Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent: March 30th, 2014

Sermon – Sunday, March 30^th, 2014

Gospel: God is found in the midst of suffering

Call: Look forward

In the Midst

Grace & Peace Bethany Lutheran Church,

I have some exciting news to share with you all, which some of you may already know.  My twin brother Neal, who is also training to be a Pastor at Luther Seminary and is going through the first call process, has been assigned to the Northern Illinois Synod of the ELCA – which means that whatever church he ends up at he’ll be dangerously close by!  I say dangerous, because we have been known to pull shenanigans from time to time.

Some of you have gotten a chance to meet him already – Others of you have probably seen him … and thought he was me – because as you might know we are identical twins.  And to answer the question that I’m sure you are all wondering right now – yes, at some point in the future we will definitely do a pulpit swap ... and I will NOT tell you ahead of time. (Trust me, it's more fun that way).

Having my brother around is going to be really good for me for a lot of reasons – one of the primary ones being that if I ever get into mischief, I can always blame it on Neal.  I can picture it now.  “Pastor Paul, I could have sworn I saw you and some middle schoolers sticking pink flamingos into (the Bengstons, the Thoreson’s) yard yesterday evening…was that you?”  “Uhhhh. Me? No!  Maybe it was Neal.”

Of course, it’s a double-edged sword.  Neal could easily blame me for his shenanigans as well.  I fear the day when I get an angrily worded email – yelling at me breaking a stain glass window … at a church I've never been too.

But it is nice to have a built-in fall guy – somebody I can always point to and blame when I need it.  Because that really is our nature isn’t it?  When something goes wrong we are always looking for somebody to blame – somebody to point the finger at and say “Aha!  You’re the one who screwed up!”

That has been true of human nature for a long time.  Today we hear the story of a blind beggar and immediately, the disciples want to find out who’s to blame for the man’s condition.  They ask Jesus the preposterous question, “Who sinned that this man was born blind?  Him, or his parents?”

Who sinned?  Really?  That’s what the disciples want to know? Most of us don’t think of blindness as something caused by sin anymore.  It’s a medical condition.  Blindness – particularly if one is BORN blind – isn’t something that we can avoid by a holy life.

But today, I’m inclined to cut the disciples a little bit of slack, because they are simply asking a question that we all want an answer for, and that question is “Whose fault is this?” “Who can we blame?”

We are quick to judge the disciples here, but we ask the same question all the time.  I was listening to the news earlier this week, and they were talking about the horrible mudslide that happened over in Washington State.

As of Saturday 17 people were confirmed dead, and about 90 people are still missing – all because of a rain-soaked mountain that couldn’t hold back the ground any longer.  All those homes – all those people vanished in an instant. 

The newscaster was interviewing a geologist who revealed that this same spot has seen many mudslides over the last century. Geologists and other scientists have studied the area since the late 90s and concluded that it was vulnerable to the same thing happening again. 

They even wrote official reports about it warning people of the danger.  And what was even more astonishing, was that they said that many, if not most, of the townspeople were aware that something like this could happen.

The people on the news were looking for somebody to blame. “Whose fault is this?”  Was there a failure of policy here?  Should people have been allowed to build on an area that was known to be unsafe?  Should they have known better?

Who screwed up here? Who sinned?  In situations like this we really want to have somebody to blame because it makes us feel better.  If we can answer those questions, if we can identify what people did wrong … then maybe we can avoid disaster ourselves.

The only problem is this: sometimes there isn’t anybody to blame. Sometimes it’s just a water-soaked hill that can’t hold back the mud any longer. Sometimes it’s just a man born blind. And so Jesus tells the disciples their answer.  He says, “Neither this man, nor his parents sinned.” 

Jesus is saying that by asking who sinned, you’re asking the wrong question.  The question the disciples asked assumes that God was the one to blame – that God was punishing the blindman for some unseen sin.  But God, Jesus says, didn’t do this.  He didn’t make the man blind.  He didn’t collapse the side of a mountain.

Despite these words from Jesus, we still want to blame God when things go wrong.  When we run out of people to point fingers at, the only one left to blame is God. We sense that in tragedy, God must be close by. And so our instinct is to ask, “Where is God in all this?”

I know it’s a troubling question, but it’s one that we have to ask, because the world is wondering. With the new movie about Noah out in theaters now, I expect there will be a lot of discussion about why God lets bad things happen. 

Where is God when people are born blind?  Where is God when mudslides destroy towns?  Where is God when floods wipe out a city-a world?

There are seemingly two ways to answer that question.  On the one hand, there are the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of the world who take the route of the disciples and blame 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina on sin. They point their fingers at so-called sinners and lay the blame at their feet.  Nevermind that it’s not what Jesus says – particularly in our text today. 

Another way to answer the question is to say that God doesn’t exist – or even worse – that he doesn’t care. But whenever I find myself doubting, I think about the incredible transformations I’ve witnessed – both in myself and in others – and the only explanation I can come up with is that God must be behind all this.

And I can’t deny God’s love for the world when I see the poor being cared for every day – or when thousands of Christians rush to disaster zones around the globe in the name of Christ. Yes, I believe God cares deeply about this world we live in.

And so Jesus tells the disciples that God didn’t cause this poor man’s blindness.  To ask “Who sinned?” or “Who is to blame here?” is indeed the wrong question because it looks backwards.  Rather, the question to ask is, “How does God respond to tragedy?”  “How do we respond as a people of faith?” 

As Christians, we look forward.  It’s not our place to judge.  It’s not our place to lay blame. It is our place to help.  It is our place to heal.  Jesus tells the disciples that it’s not about what the blind man or his parents did, it’s about what God is about to do through a blind beggar.  Through blindness, Jesus was going to make the world see God.

There is a third way to answer this question of suffering.  The Biblical witness is that God is indeed very present in the midst of suffering, but it’s not because he is causing it, or because it’s his will, or because he’s punishing somebody.  God is present in suffering, because God is working to transform it.

Finally, on the cross we learn that God does not exclude himself from suffering either. God suffers with us. The twenty-third Psalm that we heard today talks about it this way.

1 The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

2 He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters;

3 He restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name's sake.

4 Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me;

your rod and your staff— they comfort me.

5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;

you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,

and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

I don’t know about you, but the line that grabs me today is this, “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me.” That’s how God responds in the midst of darkness. He stays with us.

We all have dark valley’s in our lives. Sometimes, darkness comes from outside of us in tragedy – like mudslides and hurricanes. Sometimes darkness seems to come from within us, like blindness or depression or addiction or cancer.

In the midst of that darkness, God is with you.  He’s not blaming or pointing fingers because sin itself has already been put to death on the cross. It’s behind us. There’s no reason to look back. God is looking forward. He’s transforming. He’s creating life out of the dead places.  

Brothers and sisters in Christ,

That is what we are called to do as well – to look forward. 

To heal.  To Transform a broken world.

That is who our God is. 

That is the amazing grace of the risen Lord.

Let us all look forward in praise to God.

Amen.

Sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Lent: March 23, 20014

Sermon for the 3^rd Sunday in Lent: March 23, 2014

Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

PREACHER: Pr. Carrie Smith

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

First of all, a big “thank you” to this congregation for the gift of continuing education time. In the past, I’ve attended preaching conferences and theological conferences here in the States for continuing ed., but this time I was able to travel with my spouse to the land of Jesus’ birth, ministry, death, and resurrection, both to attend a ministry conference and also to meet with Bethany’s sponsored missionaries, Danae and Steve Hudson. It was such a treat to be able to walk the Way of the Cross in Jerusalem at the beginning of this Lenten season. Thank you, again, for allowing me the time to make it happen.

A little over one week ago, I was sitting in Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth, attempting to learn traditional Palestinian embroidery. 

Our teacher’s name was Margot, an Arab Christian woman from near Bethlehem, and she spoke very little English. Our lessons therefore consisted of her showing us a lightning fast stitch, and then barking at us, in Arabic, “Shway, shway" and “Yallah, yallah, yallah!” which translates roughly to “Slowly, slowly…now hurry, hurry, hurry!” 

We thought we were signing up for a three hour class, three days in row, with time for sightseeing and relaxing afterward. Oh, were we mistaken! The three hours were merely for instruction. Each afternoon (and evening, and middle of the night) were for doing the “homework” Margot gave us to finish. We embroidered for at least ten hours a day.

By the second day our backs were aching from sitting hunched over, and our brains were hurting from trying to understand Arabic. We were feeling frustrated that Margot would rip out work we had spent hours doing.

And…our fingertips were bleeding! Actually, this was just me. Apparently, I was doing it wrong. Thank God we were working on black fabric!

The other women I was with – three of our ELCA Young Adults in Global Mission and one ELCA missionary—commiserated along with me about the difficulty of this project. We were humbled! We were tired! We were certain we’d never produce anything worth looking at! And was it over yet?

At the end of the third day of class, having sewn half a shawl which only a mother would think was pretty, I walked over to the table of Margot’s completed shawls, bags, and purses, and picked one out for my mother. I had admired things like this for years, but now, bearing bloody fingertips as scars from the last three days, I fully appreciated the time and effort that went into making them. I paid full price—no bargaining down. I knew it was worth every penny. 

Our teacher, Margot, is on the left

I asked Suraida, the inn manager, to help me communicate with Margot about the price, and to tell her that this particular purse was going to my mother, all the way to Texas.

For some reason, this was unbelievably funny to Margot. She smiled hugely and said, in English: “It could even go to Colorado.” And then she laughed so loud she could hardly breathe.

Well, I didn’t know what to say! Was this funny? Is Colorado some kind of joke in Israel and Palestine? I had no idea! So I smiled nicely and nodded, until Suraida said, “You will have to forgive Margot. She has suffered greatly in her life. Laughing and sewing are the only way she can survive.”

Those words stopped me short. Margot had suffered greatly. I thought about her high standards and her patience (and impatience) with us. I thought about the hours we had spent together, and how language kept us from sharing more than embroidery stitches.

I don’t know what Margot had suffered, but I can imagine. I can imagine, because I know she lives in the occupied West Bank, in Beit Jala (a suburb of Bethlehem). She is an Arab Christian woman, a minority among a minority. I know that as an Arab woman, even in the Christian community, she has little recourse if she happens to be in an unhealthy marriage. (Ninety-nine percent of marriages “succeed” in Palestine, not because they are necessarily happy or successful, but because divorce is just not accepted.) As an Arab mother, I know it’s likely she has lost a child, a nephew, or a brother in the violence that erupts all too often between Israelis and Arabs. And I know that as an Arab Christian, she has watched as her community has gradually left the land of Jesus called home, because life under occupation offers so little future for the next generation of Christians.

I don’t know Margot’s story of suffering, but I know the story of others like her. So when I see the beautiful things Margot has created with her hands, I think of the passage we heard today from Romans, chapter 5:

“And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

To me, Margot’s beautiful embroidery is a sign of hope—hope that springs from a  deep well of faith. My bloody fingertips are all but healed already! But what about Margot? What about her family? What about her community? What about her heart? When I look at her intricate handiwork, and see how passionate she is about passing on these traditional skills, I remember how so many beautiful things are born out of great suffering: art, music, literature, acts of resistance and acts of great love.

During Lent, we as a Christian community take time to contemplate the greatest act of love—the suffering of our Lord Jesus on the cross. We walk the Way of the Cross, lovingly interpreted this year by artists in our congregation. We take on spiritual disciplines—praying more, giving more, eating less—in order to be in solidarity, not only with Jesus Christ, but with all those in the world who suffer today. And we acknowledge the pain we ourselves have suffered or have caused, and the ways in which we have fallen short of the glory of God.

But as Christians, we don’t stay in that place of darkness for long. For Lent is when we also remember that the most beautiful thing of all, the thing that binds us together, the thing that gives us the strength to carry on—namely the peace and reconciliation we have with God through Jesus Christ—was born out of pain and suffering. During these forty days we remember that while we are indeed people of the cross, we have hope because we are also people of the resurrection, and we look with anticipation to Easter Sunday, when we will celebrate that beautiful gift in all its glory.

What is hope? The hope the Apostle Paul speaks of in Romans chapter 5 isn’t merely wishing for something or showing a preference for an outcome (like hoping your NCAA bracket isn’t a total failure!) Hope is having absolute confidence in God’s love, and in the peace that even sinners like us have through Jesus Christ, in spite of anything the world throws at us. Hope flows from the living water Jesus offered to the Samaritan woman at the well! As he said to her: “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Through Christ, our thirst for love and grace, acceptance and forgiveness, is satisfied forever. No matter what we face in life, this hope will sustain us. For we know that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”

Now, flash forward a few days into my Holy Land trip, and you would find me standing in the lobby of the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem—one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever stayed. Robert, who had stayed there before, showed me over to a large frame on the wall, in which was housed the history of Chicagoan Horatio Spafford. 

You probably have never heard of Mr. Spafford, in spite of our proximity to Chicago. However, his was indeed a tale of hope in the midst of great suffering.  

Horatio and his wife Anna lost their first son to scarlet fever in 1870. The next year, they were financially ruined in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Then, in 1873, Horatio planned to travel with his wife and four daughters to Europe, but was detained in Chicago for business. He decided at the last minute to send them on ahead. Sadly, the ship sank in the Atlantic Ocean after colliding with another sea vessel. All four daughters drowned, but Horatio’s wife, Anna, survived. She sent a telegram to her husband, with these two words: “Saved alone.”  

Horatio soon traveled to be with his grieving wife, and as the ship passed over the spot where his daughters died, he penned these words: 

“When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.”

You may have never heard of Horatio Spafford, but raise your hand if you recognize those words… These words of hope, written out of a father’s great suffering and even greater faith in God, have become one of the most beloved hymns of all time: “It is Well with my Soul.” 

Why, you might ask, is this history hanging in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem? Because, in spite of all they had suffered, Horatio and Anna went on to have three more children. And in 1881, they moved with other Christians to Jerusalem to help found the American Colony, whose mission was to serve the poor. Today, the Colony serves mostly the wealthy who stay in its luxury hotel. But while the American Colony never became the Christian utopia he had planned, Mr. Spafford has left us an enduring legacy in the hopeful words of this hymn, a hymn which has helped countless Christians through stormy waters.

My dear sisters and brothers in Christ, no matter what you are enduring today, and no matter what you have suffered in the past, today it is my hope that you will hear again the words of the Apostle Paul, who assured us that “while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” Yes, it’s true: While we were still weak from sin; while we were still weak from sorrow or suffering; while we were even still weak from doubt; just at the right time, God proved God’s love for us through the cross of Christ.  “For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.” This is our strength. This is our hope. And hope does not disappoint us. Thanks be to God! Amen.

1st Sunday in Lent (March 9, 2014) Pr. Cordell Strug

Matthew 4: 1-11

1 Lent

Bethany Lutheran, Crystal Lake, IL

March 9, 2014 

Pr. Cordell Strug, Preacher

            Since I’m retired, I lead a life that’s entirely peaceful and unadventurous.  My pulse rate goes up when the UPS truck goes down the street; if it stops with a package, I have to lie down and catch my

breath.  But even back in the day, when I was out and about, performing daily thrilling feats of ministerial derring-do, most of what I did fell well within the parameters of the ordinary, the routine, sometimes the flat-out boring.

            What I’m getting at is:  I personally never had to fight off a zombie attack.  Or dally dangerously with a glamorous vampire.  I bet you never did either.

           

Few of us have ever been questioned by a talking snake, or been asked to marry a millionaire or kiss a frog that turned into a prince.  Few of us have ever been in a real gunfight or sweated in terror while the bomb squad deactivated an explosive tied to our chair.  We haven’t travelled through time or been marooned on another planet after our spaceship crashed.  We’ve never had a godfather…or a devil in the wilderness…make us an offer we couldn’t refuse.    

            Yet the fabulous and the dangerous grip our spirits out of all proportion to the likelihood of their gripping our lives.  Stories of adventure and wonder, real and imagined, flicker across our tv and movie screens as their ancestors crackled around the campfires of our ancestors—ever since people learned to say ‘once upon a time’ or ‘you will never believe what just happened to me’.

            Given the sheer routine of most lives, and the way almost anything can become routine, we might put this appetite for the marvelous down to nothing but a desire for a little escape and excitement, something rich and strange to flavor the ordinary.

            But who says we live only in our bodies?  The human record might suggest the opposite.  Besides, the merely strange will bore us very quickly:  a vampire would only be a rodent, without the young couple we want to see escape the bite of death; a gunfight would only be acute population decline, somebody else’s problem, unless there were someone in it we wanted to see get home; even Wonderland is just some other place, until Alice—that human girl—falls into it and finds it weird and frightening.

            We want to see one of us tested against the fabulous, against the dangerous.  Our spirits are gripped because we have a stake in the fight.  All our beloved tales, both real and imagined, really do tell us something about us, about our vulnerability and our power, our fears, our desperation, our hopes; something about courage and fortitude and dedication; about defeats that look like victories and victories that look like defeats.  Telling a story is the oldest way of thinking seriously about life and death, what tortures life, what brings death, what makes the passage worth it and what ruins it all.

            We follow Jesus today into one of those strange arenas of testing, a landscape of earthly devastation and supernatural clarity, as distant from the ordinary scenes of his life as from ours.  Jesus—for one of the rare times—is the most ordinary thing in the story, as well as the only human in sight, just as Adam and Eve are the only ordinary things in their magic garden.  We have left the superficially ordinary; but we’ve gone back to basics.

            ‘Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.’  He’ll be tempted by things we would never be offered, because we’re not powerful enough, faithful enough or important enough to bother with.  Yet Jesus is one of us, and he is there as one of us.  He’s not there as Superman:  he’s being tested on the basics of our life:  how humanity stands before God, the deep conflicts of our needs and desires. 

           

 And look how harmlessly it all begins.  That’s what makes this story such a pure picture of the basics of life:  nothing ever looks bad when you want it badly, or when you can convince yourself you really need it.  That first temptation—turning stones to bread, which seems to boil down to eating—seems so unquestionably necessary, so neutrally basic and fundamental, it almost can’t count as a temptation.  The devil seems…supportive, almost caring:  ‘Man, listen to me:  you are dying here.  Who are you?  Joe Schmo?  Wake up!  You’re the Son of God!  Make a little bread!  Explain to me, please, what harm this could possibly do.  You can’t be moral if you’re dead.’

            But we’re probing what makes our passage through life worth it.  What we need is being  turned from an apparently obvious fact into a troubling question.  The claim of fundamental need can hide the question of fundamental choice.  All the monsters of history—the conquerors, the ethnic cleansers, the mass murderers, the assassins and the torturers, whom we joined so easily, so easily—all have claimed helpless necessity to hide the reality that a choice was being made, a choice that led into the darkness.  All the thugs have found their first and easiest excuse in necessity.

            Now, we could say the temptation here is to doubt the power of God to provide.  That is, we could try to trump the devil by an appeal to faith.  But Jesus’ answer goes deeper:  he challenges the obviousness of what it is we think we need:  ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.’  That’s basic, that’s fundamental.

            There was a modern psychologist—whose name I’ve blessedly forgotten—who said human needs formed a kind of pyramid:  basic needs at the bottom and the less essential as we go up.  He took the scale as obvious, and his point was we satisfy ourselves from the bottom up:  self-preservation, food, clothing, shelter; after that, you get a more comfy chair, a new coat, maybe a pickup truck; with a little more, you go for an i-pad, maybe a hot tub; and pretty high up on the pyramid, you could run into a religious need you might satisfy—unless you’d rather have a yacht.

            I heard this pyramid of needs expounded with admiration, for its alleged wisdom, at a church meeting, by a conflict manager who worked for one of the synods, and I came away wondering whether the speaker was an emissary from hell sent to convince us the church was a useless luxury or just one more modern half-wit too enamored of psychological gurus.

            What’s wrong with that pyramid is that it describes almost no society known to history—except perhaps our own, bloated with physical satisfactions, choking on junk we don’t have enough landfills to keep up with.  That bottom of the pyramid can become endless; this country is producing billionaires who don’t even notice the lives of other people except as sources of more wealth.  If that’s how our pyramid starts, it never has to go up.

            But you listen to Jesus:  that’s not where we start!  There are people of faith, communities of faith, that lived and died with nothing compared to what’s stored in my garage.  Even apart from faith, people have scorned self-preservation, they’ve scorned to preserve themselves for the sake of something more precious to them.  Watch high-school kids when they get off the bus:  why do they have thin clothing and no head covering in the middle of winter?  Because they’re slaves of glamour:  they value beauty more than health.

            More seriously, people sacrifice their lives—they sacrifice their livelihoods and their futures—for the sake of other people they love.  Police officers and fire fighters risk their lives, out of civic and moral ideals, for people they don’t even know. 

            (Picture something helpless:  a roomful of newborn babies, two hours old.  The pyramid would say:  their basic, immediate needs are food, shelter, warmth.  Wrong!  Their basic need is someone who loves them enough, or cares about them enough, or is being paid by someone who cares about them enough, to give them those things because they’ll never get them on their own.  The bond of caring is a more fundamental need—if that’s not satisfied, they’re not lasting the week.)

            That psychologist described no life worth living.  That pyramid of needs hides all life’s fundamental values and choices.  Those don’t just appear in the spare time bought by luxury:  they’re always there, from the bottom up.

            Now, it would be pretty surprising if a bunch of Christians sitting in a church service and looking forward to a tasty lunch couldn’t at least follow Jesus that far with a nod of approval.  ‘Yeah!  You tell him!’

            Here’s where things get interesting.  Here’s where the story of the temptations becomes profound, and shakes the comfort of the faithful.  The devil throws faith right back at Jesus:

            ‘There’s my man!  I KNEW you wouldn’t bite on those stones!  You got the power, the faith, you live by the word.  You know what?  I’m so pumped I’d like to see some more of that Big Faith—let’s say you and me climb to the top of the temple and you jump off and I’ll watch the angels catch you….  I mean, you do believe the angels will catch you, right?  You must know psalm 91—wait:  let me quote it for you…’

            And he does.  And he does not distort it:  this is an honest quote—and if it doesn’t mean what the devil says it does, I don’t know what it means.

            Now take this to heart:  the devil sounds more pious, more faithful, than Jesus.  What a provocative, challenging lesson this is!  Pure evil is just as comfortable inside belief as outside it.  Don’t ever forget that.  It’s the devil that urges the miracle, the wonder; it’s the devil that urges the defiance of the earth, the expectation of heavenly aid; it’s the devil that proclaims the arrogant certainty of what God will do.     

            And that clever devil always makes me think of the loud-mouthed Christian heroes that haunt our media, the angry preachers and politicians so quick to tell us how Christian they are, how DISGUSTING the rest of us are; or those sex-obsessed men in black, the hilariously self-appointed guardians of healthy sexuality, so ruthless in denouncing others, so generous in protecting themselves.  They and their audiences might profitably ponder this passage and how easily the words of faith rise to the lips of…even the devil.

           could think that Satan was the real believer and Jesus the doubting soul.  It’s striking that Jesus, who was capable of wonders, does nothing wonderful at all throughout the entire episode.  He never even mentions wonders.  He never mentions his own unique mission and power.  He never says or does anything more than what one of us could and should say and do.

Anyone overhearing this little dialogue

            It’s the devil who’s intoxicated by Jesus’ status—he says twice ‘If you are the Son of God…’  What Jesus displays is his true humanity.  Everything he says is a scriptural quotation, somebody else’s words, each of them intended to guide all of God’s people, and Jesus identifies himself with us in every one of them.  He doesn’t act out or argue from his divinity:  he displays human faith:  we don’t live by bread alone, but by the word of God; we don’t tempt God; we worship God alone.  It’s the voice of perfect—but still human—obedience. 

            By the time we get to the third temptation, the game’s over:  Jesus’ refusal seems like a foregone conclusion.  The devil sounds almost sad, begging like a doomed, rejected, demonic lover:  ‘Oh, I’d give you the whole world if you’d only worship me!’

            Refusing that seems almost ho-hum…until we look in the mirror and realize:  a lot of us sell our souls every day for a lot less:  for peanuts:  for a shred of that earthly power, for profit, for promotion, for pleasure, for payback, for…all kinds of puny purposes.  We almost give our souls away and we don’t get anything close to the world in return.

            It’s good to remind ourselves that Jesus turns it all down—he turns literally everything down, all the garbage we spend our lives chasing, all the garbage we’d give anything to have a fraction of.

            And he does it, not with super powers, but with simple faith, as one of us.

            We hear in the story of Jesus our story, the true life before God, human life restored for us, hidden within all creation’s allurements, but always calling us as obedient creatures to the one who created us, who sent his Son to live and die for us, to be one of us…and show us how it’s done.

            Amen

           

           

Sermon - For God so Loved the World

 Sermon –John 3:1-17

Pr. Paul Cannon, March 16th 2014

Gospel: For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.

Grace and Peace Bethany Lutheran Church!

A word of warning before I begin: This sermon has an unusually high number of sports references in it. Maybe it’s just the time of year, between football ending, baseball starting and Bethany Softball gearing up soon that has me itching for some sports.

But I was thinking earlier this week about the golden age of Chicago Bulls basketball – back when Michael Jordan was an international sensation.  I was about in Elementary/middle School when everybody wanted to be like Mike, and I guess I wasn’t any different.

Michael Jordan made me fall in love with the game of basketball. I would be playing in the driveway, trying to recapture some of that Jordan glory by making a last second shot. I would start the countdown: 3….2….1… throwing up a fadeaway jumper.  And if I made it, then I would throw up my arms and do a fist pump.  And if I missed, I’d cut to the announcer voice, “But he was FOULED!” And proceed to shoot some free throws.

My love for basketball carried over into high school.  But of course, high school sports is a totally different animal than playing in your driveway.  When you make the team, the first thing the coaches want you to do is conditioning drills. 

It’s at this point, where the old adage, “no pain, no gain” becomes particularly true.  You either love the game or you quit.  The coaches would have us doing ladders at the end of practice, or stair runs up the side of a mountain or wall sits in between defensive slides.

Even though my greatest contribution to the team ended up being my unique ability to warm the bench, I think my love for the game kept me pushing myself. I was holding out hope that maybe one day I could actually live out that dream of draining a last second shot like I would in the driveway. And even though the work I put into never really paid off the way I wanted it to, I couldn’t bring myself to give up the game altogether.

And I think that same principal could be true for all of life – that the more you love something, the more you will be willing to give up for it. Think about it.  What do you love?  Maybe you’ve played or sport.  Maybe it’s music. Hopefully we all love our families.

We all make sacrifices for the things we love.  If you love music, you spend time practicing your instrument.  If you love playing basketball, you do wind sprints.  If you love your family – you’re probably willing to give up even more for them.

So on some level, we deeply understand what Jesus was talking about in John 3:16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life. 

We hear this Bible verse quoted more than any other.  John 3:16 often it gets spray painted onto poster boards and held up high in the end zone stands – supposedly out of hope that somebody happens to have their Bible with them at the Bears game and might want to look it up in between kickoffs.

It’s a strange, (and mostly uneffective) way to evangelize, but I really don’t blame those people for wanting to share that verse with others.  There’s something about John 3:16 that captures our collective imagination.

The third chapter of John starts with a Pharisee (a Jewish religious leader) named Nicodemus approaching Jesus at night – not wanting the other Pharisees to see whom he’s talking to.  Of course, good ole’ Nic gets a little more than he bargained for, because like any good preacher, you ask him a question and Jesus launches into a sermon.

It’s the kind of sermon that even Nicodemus, an expert in Jewish law, is having trouble following.  Jesus is talking about being born from above, or born again, and then he starts talking about wind and spirit, and then he launches into something about Moses lifting up a snake in the wilderness.

It’s one of those sermons that you could be listening to and starting to doze off to the long theological discourse of Jesus, until you get to John 3:16, and BAM! You get this moment of clarity and pure gospel: For God so loved the world…

Reading John 3:16 is like watching Cubs game – you’re in the bleachers … and starting to nod off (because you’re watching the Cubs) and then CRACK! Anthony Rizzo blasts a homer over the ivy fence.

It’s great verse, but I want to be clear on what this verse means and what it doesn’t mean. If you read it in English, it starts out sounding kind of sappy and sentimental. There are a lot of Christians out there who try to characterize it as a love note between God and the world.

It starts out sounding that way … For God sooooo loved the world.  The way that it’s Christians talk about it, sometimes reminds me of teenagers because they love that word “so.” You ask them how they liked a movie they just watched, and they’ll say “It was like…soooo good.” Or “ugh…it was soooo dumb.”

While that sounds like it would be a nice thing for God to say about the world, it’s not really what John 3:16 is really getting at.  We know that by digging into the grammar a little deeper. That word “so” is a pretty small word in English, but it can mean a couple of different things. It can be the cheesy way to say “very.” As we were saying before, ‘I love you soooo much’ and ‘I love you very much,’ can mean the same thing. 

But that’s not actually what the verse says in the original Greek though.  In John 3:16 the Greek word that gets translated as “so” is “outos,” which does not mean “very.”  A more literal translation for outos is “in this way” or “in this manner.” 

And the reason that’s important is because it changes how we hear John 3:16.  When the verse says “For God so loved the world” what it really means is, “For God loved the world in this way…” This is how God loves the world. It’s not so much a love note, as it is Jesus setting up the beginning of a story for Nicodemus.  The beginning of his story.

Yes, it is the story of God’s love, but it’s not the love story that we were hoping to hear. Jesus is setting up the narrative that is about to unfold in his life. “For God loved the world in this way: that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.”  And I think when we hear the verse like that, the meaning is transformed from sentimentality to tragedy.

I think that’s the part that I think really grabs our attention. That God saw the sin that caused death and destruction – and our inability to pull ourselves out of it – and it grieved God so much that he sent his son Jesus to put sin itself to death, by dying on the cross.

That’s what makes you sit up a little bit straighter in your chair. It’s not simply that God loves the world – it’s the depth of the sacrifice that makes John 3:16 so powerful.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we are all in the middle of this story. The love that God has for you hasn’t changed and never will. These forty days of Lent give us time to explore and wonder and marvel at a God who pulls out all the stops for the world and the people whom he loves.

Before I wrap up here, I have to be honest, and share a small “Pastor Fail” moment with you.  Before I sat down to write this sermon, I hadn’t chosen to do anything special for Lent.  I didn’t give up chocolate, or bread or meat – because I wasn’t sure why I would do something like that that. 

But as I was writing yesterday, I realized something: even small acts of sacrifice can be outward signs of love. And so I’ve finally picked something to do during Lent, and I hope you find something as well.  It’s not too late if you haven’t started yet.  And while giving up chocolate or doing daily devotionals might sound silly to somebody looking in from the outside – to us as Christians, it’s a small reminder of John 3:16 – it’s a small reminder how much more God first loved us. 

Brothers and sisters in Christ, I pray that in these 40 days we all might come to know that love better each day.

Amen.