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Sermons at Saint Mary's
The Fourth Sunday of Lent Everything I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten. Remember that little book by Robert Fulghum a few years ago? Well, for me as it turned out, everything I ever needed to know I learned in my kindergarten Sunday School class. It was there that I first heard about how God created all things and how all things created in God were good; there too where I first heard about Abraham and Sarah, the forebears of our faith, and Moses, the one who led the children of Israel out of their bondage to a new land, and King David who composed the Psalms, and the prophets who hungered and thirsted for justice in a time when there was no justice. It’s amazing to me now a half century later, what I learned and even more amazingly, retained from my kindergarten Sunday School class. In the evangelical Presbyterian church I grew up in, it was all about planting seeds. This was accomplished by having all of the children in Sunday School memorize prodigious amounts of scripture. All of it was obligatory, and all of it, mind you well, was in the King James Version. And all of it began in kindergarten with this little Gospel verse we have heard this morning. John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he have his only begotten Son so that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” Friends, it is a humbling thing to realize now how this single verse has shaped my life of faith. And yet each time I think I have understood it fully, there is still something in it that is deeper and more profound to understand. Take the words: “For God so loved”…the tense is declarative, and the assumption is so provocative that it has animated 2000 years of Christian history. Jesus, of course, was not the first to declare God’s capacity to love. But Jesus was the first to demonstrate what the love of God looks like. The love of God is unconditional, it is sacrificial, it is selfless, it is before all things and beneath all things. Out of love God creates, out of love God redeems, out of love God sustains. Which means, brothers and sisters, each time we ourselves love we are acting in and like God. We were born in love, and we shall die in love. Because God so loved. Because God is love. And God so loved the world. One of my greatest theological revelations in recent years is the choice of words in this verse. I had always assumed, as virtually every other Christian dead or alive has assumed, that the meaning here was that God so loved humanity. But it isn’t the Greek word anthropos that is used in John 3:16. Rather it is the word cosmos that appears in this verse, which literally translates “God so loved the cosmos” In other words, the creation and redemption and sustenance of God is not primarily for humanity in and of itself. It is the entire world, the entire cosmos God loves into being, and God seeks to redeem, and God endeavors to sustain. Think of the implications. What if this verse actually turns upside down our anthropocentric view of God? What if we actually stopped thinking about humanity as the sole focus of God in Jesus Christ? What, instead, if we actually began to view God cosmologically of which humanity is a part? What if we saw every living thing around us as having equal value in God’s eyes, that God actually loves the rest of creation as much as God loves us? I wonder. And God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son. Here is the great mystery of the incarnation: God gives us God’s only Son. God does not hold back. God spares nothing. It is not as if Jesus is one avatar, one demigod among many that God sends as a trial balloon. For the cosmos God completely and utterly puts it all on the table: Without hesitation or regret, without conditions or collateral. Out of love God gives everything. Out of love God enters into creation as one its own. Out of love God is born and out of love God dies, entering into solidarity with all of organic life, entering completely into the cycle of birth and death in which all of us exist. But it does not end here. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life. The word whosoever does not leave room for exceptions. It is emphatic and it is categorical. This means that in God’s economy, there are no preordained outsiders. It means also that any human definition of who stands outside of God’s grace is ipso facto an outright fallacy. For as the old hymn says, All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all. There are no conditions to God’s love, but one: and that is that we believe that we are in God and God is in us. For whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life. The word perish is much stronger than the word death. It means to be obliterated, totally destroyed, erased from memory. Even death can not do not this, Jesus tells Nicodemus, for God sends God’s only Son into the cosmos not to condemn the cosmos, but that the cosmos might be saved through him. We may die, but we shall not perish, for in Christ each and all of us and this entire cosmos of which we are a part is destined for eternity. Everlasting life is at the heart of the cosmos, because that is where God is, and in dying we are drawn into the embrace of God forever. For we are part of a universe whose beginning and end we cannot know, but all of it, all of it, is leaning on the everlasting arms. And strangely enough, thinking about all of this, eternity, light, God’s love, the cosmos, brings me back to that very first moment I memorized John 3:16. Back then, like every child of 4 or 5, I was wide-eyed, in full abandon to the wonder and mystery of life, I could see and hear and touch God in everything. How wonderful and how mysterious it is, now, in the full blush of the middle of my life, to be reminded of where I have been, where we all have been, and remember where all of us, one day, are going. |
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