For the Sake of Love

Lent 4B, March 18, 2012

Numbers 21:4-9 But the people became impatient on the way.
Ephesians 2:1-10 This is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.
John 3:14-21 Those who do what is true come to the light.

O God of grace, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

Some of you are likely wondering why I just chanted our Gospel reading this morning. If you aren’t a regular at our Christmas Eve services, you might never have heard me do it. On Christmas Eve, I chant the Gospel because the prologue to the Gospel of John is a hymn text and singing it seems like a good thing to do. Besides, chanting on Christmas Eve enhances the sense of mysticism and wonder, and gently moves us out of our analytical and calculating heads which have been making all kinds of lists and checking them twice. I don’t know why it’s never occurred to me before to chant the Gospel at other times of the year. But earlier this week, when a group of us met for early morning Bible study, the weight of the baggage associated with this text threatened to squash some of us, I imagined that chanting it might lift that burden a little.

We’ve been chanting more than usual in our services this Lent as a way of deepening our communal prayer. We’re chanting more of the texts and we’re chanting what’s called “the ordinary,” that is, the Kyrie, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei.[1] (The Gloria is part of the ordinary, but it traditionally is omitted in Lent.) The Gregorian chant settings are a little hard to sing for some people – but honestly, I think that matching pitch is overrated when it comes to congregational chanting. As my friend Ana Hernandez, who teaches the sacred art of chant all around the country says, “anyone can chant. It doesn’t matter if people have told you all your life that you can’t sing. They were wrong. God gave us all a voice” to chant.[2] All of the spiritual traditions that I can think of employ chant to communicate with the Holy. That’s what we are doing when we chant. And you know what? I’m pretty sure that the Holy doesn’t mind if you’re not matching pitch. Besides, if everyone sang the same note all the time there would be no harmony. Some harmony is intentional and some is unintentional. Some harmony is consonant and some is dissonant. It’s all good. God gave you your voice and invites you to use it in the company of others.

So back to the baggage I mentioned a moment ago. The heaviness of it has to do with is a “who is in and who is out” realm of God sorting mechanism. One person in our Tuesday morning Bible Study conversation called it a shakedown. I tend to listen to each person who comes to Bible Study at O-dark-hundred as representing others – you all, for example. We almost always have a wide range of views and reactions represented in our conversations.

I realized on Friday, as I was writing this sermon, that in my dozen or so years of preaching almost every week, I have somehow managed to avoid preaching on this Gospel lesson which contains John 3:16. I think I’ve avoided it because it frightens me. I’d much rather preach about the story of the snake on a stick that Moses lifted up to cure the people who’d been bitten by snakes in the Book of Numbers. I’d rather preach about the grace of God, given freely in the Letter to the Ephesians. I’d rather preach a whole sermon about the history of chant! So on Friday morning, I was busy trying to figure out how to avoid John 3:16 again and I nearly jumped out of my chair when I realized that the date was 3/16. Yikes!

John, chapter 3, verse 16, is sometimes called “the Gospel in a nutshell” and is often found on bumper stickers and billboards, posters at professional sporting events held by people who hope to be caught on camera for the television and the jumbo-tron. (What a name). Did you know that “John 3:16” is also printed on the bottom rim of paper cups in the fast food chain “In-N-Out Burgers” and on the shopping bags of the clothing retailer “Forever 21”? (Really. Would anyone want to be 21 forever? That sounds like hell to me.) “John 3:16” is printed on the boxes of Tornado Fuel Savers too (for you city-dwellers, a Tornado Fuel Saver is an automotive part which doesn’t work at all, according to consumer watchdog groups). Perhaps you remember that Heisman Trophy winner, Tim Tebow, often wrote John 3:16 on his face in eye black before football games in college, and later, he threw completed passes for 316 yards resulting in a playoff upset against the Pittsburgh Steelers. If that doesn’t make you believe in Jesus Christ, I don’t know what will! That kind of zealous religious faith frightens me, especially because it is often used against me and people I care about.

But when I stopped to think of what verse of the scriptures I might choose for my “Gospel in a nutshell,” if I could only choose one, I realized, to my chagrin, that it would have to be John 13:34 in which Jesus says, “Just as I have loved you, you are to love one another.” Jesus actually says, “love one another” four times in the Gospel of John – he really meant it, as far as I can tell. And my poking fun at other people’s piety is not at all loving. I certainly wouldn’t do it, for example, to Tim Tebow’s face if I ever met him, and so I know I shouldn’t do it behind his back. Religious arrogance is ugly whether its face is progressive or conservative, whether it manifests itself in a believer or an agnostic or an atheist. It’s always particularly ugly from a pulpit, so I hope that anyone who I offended a few minutes ago, has stayed in the room long enough to hear my acknowledgement of the ways in which I miss the mark. The thing is, it’s so easy to succumb to one-upsmanship when one gets afraid. Right?

One of the other things that happens when progressive Christians engage this text is that we hear things that are not there. These came up at Bible Study too. So I want to point out three things that are not in this text, even though many think they hear them. First, what is not here is penal substitutionary atonement theology (you know, the idea that God caused Jesus to take the punishment for our sins when he was crucified). It’s not here because it wasn’t invented until the Reformation. Second, what is not here is exclusivism with regard to Christianity. It’s not here because Christianity wasn’t invented yet. It wasn’t invented in Jesus’ time. And it probably wasn’t even known in any way recognizable to us when the Gospel of John was being written.[3] When John was being written, there were Jesus-following Jews, non-Jesus-following Jews, Jesus-following Gentiles and non-Jesus-following Gentiles, Jesus-following Samaritans, and non-Jesus-following Samaritans, and enormous variety of religious teachings and practices. The term Christian was a derisive term for a group of folks in Antioch who would not acknowledge the supreme authority of the emperor of Rome in the second half of the first century because of their allegiance to Jesus’ teachings. The word Christian was a “vulgar appellation” according to the Roman Historian, Pliny the Younger. Finally, what is not here is an idea of heaven as a happy place one might go after death. Eternal life in this case is about a timeless now, not never-never land.

So what might I make of this Gospel passage if my “Gospel in a nutshell” is “Love one another”? I can imagine that this Gospel was written for a community which was afraid. It’s not exactly clear what they were afraid of, or what had happened to make them afraid, although the mighty Roman army would be high on the list of possibilities. In an environment of military aggression and economic oppression, people who normally might have only minor difficulty loving one another, often have a great deal of difficulty. The fear gets codified in the Gospel of John as “fear of the Jews,” but it’s also an intensely Jewish Gospel, and even within it, Jews are not consistently portrayed in a pejorative way. There are plenty of messages of God’s love for the whole world and pluralist assertions like that there are other sheep which belong to God, but which do not belong to “this fold.” In fact, in Greek, the words emphasize the intensity of God’s love for the whole world. “God loved the world so [much] that God gave the unique Son (it doesn’t say “his only”) God gave the unique Son, so that all the ones trusting in him would not perish, but have eternal life.” This was being written to comfort those who were at risk of perishing.

Another person in the Tuesday morning Bible Study conversation noticed considerable hope and affirmation in this passage – encouragement in these early chapters of John for those who do what is true, that is, whatever is just, whatever is right, whatever is loving; whatever is done in the light because it is good. John says, “for God did not send the Son into the world in order that the Son might judge the world, rather, in order that the world might be saved through him.” Here is strong evidence of faith in Jesus as God’s messenger of reconciliation and well-being, of dignity asserted in non-violent ways. By trusting in him and his teachings, anyone can have a whole-hearted and meaningful life in God.

Perhaps we can imagine that the condemnation that exists in this text is a little like the separation and self-differentiation process that can happen in anyone’s spiritual development – a kind of spiritual adolescence in this Johanine community. Perhaps we can imagine that loving the Gospel of John is a little bit like loving a beleagured middle-schooler who is feeling alone, alienated and persecuted, and who has extraordinary talents and beautiful gifts! A wise teacher once told me that in order to love a middle-schooler, you have to learn to love your own inner-adolescent. You don’t let your inner-adolescent do whatever he or she wants, but you love him or her. You believe in him or her, which is not an intellectual or analytical calculation, but a leaning in to mercy, and mystery,  and wonder for the sake of Love. Some days are easier than others of course.

To return to your place in the text click on the number of the footnote you read.

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