Tag Archives: John 3:16

Preaching, Sermons

Who has been Jesus for you? John 3:14-21 [OR Would Someone Please Put John 3:17 on the Poster, Too?]

**sermon art: Jesus Washes the Disciples Feet by Luke Allsbrook, oil on canvas (2018)

Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on March 10, 2024

Ugh, you know, the thing I don’t like about Jesus is that he was always telling his followers to get their revenge, to trash talk, to really stick it to people. He was super mean all the time. He didn’t like weddings. And little children really got under his skin. I should probably stop there on the slight chance that anyone thinks I’m serious. Obviously, Jesus was none of those things. The stories we have about Jesus and the things he said reveal an incredible human. Non-Christians say how great life would be if Christians actually lived like Jesus lived. Many people who aren’t Christians try to live their lives as Jesus lived. Just as those of us who say we follow Jesus try to follow his example.

When we welcome new members into Lutheran churches like this one, we call it affirmation of baptism. There are promises we make as part of the affirmation of baptism when we join a church. The last few weeks we’ve covered a few of our promises: to live among God’s faithful people, to hear the word of God and share in the Lord’s supper, and to proclaim God in Christ through word and deed. Today, we’re highlighting our promise, “to serve all people, following the example of Jesus.” Our Bible readings today help us remember a very important part of this promise. Jesus is Jesus and we are not, even if we are called to follow his example.

Verse 17 of the John reading takes that one step further. If Jesus didn’t come into the world to condemn the world, then why would any Jesus follower think it’s their job to condemn people? I shared at Evening Prayer last Wednesday that I was raised in two denominations that painted the scariest portrait of God you could imagine, and that God sent Jesus to police the planet for evil deeds of any size. When I left home, I left Jesus behind. Why take him to the party if he was just going to frown away? And then I married a Lutheran Christian. We baptized our babies and made the promises to them that you hear me ask parents or baptized adults to make at our baptismal font. What changed? God didn’t. I did.

John 3:16 and 17 were written as a continuous thought in the original Greek.[1] “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. 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.”

God’s love for the world revealed in Jesus is good news because it reveals God’s goodness and light. Jesus was not sent to condemn the world but to save it. Salvation in John’s gospel is focused on life. Eternal life today because God is eternal, and God abides with us right now as we abide with God right now. How would it change Jesus’ message for you to think about salvation that way rather than a dividing line at death? Why would a God whose love for the world, who draws all people to God, suddenly turn against people when they die? Have we projected our own fear about dying onto God?

These questions are relevant to today’s reading because people have used verse 16 over the centuries to blast people beyond God’s love. It’s what happens when verse 16 is separated from verse 17. It’s what happens when belief is set as the highest power above even God’s grace, as if the power of God’s grace could be limited by our beliefs and doubts which is, of course, ludicrous. In case we think too highly of our own power, hear the reminder from Ephesians – “For by grace you have been saved through faith, this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” Faith as a gift from God, by definition, means that belief cannot be a work. We don’t dredge belief and faith up in ourselves. That’s a real mind bender, isn’t it?

We haven’t focused on the Hebrew Bible’s stories of the Old Testament much over the last few weeks. Those readings in worship have emphasized the covenants that God makes to God’s people. Each covenant God made is evidence that the promise to some was for the benefit of many. From God’s covenant with Abraham would come blessing for the whole world.[2] From God’s covenant with the Hebrews led by Moses, would come life-giving commandments that brought peace among neighbors.[3] And from God’s covenant with the whole world through Jesus, would come a love so powerful that it transforms hearts and minds.[4]

Which brings us back to the baptismal promise we make “to serve all people, following the example of Jesus.” We don’t make this promise to serve in order to grow the church or to win souls for God or to prove how cool our theology is. We serve following the example of Jesus because as the Ephesians reading tell us, “…we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”

I’d like you think for a minute about the people who have served you like you imagine Jesus served people in the Bible stories. Call to mind names and faces and what happened. It may be someone who prayed for you.[5] It may be someone who healed you like a chiropractor or physician or counselor.[6] It may be someone who didn’t let a past harm define you.[7] It may be someone who has more grace for your flaws than you ever could for yourself and doesn’t condemn you.[8] It may be someone who stayed up with you late at night, talking when you needed it most.[9] It may be someone who fed you when you had no way to pay them back.[10] As I prepared this sermon, so many faces and names swam through my mind.

Most recently, it was my friend, Lee McNeil. Lee and I worked on human dignity policies and legislation with Together Colorado especially related to race and justice. I called her Sister Lee as did many others who knew her. It was an honorary title of respect for a beloved and wise elder. As the great granddaughter of an enslaved person, and the triple-great granddaughter of someone who owned African people, our friendship evolved over the ten years of working together. A few weeks ago, we were asked to write an opinion piece together supporting the Racial Equity Study bill moving through the Colorado legislature that will increase understanding of the generational impact of law and policy on Black Coloradans. Sister Lee and I wrote it in my office here at the church. First we reminisced over people we knew because we hadn’t talked in over a year. Then we kept right on talking while I typed and read out loud and we talked more and edited the letter together.

At the end of our conversation that day, I told her how grateful I am for our friendship and for her grace while I learned things I could never have learned without her loving instruction and willingness to just talk. We hugged. She told me she loved me and I told her back. There were a flurry of emails back and forth with final edits and I submitted our letter to the paper. A week later I found out that Lee died suddenly. A long life well lived. I was stunned and heartbroken and incredibly grateful to know her and unbelievably grateful to have seen her right before she died. Sister Lee was kind and thoughtful and fierce. She loved Jesus and she served people following the example of Jesus.

I’ve watched many of you love each other similarly. Oh sure, there are disappointments, disagreements, and sometimes frayed nerves. We are human after all. But we’re reminded time and again how much God loves us and we’re reminded that Jesus commanded us to love each other and then showed us how to do it. The list of things that Jesus did for people is long. If there’s not someone coming to mind at the moment who has been Jesus to you, take this question out of worship with you today. Who has served you as Jesus served and, in some small way, helped you understand just how much God must love you? Because that’s what our service to other people does, it reminds them that God loves them too. This reminder is no small thing in a world that is in desperately in need of Jesus’ transforming love.

Thanks be to God and amen.

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[1] Joy J. Moore, Professor of Biblical Preaching, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN. Sermon Brainwave podcast for Bible readings on Sunday, March 10, 2024. www.workingpreacher.org/podcasts/952-fourth-sunday-in-lent-mar-10-2024

[2] Genesis 12:1-5 The Call of Abram

[3] Exodus 20:1-17 The Ten Commandments

[4] Acts 9:1-22 The Conversation of Saul/Paul

[5] John 17:1-26 Jesus’ Prays for his disciples.

[6] See all of Jesus’ healing stories.

[7] John 8:1-11 Woman caught in adultery.

[8] Luke 22:54-62 Peter denies Jesus.

[9] John 3:1-21 Nicodemus visits Jesus by night.

[10] Mark 6:30-44

Sermons

Jesus: Superhero? Antihero? Neither?  [John 3:14-21]

Caitlin Trussell with Augustana Lutheran Church on March 11, 2018

[sermon begins after Bible reading]

John 3:14-21 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that 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. 18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 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. 20 For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21 But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

[sermon begins]

Wonder Woman hit movie theaters last spring and tallied box office returns of $103 million for opening weekend and over $800 million in worldwide box office sales.[1] Black Panther opened in mid-February to the tune of $202 million and is currently well over $900 million in worldwide ticket sales.[2] It’s still in theaters so, who knows, a billion dollars is possible. Those are record breaking numbers. People not only enjoy the quality movie making, they also care deeply about these films – their characters and stories. I’m fascinated by how deeply people care. Every so often, I day dream about the doctoral program at DU called Theology, Philosophy, and Cultural Theory.[3] Programs like this excavate the layers of experience and thought behind cultural phenomena. For now, there are experts in their fields who propose their own theories. TV critic Eric Deggans thinks that, “Superheroes answer this desire that a lot of us have to have somebody cut through all the nonsense in life, use extraordinary powers to bring justice to a situation, and I think that’s the appeal of these movies and these T.V. shows; To find somebody who can just sort of cut through all the nonsense and deliver justice very directly.”[4]

It’s not a stretch that we would want God to work in the ways of the superhero, too. Especially in the Gospel of John in which Jesus performs miracles and seems to have superman-like resolve from his baptism all the way through his death on the cross. While I do not think this means what we often think it means, there is something both super-human and all too human going on here. The human part is that we are prone to condemnation. We like to judge other people as if we could do better in the same set of circumstances.[5]  And we tend to pull God into our court to support our verdict. Along this line, I hung out with the first communion students and their parents on Wednesday evening. Their first communion book, written by Daniel Erlander, tells stories about the crabby people who were very, very crabby about Jesus.[6] They didn’t like the way he healed. They didn’t like the way he fed. They didn’t like the way he forgave.

They didn’t like that he ate with the wrong people. You get the idea. We worked through the first few pages of the book, regaled by stories about Jesus while the crabby people in the stories plotted to kill him. The crabby people were meting out their own kind of justice with a plan to hang Jesus on a cross. Class ended with this thought. I told the kids that there may be crabby people who pop up in our lives to ask us the question, “Do you know what God’s going to do to you?!” Then I told them how to answer it by saying, “Yes, God’s going to love me.”  We know this because all the way to the cross there was not one finger lifted by God against the very people who were part of the execution.

The love of God is part of these verses today as the world God so loves. It’s a reference from John 3:16 which begins, “For God so loved the world…”  John 3:16 is well known to us – on signs at football games and quite possibly anywhere else you could imagine, the signs read either just chapter and verse or sometimes the sign-artist will write the whole thing. “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.” I always hope that the next verse, John 3:17, will make it onto the sign too.

Listen to beginning os John 3:17 again, “”Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world…” The Son in these Bible verses is Jesus. In God’s mysterious way, those of us who confess a faith of Jesus, also say that Jesus is God and God is Jesus. The Gospel of John begins with this claim. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…what came into being was life and the life was the light of all the people…the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it…and the Word became flesh and lived among us.”[7] The Gospel of John confesses Jesus’ divinity.

 

Jesus came not to condemn – came NOT to be the movie superhero doling out retributive justice. Yet that is the justice often claimed out of these verses. It’s the kind of justice we crave from our superheroes because it cuts through the nonsense and appeals to a sense of fairness that is satisfying. Satisfying, that is, when it’s someone else getting cut down. A little less satisfying when we’re the ones under judgment. But, our satisfaction is amplified when our connections with each other are made around a common enemy. Kind of like those crabby people in the first communion book who are united against their common enemy of Jesus. Why doesn’t Jesus come out swinging and deliver the final one-two punch? Jesus, while occasionally sarcastic and biting, is no anti-hero. He isn’t skulking around, isolated and cynical. He is walking around as the light. Shining light on the human condition by telling the truth about the deeds we do in the darkness and light that exist in the world.

Here’s the truth of it. We take turns in the darkness and light – by choice and by circumstance. Part of God loving the world is shining light on the truth of what we do. This isn’t necessarily joyful or easy. But shining the light on our rush to judgment without all the data, our call for retributive justice without compassion, or our determination to energize around a common enemy is exactly what’s needed. Shining a light on all of our attempts to end up at the top of the heap while condemning others around us.

In the Gospel reading we are told that, “The light has come into the world.” The very first verses of the Gospel of John tells us Jesus is “the light of all people.”[8]  During communion we hear the words of Jesus spoken over the wine:

Again, after supper, he took the cup, gave thanks, and gave it for ALL to drink saying: This cup is the new covenant in my blood, shed for you and for ALL people for the forgiveness of sin. Do this for the remembrance of me.[9]

During the invitation to communion, we often say that if you are here you are welcome to Holy Communion. It is Christ’s table for all because Jesus is the light come into the world, the light of all people. Such is the welcome and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Neither superhero, nor anti-hero, Jesus is simply given to us by grace, for God so loves the world and continues to draw us into the light of Christ by this good news.

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[1] The Numbers: Where Data and the Movie Business Meet. “Wonder Woman” as of March 10, 2018. https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Wonder-Woman-(2017)#tab=summary

[2] Ibid. “Black Panther” as of March 10, 2018 https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Black-Panther#tab=box-office

[3] DU/Iliff Joint PhD Program in the Study of Religion: Theology, Philosophy, and Cultural Theory. https://www.du.edu/duiliffjoint/current-students/concentrations/theology-philosophy-cultural-theory.html

[4] Eric Deggans, NPR TV Critic. “Here and Now.” March 9, 2018. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510051/here-x26-now

[5] Karoline Lewis. Associate Professor of Preaching and the Marbury E. Anderson Chair in Biblical Preaching, Luther Seminary.  “After Effects” (John 3:14-21) for Dear Working Preacher. Sunday, March 4, 2018.  http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=5075

[6] Daniel Erlander. A Place for You: My Holy Communion Book. 1999. http://danielerlander.com/apfy.html

[7] John 1:1, 3b-5, 14

[8] John 1:5

[9] Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW). Holy Communion, Setting One. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), 108.