John 3:14-21
Sermon preached by Renee Roederer
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Pasadena Presbyterian Church
John 3:14-21
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
‘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.
‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.’
We’ve heard these words before.
Many of us have heard these words more times than we can count. They’re so familiar to us that perhaps they seem a bit like the soundtrack of our faith – like constant, background music that’s shaping who we are, and. . . if we’re honest. . . like a wall of background noise that we can easily tune out when this passage is read once again.
It’s just that familiar.
Some of you had an experience that mirrors one like mine, and this passage has been a part of your life for a very long time. I was a five year old, pigtailed little girl who memorized this passage in the heat of an Indiana summer during Vacation Bible School. The first church I attended as a very young child is in one sense, locked in distant memory. And yet, aspects of it are so vivid to me. During a week of dipping cookies in Dixie cups of lemonade, I memorized these words: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
Now there were things I didn’t understand. Perish? Begotten? What are those words? They weren’t in my five year old vocabulary, and maybe that’s a good thing. But there were some things I did seem to understand. “Wow, God must really, really love me. . .” I made a profession of faith that summer and was baptized the next April, which was quite young I might add for a little Southern Baptist!
Maybe you had an experience like that one. You memorized these words at an early age, and they’ve been the soundtrack of faith in the background for a very long time.
But maybe you didn’t grow up in the church or in any sort of religious environment. And your encounters with this text were a bit different. You came to be intrigued (or maybe annoyed) with all those signs at sports games on ESPN: John 3:16! John 3:16! There are those strange numbers again. . .What’s that about, and why do Christians need to put those numbers all over t-shirts and billboards? The depth and the beauty of these words started to sound rather trite and well. . . kind of weird.
So we have a few paradoxes here.
We have a text that makes large, expansive claims. “For God so loved the world!” The original Greek text literally says, “For God so loved the cosmos!” God loves all that is. What a beautiful conviction. . .
And how difficult it is to wrap our minds around it. . .When we see the clear night sky away from the city, when we view the band of stars above our heads that we call the Milky Way, when we see far-away places we can’t comprehend, we can know that God has created this cosmos and these people under one sky for love. That’s beautiful.
But this claim isn’t only large and expansive. It’s somehow particular. We’ve experienced it in the specific contexts of our lives. I was found by the love expressed in this text when I was a kindergartener in the midst of summer Bible lessons and games. And you’ve had specific experiences with this love too. It’s expansive and specific. . .That’s a paradox in our experience of this text.
And here’s another one: For some of us, we have a text that has been a soundtrack of our lives as we’ve grown up as insiders within the church. This language has become so saturated and repetitive that we insiders sometimes lose the beauty of its expansive claims, and we tune it out when we hear it again. We’ve been insiders, and this has been part of our language. But for others of us – and certainly people who would never step foot in a church or faith community – this language has been experienced as slogan, a trite set of numbers with a colon in the middle. I have no doubt that some of those signs and t-shirts are displayed with great intentions and a lot of love, but for many people on the outside of the Christian faith, I think that this reduction of a beautiful claim to a set of weird numbers is likely experienced as a way of marking those who are insiders within a certain type of Christian culture and those who are outsiders beyond it.
And perhaps paradoxical experiences with this text are appropriate when we look at its original context. Nicodemus was an insider and an outsider at the same time. Earlier in this chapter, we learn that Nicodemus is a Pharisee, one of the religious insiders of 1st century Judaism. He was curious to learn from Jesus, but his fellow religious authorities were quite suspicious of who Jesus was and what he was teaching. So Nicodemus came to converse with Jesus during the night when he wouldn’t be seen. This insider had to come to Jesus as an outsider in a roundabout way.
Nicodemus has questions of Jesus too. Jesus begins their conversation with intriguing language, that those who see the Kingdom of God must be born from above. They must be born again. But Nicodemus wants to reduce the beauty of this language to something tangible and literal. “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” he asks. “Can one enter a second time into the Mother’s womb and be born?” Rather than reducing his words, Jesus expands them again, and a few verses later, our text emerges. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Expansive and specific. . . insiders and outsiders. . . I wonder if these paradoxical experiences of this text have something to say to us today. . .
We do have a soundtrack of our faith. We do have depth and beauty and an experience of God’s love. Perhaps some of these scriptural words could be a part of our Greatest Hits Album: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all of creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:37-38)
“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out all fear.” (1 John 4:16-18)
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them, and they will be his peoples. And God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes.” (Rev. 21:1-4)
Our soundtrack of faith is large and expansive, but it’s also specific, because this love has swept us up in its depth and beauty in particular ways. It has transformed us as individuals and as a community. I wonder what would happen if we took this soundtrack, the convictions behind these words, and our experiences of God’s love, and we offered them as a treasure trove toward our neighborhood? What would happen?
We’d probably have a few choices ahead of us. Sure, in a well-intentioned effort to get people sitting in pews on a Sunday morning, we could reduce this treasure trove into a formula. I like to call this the Field of Dreams Plan. “If you do such and such, they will come. . .” Churches do this all the time. They think a certain type of music style or a certain type of program or hiring a certain type of personality will be that magic fix. Well. . . maybe the treasure trove doesn’t need fixing or a marketing plan. Maybe it needs practicing.
So rather than creating a formula or a strategy to get people inside a church – which for some people, seems like a fortress - the church is called to go outward, isn’t it?
“See, the home of God is among the people. God will dwell with them. . .” How might God be dreaming to dwell in our neighborhood in and through our presence? It won’t be about a formula. It won’t simply be about getting outsiders into pews. It will involve us dwelling in our own treasure trove – our own soundtrack of faith – so that we begin to create doors within this church. Doors all over the place! So that we will begin to create portals that get us outside, practicing our faith among the people in particular ways in love, and providing spaces where outsiders can come in, be loved, and become insiders in our midst.
These days, we’re dreaming about ministries that can become doors, faith practices that can become portals – so that loving, sacred space can be the only thing standing between insiders and outsiders, rather than barriers or marketing strategies.
I want to give you a few images and then invite you do so some dreaming yourselves:
In 2007, when I was a seminary student, I took an incredible trip to Germany and Switzerland to see sights from the Protestant Reformation. Our first stop was in the town of Wittenberg, made famous when the disaffected monk Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses of theological grievances on the door of the cathedral. That church is obviously the most famous one in the town. But the other famous church is the smaller building where Martin Luther was himself a pastor. When my friends and I walked into that building, I was shocked, surprised, and intrigued by the paintings that fill that church. They are the work of Lucas Cranach, a contemporary of Martin Luther, and the town artist. They’re filled with pictures of scriptural scenes – scenes like the last Supper of Christ – but instead of creating imagined renditions of Jesus’ disciples, the people in these paintings are actual people from Wittenberg. They’re real individuals. We know many of their names. Lucas Cranach made the neighborhood into the disciples of Christ. The church is filled with pictures like that. And 1500 years from Christ to Wittenberg are somehow united. Incredible.
I wonder how Christ’s disciples – insiders and outsiders alike – are experiencing love today in the Pasadena Playhouse District?
I want to close by doing something very different and outside the box. There’s an insert in your bulletin. I want to invite each of you to make these expansive, loving claims specific today. How are you called in this moment to build those doors – those portals that get us outside in our neighborhood, that become space where outsiders can become insiders? What are you going to do – you, specific disciple, you? You, who may be the only one to make a specific dream happen?
I’m going to give us two minutes of silence to answer these questions, and I invite you to place them in the offering plate in a few minutes. I’ll read them and be prayerful for you as you consider how God is calling you. If you’re joining us through our television broadcast, I’ll tell you what this insert says so you can think about it too. . .
It starts with a great quote from Frederick Buechner. It says, "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." [Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC]
And here are the questions:
What gives you joy and gladness?
What is one need you see around you - in our church or in our neighborhood?
What will you do to bring your deep joy and gladness into the need you see? What tangible action will you take to intersect gladness with that need?
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