Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 13, 2012

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.

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ conquers the world. The victory that conquers the world is the Christian faith. The one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God conquers the world. It says so right there in the Bible, in the First Letter of John. Christians conquer the world. That’s what our faith enables us to do. It says so right there in the Bible. And that passage really was prophetic, wasn’t it. It was written late in the first century or early in the second century of the common era. Christianity certainly hadn’t conquered the world by then, but fast forward fifteen hundred years or so, and Christianity was out happily conquering as much of the world as it possibly could. In the Age of Exploration Christian missionaries followed the military and commercial forces of the European powers all over the world, converting as many people to Christianity as they could. Oh yes, there was that thing about them sometimes resorting to violence to do it, but what’s a little torture when you’re trying to save someone’s soul? They were just doing what the Bible told them to do, weren’t they? They were conquering the world just like 1 John says they should, right?

Well no, of course not. Of course not right. Not right at all. You can’t legitimately use our passage from 1 John to justify Christian imperialism, although I have no doubt that it has been used that way many times over the centuries. To get at why you can’t legitimately use our passage from 1 John to justify Christian imperialism, and to get a better idea of what that passage really has to say to us, let’s go back in time to those early decades of the Christian movement when 1 John was written and try to understand it in its original context.

When 1 John was written so long ago Christianity was in its infancy. It had only recently separated from its Jewish mother faith and begun to see itself, and to be seen by others, as a separate religion. There were small communities of Christians in all of the major cities of the Roman Empire, but at the end of the first century CE all the world’s Christians together couldn’t have numbered more than a few tens of thousands. They were all living under the thumb of the Romans. From time to time the Romans would persecute some of them because of their Christian beliefs, beliefs which led them to refuse to worship the Emperor, or to serve in the army, or to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods. Conquering the world in any imperial sense had to be about the farthest thing from the minds of those Christians as the first century CE changed to the second. Conquering the world the way empires and their established religions conquer the world can’t possibly be what the author of 1 John had in mind when he used the phrase “conquer the world.”

OK, that’s not what he meant; but that is the phrase he used—conquer the world. He used it three times in the five short verses that we heard. If he didn’t mean conquer the world like an empire conquers the world what did he mean? Or to ask what is actually a better question: If this passage doesn’t mean conquer the world the way an empire conquers the world, what meaning can it have for us?

A good place to start when answering questions like that about any text in the Bible is to look at what the original language that we’re reading in translation actually says and then to look at different ways that that language has been translated. In this case it turns that the original Greek literally means something like “be victorious over.” The Greek text uses the word “nike,” which isn’t the shoe company of which the University of Oregon athletic department is a wholly owned subsidiary, it’s the name of the Greek goddess of victory and the common Greek word for victory. So “conquer” is a pretty good translation, technically speaking. Yet several English translations other than the NRSV that we use here translate the word differently. They translate our passage as “overcome the world,” not “conquer the world.” Although it may not be as technically correct as “conquer,” understanding our text as being about “overcoming” the world helps us find meaning in it perhaps better than the more technically correct “conquer” does. Consider this:

The early Christian movement had a powerful awareness of how Jesus Christ called them to a new way of life that is radically different from the world’s way of life. St. Paul often expressed that difference by contrasting the life of the spirit with the life of the flesh. In the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus expresses that distinction by using the phrase the Kingdom of God for the way God calls us to live. The Gospel of John, so closely related in its theology to the Letters of John, expresses this distinction by calling us to be born anew in the Spirit. In all of these different metaphors Christian scripture calls us to a new way of life in Christ Jesus, a way of life radically different from life the way the world expects us to live it. When our text this morning says that as Christians we conquer the world it is, I believe, using a different metaphor for that same distinction between life the way God and Jesus Christ call us to live and life the way the world has taught us to live. It uses a metaphor the calls us precisely to overcome the ways of the world so that we may live the ways of God.

This text points to a profound truth of which the early Christian movement was keenly aware but many of us are not. That profound truth is this: We not only live in the world, the world lives in us. We have all internalized the ways of the world. We have all internalized the world’s values of wealth, power, and prestige. We have all—and we men most of all—internalized the world’s notions of success as something that is measured in material terms. We have all internalized the world’s justification of force and violence as legitimate means for achieving what the world considers to be legitimate ends.

You see, the world that our passage from 1 John says our faith conquers isn’t primarily the world out there. It isn’t the external world in which we live. It is first of all the world in here. It is the world inside us, the world that we have all internalized simply because we grew up in it. It is the worldly values that we’ve all adopted simply because we are constantly surrounded by them—bombarded by them actually. We take those values in with the very air we breathe because the air we breathe is the air of the world. We live in the world, yes. That’s inevitable. That’s how God has created us, as creatures of the world. But the world also lives in us, and that isn’t inevitable. We know that it isn’t inevitable because Jesus showed us that the world doesn’t inevitably live within the human heart. We don’t have a choice about living in the world, but we do have a choice about the world living in us. Jesus showed us that choice. Our text this morning points us to that choice. Conquer the world within you, or overcome the world within you if you prefer, through the faith of Jesus Christ. That is the scripture’s call to us this morning.

OK. Fair enough. But I imagine many of you are asking, just as I am asking, how in heaven’s name we do that. It’s not easy. We really have internalized the world and its values, and the Kingdom of God and its values truly are very, very different from that world and its values. To the world the values of the Kingdom of God seem weak and unrealistic. Nonviolence? Really? The world just doesn’t get it, and the world inside most of us doesn’t get it either. Yet the God we know in Jesus Christ is nonviolent. Always. No exceptions. And that God calls us to be nonviolent too. Care for the poor, even to the extent of reducing our own standard of living so that everyone has enough to live? Really? The world doesn’t get it, and the world inside most of us doesn’t get it either. Yet the God we know in Jesus Christ is a God of radical distributive justice, and that God calls us to radical distributive justice too. No, overcoming the world inside isn’t easy. The world simply is too much with us.

But here’s the thing. When we try, when we pray for guidance and for courage, when we work together in Christian community to help make the Kingdom of God real in the world and in ourselves we never do it alone. Through the Holy Spirit Jesus Christ is with us, guiding us, inspiring us, forgiving us when we fall short. And that’s how we can do it. By holding tight to God’s Spirit within us and among us. The world doesn’t yield easily, not out there, not in here. The work to which God calls us, out there and in here, isn’t easy; but it is possible. Not on our own perhaps, but it is possible through the grace and the help of God. If we will rely on that grace and that help we can do it, as do it we must if we are truly to be faithful disciples of Christ. So let’s do it. Let’s conquer the world. Not the world out there. The world in here. Amen.