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Welcome to our online sermon library. To the right, you will see links to text transcriptions of our Pastors' messages.
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"God So Loved" |
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When you are looking for information, I want to remind you how important it is to ask the right questions of the right resource. For example, if you’re planning a road trip to California, and you want to hit every national park and scenic spot between here and there, a cookbook wouldn’t be very helpful. On the other hand, if you want to make lasagna and you pick up Rand McNally, that’s not going to be helpful. You need to have the correct resource and in order to get the help you need, you have to ask the right questions of the right resource.
That seems obvious when we’re talking about cookbooks or maps, but it may not be quite as obvious when we talk about the Bible. What are the right questions to ask of the Bible? Some people look in the Bible for all kinds of answers, such as: where am I going to find a parking space? Sometimes they ask foolish questions like that, and sometimes they ask questions that they think are serious, such as: how was the world created? There are a lot of questions that we can ask of the Bible, but if we ask the wrong questions, we won’t get helpful answers. The questions that the Bible seeks to answer are few in number, but enormously significant.
The first of those questions is: what is God like? It matters. It matters what we perceive as the reliable, authentic, and true nature of God. What is God like? It matters.
A second question, which the scriptures address, is the question: what are we like? What is humanity like at its core? What is humanity’s greatest possibility and greatest liability? We live in a culture that is pretty much persuaded that it doesn’t get much better than to be us. We’ve got to keep our self-esteem up and feel good about ourselves. After all, we’re the flower and the glory of creation.
But that’s not exactly how Biblical religion views us. We talked about this at some length last week. The biblical view of humanity is that humanity is flawed to the core. The biblical view is that we are people that are distorted, sick, and twisted, in some fashion, at the very core of who we are. One of the great theologians of the twentieth century often said that the doctrine of sin is the only one for which there is objective evidence.
One of the things that fascinates me about the way we look at humanity is the way we look at newborns. We look at newborns and we say, “Oh, aren’t they sweet and innocent?” Where did you get that idea? They are the creatures that insist that they be fed when they want to be fed, and cleaned when they want to be cleaned, and it doesn’t matter if you haven’t had a wink of sleep in a week. Is that sweet and innocent?
Mark Twain had the interesting observation that humanity was made at the end of the week when God was tired. If we’re honest, we know that we have never quite done this great business of living right. We don’t get it right as individuals, and look at the chaos that humanity, as a collective, has made of things.
If we honestly acknowledge that we don’t get it right and not only that, we can’t get it righty, then do you see how the true nature of God becomes even more important? If we can get it right, it doesn’t much matter about God, because we can get it together. But if we cannot, if we’re fundamentally flawed in some way so we cannot get this business of life right, then it makes all the difference in the world what God is like.
One of the things we do every year throughout the weeks of Lent is to place confession sheets in the bulletin. We invite you to place your confession on the cross in the narthex. If we don’t need confession, if we haven’t failed, then we don’t need the cross, and we don’t need Easter, if the hope is in us. It matters what we’re like, and what God is like.
The scriptures say a lot of things about what God is like but, fundamentally, the scriptures say one abiding thing about the nature of God. The scriptures say God is love and God so loved the world. Notice when the Bible says God is love it doesn’t say that love is one attribute of God. The scriptures don’t say that love is one of the many things that God is. The scriptures clearly state that God is love. Love is God’s identity; God’s core identity is love, and God’s creativity, God’s judgment, God’s guidance, and all the rest that we may see in terms of the character of God, flow out of this core factor, which is the love of God. God so loved and loved and loved the world.
Willa Cather was a novelist and writer who grew up in the early twentieth century on the plains of Nebraska. If you’re from Nebraska, you know Willa Cather and her wonderful stories about life in that state. She wrote a wonderful short story that she called The Burglar’s Christmas. It’s the story of a man who, as a teenager, got crosswise with his parents and left home, never to be seen again by his family. He was just gone. Before he went, he made such a havoc of that family’s life that they couldn’t help think of him without thinking of the pain, not only of his leaving, but also of his presence. Years and years passed in Cather’s story. The parents relocated a time or two and he was still just out there somewhere. One Christmas Eve night, this man who had not done well on his own, found himself hungry, homeless, suicidal, and still fundamentally angry at the world, believing that he deserved more. And so, in order to feed the gnawing in his stomach, he burglarized a house on Christmas Eve. Even as he was robbing the home, the homeowner caught him. His parents, from whom he had fled those many years before, were the owners of that home. In Cather’s story, the young man began to pour out something of the journey upon which he had been traveling and his mother said to him, “Stay, stay – we’ll make things right.” He looked at her and he said, “You have no idea what you pardon.” She said, “My poor boy, much or little, what does it matter? Have you wandered so far, and paid such a bitter price for knowledge, and not yet learned that love isn’t about pardon or forgiveness. It only loves and loves and loves and loves.”
Pardon and forgiveness are part of the love of God, but it’s so much more than that. Pardon and forgiveness are just expressions of the bigger thing which is love, love, love. God so loved the world. God loves this broken old planet where the earth shakes, and the winds blow, and we human beings make such a mess of things. God so loved the world. There’s a Jewish proverb that says: when you save one person, you save the world entire.
God so loved the world and for this moment, at least, you are the world entire.