4th Sunday in Lent: March 18, 2012

4^th Sunday in Lent: March 18, 2012

John 3:14-21

Preacher: Pr. Carrie B. Smith

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

In a certain January football game between the Denver Broncos and the Pittsburgh Steelers, some amazing things happened:

First, Tim Tebow passed for 316 yards against the Steelers and set an NFL playoff record with 31.6 yards per completion.

And if that wasn’t amazing enough, Tebow’s favorite receiver in that game was Demaryius Thomas, who was responsible for the game-winning touchdown in overtime. Thomas was born on Dec. 25, 1987. And who else has a birthday celebrated on Dec. 25? (hint: The answer is not Santa Claus…)

If you don’t know who Tim Tebow is (or if you haven’t watched television for the last 5 months), then you might not understand the connection, so here it is: Tim Tebow is a football player who has become famous for his open profession of the Christian faith—primarily in the form of kneeling in prayer on the field. He has even inspired a new word—“tebowing”—which means “to get down on a knee and start praying, even if everyone else around you is doing something completely different.”

Sports fans and Jesus fans alike took special note of the “3:16” connection in that particular January game, certain that it was proof of divine intervention. God must have been sending a message to the world via Tebow’s passing arm! And according to the tebowers, the message was this:

¹⁶“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

I don’t know if the world got the message, but Google certainly did. That Sunday evening and into the next Monday morning, the most popular Google-searched phrase was “John 3:16”, as countless football fans tried to learn what all the fuss was about.

Many people may have needed to look it up on Google, but John 3:16 is still by far the most beloved verse of Scripture. It is memorized by Sunday School students, painted on posters, tattooed on arms, screen-printed on t-shirts, and, apparently, can even be found hidden in football statistics. It has become a sort of Christian tagline—an easy, one sentence sound bite that sums up more than 2,000 years of Christian history, theology, and practice. Do you want people to know you’re a Christian? Get a John 3:16 license plate! Do you want customers to know you’re a Christian business? Put John 3:16 on the bottom of your paper cups! (for the record, the In-N-Out Burger chain in California actually does this…)

If I sound a little cynical about the John 3:16 craze, it’s only because the extreme popularity of this verse has also contributed to the neglect and watering down of the Good News of God’s all-encompassing love for the entire world.

Let’s take those posters you see at sports events, for example. The poster-bearer may intend to send a message of hope and love via national television, but more often the message received is something like this: “I’ve got the world—and God—figured out, and so should you.” Or “I’m a crazy guy carrying a poster at a football game—please ignore me!’

Unfortunately, even though this verse has incredible, deep meaning for Christians who have learned it within a community of faith, outside of that experience John 3:16 can sound less like a love letter from God and more like a threat: “For God was so annoyed with the world that he gave you one chance to believe, and sent everyone else to hell. You’d better believe before this game is over.”

I doubt very much that anyone has been brought to faith in God and belief in Jesus Christ through a John 3:16 poster. And for this reason, I see those John 3:16 t-shirts, license plates, and other public witnesses as a matter of Christian pride rather than evangelism. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not advocating for Christians to stop having pride in their faith (in fact, telling Lutherans to be a little quieter about their faith is like telling Chicagoans to drink a little more beer on St. Patrick’s Day! Completely unnecessary.) But I do wonder if simply throwing this verse out there does justice to the awesome message of love we have from God in Christ Jesus.

Let’s look again at that familiar verse, but with its surrounding verses for a little context:

¹⁴And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. ¹⁶“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. ¹⁷“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.

“For God so loved the world.” The word for world in biblical Greek is kosmos, which is the root for our words like “cosmic” and “cosmology”. Properly understood, then, John 3:16 proclaims that God so loved the cosmos, that he gave his only Son. God doesn’t just love Lutherans, or Christians, or Americans, or the good people, or the beautiful people, or those pay their taxes on time, or those who vote a particular way. God sent Jesus into the world because God loved the cosmos—people, animals, plants, worms, birds, the earth, the moon, the stars, and the planets that have been shining so brightly in the skies the last few weeks.

This is a love that won’t fit on a poster or a bumper sticker. This is a love we can’t quite grasp—for our love is limited. Our human ability to love is bound by our sin, by our inward-turning nature, and by our affinity for those who are like us. But God’s love is bigger than we can imagine. God’s love is so great that God sent the Son to be born among us, to walk with us, to suffer just like us, to die for us, and to be raised for our sake. Twentieth-century Presbyterian theologian and writer Frederick Buechner said this about God’s love: “Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all.”

God’s love is Good News for the universe, not for a limited few—which is one reason it’s so frustrating when John 3:16 is used –or heard—as a message of condemnation or a weapon of judgment. Perhaps it would help if we didn’t stop at verse 16, but made the effort to include verse 17 as well:

¹⁷“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.

In other words, God isn’t playing games with us. We weren’t given the Son as a limited time offer, this week only, subject to availability and not guaranteed in all areas. God loved the entire universe God created, and sent the Son to save it…period. Amen!

Is there judgment? Indeed—in fact, verses 18 and 19 state that “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 judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” But condemnation and separation from God, rather than being an event that happens at the pearly gates of heaven if you have failed to believe in your lifetime, is visible here and now. Humans love darkness more than they love the light, and as a result many suffer in a hell of their own making. We may even have personal experience with the darkness and suffering of unbelief.

Unbelief does cause suffering. But belief isn’t about being theologically correct, or saying a magic prayer, or praying in the end zone after a winning game. Fredrick Buechner wrote: “Believing in him is not the same as believing things about him such as that he was born of a virgin and raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, it is a matter of giving our hearts to him, of come hell or high water putting our money on him, the way a child believes in a mother or a father, the way a mother or a father believes in a child.”

What if, instead of tuning it out because it’s so familiar, we heard John 3:16 in this way?

“God’s love is cosmic. God didn’t send Jesus to condemn us, but to save us from a life of darkness and futility. Giving our heart to Jesus means living a whole and lasting life.”

This is the message of John 3:16, after all—but maybe all of that won’t fit on a bumper sticker! And this is really the point of this sermon: That God’s love is too big for a sound bite, and too important to entrust to the guys who bring their Bible posters to football games.

God’s love is amazing—and it’s too good not to share. This week, as we enter the 4^th week of Lent, inching closer to Holy Week and the story of Jesus’ passion on the cross, consider the greatness of God’s love. Consider how it has changed you. Consider those in your life who are not yet living in the light of God’s love, and how you can bring that light closer. Here’s a hint: you probably don’t need to make a poster.

One more time, a few words from Pastor Fredrick Buechner to close out the sermon:

“Who knows how the awareness of God’s love first hits people? Every person has his own tale to tell, including the person who would not believe in God if you paid him. Some moment happens in your life that makes you say Yes right up to the roots of your hair, that makes it worth having been born just to have happen. Laughing with somebody till the tears run down your cheeks. Waking up to the first snow. Being in bed with somebody you love. Whether you thank God for such a moment or thank your lucky stars, it is a moment that is trying to open up your whole life. If you try to turn your back on such a moment and hurry along to Business as Usual, it may lose you the whole ball game. If you throw your arms around such a moment and hug it like crazy, it may save your soul. How about the person you know who as far as you can possibly tell has never had such a moment? Maybe for that person the moment that has to happen is you.” (quoted from “Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals” by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilsobn-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro, p. 286)