Texts: John 3:14-21, Ephesians 2:1-10
Did you know that we are feared? Not this church in particular, I mean the Church with a capital C. Christianity. You can hear it around town, or on Youtube. It’s not a new thing. You can read it in Mark Twain, or H.L. Mencken. We talked about Mencken before, remember? He’s the one who defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.”
He also wrote this: “I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind — that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.”
It’s a double-sided fear, first that we might become zealots and crusaders, intent on controlling everyone, and second that we might simply waste our lives. Suppose you think all this is simple farce, imagine the wasted potential gathered just in this room. We have artists and writers, workers and business owners. This one room has enough intelligence and clout to make our little corner of the world a better place. Instead, we’re sitting around waiting for a non-existent God to come fix our problems. Do you feel the loss in that? Now multiply that by the third of the planet that self-identify as Christian, and you are talking about the single most devastating destruction of human potential in recorded history.
All that’s horrible enough, but we keep handing them more and more reasons to believe it! We worship a cosmic kill-joy and run around like mini-killjoys, as if the biggest concern in our lives is whether or not someone else believes the same thing we do.
Do you remember the John 3:16 guy? For years, at football games there was this guy who always bought a seat right in the center, between uprights at NFL games. And every time someone tried for a field goal or extra point, the camera shifts to catch the kick, and up pops a sign: John 3:16.
His name was Rollen Stewart, and his plan was simple. Football fans would see the sign, over and over, and eventually get curious. That would open the door for the good news. Because John 3:16 is the gospel in a nutshell. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
It’s nicer than some of the things Christians have tried in the past. But put yourself on the other side. It’s Sunday afternoon. Long week at work. All you want to do is sit down and watch the game, and right at the crucial moment when the game transcends itself and becomes a story about who we are and who we can be, some guy pops up with a sign. Again and again with the stupid sign, until you finally go look it up, and it says if you believe in Jesus you live forever, but if you don’t you go to hell. Enjoy your game!
Rollen Stewart didn’t even like football! He said, “I despised sports.” The only reason he did it was because people turned sports into a god. They loved sports more than God, so he had to wake them up. That was two decades ago. Guess where he is now.
Turns out, holding your football game hostage was not enough. People still weren’t listening, so he had to turn up the volume. He took actual hostages. Convinced that the end of the world was imminent, and that a whole lot of people were going to burn if he didn’t wake them up, he made plan to make the news.
He picked up two day-laborers and took them to a hotel. When he walked into the room, he surprised a housekeeper, got flustered, and pulled a gun. The day laborers hit the door and the housekeeper locked herself in the bathroom. When the police arrived, he demanded a three-hour, televised news conference so that he could warn the world. (source) God is coming! And he’s angry. John 3:16 For God so loved the world that he sent his Son, and whoever doesn’t believe in Him will one day soon experience eternal, conscious, torment. Hear the good news.
They didn’t give him a press conference. They gave him a concussion grenade, followed by a SWAT team take-down, arrest, and conviction for three counts of kidnapping. They are scared of us. And we’ve given them cause. We should all be grateful that Rollen Stewart is in prison. Not just because it makes us all safer, but because it gives us one more chance to say as loudly and clearly as we can, “That is not what this book means.” Everyone’s so sure they understand it, that we’ve all stopped reading it. John 3:16, the verse everyone knows. But what does it actually say?
For God so loved the world. Not Christians, not Americans, not the infinitesimally small fraction of humanity that happens to agree with me on the finer points of both religion and politics. The world. The Greek word here is “kosmon” as in cosmos, as in all of created space and time, as in all the systems of this world that ignore and oppose God’s plan. What plan?
For God loved the world in this way. He sent his only-begotten Son. And what did that Son do? He died. This is the Christian revelation of God. God’s judgment is love. God’s choice is love. God’s plan is love.
Well, that’s great preacher-man, but you only read half the sentence. For God so loved the world, he sent his only Son, that whosoever believes will not perish. If that’s true, then the opposite must be true. Those who don’t believe will perish. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Or as our reading says today, “you were dead in your transgressions and sins… Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.” All right, calm down.
I’ve forgotten where I first heard this story. My apologies to the author for the parts I’m sure I’ll get wrong. In my recollection, it was a true story. Once upon a time two friends were walking through Rome. One was a Catholic priest, and the other an Eastern Orthodox monk. The priest was showing his friend the old frescoes and murals painted by the greatest religious artists of the West. And each time, the monk would answer with the Eastern spin on that particular scene. Until at last, they approached Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.
You’ve probably seen it. In the center, standing on a cloud, surrounded by radiance, by saints and angels, a muscular, bare-chested Jesus stands with hand upraised. Around and above him, the colors are bright, and the people are beautiful. But if you follow the line of his hand and the line of his eye, the colors get darker and images more disturbing, until you get to the bottom where gleeful dark demons drag terrified souls to hell.
And the Orthodox monk says, “This is yours. We know nothing of this.” You see, the split between East and West wasn’t just a political split. It was a theological split. It was a cultural split. In an effort to explain the mystery of the cross to Roman minds obsessed with law, western theologians pictured the universe as a law court, with God as the judge. “It’s like this,” they said, “You’re guilty of breaking God’s law, but Jesus took the punishment for you, so now you can go free.”
This legal understanding is not wrong. There’s scripture to support it. It’s just not the only scripture. We’re talking about a religious mystery. We’re attempting to explain things too big for our heads. The Eastern Church chose a different metaphor, also grounded in scripture. It sounds a bit more like the story I told the kids today. God is light. When you step away from the light, you enter darkness. God is life. When you cut yourself off from the source of all life, the result is predictable. You see how those two stories would result in very different art?
For God so loved the world, he gave his only son, that whoever believes should not perish. The Greek word is here is ah-POL-ay-tie to perish, to die, to be destroyed. Not to be punished, not to be tortured, not to be found guilty in a court of law. Different words. It does not say, “believe or God will punish you.” It says, “Your unbelief is killing you.” You are a flower cutting off your own roots, and turning your face from the sun. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save it.
“Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already” Huh? I thought judgment happened at the end of time, when God takes the ones he likes and puts them up here and the ones he doesn’t like and puts them down here. Not according to this text. God’s judgment is already complete, and the verdict is love.
It’s our judgment that happens every day. Every single day, every moment of every day, we decide whether we’re going to believe that love, and trust it enough to bet our lives. Will we follow his footsteps, choosing to love, even though it costs us? Will we follow him, even to the cross, in hopes that like him, we too will rise? Or will continue to play the game, protect our own, even if it means people have to be hurt?
When they interviewed Rollen Stewart and asked him how he could justify taking people hostage, he said, “It was a crime to prevent a greater harm… If somebody’s standing in the way of me going into a burning building, I’m going to knock them on their butt.” This is not a polite conversation about hypothetical religious concepts. This is a continuation of the “faith as deal” argument that had Jesus turning over tables in the temple.
“If I believe, God will let me into heaven.” That’s not what it says. Faith is not a coin you drop into a God-sized vending machine and out pops salvation. “Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” The revelation of God, which is the cross, is a litmus test, a phrase that means the exact opposite of how we usually use it.
Usually we say litmus test, as in anyone who does not fit this standard need not apply. How many here have actually done a litmus test, with actual litmus paper? Real litmus paper has been treated with specific dyes that turn color based on pH, red for an acid, blue for a base. The test doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t decide ahead of time what the answer should be. It reveals what was already there.
Our choices matter. Every day, they matter. Eternally, they matter. Not because that’s how we earn God’s love, but because they reveal who we are. That’s not faith. That’s reality. Faith means seeing that reality and choosing to believe based on Jesus that God loves us anyway, choosing to believe that loving the world anyway is worth the cost. Faith is seeing the light and stepping into it anyway. Our life choices make that easier or harder to do, but they don’t change the light. God’s love for us is not dependent on us; it depends on him.
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.”
Over the last few week’s we’ve examined the marks of a Christian. We are people of the cross. We are people of passion. Today, we add a third mark. We are people of gratitude. If God’s judgment is love, a gracious gift, given for no other reason than who God is, then every waking moment is an opportunity for gratitude.
So here’s your challenge for the week. Don’t judge people by what they say they believe. Instead, listen for echoes of the cross, watch for moments of passion, pay attention to all expressions of gratitude. You may discover we have brothers and sisters where you least expect it. In December 1921, H.L. Mencken, that atheist critic of Christianity, wrote the following and signed it Epitaph. “If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner… and wink your eye at some homely girl.” If our non-Christian friends fear us, it is not usually because they hate Jesus. It’s usually because we don’t resemble him.
First preached at First Congregational Church of Saugatuck on March 18, 2012.
Grateful for the Gift is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Link to revsmilez.com.
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