Sermon - John 3:16

Below is a sermon I gave today on the famous John 3:16 passage...

Throughout the history of Christianity, art and music have played an essential role in helping followers of Jesus to express their faith—to convey and share with others the depth of the experience of healing, peace, grace, freedom, and love they have experienced in encountering the living Christ.

In ancient times these artistic representations might take the form of mural paintings of the Good Shepherd or drawings depicting Jesus playing a flute, calling God’s beloved children to the beauty and grace of his saving message. Other Christians in later times painted portraits like Rembrandt’s The Prodigal Son or composed oratorios like Handel’s Messiah or Bach’s St. Matthew Passion as ways of expressing their faith.

More recently, film has emerged as an important way in which followers of Jesus have discovered a uniquely powerful means of expressing what it means to experience God’s mercy and love. From the beginning of cinema, filmmakers ranging from Thomas Edison to Martin Scorsese have used the medium of film to express a sense of the good news of God’s gracious love as found in Jesus.

For that reason, I found it both amusing and poignant recently to come across a very creative YouTube video that features one of the older of these films about Jesus. Rather than simply show the film in its original format, however, the video displays the visual footage but dubs over the film’s original audio track with a decidedly different kind of script.

To give you a sense of the effect, I’ll set up the scene. Jesus has just arrived to give the Sermon on the Mount and is greeting his disciples. However, rather than the message that we’re used to hearing—one, of course, of mercy and love—we find something quite different. Here’s a brief excerpt to give you an idea: Jesus says…

“Well alright, now it’s time for me to tell you all what you’ve done wrong since I last saw you. And don’t try and hide, because I’m Jesus and I will find you. Let’s start with you, Peter. You lied to your mother the other day. Andrew, you said a naughty word when you hit your finger with the hammer. James, you laughed at him when he hit his finger…Moving right along, John you drank too much wine the other night, not way too much, just enough to make me angry. Matthew, we fell asleep in church yesterday, didn’t we? Yes we did!...And you, I forgot your name, so you’re off the hook for now…Benjamin, you aren’t wearing your WWJD bracelet…Alright, all you sinners come with me…it’s time to pay the piper.”

So then Jesus makes his way to the top of the hill to give his sermon and there proclaims…

“Look at all these sinners. Alright, listen up, listen to me. I’m Jesus. Listen to what I have to say. I have done many wonderful things. I have healed many people of diseases. I have performed many miracles, so that I can tell you this: you’re all evil, there is no hope. That’s it. Thank you.”

Of course, this video is quite amusing and definitely worth checking out—you can search for it as “Hilarious Dubbed Jesus Movie” on YouTube. But, kidding aside, for all the humor of the video there’s also an essential message there for all of us. Quite simply, the reason we find the juxtaposition of the footage and the harsh message so funny is that we know how dissimilar that message is to the actual message and real ministry of Jesus.

We ourselves have encountered this authentic Jesus, the Jesus proclaimed in today’s Gospel reading from John. As John tells us, it is Jesus who makes present for us the living God—the God who so loves the world; the God who does not condemn the world but in fact saves, redeems, enlightens, and transforms it in love. This is the God experienced by the people of Israel through the healing ministry of Moses and the same God encountered at the actual Sermon on the Mount—not the amusingly incongruous YouTube version. This is the God experienced in the living faith of the community of believers passed down all these years to us today. And perhaps most remarkably of all, this is the God whom we too can share with a world so in need of the transformative power of love.

Our motto as a church in the ELCA is “God’s work, our hands” and that, precisely, is the message that our lessons today are pointing to. To paraphrase today’s reading from the letter to the Ephesians:

“God, who is rich in mercy, out of great love, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. And God raised us up, so that immeasurable riches of kindness and grace might be shown.”

God is rich in mercy and goodness. God has forgiven and saved and raised us up. God has come to abide with us and in us and to empower us to share love and kindness with the whole world, not to prove that we’re worthy or to somehow merit or deserve God’s love, but to share and pass on what we’ve been given.

As Christians, we live in and act from the love of God that has come to us in Jesus—the love in whom we live and move and have our being. Whether we’re advocating on behalf of the poor and marginalized, visiting the sick, reaching out to those in prison, assisting those who are migrants in our land, working for justice and peace in our society, or in turn welcoming the ministry that others share with us when we ourselves are in need, whatever it is that God inspires in each of us and in all of us together, it is all grace. It is all love. It is all God’s goodness and mercy touching us, transforming us, and sending us out to serve.

In truth, it really comes down to something like the experience many of us have had watching a film, or viewing a work of art, or hearing a piece of music that helps us to encounter the living Christ. Rather than the laughably pompous and judgmental character of the dialogue in the video that I described earlier, when we encounter the real Jesus we know we’ve found authentic hope and transformation. We know that mercy and compassion are possible. We know that we can live and share that message in our own lives as well.

Like a film or a hymn or a work of art, our lives too as Christians—both as individuals and together as a church—can and will be a sign and a message of God’s love. We too, abiding in and sharing God’s love, can serve as God’s hands in the world—a world that God sent Jesus into, not to reproach but to enlighten; not to judge but to liberate; not to condemn but to save—that is, to bring to integral wholeness and all-encompassing liberation through the only power there really is: love.

The Universe & God

I recently finished another helpful book from theologian Marcus Borg, entitled The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith (HarperOne, 1998). Among other things, Borg has some helpful insights about the nature of God, such as the following:

"God...[need not necessarily be thought of as] a supernatural being separate from the universe; rather, God (the sacred, Spirit) is a nonmaterial layer or level or dimension of reality all around us. God is more than the universe, yet the universe is in God. Thus, in a spatial sense, God is not 'somewhere else' but 'right here'" (12).

To me, this is a helpful way of thinking about faith. We can tend to get caught up in thinking of God as completely other than and separate from our own realities. However, our faith tells us that our lives are in fact permeated by the sacred - by God's Spirit. Again, Borg:

"The Christian tradition...has throughout its history consistently affirmed that God is both *transcendent* and *immanent*...The transcendence of God refers to God's 'going beyond' the universe, God's otherness, God as more than the universe. God's immanence, on the [other] hand, means God's presence in everything or nearness to everything. Immanence means to dwell with or within...The immanence of God thus means the omnipresence of God" (26).

God is beyond us and yet always with us - to be praised and magnified, yet also a close friend and beloved one. The sacred is something we'll never fully be able to grasp and yet also a reality that, when we're open to it, can touch and transform our daily lives.