"Revealed"

Dear Friends in Christ,

I’ve got a little game for you this morning. I’m going to put the shadow of an object on the screens and you try to guess what it is. Here’s a couple easy ones… Now for something more difficult… And finally, what do you think this is? Give up?

I did this little exercise because its actually part of a very old story told by the philosopher Plato. Plato once considered what might happen if you had a group of people who had never seen a real object in their entire lives. Only shadows. The situation he created was of several people who had been chained inside a cave since birth, unable to see themselves, the people around them, or anything but the wall of the cave. Behind them was a bright fire that lit up the entire cave. And between them and the fire a group of people carried objects so that they cast huge shadows on the wall. What would happen?

Well, the first thing that Plato realized is that the trapped people would create names for each of the shadows as they went. Perhaps one person would be more fascinated by the details of one object than the others, or perhaps somebody would begin to track the pattern of which objects went by when. In a sense, they would become scientists of shadows. Another person might tell stories about how each shadow cam to be the shape it was, or sing songs about the relationships between each shape. They would be shadow artists.

Finally, there might actually be someone who would question how the shadows came to be, and how each of the people had become trapped in their current location. But without knowing what the outside world looked like or even what their true existence was, it would be difficult to ask more than aimless questions without the hope of answers. That person would be a philosopher. Perhaps, even, a theologian.

After he had established this fictional world, Plato asked another question. What would happen if one of those men and women were set free? What if he were shown the real, full color, three-dimensional objects he had previously seen only in flat, black, shadows? Would he even recognize them? And if he did, if in joy and excitement he ran back to the others in the cave and described to them what these objects were like, would they believe him? Would they even be capable of understanding him?

I tell this story because I think it illustrates the current mindset of the nation today. Last week, Pastor Meyer did a thorough presentation of the problems with post-modern morality, or lack thereof. Yet, there’s more to post-modernism than lax morals and corruption. For its relativism extends into the very nature of the reality. Post-modernism says that the world I see is only the world I’ve been allowed to see. It’s only my perception of the world. And that there’s as good a chance that I’m seeing the real thing as that I’m seeing a shadow on the wall, because I wouldn’t know the difference either way.

Thus, “Truth” is an illusion. A fantasy. A shadow. Truth extends only as far as the edge of my eyes. Everything after that point is unreliable. I can’t judge what you’re doing, because I’m not inside your head. I can’t say that your religion is right or wrong because I don’t know how it makes you feel. I can’t claim to know your purpose in life because I’ve spent my life chained inside a cave staring at shadows on a wall.

It’s a depressing way to live, when you really think about it. Yet, it’s embraced by millions, perhaps billions of people. And I think it’s embraced by so many because it strikes a chord of truth inside us. For the post-modern view of reality isn’t really so far off base. Listen to what the prophet Isaiah says of the state of man:

Therefore justice is far from us, and righteousness does not overtake us; we hope for light, and behold, darkness, and for brightness, but we walk in gloom. We grope for the wall like the blind; we grope like those who have no eyes; we stumble at noon as in the twilight, among those in full vigor we are like dead men. We all growl like bears; we moan and moan like doves; we hope for justice, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far from us. For our transgressions are multiplied before you, and our sins testify against us; for our transgressions are with us, and we know our iniquities: transgressing, and denying the Lord, and turning back from following our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart lying words. Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away; for truth has stumbled in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey.

-          Isaiah 59:9-15

This was written 2700 years ago, and yet it could be describing the world today.

A world that has embraced sin to the point that it now stumbles blindly in the dark. Unable to see God. Unable to see righteousness and justice. Unable to see even truth itself. As St John says, a world that is so full of darkness that even when the light shines into it, we can’t comprehend it. That even when someone who has seen the truth runs back to his friends in the cave of shadows, they don’t believe him. Truth is now so foreign that people would rather cling to the shadows than accept reality.

            And yet, this is really nothing new for us. Nor was it new for St John. Or even for Isaiah. This has been going on since Eve chose to believe the lie that Satan told her, rather than the truth of God’s Word. This is nature of original sin. Bondage to shadows. Bondage to a lie. The utter inability to comprehend anything just, right, or Godly. A world that can with every ounce of strength seek to do good, and yet become more and more evil. A people who are handed God’s Word on a silver platter, and yet ignorantly place it on a shelf alongside the babblings of Muhammed, Buddha, and the scientific community.

            It’s no wonder that we find it so difficult to get people into the pews on Sunday morning. For we are little more than shadows ourselves in their eyes. How do you reach out to someone like that? How do we convince someone who is skeptical of everything he or she hears?

Simply put, we don’t. God’s Word does. As St Paul writes in our epistle lesson today, “In the Gospel the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith.” The world is spiraling downward, out of control. But it is God’s Word that pulls us into an upward spiral. “From faith, for faith.” From the faith that only the Holy Spirit can provide. For the faith that brings us back to God’s Word and the power of the Spirit. An upward spiral of revelation. God’s righteousness revealed more and more through the Holy Gospel. God’s light revealed into the darkness of our hearts until in faith we can understand all that Christ has done for us.

I once heard a story of a young man who was blind from birth. Never having seen the world, there were many things he had heard about but could never understand. But there was one thing that he wished he could see most: light. It seemed to be everywhere and sounded so beautiful. He had asked his mother and father what light was like, but they simply stuttered and fumbled for words, unable to explain it. “Light is… well… light.”

One day the young man woke up and he could see! It was a miraculous recovery, one that nobody could explain. Suddenly, life was so much easier for the man and his parents. But he had only one thing in mind. He wanted to see light. He asked his mother about it first. She pointed to a lamp, “That’s light.” The man stared at it, dumbfounded. “No, that’s a stick of wood topped by a glass bulb and covering of cloth.” He thought. That wasn’t light. He went to his father, and he pointed up at the sky. “That’s light,” he said. The man’s heart sank. No, that’s the sun. A ball of burning hydrogen and helium sitting in space. The young man looked in scientific literature, where he read that light was both a wave of electromagnetic energy, like radio transmissions, and a microscopic particle. Both sounded invisible in the young man’s mind, and yet so many people said they could see it.

For years the man struggled to figure out this problem, obsessed with finding light. And every day that went by he grew more and more frustrated and depressed. Finally, early one morning he walked to the top of a nearby cliff, fully intending to throw himself off the edge in his despondency. At the top he met a painter, staring down at the valley below them as he work. When the young man looked, it took his breath away. Fog filled the valley, and as the sun rose blinding streams of white cut through the mist. “What is that?” the young man asked in amazement. The painter turned to him and smiled. “That? That’s light, man. Pure light.” And the young man finally understood.

May God grant you the eyes to see his light. And may he grant you the opportunity to be a guide to others. Amen.