Worship Service Archive

‘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.’ John 3:16-17 (NRSV)

John 3:16-17 are some of the most co-opted verses in the Bible. We have all seen them on street signs, memorized these verses, tried to understand their puzzling meaning. These verses are set to music, as you just heard. They are printed onto t-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, billboards, journals, and magnets. They become a symbol for some Christians of their rock solid belief and unwavering faith. They become a weapon to shame others when they do not believe ‘the right way.’ The gospel is good news, not a bludgeon. 

If these verses have ever been used to harm or shame you, we can try to take them back this morning. We can try to reclaim them together. If these verses are laughable to you because they seem anti intellectual or out of place with your , But Jesus did not intend for us to reduce John 3:16-17 into a formula for salvation. John writes this account of a prominent religious leader spending all night with Jesus in order to reveal the uncertainty of faith. And the real difficulty with this passage is that we are left with more questions than answers at the end of it. We are left in the dark with Nicodemus as he tries to figure out what in the world Jesus is asking of him. 

First, we learn that Nicodemus, a Jewish religious leaders, meets Jesus at night. In fact, the NRSV tells us that Nicodemus comes over to the house where Jesus is sleeping and asks him questions. What we don’t get in this exchange is the story of how Nicodemus got into the house, thought. I imagine he was banging on the door [knocking], waking up the neighbors in his stage whisper [Jesus! Are you in there? It’s me, Nicodemus], I imagine he wakes Jesus up, startles him in mid-dream. I imagine Nicodemus sneaking into the house, breaking and entering, so desperate to keep his presence a secret. I can see him nervously walking over the the house where Jesus sleeps, wondering if anyone will see him on the street. Nicodemus was taking a risk to talk to Jesus, this radical rabbi with the power to heal. And yet, Nicodemus was compelled to come and wrestle with God all night for answers to his questions, just like Jacob did so long ago. 

Jesus does not turn Nicodemus away. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not be woken up in the middle of the night by someone seeking answers to questions I could probably answer much better during the daytime when my brain was a little more functional. Thankfully, Jesus does not respond the way most of us would. Rather, Jesus talks with him. He talks with him all night, trying to answer his questions. 

Nicodemus admits that he believes in the power that Jesus has to heal people and believes that it comes from God. Jesus tells him that no one can see the Kingdom of Heaven without being born [from above.] Most popular quotes use the phrase ‘born again’ here, but the Greek work anothen can either mean again, above, or anew. This is where the phrase ‘born again’ Christian comes from. 

Nicodemus takes this literally. He thinks he must climb back into the womb and only then will he be born the right way, free of the sins of his parents and the sins that he commits. He does not catch the symbolic meaning of being born from above or being born anew. 

Jesus has to explain it again, this time telling Nicodemus that his body and his spirit are mysteriously born from above. He tells him of the wind and its unpredictable patterns–that we do not know where it comes or where it goes, but we can hear it. The Spirit is like that, making each of us new. 

The last words Nicodemus says are, “how can these things be?”

And then, verses 11-17 shift to second person plural – meaning these words are for us, the congregation, and are no longer the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. Jesus is talking directly to us this time, and that’s when it gets awkward. Jesus turns from Nicodemus to us now, and wants us to wrestle, too. 

Jesus is speaking truth about what faith is, although it does seem that Jesus is also being purposefully ambiguous. Faith is not a verb in this story. Faith is an action. Would we have done any better in this conversation that Nicodemus, trying to understand Jesus? I’m not so sure we would. Would we have walked away, more frustrated than relieved after working up the courage to go meet with Jesus to leave that conversation with more questions than answers? Or would be find comfort and clarity in his words?

Jesus turns to us and tells us that the way of faith is in the action of seeing Jesus lifted up like the snake in the wilderness–the snake that Moses put on a staff when the people were intensely ill and needed a cure. This is a metaphor for the coming day when Jesus will be lifted up on a cross and crucified. Jesus turns to us and says that in gazing up his suffering, we will act out our faith. Faith is a verb in the Gospel of John, not a noun. People in John’s Gospel do not possess faith, like an object to shine up and put on a shelf to admire occasionally or a precious treasure to lock inside a safe. Faith is an action–it is not crawling back inside our mother’s wombs.  It is feeling the wind and believing even when we can’t see it. It is seeing the suffering of others and knowing that our salvation lies in suffering with others. Faith is waking Jesus up in the middle of the night with our questions. And not walking away until we have our answers. 

The encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus shows us the ‘ambiguity of faith,’ as Dr. Karoline Lewis says in her commentary on John.  

But Nicodemus appears two more times in the Gospel of John. Once more to defend Jesus from the Pharisees, but still with self-preservation in mind. And the next is with Joseph of Arimethea with burial spices for his body. Karoline Lewis assumes this might be because Nicodemus is trying to save his own skin in front of his peers. And implied in his assistance with the body of Jesus is he is paying his respects, in the dark yet again, or he is testing Jesus in his death. Will faith-the-action really come, like Jesus told him, because Jesus was raised up on the cross and people gazed upon God suffering?

Nicodemus flits in and out of the Gospel of John, always seeks, with one foot in and one foot out. A deep thinker. A wrestler of God. A question asker.

So what questions are you longing to ask Jesus in the middle of the night? What is keeping you up right now? I implore you, do not walk away from those questions. Defend Jesus in front of your peers. Come and witness his suffering, even if you are testing Jesus a little while you do it. Come and ask “How can these things be?” 

When Jesus tells you of the mysteries of faith-the-action, sit with him. Jesus will stay up all night with you, reminding you that you don’t need to climb back inside your mother’s womb. 

Sit with Jesus in the night.  

Then go live like you can see the wind–you’ll meet the Spirit there, not back in the womb.

Amen.

The gospel writer Matthew lived in a time of deep religious and political tension. Biblical historians place the writing of Matthew’s gospel around the time the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Jewish temple. Matthew’s community was in active conflict about what it meant to be Jewish without the temple and what the future of Judaism would look like. 

Jesus proclaimed his famous Sermon on the Mount in the midst of a heated time. This was not meant to be a playbook to memorize or a list of traits to comfort his listeners. Jesus delivered this message in order to course correct the debate about the direction that God was telling Israel to take politically and religiously. 

Jesus’ context: the Roman Empire still occupies Israel, and the Jewish people have lived under foreign rule since the Babylonian exile started in the 5th Century BCE. They are accustomed to others calling the shots and regulating their lives. Sure, the Jewish people rebuilt the temple under the Persian empire and moved back to their ancestral home, but they did not return independently. They returned with the permission of King Xerxes and now worship their God at the pleasure of the Roman Empire. 

The Jewish community was wracked with questions: How can it be that Jerusalem is God’s holy city and the home of the temple when they are both occupied by Gentile rulers? Does God want us to do anything about that? And if God does, what does God want us to do? 

On one side of the debate over the future of Israel were the religious zealots who wanted to train a Jewish military and fight back. On another side were the Saduccees who wanted to collaborate with the Roman Empire and compromise with the powers that be. One yet another side were the Pharisees, which were divided between the military ambitions of the zealots and the lure of going inward. They encouraged many people to study Torah and to preserve Jewish culture. Their reasoning was that the Jewish community could never match the Roman Empire in its military strength, so it was a lost cause to attempt to seize control of Judea. 

Like Matthew, we live in a time of religious and political tension. Divides between various groups seem to increase rather than decrease. We tend to have relationships with people who only think or act in ways that make us comfortable or validate our opinions. We replace curiosity for someone else’s perspective with one dimensional labels, writing them off before they have the opportunity to express their thoughts. We identify ourselves or others as progressive or traditional, liberal or conservative, moderate or indecisive. 

The era of Christendom as a social force in politics and communities continues to decrease. According to the most recent “Religious Landscape Study” by the Pew Research Center for Religion and Public Life, 17% of Marylanders identify as mainline Protestant, which includes Presbyterians of every stripe. 23% of Marylanders identify as nonreligious. Mainline denominations like ours do not have as much social clout as they once did, and public opinion about Christianity is general is more negative than positive. 

A major distinction I would be remiss to ignore is the one of the colonized versus the colonizer. Unlike the Jewish audience of Matthew’s gospel, most of us in this room today are not the ancestors of the first people to inhabit this land. Most of us in this room today do not know what it is like to live in occupied territory or be forcibly brought here on slave ships. Some of us do. Some of us relate to the oppression and struggle for liberation of the Jewish people. Others of us relate more to the Roman Empire and its colonization of Judea, the product of centuries of occupation, slavery, and immigration. Wherever you find yourself in the context of this passage, God has room for you to encounter something holy and something real this morning. 

So in light of this broader context, the Christian community is also wracked with questions: What does it mean to be followers of Jesus Christ in this political and religious landscape? How is Jesus commanding us to live?

Jesus lays out provocative answers to these questions in this segment of the Sermon on the Mount. He starts out by telling his audience to live out their identity as the nation of Israel. He tells them that they are salt. This metaphor is based on a long religious tradition that values salt. According to Mark Kurlansky, in his book Salt: A World History, “Salt was to the ancient Hebrews, and still is to modern Jews, the symbol of the eternal nature of God’s covenant with Israel.” Salt flavors and preserves food, purifies meat by removing blood, which was a Torah requirement before consuming it, cleanses, and heals. First century Palestinian Jews would have known these common uses for salt, and it is most likely that these reasons led to salt’s uses in temple sacrifices and offerings.

This symbol of God’s promise makes its way into the Sermon on the Mount because of its importance. Matthew believed that the apocalypse would come soon and his faith community might live to see it. For him, reminding his audience of their essence mattered deeply. Maintaining their essence as salt–as a powerful, ordinary, life sustaining property–meant maintaining their connection to God at whatever the cost to their personal lives. 

Jesus also tells them that they are light, another highly valuable commodity in the ancient world. The prophet Isaiah 42:6 uses this metaphor: “You are the light of the world.” Without sunlight, crops will not grow, animals will not thrive, people will not find their way during the day or night. Lights are meant to illuminate or make brighter whatever else surrounds them. Jesus tells them they are essential. They are ordinary elements, salt and light, and yet critical to the Jesus movement. They must continue to be exactly who God made them to be. Salt and light. Flavorful and bright. Covenant keepers and truth bearers.

The good news for us today is that each and every one of us is ordinary salt and light. Each of us is as ordinary as a tiny grain of salt or as numerous as a ray of light. And yet, that does not diminish our importance. In fact, it elevates it. You see, one grain of salt can’t do much to flavor anything. And yet together, with many other grains of salt, salt is powerful. Salt can do more together than it can do alone. 

In the earlier section of this chapter in Matthew, Jesus tells the depressed, the grieving, the hungry, the merciful, the peacemakers, and the justices seekers that they are blessed. Now he is telling these very people how ordinary and necessary they are. 

And he is telling us the same thing, too.

I grieved and wrestled this week, church. I wrestled with how to get up here and preach on how change is possible because God declares us blessed and powerful beyond our understanding. I grieved over yet again another news cycle week that makes me feel more despair the longer this presidency continues. And I wrestled. I wrestled with how to get up here and deliver a good word to you. What is a good word in the midst of all this mess in Washington and in Baltimore? 

A good word is the one that Jesus brings to his audience in Matthew 5, and he brings it for us this morning, too. We are salt – we are absolutely vital. We are light – we are unmistakably bright. 

Jesus tells people who do not feel vital or bright how necessary and ordinary they are. The ones who feel alone. The ones who feel lost. The ones who feel uncertain about the future. The ones who have compassion fatigue. The ones who are close to burnout. The ones who are overwhelmed with anxiety. The ones who watch the same news as everyone else. 

We are ordinary. We are essential. We are necessary. Jesus declared it so. 

Annie Dillard says in Teaching a Stone to Talk, “You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary.”

So go and shine your light in this dark time, church. Go and look for those stars in the dark sky. 

Be ordinary, as Jesus himself was ordinary. Amen.

Benediction

“Salt” by Steve Garnass Holmes

“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?” 

1 Corinthians 2:12

Your salt is kindness.

Let all you do be salted with love.

Don’t leave your faith unsalted.

Don’t lose your love for anything else.

Be the salt of every moment,

releasing the flavor of grace.

Let love be what preserves,

what honors, what keeps.

Honor the grit of your salt,

the courage to seek justice.

Let the salt of your mercy

melt the ice of injustice.

Let your prayer be an epsom salt bath

in the kindness of God.