|
Back to Sermon ArchivesMarch 22,
2009
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Isaiah 6:8, 43:1-5, Ephesians 2:1-10, John 3:14-21
“We Are Whosoevers: Our God Don’t Make No Junk!”
Theologian Karl Barth is remembered for all of his years of preaching and teaching,
and the thirteen volumes of his Church Dogmatics which ran to some six
million words (Have I reached that number here yet?). But he is remembered
as well for saying that all his thinking and meaning can be found in the simple
words of the song – “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so!”
Whatever else might be said of those who sit in end zones, behind baskets and
home plates holding up “John 3:16” signs, they got the theology right! Martin
Luther calls those words “the Gospel in miniature.” We cannot escape the paradox
-- for all the Bible’s attention to judgment and justice – all the laws and the
rules – God’s mercy and love win out – in the end and all along the way!
Human rights activist Rev. Ben Chavis captures the spirit of God’s love in his
version of Psalm 132 –
Jesus is love / because God is love
Jesus is love / because God so loved
the world
that Jesus was sent in love / for
love
Jesus is love / breaks open the eternal
possibility
for love / to be for all / because
Jesus is love
Not every Sunday an appointed text from the lectionary has such currency for
events in our common life as John 3:16 has for Reno-Sparks today. The infamous
Fred Phelps, self-identified pastor of a Baptist church in Kansas, plans to be here
April 3 to picket Reno High School, UNR, Western Nevada College, the Legislature,
and Carson High – with signs reading “God Hates Nevada” – presumably because Nevadans
will not condemn homosexual persons and practices. Targets of this campaign
include Gay Student Alliances on campuses and a bill to prohibit picketing at military
funerals. In the eyes of some, the military is a lot more inclusive and tolerant
than others might like to think!
Some congregations and community organizations and concerned individuals are
preparing to meet the message of hate with a demonstration of love and respect for
all persons and peoples. It will a demonstration of mercy and grace for those
who still have not heard and/or still resist the word that God is Love. Signs
held by these demonstrators will say simply “Forgiving Fred.” It will happen
at Manzanita Bowl in front of UNR beginning at 7 AM. A festival of the
diversity of our community will follow until 11 AM. Come, live out love
for all!
Light of the Soul Church of Christ (which had its beginnings worshiping here)
will offer T-shirts reading “I Am a Whosoever” – referring to the gospel this morning
– which traditionally reads, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten
Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting
life.” The shirts will also read, “I Am Your Neighbor” – reminder of
Leviticus cited by Jesus to say love of God and love of neighbor sum up all the
teachings of Law. Could it really be, as the song says – “All we
need is love?!”
For we want to say in light of this text this morning -- we are all “whosoevers!”
“Whosoever” any one of us is, we could have been any other! Any other “whosoever”
could have been us! We are all in this “world” God loves so much -- together!
No one of us is any more or less earning, any more or less deserving of God’s love
and our respect than anyone else! Our God don’t make no junk!
Jesus is addressing himself to Nicodemus – a leader among the Pharisees by day,
so to speak, a follower of Jesus by night. Jesus tells him he must come to
the light. He must be able to see things as they really are. And he
must risk being seen for who he really is. He must not be ashamed or afraid
of his love for Jesus – his desire to be identified with the good works of love
Jesus offers to all.
It does no good to try to apply some heavenly standard of judgment on earth.
As we hear the cry of the prophets this season, we hear the anguish of God – for
whom the prophets speak. God keeps learning anew how hard it is to be human
and part of this world. Gods learns from the everyday prophet Amos the hypocrisy
Amos feels when he goes to worship as usual, does all the right and traditional
prayers and readings and offerings and sacrifices. Yet he returns to the world
and finds all us good worshipers participating quietly and obediently in a system
that tolerates so much ignorance and indifference toward one another!
God learns from the unrequited prophet Hosea how costly it is to love someone
unconditionally. It is so hard for us to acknowledge when persons and
peoples and nations we love do not act out of our highest hopes and ideals but
settle for greed and corruption. If we trust ourselves all to be in the
image and likeness of God, why is it so hard for us to hold the mirror up to one
another? To help one another see for ourselves how others may see us? To
see what harm we may do – or may be done in our names -- even when we may not
mean for it to be done?
God learns from the persistent prophet Isaiah there are no “quick fixes” or
“instant gratifications.” Just saying to others what God says to us does
not make it happen! It is hard for us to imagine how much
self-centeredness, for instance, our children may ingest with all the
commercials they watch growing up – or even how much killing we all come to
countenance in popular media. We lose a capacity for feeling when we hear
and see suffering in real life. We tune out. We find all the news so
“negative,” so “depressing.” In fact, we cannot stand the message so much
we are driving the messengers – even the newspapers – out of existence! Or
forcing them artificially to create “good news” to appease us!
Isaiah shows God how hard it is to be prophetic and popular all at once.
If after Hosea, God has any feelings left to be hurt, God better get over them.
Isaiah says only a remnant at best, a flickering few of the faithful will survive
for God – what Joan Chittister calls “the small voice of another truth in a
world on the rampage.” She invites us to join with Isaiah – and with the
Jesus who leads to Jerusalem – holding on, going on, carrying on, seeing little
success, exerting great effort – Can any of us identify with that? Give a
witness to that? – “giving our entire lives to an apparently fruitless task that
is right only because it is right!”
Nobody could pay us enough to do what we do freely in love. Chittister calls
us to “holy imagination” – to visions and voices, options and opportunities that
never have been before! And to “indomitable spirit” – the capacity to
stand with the farmer who says – “Every day I cast my seeds to the wind.
It takes no virtue to cast those seeds, of course. But it does take
courage to go on facing the wind.”
Allow me a moment to mention the indomitable wind-facing, seed-casting spirit
of Louise Johnson – among so many in whom I have seen the face of Jesus in congregations
through the years. Louise died this week at age 88. She had convinced
herself she was too spry for senior housing in Tennessee and had boarded a bus to
move closer to family in Michigan when she took sick. She worked her whole
life as a home-cleaner and meal-caterer – much of her living made on her knees.
Yet she was lay leader for a small congregation of mixed class and color on the
south side of Chicago -- whose own struggle to survive opened them to respond to
the struggles of those around them. They provided food pantry, emergency shelter,
transportation, activities for neighborhood children and seniors, interventions
with courts, schools, public aid offices. Like Ms. Johnson herself, a congregation
that did not know how or when to quit!
Congregations at our best know we are made up of those this epistle to the Ephesians
calls as good as dead. Apart from the congregation, it is so easy for us to
lose ourselves to the world – with all the competitive self-centeredness that divides
us into few winners and many losers – regarding each other as burdens and threats
– keeping as much to and for ourselves as we can – leaving the leaders of systems
and structures to lord over us and exploit our ignorance and isolation from one
another. It is God who loves us from death into life – who makes us alive
together with Christ! God makes us the very Body of Christ – connected, related
to everyone anywhere -- in their gift and in their need.
God hears the cry of the prophets – because the prophets cry for God!
If God ever was so “God-like” – so almighty and so detached and distant that
nothing human ever could reach God or touch God or move God – in Jesus God has
to get over it! In Jesus God gives us everything God possibly can.
God gives us God’s own flesh and blood. No longer can anything human ever
be unknown or alien to God! God loves the world – though the world may do
its worst to Jesus. God loves each of us – no matter how lost, how missing
in God’s action we may be, how sorry and self-righteous we may feel for
ourselves – with an “eternal” love that means, quite simply – God will never
give up on us!
Unlike those whose own fear of God leads them to see God as hateful – the
hate they project onto others of God’s own children – God sends Jesus to save
the world -- not to condemn it! Again, that has nothing to do with us
being worthy of salvation – worthy of being healed and made whole from our sins,
trespasses, and debts of all kinds. It has nothing to do with what we
might earn or deserve – even with whether we have a job or a home at all!
For God knows -- God learns from God’s prophets, even from us – we are so good
at condemning ourselves!
We fear our own judgment so much, the only way we can look up for ourselves
is to look down on somebody else! Somebody must be our scapegoat, our
excuse on whom to blame our own problems and projections of what we would do if
we only we could be somebody else. That is why, hard as it is, only deep
forgiving of Fred Phelps has any chance of changing him – and us together with
him!
Jesus is lifted up – like Moses lifts up the serpent to save the people from
all their own bittenness, all their own bitterness – so that all who believe our
lives are of his life – his life is of our lives – now and forever – are gathered
up with him! It comes back to Nicodemus and his fear of the light -- revealing
and exposing him for who he is. Is he one who wants the satisfaction, the
comfort, the reward of following Jesus -- without the risk of following Jesus?!
Does he not want the risk of being identified with all the others who follow Jesus?
Others with whom he prefers not to be bothered, burdened or threatened with changing
his own one safe life? Jesus is born of God -- not only to comfort the afflicted
-- but also to afflict the comfortable. So he is even now leading us into
Jerusalem!
In hopes that not only we but even Fred Phelps will be afflicted in our own “comfort
zones,” let us move as a congregation to affirm the “All Means All Declaration”
made available by the Reconciling Ministries Network --
Believing ALL MEANS ALL, our congregation
welcomes persons of all ages, races, ethnicities, [languages], sexual orientations,
gender identities, economic conditions, marital status, mental or physical abilities
to attend, join, and participate fully in the life of our congregation. Such
belief advances our United Methodist mission to make disciples of Jesus Christ for
the transformation of the world by applying the three simple rules: Do no harm,
Do Good, Stay in love with God.
Those who will, please say Amen!
top of page
Archives
| 