The Rev. Erin Hensley March 12, 2017 The Second Sunday in Lent, John 3:1-17 Heaven Help Us Based on over 1.7 billion page views and over 180 million visitors to the Bible Gateway website from December 2015 to November 2016, this verse was the most popular. In terms of the most popular keyword search, “Love” was the most popular and “faith” the second most popular on Bible Gateway in both English and Spanish. I find these statistics quite interesting. Some people have felt God’s love deeply and come to professions of faith through John 3:16. However, this memory is not the case for many. The popular interpretation goes “If you don’t believe in Jesus, you’re going to hell.” Christians have scared others into belief and held those of other faith or no faith with pity or contempt. Or, we can think it’s our job to convert the world to Christianity. We can become as the saying goes “so heavenly minded we are no earthly good.”1 We can forget about love and live in fear. We can trick ourselves into thinking that Christianity is about heaven and hell, that what makes God love us is our belief in Jesus, that what makes us good is our how different we are from the rest of the world. We live in a time and a place in which difference is condemned and criminalized. This, brothers and sisters, is not why Jesus was sent into the world. This is not why the Church, the Body of Christ, was sent into the world. “God so loved the whole of creation-not just your people and my people-that God freely chose to become human, so that everyone who offers his heart and loves what God loves may not perish but participate already and unendingly in the life of God.”2 “Wait a second, this isn’t how John 3:16 goes,” you say. Very truly, I tell you, the popular interpretation of John 3:16 begs for a better translation; the one I shared is my paraphrasing of biblical scholar Marcus Borg. For God so loved the whole of creation-not just your people and my people-that God freely chose to become human, so that everyone who offers his heart and loves what God loves may not perish but participate already and unendingly in the life of God.3 This translation gets at the meaning of John 3:16 that has been lost in interpretation: For God so loved the world In the New Testament, there’s the positive sense of the thing “the world created by God-the whole of creation’ and then there’s the negative sense "this world,’ meaning the humanly created world of cultures with their domination systems.” God loves all of humanity and all of creation, even the domination systems that crucified him as a common criminal. God loves the whole world; God’s love is not reserved for a “frozen chosen.” 1 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/687900-some-people-are-so- heavenly-minded-that-they-are-no 2 Marcus Borg on John 3:16 http://day1.org/2897-dr_marcus_j_borg_on_john_316 3 Marcus Borg on John 3:16 http://day1.org/2897-dr_marcus_j_borg_on_john_316 1 That he gave his only Son In the Gospel of John, this giving is about the incarnation- Jesus’ life, death, reasurrection, and ascenscion. Remember the first verses of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” so that everyone who believes in him Generally speaking and in this verse too, belief is not about agreeing with certain claims about Jesus; this understanding of the word “belief” emerged with the Enlightenment. Belief is about loving Jesus, giving Jesus one’s heart, one’s faithfulness. may not perish but have eternal life For John’s Gospel, eternal life does not begin after you die. The Greek words behind the English phrase “eternal life” mean "the life of the age to come." This is something that is hoped for and something in which one can participate in the present; eternal life in John’s Gospel begins now. John the evangelist defines eternal life later in the Gospel when he writes in the 17th chapter the 3rd verse "This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." Did you hear the present tense? Note that the definition of that life is, as scholar Marcus Borg says, “knowing God and Jesus. To know God and Jesus in the present is to participate already in the life of the age to come.” Nicodemus, a leader in the religious establishment of Jesus’ day, sought Jesus one night with his own certainty about God’s work in the world. Nicodemus began with what he and the religious establishment knew “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus responded “Very truly I tell you no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again and born from above.”4 In the conversation that followed, Nicodemus focused on being born again at expense of being born from above. Jesus attempted to redirect Nicodemus to being from above, of the Spirit. The Spirit of God that hovered above the waters at the beginning of creation (John 1). The Spirit that hovered over Jesus in his baptism and over us in ours (John 1:32). The Spirit that will teach us all things and remind us of what Jesus said (John 14:26). The Spirit that will guide us into all truth (John 16:13). Nicodemus and the religious establishment that he represented could not fathom such a Spirit from above, such a Spirit from God walking in the world. What about us? Can we fathom such a thing? Can we be led by that Spirit? I hope so. People are looking for love. People are looking for faith. Online. In person. “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.” May heaven help us be earthly minded. Amen. 4 Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” or as some translations say “born again.” The Greek word behind the English translations includes both meanings. New Interpreters Bible Commentary 549 + Meda Stamper at workingpreacher.org 2 .