“Bearing Witness”
David grew up the son of a Pentecostal music minister out in Arizona. He always assumed he’d become a music minister himself. In time, he would minister to many with his music. But not in the way that he anticipated.
In his teenage years, he began to write his own songs. Before long, he was putting out records on an alternative Christian label. His music had a compelling element that attracted listeners beyond the Christian subculture. He had a prophetic edge to him, a sharp honesty that both enticed and threatened the listener. I remember in college listening to one of his songs, the lyrics of which seemed to address the hypocrisy of religious leaders who preached one way but lived another: “Wouldn’t you like to be / on the cover of a magazine / healthy skin, perfect teeth / designed to hide what lies beneath?” His songs were all about “what lies beneath.”
If I had to guess, the kernel of David’s grievance with the church had nothing to do with the gospel, with a God of love and forgiveness. It had to do with the people who took that God’s place, who presumed to speak for God, who demanded conformity to their interpretation of things. In interviews, David has shared how his religious upbringing alienated him from reality, from his feelings, from himself. He felt so forced to think a certain way and feel a certain way and live a certain way, and there was no space for honesty and conversation. (Our brothers and sisters in Islam have a saying that goes something like this, “Where there is compulsion, there is no religion.”)
What I will share next will probably sound like a turn for the worse, but I would like to encourage you to suspend judgment for a moment. It may not be what it sounds like. In 2009, when David was thirty-three years old, he came out with an album, Curse Your Branches, in which he publicly professed the loss of his faith. On it is a song that sprung to mind as I read this week’s scripture. The song is called “Bearing Witness,” and I’d like to share with you a couple of its verses:
From ancient autographs I cannot read.
Though I've repented [i.e., renounced belief] I’m still tempted, I admit—
But it’s not what bearing witness is.
Too full of fear and prophecy to see
The revelation right in front of me
So sick and tired of trying to make the pieces fit
Cause it’s not what bearing witness is.
What is “bearing witness”? David concludes that it is simply being honest. “Let go of what you ‘know’ / and honor what exists / Son, that’s what ‘bearing witness’ is.”
“The Things That Your Eyes Have Seen”
Our scripture today is an exercise in precisely the “bearing witness” that David is describing—namely honesty, “honor[ing] what exists,” celebrating not some doctrine from on high but our flesh-and-blood experience: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1). According to 1 John, our faith is not about a separate reality, a place we only know secondhand or in the third-person, a realm removed from this world that we do not know now but will later, as though God were there but not here. No, our faith is about the goodness of God that we have come to know right here—through what we’ve heard, seen, and touched.
I’m reminded of the way that Moses talks about faith when he prepares the Israelites to enter the Promised Land. Even though the old generation has died and he is addressing a new generation, a group of people who did not all experience the exodus from Egypt and all of the events in the wilderness, he insists: “Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us alive here today” (Deut 5:3). Now, as rabbis have pointed out for centuries, this claim is literally false. God made the covenant forty years prior to this moment, with the fathers and mothers of the people to whom he is speaking now. But perhaps this statement is true in another way. I think Moses is making a fundamental claim here about faith. For it to be real and authentic, it must not only be inherited but also experienced. It must not be only about “miracles we have not seen” and “ancient autographs we cannot be read”; it must not be from “fear” or “prophecies” of exclusion, whether from a community or an afterlife later; rather, it must be, in some way, from our own experience. “Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us” (Deut 5:3). He is inviting this new generation to understand themselves as God’s partners, to understand that what God did with their parents, God is doing now with them. Maybe they didn’t experience the crossing of the sea or the early miracles in the desert, but they have their own experiences to draw from, which are just as valid. “Take care,” Moses says, “and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life” (Deut 4:9).
Then Moses makes a claim about God that I think has been largely forgotten or neglected. “Acknowledge today and take to heart that the Lord is God in heaven above”—everyone knows that; no surprises there—“and on earth below; there is no other” (Deut 4:39). The Lord is God “on earth below”? That would mean that the Lord is God now, here. God is no different on earth than God is in heaven. What we see and hear and touch, is what we get. It’s all one reality. The reason that the gospel makes such a splash in the world, is that it reclaims this fundamental truth. It insists that within what we see and hear and touch, is God. Within this world, is the kingdom of God.
Faith as an Honest Story
I suppose what I’m hearing in today’s scripture and its counterpart passages in Deuteronomy is a reminder that faith is, at root, an honest story. What I think the writer of 1 John is getting at, is this. The good news that changes people’s hearts is not some memorized formula of truth, but our honest story. I know this might be pushing the envelope, but I believe it is worth pushing: I would suggest that there are no “right answers” in church, that the only “right answer” is an honest answer. At the Lenten Bible study, someone brought up the concept of the “priesthood of the believer,” which is an idea that gained popularity in the Protestant Reformation and therefore sits close to the heart of our own Disciples tradition. The priesthood of the believer is just a way to say that because “the Lord is God…on earth below,” each of us encounters God equally. Each of our honest experiences is equally sacred.
If you’re like me, perhaps sometimes you doubt that your own experience is shiny enough or compelling enough to be good news for someone else. So I appreciate how 1 John emphasizes the need for honesty, especially about our shortcomings. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). To manufacture that cover-worthy image, that “healthy skin” and “perfect teeth,” is in fact a disservice to the good news. Not only does it “hide” the broken reality that “lies beneath,” it also hides the grace and forgiveness of God. The good news is not all about us. It’s not that we are perfect. The good news is about God, that in Christ God accepts us as we are and liberates us from the chains of the past: “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
Looking for the Fingerprints of Christ
I don’t know how David Bazan, the musician whose music I mentioned earlier, would describe his faith today, or lack of it. But I do know that now he sings about what he has seen and heard, about what he has touched with his own hands. I do know that his honesty is much closer to the good news than any formula of truth is, and that like a good minister he invites the same honesty from his listeners. I suspect that he is himself closer to Christ now than he was before, whether or not he uses that name.
If it’s not obvious already, I feel a real sympathy toward David. I see many parallels between him and my friends who have left the church. Although some friends can articulate better than others the reasons they have left, I sense a common theme in all their stories, namely a sense of disenchantment or quiet disappointment. The “good news” that they had heard in church just seemed too disconnected from reality. It seemed cliquish and otherworldly, more like escapist propaganda than a deeply rooted trust in the goodness of a God who is with us right here, right now. It lacked the vibrancy of flesh-and-blood experience and the wild, nitty-gritty grace that does not abide by formulas.
I consider myself very fortunate to have known honest Christ-followers who shared with me not a cookie-cutter story of salvation, but the bumps and bruises and beauty of a real faith. I have known that among you. Oftentimes it’s in passing conversation at a table. Hmm. Oftentimes it’s at a table…
“We declare to you…what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (1 John 1:1). The good news of God’s love is not in another world behind the clouds, but here in this very life—if you would believe it—in all the ways that we have been touched and transformed by Christ and his kingdom-way of love, forgiveness, and peace. This Easter season, I invite you to ponder the fingerprints of Christ on your life: what you have heard and seen, and especially how you’ve been touched, by Christ. And you might remember that, as poet Gerald Manley Hopkins reminds us, “Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.” Christ may have touched you through a parent, a river, a book, a child, an ocean of tears, a friend, the eyes of a wild animal, an eruption of laughter—through anything that brought to you the good news of God’s love, forgiveness, and grace.
And if your story is not a cover-worthy success story, well, all the better. We do not proclaim ourselves. We proclaim the God who is love.
Prayer
Holy God,Who is Lord not only in heaven but also on earth below,
Who is revealed in the very midst of our lives,
In what we have seen and heard and touched—
Sometimes, like the disciples in the locked room,
We are afraid that you are gone
And we are alone
…
Greet us, like them,
With your peace, your encouragement,
And grant us hearts of faith
To know your presence
And declare your goodness in our midst.
In Christ, whom we have seen and heard and touched: Amen.
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