Sermon for 4th Sunday in Lent: 15 March 2015 (John 3:16)
Sermon for 4th Sunday in
Lent
15 March 2015
The Rev. Carrie B. Smith
Grace and peace to you from God our
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
This morning’s
Gospel text includes John 3:16—by all accounts the most beloved, most familiar
verse in the Bible, and at the same time the one we still most need to hear.
It can be
difficult for a preacher to imagine what “new” can be said about such a
familiar verse, but then again, “new” is never the point of preaching. The Good
News is the aim of preaching, specifically God’s Good News for our Bad Situation.
The Good News is now, and ever has been, that through the cross of Christ we
see that God loves the world. And our bad situation is that we love the
darkness.
Heaven
knows, there’s plenty of darkness in the world today. There is the stuff we’re
pretty sure doesn’t apply to us (terrorism, extremism, and violence) and the stuff
we actively seek to avoid (racism, sexism, and homophobia). Then there’s the
stuff we know is darkness but find
tempting anyway (consumerism, greed, grudges, and indifference to the suffering
of others, to name a few). But the darkness we really love, the darkness which
most attracts us all, is the belief that
only some of the world is beloved.
“For God so
loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him
may not perish but may have eternal life.” John 3:16 has been called “the Gospel
in a nutshell”, a perfectly condensed expression of the Good News. We memorize it,
we put it on t-shirts, we stick it on our cars, but when it comes to living it
out, the news sounds a little different: For God so loves the good people….For
God so loves the ones who look like me…For God so loves the ones who vote like
me…For God so loves the Christians…For God so loves the Christians who worship
like me and share my theology...For God so loves the people on my side of the
city, my side of the wall, my side of the issues…
With John
3:16 as our motto, we proudly proclaim that through the cross of Christ, God loves
the world…but the world we imagine is very small indeed.
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| View from the tower at Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, Jerusalem Photo by Carrie Smith |
I’ve been
showing my parents around Jerusalem for the last several days. It’s their first
visit here, and it’s been interesting to see the city anew through their eyes.
Things that seem normal after living here for a few months (I’ve now been here
almost eight months—hard to believe!) once again look scandalous and strange. The
division seems starker. The quarters seem further apart. The lack of human
interaction across boundaries is shocking and even embarrassing to behold. Do
all these people really live on this tiny piece of real estate? Wait, who is
allowed to live in this part of the city? Wait, where would this third temple be built? Who is allowed to pray, and
where? How many churches are sharing
this space? And why do they fight? Explain again about the ladder?
Jerusalem is
the perfect place to see in living color how the darkness of exclusivity is so attractive to humans. God
loves us, and not you. God wants us to do this, and not that. Christians are certainly
not immune. Pastors and missionaries and activists and aid workers are not
immune. And this is why we need to hear John 3:16 again, and again, and again.
For God so loved the world. For God so loved
the world. For God so loved the world!
The belovedness of the world—the whole
world—is the most amazing Good News to hear, and the most difficult news to
accept.
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| Milky Way, Wadi Rum Photo by Danae Hudson www.flickr.com/photos/danae_hudson |
But indeed,
this is the message of John 3:16, for, as it reads in Greek: “God so loved the kosmos, that he sent his only Son…” And
yes, that means exactly what it sounds like in English. God loved the cosmos, the universe in its entirety, all
of creation—or, as Psalm 24 puts it: For “the earth is the LORD's, and
everything in it, the world, and all
who live in it”. God’s love is for those who are like us and those who are not
like us at all. God’s love is for those with whom we agree and those we would
call enemies.
God’s love is for everyone—like it or not.
The
belovedness of the cosmos is radical
Good News – so radical, in fact that perhaps it is the kind of Good News which
needs a hospitable environment in which to take root and grow. I wonder if our difficulty
in accepting and living into the cosmic love of John 3:16 stems from our inability to believe our own belovedness.
The other
day, I heard a National Public Radio report on a study of American children
entering college, and it found in these students a dramatic rise in narcissism
(a belief that you are better than everyone around you) and an equally dramatic
drop in compassion (an awareness of and caring for the situation of others).
The cause? It seems to be the decades of concern over the “self-esteem” of our
children.
I was
thinking about this report, and how it reveals that once again, we humans have
missed the point. We saw darkness (kids with low opinions of themselves) and we
tried to fix it with something that ended up being just as dark (overindulgent
praise, resulting in kids believing they are better, bigger, stronger, and
smarter than everyone else in the world.)
According to
this report, the problem of self-esteem has gone away, but now we have created
young people who love themselves, but aren’t too interested in other people.
Feeling good about ourselves and our abilities isn't a bad thing. However, I wonder
what it would mean for us to know instead that we are beloved—by our parents, certainly, but more importantly, by God.
After all, having
good self-esteem just means feeling that when you are put up next to other people,
you are just as good or even better.
But being beloved means knowing you are loved even
if you are shorter, slower, darker, lighter, richer, poorer. Being beloved
means standing tall on the foundation of God’s love and not on our merits or our
talents or our DNA. Being beloved means understanding that you are worthy of
love and respect because you are part of the cosmos, a world wondrously created by God and redeemed by the cross
of Christ. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not
your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one
may boast. For we are what he has made us,
created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our
way of life.” (Ephesians 2:8-10)
Being
beloved frees us to see the person in front of us not as a threat, but as an
extension of God’s love—worthy of respect, worthy of mercy, worthy of
forgiveness, worthy of gentleness.
Catholic
priest Henri Nouwen, who spent decades living and working with the
developmentally disabled, wrote eloquently about this in his book, “The Life of
the Beloved”:
“To be
chosen as the Beloved of God is something radically different. Instead of
excluding others, it includes others. Instead of rejecting others as less
valuable, it accepts others in their own uniqueness. It is not a competitive,
but a compassionate choice. Our minds have great difficulty in coming to grips
with such a reality. Maybe our minds will never understand it. Perhaps it is
only our hearts that can accomplish this.”
In
Jerusalem, at the checkpoints, in Mosul, Ferguson, and Madison, it’s clear that
human minds are not grasping the belovedness of the other. The light has come
into the world, and yet where such darkness reigns, humanity is already condemned.
But God so
loved the world that God could not abide the reality of our brokenness.
God so loved
the world that God would not just “let it be”.
God so loved
the world that God sent the Son into human time, to walk with us and share our
sufferings.
God so loved
the world that the Son was lifted up on the cross, revealing the power of love
to overcome the darkness.
God so loved
the world that on the third day the Son was lifted up from the grave, defeating
death and sin once and for all.
God so loved
the world that Christ is present for us in ways our hearts can understand: in
water, as bread, as wine, in and among the beloved community.
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| Jerusalem sunrise Photo by Carrie Smith |
Sisters and
brothers, God so loved the world that those who believe, those who have come
into the light, may live the promised eternal life in the here and now. That
life begins when we see the other as one with us, a beloved, integral part of
the cosmos God created and Christ has redeemed. Go, and live in the light. Amen.
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