July 22, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

“Jazz at Four” Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 133
John 14:1–7

Many of you may have followed the stories in the media over the last few months about Joe Paterno, the deceased coach of the Penn State football team, whose long and storied career has recently become a scandal. The most recent iteration in the argument is about the statue of Paterno, which some of you will have seen was removed this morning from its location in front of Beaver Stadium at Penn State. The questions about this statue have been many: Do you destroy it because Paterno is a role model who has been disgraced? Do you save it because many of his contributions to the school and the sport are still worth remembering? Do you keep it in place or move it to another location as a reminder of the mistakes that we all make, in the hope that it will deter future leaders from covering up abuse? I’ve read and heard compelling arguments for all of these stances.

Our culture is filled with literature, movies, art forms, and political debates that can be interpreted in very different ways depending upon your perspective. School boards have long debated the appropriateness of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for students, some arguing that it is carries a general theme that reinforces racism, others that the dignity of the slave Jim and the parody of the slave owners makes it a powerful tract of protest. When Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ came out, some people saw it as a powerful statement of faith in Jesus’ great sacrifice on the cross; others were deeply offended, seeing it as a smut film, gratuitously violent, anti-Semitic, and an inaccurate portrayal of scripture.

People disagree on matters like these, many to a deep enough level that they are willing to assume a role of public advocacy, write a letter to the editor, or at least argue about it at a dinner party. My gut feeling is that in matters such as these, people who disagree may hold their own view quite strongly, but they are also able to accept the idea that other perspectives exist—the idea that we don’t all agree isn’t some horrible threat to us all; disagreements are bound to exist.

For some of us, the Bible is a little different than this. Obviously there are plenty of quotations and stories in this book that can be interpreted in different ways. You need look no further than public debates about homosexuality, abortion, or the death penalty to find Bible-reading Christians reading the same book and coming away with very different conclusions. But the difference is that, unlike a debate about the Joe Paterno statue, many of us are less comfortable disagreeing about the Bible. We may respectfully disagree about other public matters, seeing that there are arguments different than ours and not worry about it too much.

Can we say the same thing about the Bible? The Bible is supposed to be a holy book, a book touched by the handiwork of God, and it has authority over the lives of believers, so it must mean something, and figuring out what that thing is must be important. I’d like to talk a little about that problem.

This summer, we’ve been preaching a series on well-known passages in the Bible; I’ve talked about Psalm 23 and the parable of the prodigal son. Today, I’m going to talk about a passage that many would see as divisive, John 14:6, which reads, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.”

There are actually many ideas about the meaning of this passage; tonight I’m just going to walk us through two of them.

Under the first perspective, this passage is good news. The famous one-liner—“I am the way, the truth, and the life”—doesn’t need to stand all on its own; it comes in the context of a conversation. I read the conversation in this evening’s scripture lesson. Jesus and Thomas are having a talk. Thomas brings his concerns to Jesus—he seems to want to know about the afterlife—and Jesus provides Thomas with an answer, an answer that is expressed with a beautiful image: “In my father’s house, there are many rooms, and I am going ahead to prepare a place for you.” What a wonderful image. In God’s house, in the vastness of God’s love, there is a place for everyone. No one in God’s heavenly kingdom is homeless; no one is hungry. No one is lonely and without family or friends. Everyone belongs and is part of the family. Imagine what this means for our world: None of the divisiveness of violence and war. No reason for class or religious conflict in Syria or, for that matter, in Chicago; no bad feeling that would cause one to open fire in a movie theater in Colorado. No fear of being left by your spouse or betrayed by a friend. God’s kingdom is not like this world. In God’s kingdom, there is a place for everyone—we all belong—and the tears and anger and divisiveness of this life are a thing of the past. It’s a beautiful image, and under that image it seems like a gracious and welcome statement that, if we were to say, like Thomas, “how do I get in on that?” Jesus would reply, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Sure, it’s a statement that may sound exclusive to some, but if that’s what it takes to make it into that wonderful kingdom, that house where everyone has a room and there is a place for all, then it still sounds like pretty good news.

Consider a second perspective. Under this perspective, the passage is not such good news. This perspective also includes context from the Gospel of John. According to John, Jesus says a lot of divisive things. In the Gospel of John, Jesus talks about people who “know” him and, by logical conclusion, references people who do not “know” him. He talks about people of light and people of darkness, disciples of Jesus and people of unbelief. In the Gospel of John, there are people who are consistently out to get Jesus, and this idea is shared in the Gospels written by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The other authors variously define these oppositional groups as being the general culture, the teachers of the law, the Roman Empire, people who are trying to protect their power and position from Jesus’ teachings of justice and mercy. But John’s Gospel, on the other hand, much more consistently says that it is “the Jews” who are out to get Jesus. One result of this has been that the church and Christians have a dark history of oppressing the Jewish people, and most of those instances have been defended by a biblical perspective that draws on the Gospel of John. Given this context, you can see how one might read the passage we are focusing on tonight and find it to be deeply troubling. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus says. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” If you are Jewish, this may sound like more bad news from the Christian church. “Jesus has a plan,” it seems to say, “and I am not a part of it.” Even if you’re not Jewish, what does this perspective mean for “everyone else?” What does it mean for the Buddhist who lives down the hall from you, or the person in the next cubicle at work who does not consider herself a person of any faith but seems to be a good person?

Obviously, thoughtful people and careful readers of the Bible may differ on their understanding of this passage. The challenge, I think, is to take the passage seriously and not to diminish its meaning, but also to hope to find in it something to help us with the divisiveness that so often surrounds us in the world. In the hope of doing that, I’d like to provide a third interpretation.

One of my professors from my divinity school is a New Testament scholar named AJ Levine. AJ is a brilliant scholar and a committed Jew; she also has a big heart for the church. She has committed much of her career and energy to educating Christian ministers, including me, and she has lectured here at Fourth Church in the past. Here is a story AJ tells that explains her interpretation of this passage:

AJ’s story begins like the setup for a joke as she arrives at the pearly gates to meet St. Peter. She is lined up to get into heaven with everyone else, picking up her wings and halo and harp, and eager like everyone else to finally get the answers to all of life’s most vexing questions. As she checks in and begins to float around among the clouds, she hears a voice behind her. A man is pointing at her and complaining, “How can she get in? I’ve heard that woman lecture; I’ve seen her on TV. She’s not a Christian; she’s not even baptized. What about John 14:6 where Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me?’” As AJ’s story goes, Peter summons Jesus, who has clearly heard this concern expressed before, and he begins by asking, what about Matthew 25? That passage is equally challenging, but in a different way. There Jesus seems to say that he is not interested in getting all of the “religious” statements right so much as teaching us to love one another, to take care of the hungry, to heal the sick, to visit the prisoners. And the man in AJ’s story asks Jesus, “Is the correct interpretation then that we are supposed to earn our way into heaven?” Jesus then offers an interpretation that calls both passages into question:

“No,” replies Jesus, “I am not saying that at all. I am saying that I am the way, not you, not your church, not your reading of John’s Gospel, and not the claim of any individual Christian or any particular congregation. I am making the determination, and it is by my grace that anyone gets in, including you” (AJ Levine, The Misunderstood Jew, p. 93). AJ’s story reminds us of the importance of humility when reading the Bible. Whether it is too much confidence in our own good works or our own right belief, we often tend to judge others based on the perspective we have decided is the right one—the perspective that is ours. But if we really take what Jesus says seriously, we may need to reconsider the idea that believing in him calls all of our perspectives into question.

A close and serious reading of this passage calls us, above all, to adopt some humility in our reading of the Bible. Instead of insisting that our perspective is certainly the right one, taking Jesus seriously means that we leave the judgments up to him. People of faith may differ in their opinions, of course, but the good news of Jesus is not there for us, as individuals or as a church, to use it as a weapon against someone else. It is there for us to be reminded, as we often need to be, that the power of salvation does not reside within us or within any of our institutions.

The baptism you have witnessed today is a perfect example of this. It has nothing to do with power that comes from me as a minister or from Fourth Presbyterian Church as a church. The power comes from God and is available to all of us, all of us children of God, even though we may respectfully disagree with one another on one point or another in the scriptures. It is available even to infants, because we believe that while they may not understand or even remember their baptism, God’s power is still at work.

The power for salvation is with God. Taken this way, perhaps our disagreements about scripture can even be helpful to our faith. Perhaps learning to accept the disagreements that are present in scripture can actually teach us to do a better job of humbling ourselves and loving one another. Amen.