The Present Crisis

John 3:14-21

There’s a hymn in the 1940 Episcopal Hymnal which didn’t make the cut for the “new” 1982 Hymnal. The tune survived – a good old Welsh tune, one of my favorites – but the text I still associate with that tune is gone. The words have stuck with me, though:

Once to every man and nation
comes the moment to decide,

in the strife of truth with falsehood,
for the good or evil side;

some great cause, God’s new Messiah,
offering each the bloom or blight,

and the choice goes by forever
‘twixt that darkness and that light.

I don’t know exactly why we don’t sing that anymore. Fashions change in hymns and theology as they do in everything else – and perhaps we’ve gotten used to understanding that our lives contain many, many opportunities to decide for truth, or good, or God,

not just one once.

But I think John the evangelist – John whose story of Jesus we heard just now – would have appreciated that hymn the way I learned to sing it.

You see, John is fond of metaphors about darkness and light, about knowing and choosing Truth, and John very much wants us to understand that when we come face-to-face with the expectation-shattering death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus –  when we encounter Jesus “lifted up” as he says today –our reaction to that disruptive divine encounter IS our salvation, our eternal life. Or not.

Our response in that encounter is our judgement.

That’s what Jesus is trying to explain to Nicodemus, in the fragment of conversation we heard from John’s gospel today. Nicodemus has come to Jesus at night, secretly, knowing there’s something unusually divine about this rabbi Jesus, but unwilling to risk his security - his leadership position, the respect of the community - on a public response.

And Jesus tries to tell him that this revelation of God he’s asking about is going to force him off the fence. Now that God’s Son is come into the world, the gift of eternal life is available to everyone who believes. And belief is an action verb; not intellectual agreement, not a lack of objection to new truth. To believe in Jesus is to make the active choice - once, and then continuously – to commit myself to the world as Jesus sees it. To let go - knowingly - of the comfort of controlling my own destiny, because I’m ready to give my heart to God’s vision of the world. That commitment is an act of trust, and that trust is eternal life, life in the fullness of God, here and now, in the midst of this messy world, not somewhere or someday.

And inaction – acknowledgement without commitment – is eternal loss, just as much as an active choice against Jesus.

When Jesus talks about “the judgement” today – the judgement that happens when we respond to the light coming into the world – he’s using the Greek word krisis, a decision and turning point.

That’s why I love the urgency of that hymn we don’t sing any more, the urgency of taking positive action, as soon as the choice presents itself, between evil and good, for life and truth and light.

The words of that hymn are adapted from James Russell Lowell’s poem, On the Present Crisis, published in 1845 to express Lowell’s concern about impending war with Mexico after the annexation of the slave-owning Texas by the United States,

and about the war and disaster that he sees as inevitable consequences of slavery. Lowell cast his call for freedom, leadership, and justice into verse, insisting that the abolition of slavery was the way of truth, the American way, and the way of the Cross.

Generations later – generation after generation, in fact – you and I are also confronted with a present crisis. Decisions about good and evil continue long after our nation decided to abolish slavery. And how we respond to our own present crisis does, in fact, determine our eternal life.

There’s more than one crisis facing us right now, isn’t there?

There’s a growing sense that this one moment may matter more than any other in stemming the tide of mass shootings. There’s a march on Washington later this month, and culture and business are starting to shift, just a tiny bit, in response to the words and lives of young people who will not yield to the oppressive dictate that now is not the time to talk about guns.

Those voices teach us that this is a moment of decision, of crisis, a moment to respond to God, and every single one of us faces the choice to act. Or not.

There’s a swelling sense of crisis – of the difficulty of knowing how to choose good from evil – in the relationships of and between genders, and even the definition of gender – in our culture. The #MeToo stories of sexual assault and harassment aren’t going away. Questions about transgender bathroom qualifications and public service swirl in the headlines.

There are decisions to be made, here, for truth or falsehood. This is the time to respond to seeing the Body of Christ in one another’s bodies. And every single one of us gets to act, to choose.

The sense of crisis in national politics ebbs and flows, but you don’t have to be either Republican or Democrat to feel that decisions we are making now can mean life or death for the living of the gospel in our national life.

There are crises in hunger and homelessness, in the education of our children, which appear in the headlines, or arise invisibly in our neighborhoods, over and over and right this minute. And our decision for Jesus and truth and good matters in every one of those crises.

Because how we decide these things is – as Lowell said of slavery in that poem and hymn – about how we choose eternal life. How we respond, when we come face to face with the vulnerability and power of the Son of God, shattering our expectations of what is normal and necessary in the world, how we respond to God in our present crisis, creates eternal life, or our own condemnation, here and now.

Sometimes it seems that there is no good left to choose; that this crisis is slipping over into eternal loss. But John and Jesus and James Russell Lowell all remind us that’s not the final answer: that God did not send the Son to condemn the world, but to save it,

and that God stands firm for grace yet to come, even in the midst of evil choices, in Lowell’s words) “keeping watch above his own.”

Jesus, and Lowell, and John all insist that sitting on the fence is not an option, that the crisis of our present is both rooted in, and leads us to, the expectation-shattering encounter with God in the death and resurrection and exaltation of Jesus.

You and I have decisions to make,

you and I face truth and falsehood, good and evil, and the revelation of Jesus, in our own daily world,

and we respond.

Even when we think we don’t.

And when we respond by choosing to believe, to act in trust and truth, eternal life fills us and the world.

**********

Once to every man and nation

comes the moment to decide,

in the strife of truth with falsehood,

for the good or evil side;

some great cause, God’s new Messiah,

offering each the bloom or blight,

and the choice goes by forever

‘twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper,

yet ‘tis truth alone is strong;

though her portion be the scaffold,

and upon the throne be wrong,

yet that scaffold sways the future,

and, behind the dim unknown,

standeth God within the shadow

keeping watch above his own.

The Hymnal 1940, Church Publishing. Hymn 519