God's Gracious Yes (Sermon)

God's Gracious Yes

Psalm 121 and John 3:1-17

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

4/21/24

 

¹ I lift up my eyes to the hills—
    from where will my help come?
² My help comes from the Lord,
    who made heaven and earth.

³ He will not let your foot be moved;
    he who keeps you will not slumber.
⁴ He who keeps Israel
    will neither slumber nor sleep.

⁵ The Lord is your keeper;
    the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
⁶ The sun shall not strike you by day
    nor the moon by night.

⁷ The Lord will keep you from all evil;
    he will keep your life.
⁸ The Lord will keep
    your going out and your coming in
    from this time on and forevermore. (NRSV)

 

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. ²He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with that person.”

³Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

⁴Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”

⁵Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. ⁶What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ ⁸The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

⁹Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”

¹⁰Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

¹¹“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. ¹²If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? ¹³No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. ¹⁴And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

¹⁶“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.

¹⁷“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. (NRSV)

 

References to John 3:16 show up everywhere, from Sunday school classrooms, to billboards, to bridge abutments, to eye-black on athletes.

However, when divorced from the words of the verse itself, the citation, John 3:16, tends to devolve into a secret handshake, a smug cryptograph. And when the verse appears out of context, it can be used with manipulative intent, saying, in essence, God may love you, but if you don’t say out loud that you believe in Jesus, God will still send you to hell. Have a nice day.

I find that disturbing because, while the words of John 3:16 are, to many of us, as familiar as our own names, those 27 words (or so, depending on the translation) become deeply and permanently transformed when we read them in the context of the over 200 words of John 3, and the nearly 84,000 thousand words in the gospel of John. In context, John 3:16 swells from a soundbite about a life in the sweet by-and-by to a daring call to inhabit and embody God’s realm in the here-and-now. So, let’s review that context.

Nicodemus, a Pharisee of significance, creeps about under the cover of darkness. He’s looking for Jesus. Nicodemus recognizes that approaching Jesus for serious conversation almost certainly means public censure. Let’s remember, too, that the Jewish leadership is furious at Jesus since he has so recently and pugnaciously run the authorized moneychangers out of the temple. So, a censure could even mean some sort humiliating punishment or exile.

When Nicodemus finds Jesus, he says that he privately believes that Jesus is from God because it takes uncommon holiness to do the things Jesus does. Now, Nicodemus makes that as a statement, but he’s really asking a question. And maybe he’s afraid to come right out and ask it because a Yes from Jesus would change everything. Nicodemus’ question is the same fundamental question the incarcerated and doomed prophet, John the Baptist, sends his disciples to ask Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for another?” (Lk 7:19/Mt 11:3)

Instead of offering a definitive Yes, Jesus responds with a cryptic comment about being either “born anew” or “born from above.” Scholars can debate which translation is more accurate, but it seems to me that, in John’s world of symbol and metaphor, they mean pretty much the same thing. That’s what makes those yard signs that scream “Ye must be born again!” so befuddling. It grieves me how casually some can forsake grace—which is God’s boundless Yes to us—and reduce the mystical faith of Jesus to a mandated regurgitation of an absolute derived from one narrow interpretation of one verse, in one chapter, from one book in the community library which is the Bible.

Then again, maybe it feels safe to declare that being “born again” is the exclusive criterion for salvation. After claiming to be born again, we can rest easy in the manufactured certainty that we have mollified God’s fury, and God will, thus, deign to allow us into heaven. Maybe that sounds like grace because it sounds so easy, but it also requires that one imagine God as resentful and violent, and human beings as little more than ten pounds of sin stuffed into five-pound sacks.

Now, I’m not saying that offering a Yes to God is unimportant. In John, though, Jesus is God’s loving and preemptive Yes to us, a Yes uttered not only before Nicodemus asks, but before the formation of the cosmos itself. That’s why John opens his gospel saying, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God…and without him not one thing came into being.” (John 1:1-3)

God’s Yes to us came long before there was an Us. And, maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that any god whose love is not fully available until weemancipate it by declaring ourselves “born again” is just a graceless idol. And grace is God’s essence. Grace is God’s character. Grace is God’s vision and legacy for the Creation.

Nicodemus is trying to live in an absolute and literal world. That’s why he asks the absurd question about a grown person returning to the womb and reentering the world with a second trip through the birth canal.

Jesus’ response again slips right past Nicodemus. He distinguishes between being born of flesh and born of the Spirit. He speaks of the Spirit blowing wherever it will, and poor Nicodemus just can’t follow. “How are these things possible?” he says.

I think John is using the Pharisee’s question to goad his readers into imagining what is possible in a world created by God’s eternal Yes. And God’s Yesis about more than the possibility of entering a post-mortem heaven. It’s about the possibility of living differently in this world now. I hear Jesus talking about living this flesh-and-blood-and-spirit human life more fully by living more deeply-connected to God who, as Spirit, moves about wherever and however God chooses. And while God is beyond our control and beyond our full comprehension, aren’t God’s movements always consistent with grace? With love? With peace and holy justice?

This blows-where-it-will Spirit is the energy that bears us, that births us into the new life through which we connect so deeply to God that our seeing, hearing, thinking, and interacting are transformed into signs and expressions of grace. Jesus implies that he is born of the same Spirit. And he says that “everyone who is born of the Spirit” can experience much of what he, as God’s grace incarnate, experiences.

Imagine that. Through the reverberating Yes of God in Christ, God bears us into Christ-mirroring holiness! That’s pretty wonderful—until we remember that Jesus experiences harassment, rejection, abandonment, and execution. That’s his earthly reward for committing himself to God’s grace.

“For God so loved the world [For God so Yes-ed the world] that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish, but will have eternal life.”

To “believe in” Jesus doesn’t begin and end with voicing belief. For John, belief means living transformed and transforming lives of compassion and hope, lives bent toward justice and joy right here, in this imperfect yet God-infused reality.

St. Francis of Assisi said, “Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take with you nothing that you have received—only what you have given: a full heart, enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice and courage.”

A “full-heart” life births us into the eternal life of Christ—a here-and-now life that doesn’t condemn the world, but enters and embraces the world. A life of deep and intimate connection to God through deep and intimate connection to all that God has created. For God so loves all that God has created that, in the power of the Spirit, God enters the Creation to reveal the Son—the eternal, and the universal, reconciling Christ.