Lent 4B, 2012

“God did it for Love,”A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, March 18, 2012 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Newark, NY

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. 17Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16-17)

This past Tuesday, I had the pleasure of being a panelist at two workshops at the Global Citizenship Conference held at Nazareth College for high school students in the greater Rochester area. 435 high school students from 21 different high schools and representing many different religious traditions – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Bahai, Mormon, Agnostic/Atheist - converged on Nazareth College’s campus to learn about world religions and to receive training in techniques for interfaith dialogue, conflict transformation, peacemaking, restorative justice and nonviolence. To see hundreds of young people enthusiastically engaged in learning about one another and developing the skills to build bridges of understanding and compassion where there has so often been discord and mistrust, offered all of us a vision of a very hopeful, redemptive future for our country and world. Then, while still in the glow of that mountaintop experience, I began to reflect on our lectionary texts for this week and what do I find when I open the Newer Testament but the famous passage from John’s gospel that is both a beloved and beautiful Christian proclamation of faith but at the same time what I call a “clobber text” from the perspective of interfaith dialogue and interreligious relations.

The Bible is full of clobber texts. There are those verses in Leviticus and Romans that people have used for centuries to condemn and excoriate the gay and lesbian community, there are passages from the pastoral epistles, particularly the letter to Timothy that have been used to silence women and prevent them from serving in leadership capacities in churches, there are many references in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian testament that condone slavery and were used by slave owners and their advocates against abolitionists during the 19th century controversies over the abolition of slavery. If you know your Bible well and look hard enough you can almost always find some text to justify treating another person or group of persons with contempt, ridicule, judgmentalism or violence if you so choose, particularly if you lift the text out of its context to suit your own needs. Ironic, isn’t it, that these sacred scriptures, that the Episcopal church believes to be the Word of God containing all things necessary to salvation and to which we look for moral and ethical and spiritual wisdom and guidance, these scriptures that teach us that all humankind is created in the image of God and that our God is a God of love who reaches out to embrace all of God’s creation, extending grace and reconciliation to all, should be used as the basis for exclusion and judgmentalism and condemnation of millions of God’s beloved children?

This particular section of John’s gospel is one of those texts that many Christians use as a justification for some of the most arrogant prejudice against people of other world religions, and for formulating a theological position that excludes all non Christians from the embrace of God’s love and salvation. “John 3:16” appears on bumper stickers, signs and banners, t-shirts, sweatshirts and aprons and bracelets, all of which are typically worn by Christians who are quick to suggest that only those who believe in Jesus are “saved.” Notwithstanding that the text also says unequivocally, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world” many Christians use this line to do just exactly that. The justification, of course, is the next few verses, where the author writes, “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.” This is one of those Biblical texts that contradicts itself as it moves from one verse to the next. First it says God did not want to condemn, then it says that those who believe in Jesus are not condemned while those who do not, are. How do we responsibly interpret this section of John’s gospel in our pluralistic and multi-religious society in a way that does not condemn our co-religionists from other traditions to some place beyond where God is?

First of all, we have to understand the context of this fourth gospel. This gospel was the last of the four canonical gospels, written around the year 110 CE for an emerging Jewish Christian sect that was in conflict with the existing Judaisms of the early 2nd century none of which accepted the idea of Jesus as incarnate Word of God. As these very early Christians wrestled to establish themselves, a minority sect within a minority religion in the oppressive Roman Empire, they struggled to justify their own existence and to define themselves against the other religious options of their culture and particularly against other branches of Judaism. The language of “condemnation” needs to be understood in light of this tense and conflicted context. In the midst of the sometimes caustic turf battles between this emerging Jewish sect and the established Judaisms of the times, these early Jewish Christians wanted to set themselves apart and make an argument for the veracity and superiority of their own position. For 21st century Christians, living in a context where our religion has risen to world prominence and has been a religion of empire and colonialism and domination for centuries, with a rather bloody history for which we must take responsibility, the kind of exclusivist and judgmental rhetoric that is so much a part of John’s gospel must not be perpetuated in our very different cultural context. To do otherwise runs completely contrary to the heart of the gospel we purport to proclaim.

The overarching image in the gospel of John, the image with which the gospel begins, is that of Jesus as incarnate Word of God. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” This concept of incarnation is central to the theology of John’s gospel and later became central to Christian religious doctrine. The idea that the divine would choose to enter human existence was not entirely new with the advent of Christianity. Hinduism teaches that periodically God has entered human history when necessary to get the attention of human beings who have strayed from the path of righteousness. There are several Hindu stories of God becoming incarnate in human existence at different points in human history. Indeed, it is because of this tradition that Hindus have no problem at all accepting the idea that Jesus was both human and divine. Their only problem with Christians on that issue is our claim that it only happened in Jesus.

As I wrestled with this difficult text, I consulted an extensive commentary on the New Testament written by a Hindu swami, Paramahansa Yogananda. Sometimes it is enriching to see what religious thinkers outside of our own tradition have to say about our texts because these writers are not burdened by centuries of theological tradition and interpretation of these texts and are therefore able to come at them with a truly fresh eye. Yogananda has this to say about this gospel passage:

Recognition of the immanence of God can begin as simply as expanding one’s love in an ever-widening circle. Humankind condemns itself to limitation whenever we think solely of our own little selves, our own family, our own nation. Inherent in the evolution of nature and humankind back to God is the process of expansion. The exclusivity of family consciousness – ‘us four and no more’ – is wrong. To shut out the larger family of humanity is to shut out the infinite Christ. One who disconnects himself from the happiness and welfare of others has already condemned himself by isolation from the Spirit that pervades all souls, for she who does not extend herself in love and service to God in others disregards the redeeming power of connection with the universality of Christ….Pure love in human hearts radiates the universal Christ-love. (Yogananda, The Second Coming of Christ, Vol. 1, Discourse 14, p. 276-77)

Our Hindu friend here gets the point of the gospel passage better than many a Christian commentator. He echoes a basic tenet of the Benedictine Rule that counsels monks to see the face of Christ in every stranger they encounter. The universality of God’s love for all of humankind, for the whole world (Greek – “cosmos”) is central to John’s gospel and to this problematic passage. Sadly our Christian tradition has too often chosen over the centuries to act on the condemnation language in this gospel, while paying mere lip service to the love language.

God so loved the world says the writer of John’s gospel. God came into the world as a human being because God loved the world and did not want to condemn it but to embrace it and heal it. The message is unequivocally universal. Believing in Jesus in this context does not mean having certain intellectual ideas about him, but rather, giving our hearts to him, loving him and trusting in him as our access point to God. In all his humanity, Jesus embodied the divine in a way we could see, touch, hear and taste. He came to witness to all people, Jews, Gentiles, all nations, not just a chosen few. Love, not condemnation is the message. Love for all the world, not just for Christians. If we choose to emphasize the love message in this passage rather than the condemnation language I suspect we come closer to living out the will of God for all God’s beloved creation.

Much religious language, particularly the language of faith is “love language” meaning that it makes hyperbolic claims about exclusivity that are really more about exclusivity of love and commitment than exclusivity of salvation in any absolute sense. The intimate, personal relationship that Jesus invites us into, like any love relationship, lends itself to language of exclusivity. When one spouse tells the other, “You are the only person in the world for me” he or she is not stating an absolute objective truth. It is a true statement about one person’s love and commitment to another. This is what we who follow Jesus say about him when we affirm that we believe in Jesus. And when we talk about what God has done in Jesus, it is all about love, not condemnation. It is about inclusive and all embracing love, not judgmental and exclusive favoritism. It is a love story between us and God that does not suggest that God’s love for people who approach God differently is any less than God’s love for us. We are invited, as our Hindu Swami suggests, to expand our love out beyond our own little corner of the world. It was witnessing that love incarnate in our world amongst those eager and excited 400+ teenagers at Nazareth this week that touched me so deeply and gave me hope that we can create a future where the love principle reigns and the condemnation and exclusion principles become artifacts of history.

God so loved the world. God still loves the world, all of it, in its diversity and color and beauty. We honor God and show our love for God when we live our lives as reflections of that love in the world and for all the world in its religious, racial, ethnic and cultural diversity. Why has God done anything that God has done? Because, “God so loved the world…” Amen.