March 30, 2003
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The
message for today on this fourth Sunday in Lent, is this: God has offered us
renewal through the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ which is a sign of
God’s great love for us. And what a gift it is. Eugene
Peterson puts it this way. “Now God has us where [God] wants us with all the
time in the world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ
Jesus. Saving is all God’s idea, all God’s work. All we do is trust God
enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish” (Eugene
Peterson. The Message Ephesians 2.8-10. Colorado Springs: NavPress. 1993,
p.402). It
is alright for us to buy ourselves gifts from time to time, but we cannot buy
this gift or accumulate enough frequent good works points to earn it. It is a
free gift presented to us out of the mercy and love of God for each one of us.
Our choice is to receive or to reject the salvation extended to us. But
we ask, why do good works if not to win our salvation? Why give away bread on
the last Friday of every month, or open our doors to Alcoholics Anonymous
groups, participate in the BREAD organization and the Olde Towne East
Neighborhood Association? Why give our money, our time, our talents? Why do any
of this if there is no guaranteed return or redemption? Because
our good works are our response to what God is doing in our lives. We know
God’s compassion, mercy, and redemption, and because we do we respond by
serving others with compassion and mercy. Our work is to respond by growing in
our faithfulness to God. Redemption is God’s work. When
I was growing up, our family collected Blue Chip stamps. You may have collected
S & H Green stamps in this part of the country.
As I remember it, grocery stores and other merchants would give buyers
little blue stamps whenever a purchase was made. Once enough stamps were
collected and pasted in the book, they would be taken to a redemption center and
traded for small appliances and other goods. Those goods were a sign of what our
family’s buying power could earn and we were grateful for what could be
redeemed for the stamps. Today’s
Psalm and the gospel of John announce a different, longer lasting redemption. We
are invited to declare the goodness of God, whose love is steadfast and eternal.
We are indeed the redeemed of God, let us say so. What
do we say? We say thanks be to God for being present to us in adversity. John
Newton expressed the thanksgiving we feel when he wrote: “Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that
saved a wretch like me! Our
sense of ourselves is too well formed for us to think of ourselves as wretches,
but few of us here have escaped a difficult moment or two in our lives. So many
of us know the pain of loss or grief or disappointment. We know deep in our
souls that we emerged on the other side of the pain because God walked through
it with us. Our deliverance and healing came from God’s continuing presence
among us and for that presence we are hope-filled and thankful. Few of us have not known the incredible, almost indescribable
renewing gift of God’s merciful presence. “Through many dangers, toils and snares, I
have already come; Christians
says that we are renewed by the gift of redemptive love shown to us in God’s
lovingkindness which is embodied in the life and death of Jesus Christ. The
gospel of John invites us into the middle of a conversation with one of the
leaders of the Jewish community. The leader, Nicodemus has arrived by night to
see Jesus. He arrived after dark in order to minimize the chances of being seen
by his peers. After all, no self respecting and prominent community leader can
be seen in the company of an itinerant rabbi. Nicodemus reminds me of the way we
are sometimes. We have reputations for what we know and for who we are and we
guard those reputations so tightly that we make it difficult for people to know
who we are and what we need. I
am not talking about privacy that each of us has a right to, I am talking about
the fact that in one way or another, we are all seekers, there are things we
want to know about how to live our lives and about how to feed our spirits.
Nicodemus came by night. Today we might seek the safety and secrecy of the
internet to get the information we do not know. We might seek the anonymity of
talk radio to make our opinions heard. All the while our fullest selves are kept
under wraps, and in the dark and the gifts of knowing and being known are not
given to us because we are not open to receiving them, except when no one else
is looking. That
is Nicodemus. After he and Jesus have a conversation about what it means to be
born from above, Jesus begins to teach him and us as we read this story about
four gifts that lead us to understand who we are as we receive the gift of love
and salvation from Jesus. The
first gift is that love means sacrifice and Jesus’ sacrifice will lead to
eternal life for all who believe in him. To make his point Jesus refers
to a story from Exodus and makes a bold assertion. He says, “as Moses lifted
up a snake, so must the Son of Man be lifted up”.
Numbers 21.4-9 tells the story. The people in the desert wilderness were
complaining that Moses had brought them to a barren place across the Nile, but
not yet across the Jordan where they found themselves without adequate food or
water. For their lack of faith God allowed some of the people to be bitten by
poisonous snakes, many people died. The others cried out to God for help. At
God’s direction, Moses made a bronze snake, put it on a long pole and held it
high. Those who looked at what had been a source of death lived. The one’s who
would not look died. We
can see why Jesus recalled this story to describe people being saved as they
looked up: “The people were in danger of death because of their sin. God
provided the agent of salvation – the bronze serpent in the first story and
the Son of Man in the second. The agent of salvation was lifted up – “the
deepest point of connection between the bronze snake and Jesus was in the act of
being lifted up, and the people were saved by looking at, or believing in
God’s agent of salvation. “But
there are these differences: the bronze snake was only a piece of bronze, having
no saving power in itself. Jesus however, is himself invested with saving power.
Looking at the ‘lifted up’ bronze snake gave the Israelites extended
physical life. Looking upon the ‘lifted up’ Jesus gives us eternal life” (www.lectionary.org
Mar30_John 3.14-21.htm p, 3-4). We
have been offered the gift of eternal life as we look to Jesus who sacrificed
his life for us and was lifted up on a cross and suffered death for the sake of
the world. And we are offered eternal life as Jesus will be lifted up in another
way. He faced crucifixion
certainly, we are indeed people of the cross, our faith is renewed as we recall
that in being lifted up, Jesus laid down his life so that we might have faith in
him and find our lives with him forever. But, Jesus will also be lifted up when
God raises him in his glorious resurrection.
Our hope is in being people of the resurrection who refuse to be defeated
by death. “Look up”, he tells us, “and live forever”.
The
idea of eternal life, of life beyond our physical limitations is so important to
the gospel of John that he uses the term fifteen times in his gospel. It defines
the second way we receive the gift of love and salvation. Jesus
declares how much God loves the world.
“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”. Here is the heart
of the gospel. Martin Luther called John 3.16 the gospel of Jesus Christ in
miniature. I had Sunday School teachers tell us that when we were feeling down
to remember the love God has for us and how it is expressed in this verse. God
loved, God gave, we believe, we live eternally. God loved the world so much that
he gave his most intimate relationship to the world. Notice that John is careful
not to say that God so loved one nation, or one people, or one race, or gender,
or orientation, or class that he gave his son exclusively to them. God’s gift
of love was and is for this world so that we might have life now and eternally.
It is a gift God willingly shares with us. Our
reluctance to share in God’s love comes in those times when we feel unworthy
to receive it and in those times we are unable to receive or to share the love
of God. Take courage in the third gift of love God gives us,
we are not condemned. God
has not sent Jesus into the world in order to show us how awful or unworthy we
are or how we never get it right. God does not, but so much in our culture does
tell us that. It tells us that we are often too old to be any good, and too
young to know anything. We are too big, or too small, too intellectual to feel
or too emotional to think. We are too much in charge to be vulnerable, or too
vulnerable to be in charge. We are so superstitious as to need to believe in
God, and so rational as to ignore our spirit’s needs. What
condemnation we know comes when we listen to those voices that tell us that we
are worthless, useless, not salvageable, guilty of just not being enough.
Whether those voices come from outside of us or from inside our heads they can
cause us to do two things. We can believe every negative word and sink into deep
despair or we can hear the condemnation and say, all of that may be true, today.
But my spirit is anchored to eternity, this moment will likely pass, and to the
extent that all is not well with me, I will place my trust in God who is able to
help me turn my life around. Because
the opportunity for renewed life is always before us, because we can stand
before a loving God as forgiven people, just because God loves us, we are not
condemned. Rather we are loved and given another opportunity to turn our lives
to God. When
we take the opportunity to turn around, we just might be able to claim the
fourth gift of love, and here it is: Our belief and faith
in Christ overcomes the bleak darkness that surrounds us and gives light to our
very being. We can leave the darkness and bleakness of separation and sin
and walk in the bright light of God’s love for us. In the opening verses of
John’s gospel, we read: “What has come into being in him was life, and the
life was the light of all people. The light shines in darkness, and the darkness
did not overcome it” (John 1.4b-5). With
our gifts of life, of love, of being lifted above condemnation, with our gift of
light we can begin to see our way to our own ministry. What is our ministry? It
is to help others to see what we have seen: that we are loved and we are
blessed. It is to share with others the gifts of God we have so that they can
begin to claim their own gifts from God. Our
ministry is to seize the good news of the gospel and then to pour it out into
the world as God’s love has been poured out from us. Our message will be seen
and heard as we live the good news that is in us. We have life in Jesus, and can
help others find life in him too. We have the love of God given to us in Jesus
Christ. We are certainly responsible for what we do, and it is God who holds us
ultimately accountable, but we are about lifting up Jesus, who did not come to
us “merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He
came to help, to put the world right again” (Peterson,
p. 190). By his grace, we are lifted above
condemnation to repentance and forgiveness. We can by our example help others
know forgiveness. We walk in the light of Jesus Christ, and as we go, we can
help others find the light of Christ in themselves. As
we accept the gifts of God offered to us by God and Christ, as they are received
by us through the great gift of the Holy Spirit, let the opening words of
today’s Psalm finds a home in our hearts: “O give thanks to
the LORD for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever. Let the
redeemed of the LORD say so”
Dr.
LaTaunya M. Bynum |
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Broad
Street Christian Church
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