Mercy & Grace & Belief
Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser
Mar
11, 2018 Lent 4B
Jn 3:14-21
I
wonder if the verses John 3:16-17 were as well-known as they are, before the
Rev. Billy Graham featured them in his evangelism? (Rev. Graham’s death was recent.) It could be - they are wonderful summaries of
God’s love and God’s desire for us. Yet
when I think of these verses, and especially just Jn 3:16, I hear it in Billy Graham’s voice: “For God
so loved the world, so LOVED the world, that he gave his only son, so that
everyone who believes in him may not perish, but have everlasting life.” Of course Billy Graham said ‘only begotten
son’ because he always quoted the King James….
As
I actually memorized the King James translation myself as a youngster, I
learned the next verse in these words:
“God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the
world through him might be saved.”
Jesus’
message is GOOD news - GOOD news!
These
verses emphasize God’s love, and God’s desire to save; they remind us that God
DIDN’T send Jesus to condemn us but to save us - -
The
world is condemned already, John says - and no one needs to tell us the evil
that’s in the world. We hear about it
every day - another school shooting, another murder, another person resigns
because their bad behavior is caught.
Yes, there are good people in the world - people who care for one
another when they are sick or needy; people who don’t lie, and who try to do
right by one another, people who pay their bills, people who live by the 10
commandments (as the guy in the airplane said); there are employers that
realize their employees are actually people and treat them as such. It seems, though, that the stealing and the
murder and the coveting and the greed and the cheating and the sexual messing
around - these come out in people’s lives as well. And the further up the ladder they are, and
the more power they have, the more people seem to think they can get away with
it, or that the expected standards of behavior don’t apply. And as corporations and businesses get
national and international, their CEOs and CFOs get further and further from
the people who work for them or people who need their product, and they get
more and more focused on the needs of the corporation or business, or lining
their own pockets, and its Buyer Beware.
We get further and further away from our souls, from the earth where we
live, from the parts of humanity that hurt, from our common good.
It
was my Boomer generation that hid under our desks, pretending we might be
protected from nuclear fallout; and we grew up recognizing that nuclear shelter
symbol - as if we could get to one with 15 min warning. There are people so evil that they would push
that button and send our world into oblivion.
My generation, and the generations since then, live with an awareness of
the possible annihilation of humanity, just below the level of our daily
functioning, but always there. Evil is
real, and doesn’t take any special new condemnation from Jesus.
So
I don’t like the way Jesus’ message of salvation has been turned into such a
negative, as if Jesus dooms people who don’t follow exactly the way that
specific group dictates. And I don’t
like the way Jesus’ message is turned into a salvation that happens after we
die, ie that Hell is the result of not choosing Jesus.
Jesus’
message is that things can be changed, and changed now. Jesus’ message is that God still loves us
more than anything, and the world can be spared, or, in the scriptural
language, be saved. I wish that those
good words ‘saved’, and ‘salvation’, weren’t so co-opted into the trite usage
that we equate with TV evangelists. Yes,
as individuals, we can begin to follow Christ in our lives, and become
his disciples, living in this way of life Jesus showed us - a way of honoring
God, honoring all creation including the earth and each other; treating one
another with justice and kindness, seeking peace, curbing those inclinations
that still linger and try to throw us back into the ways of death. God’s love and grace are freely given! We just have to accept.
As
individuals, we can form into groups for mutual support and encouragement, we
can work together to keep announcing this good news, we can teach each other
and our children to live in this way of capital-L Life.
Yet
there’s another level of the world being ‘saved.’ Jesus says that, living in God’s way
faithfully, we can be a preservative, for example like salt, but for the world ---- so it is not destroyed. The values of Christianity can keep the world
from destroying itself and all in it.
In
this way, SALVATION is LITERAL - we spread the good news of God’s love and
mercy not just so that individuals can go to heaven when they die, whatever
that means; we spread the news of God’s mercy and love so that evil won’t blow
up the world; so that an evil greed for dollars won’t so foul our nest that its
unlivable; so that people can learn to live together peacefully. The gospel of Jesus is about the survival of
humanity- humanity that God created and loves.
The world, and its peoples, are God’s creation - which is basically good
except for the evil that infected it.
God loves it all - God loves us all - God loves all creatures. God is LIFE, God made and undergirds
everything; its ALL the work of God, the expression of God. All of
this (wave hands) is the work of God - God doesn’t want to see it
destroyed.
And
we, my friends, are the ambassadors sent from God about it all! Our choices, our lives, our words, our
actions, our relationships, our orientation to the words of God - we follow
Christ as the bringers of this good news, or as my fingers seem to type is,
this god news.
I
like the correlation the apostle John makes between the old story of Moses
lifting up the snake on a stick and Jesus lifted up on the cross, or
metaphorically lifted up in terms of being made known. Moses’ folks could just crawl out of their
tents to look on that thing that bit them, that afflicted them, that was
killing them - and be healed of it.
Maybe friends dragged them out of the tents, but still they had to lift
their own eyes and look. The snake on
the stick wasn’t to condemn them, because they were already bit and infected -
Moses made that model snake and lifted it up in order to bring healing - to
save their lives.
We
don’t have to reject Jesus to suffer and die from being bit by humanity’s worst
instincts…. we’ve already been bit. We
DO, however, have to look to Jesus to be healed and our lives saved - -
and potentially our species saved and our planet saved. God will show us, teach us this new way of
living, this new worldview, when we humbly admit we’re bitten, and look to
Jesus. Looking on the bronze serpent
took a sense that this would work, that God would heal. In a sense, that’s basic belief. When we look to Jesus, its not to emote about
the cross and ‘believe in’ it somehow.
Looking to Jesus is assuming God to be right about ways of death AND
ways of life; assuming God means it all, including the promise of new life and
eternal life (whatever that is); and assuming we need to learn all that Jesus
taught and live by it.
(Its interesting that the snake on a
stick is the medical symbol for healing, although the story usually equated
with the Staff of Asclepius is from the ancient Greek – and from about the same
time of the Hebrew story. Trouble is,
folks have trouble explaining what the snake stands for in the Greek story… our
story explains it well… hmmmm…..)
Friends,
we who are alive right now are at a significant transition point in how we have
envisioned “church” and how we have envisioned being Christ-followers. Our world is at a significant transition
point as the traditional church has lost its importance and its impact on
society – so much so that many current writers are calling our age
“Post-Christian.” Many traditional
churches have shrunk to the point of not being able to financially support what
we used to think of as “church” – ie a building, a pastor, and a credible
mission outreach. In fact, aging and
shrinking local churches are closing and selling their buildings all over our
country, and sending their remaining members to other congregations that are
still going. My training time in
Portland this past week offered a special hour about the ministry of closing
churches that are at the end of their lifespan.
And we were charged that just because some local churches reach that
place, to remember that the Capital-C Church of God will continue. The landscape of our communities and their
churches is changing, transitioning; and the way we do our communities of
faith, if we still call them churches, has to transition as well. For those of us raised in the traditional way
of being church, this is very difficult - a deep grief, a deep loss. And I
don’t yet have a vision of the new way of being church that is coming.
What
I DO see is that we all need to be rethinking the way we live as
Christ-followers – our prayer lives, our authenticity, our way of living in a
changing community; we need to revision our outreach with God’s message of
grace, and not hide behind our walls and our former ways.
Transition
is hard. I believe our call is to be a
bridge to whatever God is bringing – and not to be stoppers, not to keep
stubbornly holding onto the old ways harder and harder. Indiantown has been a beacon here in our
county for a long, long time, and seen many changes. And our leadership has chosen to call a new
person and see what’s down the new road. We have to be ready for changes; we
have to be open to where the Spirit of God can take us. We need to be in prayer and seeking to grow
our own spiritual lives, so our spiritual ears are ready. Its not a time to sit back and criticize, or
to undermine, or wait for some outside answer to come. Our new minister won’t have the answers or
the ideas that will work here – that’s up to us. We know the area, we know the people – its
our divine imaginations that need to fire up.
Jesus’ message about love and grace and righteous living in 2018 and
beyond is needed, and we are the believers that are here to spread it. AMEN.
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