way is the way of wealth, teaching us that our function in life is to amass as much wealth as we can. Jesus said blessed are the poor. The world’s way is the way of exclusion, putting some people in and some people out of the good graces of society. Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners, teaching that God excludes no one and neither may we. Since Christianity became the official religion of empire in the fourth century, Jesus has been so domesticated, so de-fanged even, that we forget just how radical and countercultural his teachings and his life really are. The proof is in his life and even more in his death. The world couldn’t tolerate him and his teaching of peace and compassion, so it killed him. We Christians say that we see God in Jesus. Jesus teaches us that God’s ways are not the world’s ways and that God calls us to live in God’s ways not the world’s ways.

And we ask: How is that possible? We live in the world. We’re surrounded by the world. We’re immersed in the world. We grow up in the world, learning its ways without even being aware that we’re learning them. They seem natural to us. They seem right. They seem simply to be common sense. We think violence works and nonviolence doesn’t because that’s what the world tells us. We think wealth makes a good life possible because that’s what the world tells us. How are we supposed to overcome all of that? In the language of our passage from 1 John, how are we supposed to conquer the world?

The author of 1 John gives us the question, and he also gives us the answer. He says that it is our faith that conquers the world. He says that the one who has faith in Jesus Christ conquers the world. We can now understand those words differently than we did at the beginning. They aren’t about Christianity becoming the largest religion in the world. They are about how we overcome the ways of the world in our own lives. They are how we resist the temptations of the world that we all face. We conquer the world when we live according to God’s ways not the world’s ways. We conquer the world when we live according to what Jesus taught us, not according to the ways of the world that couldn’t, and can’t, tolerate Jesus’ ways of peace and justice.

But we still have to ask, how does our faith enable us to do that? Well, conquering the world takes courage. It takes a great deal of courage to say no to the world that is all around us trying to get us to conform to its ways. Faith gives courage. Faith gives courage because in faith we know that God is always with us as we try to live according to God’s ways. We never struggle with the world alone. When we live in faith, we struggle with God as our helper. That makes all the difference. Conquering the world requires persistence, and persistence requires inner peace, peace of spirit, peace in our souls. Faith gives us that inner peace. It gives us that inner peace because in faith we know that we are doing what God wants. We know that we are connected with ultimate truth and ultimate reality. There is no greater peace than that. Perhaps you can think of other ways that your faith helps you conquer the world. If so, good. Keep at it. It is our call as Christians.

So does faith conquer the world? Yes, but not in the way the world understands conquering. No through imperialist expansion. Not through destroying native cultures and native religions. Christianity has done a lot of that, but it isn’t something to celebrate as the victory of faith. It is something of which to repent as a violation of the rights and dignity of native peoples. Faith conquers the world in a very different sense. It gives us what we need to be true to our God and God’s ways. So cling to your faith. It makes all the difference. Amen.