Lent 2A - God's love reaches

Where my heart is


John 3:1-17
Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He 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 apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus 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?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The 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.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

“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. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

“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.”


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I read an article last week that referenced a psychological phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect.

This phenomenon describes how we are pretty terrible about accurately assessing our cognitive ability. We tend to overestimate our knowledge. We tend to be overconfident in whatever knowledge we believe we have.

And the really stunning part of this phenomenon is that the less any of us know, the less capable we are of recognizing how little we know. Our brains are pretty wired to believe that ignorance is bliss, and as it turns out, the more ignorant we are, the more bliss there is.

At least in theory. But the problem is that too much confidence founded on too little knowledge is too naive to be useful. And it’s dangerous to live without at least some awareness of your own limitations. Which is why our brains, despite it all, have great capacity to learn and to gain new knowledge.

There’s merit in those old public service announcements on TV that cheerfully chirped “The more you know…!”

But here’s the irony. The more we know, the more our eyes are opened to how much we still don’t know.

And the more we realize we don’t know, the more we understand our limitations.

And the more we know our limits, the more we ask questions to push through them.

And the more questions we ask, the more complicated our worlds become.

And maybe none of this sounds quite as fun as blissful ignorance, but knowledge and understanding and curiosity and humility in the face of the vast universe and the even vaster God behind it all - these are all very. good. things. Gaps and doubts and questions - these too are all very. good. things.

Doubts and curiosities and questions: these are the ways that we grow as individuals and as a society. These things allow us to learn empathy, and they allow us to come together as a society to share and amplify our gifts for the sake of the common good. These things are the means by which technology and medicine can advance. And these things are the way that our faith and our relationship with God can continue to grow and flourish instead of simply stalling out.

If I had to put Nicodemus somewhere in the midst of all of this, I’d say that he has observed just enough of Jesus’s ministry to have gained just enough knowledge for him to realize how very little he actually knows about Jesus.

He has gained just enough knowledge to begin asking questions.

Jesus, you’re a teacher, right?

And you can do all of these signs because you’re from God, right?

And you say that to become a part of the kingdom of God, you have to be born
from above? How exactly does that work? I mean, you can’t possibly be saying that someone can climb back into their mother’s womb, right? Or…I mean, can you?

Ok, so you mean that we have to be born of the Spirit, which blows around wherever it chooses, sure, sure…how exactly?


We might snicker a little at Nicodemus’s questions, but really, do any of us have more answers about this all than he does? Do any of us really understand this stuff any better?

Whenever we start asking questions of Jesus, we may quickly realize how little we understand about the mysteries of God. And so we keep asking questions, and we keep learning.

We just have to be careful not to get caught in an endless loop of questions, like Nicodemus does.

He gets stuck trying to figure out how it all works, and we can get stuck there too - fussing over how God’s love works, how God’s forgiveness comes to be, how Jesus is God, how atonement happens on the cross, how God decides who is saved or not, how to interpret the covenant laws, how to interpret Jesus’s teachings, especially those pesky parables…

But at the end of the day (or for Nicodemus and Jesus, at the end of the night!), Jesus doesn’t give answers to all of Nicodemus’s “how” questions. He instead invites Nicodemus to ponder the “what,” to see what God is up to in the world:

God so loves the world, that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him may not perish, but have eternal life.

And just to make sure we don’t get it wrong, Jesus continues by reinforcing what God is NOT up to:

God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved by him.

Friends, if there is one place where we as a group of Christ-followers need to not remain in blissful ignorance, it is concerning these two verses, John 3:16 & 17, which too often and too simplistically have been thrown around as a gospel of condemnation, leaning hard on the “how” - that is, worrying too much about “how” you “get saved,” and drawing boundaries around God’s love, and saying, “believe in Jesus or things’ll be bad.”

I mean, do we really need to sling these verses around to try to tell the world how bad things are? I’m pretty sure we all know it. I’m pretty sure that the world doesn’t so much need dire warnings about what it feels to live a condemned life. We all know our brokenness. And we can see terror and evil and pain all around us. Our world doesn’t need to be threatened with bad news. Our world needs good news.

And this is what Jesus gives Nicodemus. And us.

Jesus proclaims the “what” of a God who loves ceaselessly and tirelessly and without limits.

The “what” of the matter is that God loves the world. So very much, in fact, that God wants to save the world. God wants to save us from ourselves, to save us from the powers of death and evil that coexist among us, to save us from the hands of our oppressors, from the things that enslave us.

The “what” of the matter is that God sends us Jesus, not to judge us, condemn us, or bury us in layers of shame, but in order to save us. To carve out paths of righteousness and mercy for us to walk. To show us how very wide the reach of God’s love.

God’s love reaches from heaven to earth, across the span of the universe and the stretch of time.

And God’s love in Jesus reaches to the ends of the world, beyond boundaries of geography or race or class or nationality or politics, perhaps even beyond boundaries of faith and religion, at least as we tend to draw those boundaries.

Jesus will model the wide reach of God’s love for us, in his teaching and healing and serving; in compassion and in generosity. All he asks of us is that we follow. And in loving as widely as he does, we will continue to bring his good news to the ends of the world.

I mean, the secret that nobody tells you about how to live as a witness to God’s love is that you don’t have to have all the answers. You don’t have to know all of your Bible trivia. You don’t have to learn all those big seminary words like epistemology or eschatological or my personal favorite, Heilsgeschichte.

You don’t have to be able to explain why bad things happen. You don’t have to know what happened in the three days between Jesus’s death and resurrection. You don’t have to know how Noah fit two of every single animal onto a boat modest size.

You simply need to know, and to believe, that God loves the world. The whole world.

And you have to allow your questions and your doubts to fuel your passion for bringing good news to a world that knows so much death, fear, and condemnation.

I’ll be honest, I’ve been on a bit of a weird streak lately with songs that pop into my head while writing sermons. This week, my brain dug through the annals 90s alternative rock station to pull out Alanis Morissette’s song “Hand in My Pocket,” in which she sings, among other things, “I’m lost but I’m hopeful,” and “What it all comes down to is that I haven’t got it all figure out just yet,” and then later, “What it all boils down to is that no one’s really got it figured out just yet.”

Or if we wanted to put that sentiment in Biblical terms, we can quote the man in Mark’s gospel who, in asking Jesus to heal his child, proclaims, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

We believe in Jesus and we believe in God’s love and we believe that the Spirit is gonna’ blow wherever the Spirit chooses, and we’re probably going to be playing a lifelong game of catch-up to reach all the places where God goes ahead of us into the world.

And in the process, we’re going to be challenged. Our hearts will break and be mended and break again. We will know deeper and deeper joy, even as we grow softer and softer to the pains and the needs around us. We will learn more and have more questions, and if the Monday morning Bible study group is any example of this, then yikes! - the more you know, the more you can ask questions that truly stump the pastor….and make her also giggle with pride and appreciation for the Spirit of wonder and curiosity that moves among us.

Ask the questions.
Seek God’s heart.

And stay humble. For you will never arrive at perfect knowledge of God. But you may gain a deeper appreciation for God’s mysteries.

And you will certainly grow into a richer, deeper, fuller, more courageous embodiment of God’s love.

A love that cannot be contained.
A love that cannot be held back.
A love that reaches to us, through us, and beyond us,
into all the world.

Amen.

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