Scripture 1 John 3:1-3
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
Meditation
In 1999, the Rev. Dirk Ficca, a Presbyterian minister, preached a sermon at the Presbyterian Peacemaking Conference called, “Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a Diverse World.” In so doing, he inadvertently set off a war. This is how it happened.
Rev. Ficca had a lifelong commitment to interfaith understanding and dialogue—eventually he became the Executive Director of the Parliament of World Religions. In his sermon to the good folks at the Peacemaking conference, he used an image to try to explain his view of how the many diverse faiths in the world are connected—what they are, and what they are not. This is what he wrote:
Imagine a holy place ringed with windows, and light is shining from outside this holy place through stained-glass windows into the holy place. Do you have that image in your mind? Well in this analogy, the light is the truth, the windows are religions, and the holy place is the world. Light shines from outside through the windows into the holy place in the same way religions are a vehicle by which truth comes into the world. If you take anything of what I say today, take this next thing. The window is not the light. The window is not the light. And religions need to be distinguished from the truth that they let into the world.[i]
If we take Rev. Ficca at his word, we can begin to flesh out his analogy. For Christians, that window is Jesus Christ. For Jews, that window is Torah. For Muslims, it is the prophet, Mohammed, and so on.
Scripture tells us how hesitant God is to let us humans fully or clearly see the divine glory. When Moses communes with God on Mount Horeb, the glow of his face when he comes down is terrifying to the people. The light of God is almost unbearable to look at directly—even second-hand. But eventually—in death? In the next life?—we will see God. But none of us knows yet what God really looks like, what that unmitigated, unfiltered experience is, what it is to see that source of pure light, here and now. That has not yet been revealed to us.
And thus the war began. There were those who heard the sermon as heresy, that no real Christian would ever say that Christianity was just one among many paths to God. (PS: I’m not sure that is what he said.) There were indignant articles and opinion pieces written. Those from outside the PCUSA weighed in, mostly in highly inflammatory terms. There were calls for him to be defrocked. Every arm of the PCUSA at the national level issued statements assuring the public that the church still taught Jesus Christ as the one sure route to salvation.
I Googled Rev. Ficca, and I couldn’t find the text to his sermon, which I would love to read again. But I did find article after article excoriating him.
I thought of the Peacemaking war when I was reading our passage from 1 John this week. It is a beautiful passage—filled with comforting words of reassurance. “See what love the Father has given us,” the author writes, “that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are.” There is no question that our faith in the God of Jesus Christ is a gift, one through which we are blessed every day. To be children of so loving a parent, to be followers of the image of God on earth, is a tremendous blessing. To be privileged to call God father, or mother, or Beloved, suggests an intimacy in our relationship with the Divine that breaks the mold of religions in the ancient world, in which gods were unpredictable tyrants who needed to be flattered with offerings, so that they didn’t crush you.
But in the next verse, the author says something curious: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be, has not yet been revealed.” We have this relationship with God—children, born of God’s love, nurtured by God’s Word, raised up by God’s wisdom. But what we will be? The author is referring to that time when the risen Christ will return, and be present with us again in some tangible way. What will we be then? The church thinks of this as a time when Christ will come with healing, and renewal, and judgement, and mercy. What will we be like? What will he be like?
And the author answers, We don’t know. This has not yet been revealed. As one of my favorite commentators, Matt Skinner, said, “What a lovely, humble statement from a Biblical author, not trying to pretend they can explain exactly how we fit into this larger existence, beyond this life, and what God’s love looks like.”
There is a limit to the things we know. That doesn’t mean we are unfaithful, it just means, the return of Christ at the end of all things is still beyond us, still something that has not happened. But what the author of 1 John will say is, we will be like him.
What does that mean? We are God’s children now—and notice, this is all in the first-person plural. We. Faith is a communal thing, never individual. In the Hebrew scriptures God calls a covenant people together through the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, and in the New Testament Jesus calls a motley crew of people together through the unrelated people who are his disciples. Faith is always a communal event. The fact that we are God’s children now is the source of our hope for what we will be in the future. We will be like him, because we will see. We will see him as he is. No more metaphorical stained-glass window between us and the fullness of the truth of God.
On this celebration of All Saints we are more aware than most days that we are standing in the presence of a great cloud of witnesses—the saints for whom this celebration is named. The people who have gone before us—some of whom we will name today—are present, generation upon generation of them, back to the very beginning. And the saints who are not yet among us are present as well, from a future yet unknown. The enterprise of faith is not a solo flight. Does that mean that we are in the presence of those who have seen the fullness of that light?
I believe we are, but I also admit that I don’t know how this whole thing works, certainly not any more than the person who wrote 1 John. I believe in the great reunion we experience upon death—the welcoming home of our loved ones, ourselves, when our souls depart our bodies. But as to the difference between that and the last days? The return of Jesus in glory? Maybe the difference is, in death we are healed individually, and at the return of Christ all things and all people are healed, as the community we were always meant to be? And perhaps the very fact of that means that we see the light of God even more gloriously and fully?
Mind you, the last four sentences I’ve spoken all end with question marks. I don’t know. We don’t know. But I take this writer at their word. What we will be has not yet revealed, but we will be closer than ever to our Savior. We will be one with him. So we will continue to look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Rev. Dirk Ficca, “Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a Diverse World,” 2000 Peacemaking Conference, Orange, CA [http://www.witherspoonsociety.org/ficca_address.htm#diversity%20as%20conflict].