4th Sunday in Lent
Texts: John 3:14-21;
Eph. 2:1-10; Num. 21:4-9
REAL POWER
As we just said with the children, that God loves you and me is the
simplest way to boil down the
Gospel message. When we truly understand and take to heart that God
is love, we begin to live
anew right here today. The promise of eternal life isn't just
something that happens to us when
we die. Rather, it is something that begins to happen to us the
moment we believe. Our lives
begin to become transformed into something which believes in the
power of God's love as the
power of life itself. There is no other power operating in
this world that really matters. When we
take this to heart, then we begin to stop fearing all those powers
of death we see around us
everyday. To begin to live in hope and faith in this love is to
begin to live eternally. It is to begin
to love connected to the unending source of life itself. What is
that unending source of life?
God's love. God loves you and me. Simple, right?
Not quite. Because we know how difficult it can be to have faith
against those other power which
wield death instead of life -- those powers which mimic God's
preservation of life but do so on
the basis of wielding death. When terrorists come wielding that
power of death, it is very difficult
to not trust in having more of that same power that preserves life
by wielding more death. Right?
In Jesus' time, his own people were dominated by that kind of power
of death in the Roman
Empire, a power which sought to preserve life for Roman citizens at
the expense of its enemies
-- which meant that a lot of Jews died horrible deaths on Roman
crosses. Jews had hope and
faith in the Messiah to set them free from this kind of power. But
the question is always: what
kind of Messiah? One who simply wields more of that same kind of
power? In other words, one
who will preserve the lives of the Jews by wielding the power of
death over Romans?
That was Jesus' mission in life as the Messiah, a mission that is
still formidable today. It is the
mission of getting us to stop fearing and wishing for that kind of
power and to instead have faith
in the power of God's love, which is the source of life itself. The
power of God's love doesn't
have to preserve life by wielding death because it is the unending
source of life itself. It is the
power of life even in the face of death itself. Jesus' mission thus
took him to the cross, in a self-giving act of love, to show us the
greater power of God's love. He gave himself up to the human
powers of death, represented by the Roman form of execution of its
enemies, in order to show us
the greater power of God's love on Easter morning. Can we continue
to have faith in that power
of love as we continue to face the powers of death in our own time?
That's always the question
of faith, and it's not an easy one. It is so easy to fall back into
the age-old faith in those powers of
death, to fight fire with fire. And it is very difficult to believe
in the power of love which gives
itself up to those powers of death rather than wield those same
powers, even if it is to preserve
some life.
It all revolves around the ancient idea of sacrifice, really.
Sacrifice is that old time belief that you
must sacrifice someone else's life in order to preserve your own.
They used to do it religiously on
an altar, thinking that that is what the gods want. But Jesus came
to turn that whole thing upside-down and inside out by letting himself
be sacrificed rather than to sacrifice anyone else. He came
as the Lamb of God, God's willing Lamb to the powers of our human
sacrificing, so that we
might finally see that there is a mightier power in the world. It is
a power which can even let
itself be sacrificed to the human powers of death because it is
plugged into the very power of life
itself -- which turns out to be a power of self-giving love, the
exact same kind of love that
created this world in the first place.
So it's simple and difficult at the same time. It's as simple as the
power of God's love. But it's as
difficult as what the power of God's love moves us to want to do --
namely, if it's God's love
that's renewing us and giving us new life, then it is a love that
calls us to break down all the
barriers that our rules of sacrifice have set up, including that
most basic and formidable wall
between friends and enemies. In today's second lesson from
Ephesians, we have that basic Good
News about God's grace to us in Jesus Christ. If we continue on just
a few verses, it tells us this
difficult part of what that new life in grace means. St. Paul
proclaims to us:
For [Jesus Christ] is our peace; in
his flesh he has made both groups into one and
has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between
us. He has
abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he
might create in
himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making
peace.... (Ephesians
2:14-15)
One new humanity in the place of two. As we begin to live eternal
life in Christ, this new peace
is both a grace and a challenge. St. Paul isn't talking about
inner peace here. He's talking about
the peace of a whole new humanity that formed out of all the
little splinter groups we make for
ourselves, the most basic one being friends and enemies.
To see both the unbelievable grace and challenge of this peace, I'd
like to do two quick things:
(1) lift up our theme of the Greater Milwaukee Synod this Lent, the
theme of walking with the
poor; and (2) I'd like to take a quick look at the context of our
Gospel Lesson today, namely,
Jesus' conversation with the Pharisee Nicodemus, in which he also
tells him that you must be
"born from above, " or "born again."
First, think about poverty for a moment. Gandhi called it the worst
form of violence. I think that
is because, for those who aren't poor, the poor so often do not even
make our radar screen
enough to even be enemies. They are perhaps more in the category of
simply not being our
friends, not being our family. They are thus those sacrificed out of
neglect. They are those thrown
to the powers of death because our very institutions are structured
sacrificially -- that is, our
institutions preserve the lives of some at the expense of the death
of others. These others need not
even be our enemies; they need only be our "not friends." What is
the old saying: family first? Or
nation first?
Sometimes, we even say, God first. But if we follow that "God first"
with family second and
nation third, then I think Jesus is shattering that whole way of
doing things in the Gospel Lesson
today. God so loved the world -- not God so loved our
family, or our nation, but God loved the
world. We can see this even more by taking in the whole passage from
the beginning. Jesus tells
Nicodemus that to see God's Kingdom one must be born from above --
though the words Jesus
used for born from above can also mean born again.
Nicodemus tries to figure out what being
born again means while Jesus is trying to explain to him what being
born from above means. It
means being born from God's Spirit to a new way of seeing the world,
just as Jesus at his
baptism was born from above by the dove-Spirit that descended upon
him. He now experienced
the world as God does -- namely, with the deep, abiding love of a
parent.
Now, what does this mean to seeing the reign of God's love in the
world? Think about how many
things are set by our birth in this world: (1)
We are born in a geographical location that can either
accustom us to unjust privilege or prevent us from access
to clean water, education, the chance to
live to adulthood. We are born in families that instill in us a
sense that we are loved and too often
a sense also that we are deeply inadequate. We are born with a skin
color that will also condition
our sense of who we are, what we deserve, whom we may love or fear.
This world is set up in
ways that try to lock us into patterns of relationship based on our
birth -- patterns that separate
us from one another and from God.
How might the world be different if those patterns were disrupted,
if you and I could be sisters
and brothers in healthy relationship? What would our relationships
look like if we shared one
birth and were raised in one loving, supportive family? What would
an economy look like that
took seriously that we live and work in a world that is our common
inheritance, and not a set of
disconnected chunks of land and resources to be conquered like a
Risk game board? What would
a world look like in which we saw every child as our own little
sister or brother, if "family first"
included them all as our own flesh and blood?
That's Jesus' invitation to us today. Being "born from above" means
that Jesus offers us freedom
from relationships that ensnare, and the choice to relate to one
another as beloved children of one
loving God. It's a choice not just for a new name:
It's a new world of new relationships, of new and abundant life.
Thanks be to God!
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Delivered at St. Paul's Lutheran,
Milwaukee, WI, March 26, 2006
1. This ending of the sermon is based on the
ending of Sarah Dylan Breuer's
essay for
this
lectionary Sunday.