I.N.I.

a sermon to be preached on Trinity Sunday, 27 May 2018, at Christ Episcopal Church, Accokeek, Maryland, based on the Holy Gospel for the day, St. John 3:1-17, but especially verses 16 and 17

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus, our Lord,

Dear Friends in Christ,

When I was a kid, maybe 5th grade or so, we would occasionally break out into a little playground song that started: “Nobody likes me, everybody hates me / I think I’ll go eat worms!” It’s the sort of song lyric that appeals to 5th grade boys. Especially the squeal-producing descriptions of the actual worm-eating.

I don’t believe — although I don’t really know — that any of my friends back then really felt when they sang the song that nobody liked them, or that everybody hated them. We had each other, after all. We had our classroom and playground friends. We looked around and didn’t think that we saw anyone for whom the lyric was truth. Which just means that they were invisible to us. They were there among us. We just didn’t recognize them for who and what they were.

Back in that somewhat simpler time of black and white TV, a time before computers or cell phones, there were indeed people in school who felt totally unloved. Today they might bring a semi-automatic assault rifle to school. We’ve been fortunate that we haven’t had a mass school shooting nearby us, but you know as well as I do that violence is not far away. Whether it’s domestic violence, or police shootings, or gangs and drugs, you know it’s not that far away from our doors. Clearly these are all complicated issues, but I’m pretty sure that feeling un-loved is in there among the causes.

It can be really hard to recognize that people around us might be ready to sing that old playground song, that they really feel as if nobody likes them. I look around this church on Sunday mornings and I don’t think I see anyone who could sing that song truthfully. But I don’t really know that. If you’re here knowing you really could sing the “Nobody likes me” song, please know also that I’m sorry for not knowing. I don’t do small talk or groups or socializing very well, so I haven’t gotten to know you. Even with the way that support is built into our shared DNA as a congregation (partly because there is a LOT of shared DNA here), maybe we don’t recognize that feeling among us.

II

But here’s the thing: Jesus has something to say to us this morning about your pain. As well as about the pain that so many many people feel when they start thinking about God for whatever reason. You see, while some of us feel cut off from other people, rejected by false friends, even hated by everybody; at the same time there are people who are afraid that God in Heaven feels that same way about them. That God is a determined spiteful judge who is more than ready to bring down his hammer and declare us guilty. Right? God is perfect, we aren’t, which is true, so some people are just always a little afraid — and maybe a lot afraid — that God is just waiting for the right moment to call down the punishment we deserve.

Well what is it that Jesus said about all this? Bump down to the end of the Gospel in your bulletin. This text does NOT support the idea that God is an angry, vengeful judge who is eager to pound the gavel that will send us off to judgment. In John 3, verse 16 Jesus says that God loved the whole cosmos so much that He sent His only beloved Son (Jesus’s way of speaking about Himself), but not as a police officer, an investigator, or a detective, not as a prosecuting attorney, not as a judge. God the Father loves the cosmos so much that He sent His Son so that whoever believes in Jesus will by that faith be saved. And keep reading to verse 17: God didn’t send His Son into the cosmos to condemn it, but that the whole cosmos might be saved through Him.

Maybe you noticed that I used the word “cosmos” where our bulletin translation has “world.” When Jesus said “world” He didn’t mean the physical earth. Nor did He mean something like ‘all that sinful stuff’ like when Christians sometimes talk about ‘the world, our sinful flesh, and the devil.’ The Greek word here is “kosmos” that includes the sense we have in English of “everything that is.” The whole cosmos includes stars and planets and comets and black holes. The whole cosmos includes pandas and flowers and monarch butterflies. The whole cosmos also includes deer ticks and poison ivy and erupting volcanoes. The cosmos includes people, too, of course: newborns and our ancestors, religious saints and religious heretics and school shooters, too.

How does God show His love to all of these? By sending His Son into the middle of it. Remember, too, that Jesus did not come on a mission to condemn, but in order to save. (John 3:17) His motivating power is love. His mission is to save.

But then why do we read so many times in Scripture that at His second coming Jesus will come to judge, or that the Lord will judge, or that God is our judge? Well, because He is. Now this is important: As judge, God is going to look at all the facts before rendering a decision. He looks at us. He looks at our situation. He looks at our past acts, both our sins and our good deeds. And here is the good news, here is the best news, here is the Gospel: God looks at each person and when He is looking at a person of faith, God sees His only Son, the One Whom He sent, sent out of love. And God pronounces His judgment; and it’s not a condemnation. He says ‘You have eternal life, I do not condemn you.’

On this Trinity Sunday — when much of the Christian Church pauses over the eternal mystery of just how the three persons of the Trinity who are revealed to us in the Bible are three persons but only one God — on this Trinity Sunday we can also ponder the mystery of just why God determined that this was how salvation history should play out. We don’t know why, but we do know that. We know that God saves us because we believe in Jesus, but we don’t exactly know how.

I also don’t know how God reveals Himself to the rest of the cosmos that He loves so deeply. other than by the sending of His Son. I don’t know whether God reveals Himself in other particular ways to the deer ticks and pandas, to the flowers and poison ivy, to the stars and volcanoes, and to all the other marvelous and wondrous creatures both animate and inanimate that make up the cosmos. I don’t know; God’s Word doesn’t spell that out. Maybe He doesn’t need to, especially if they never fell into sin (although I do have questions about the ticks on that score). Or perhaps God does reveal Himself in special ways that are beyond our comprehension. After all, Jesus says explicitly that “God so loved the whole cosmos” and that the Father sent Jesus not “to condemn the cosmos, but that the cosmos might be saved through Him.”

III

Here is a great solution to whatever the worm song is in your life, to whatever might cause you to want to sing a lament, a “woe is me.” Live in John 3:16 and 17. Live in it. Dwell in it. Settle down on those verses like a hen arranging herself over some eggs she has in a nest. Then hatch the promises latent in this text.

Here they are in outline:

a. You, yourself, you are very deeply and personally and thoroughly loved by God;

b. You are not condemned by God, even though you are judged, because when He looks at the evidence it all points to Jesus; and

c. You are even then ransomed by God, purchased and won, bought back, delivered, saved. You, yes, and the rest of the cosmos: the pandas, and the volcanoes, and the school shooters, and the poison ivy, and the chipmunks, and all the rest of this cosmos that God made and loves.

IV

We know that these unbelievable truths are believable because we find them in God’s Word. And as we go forth into the rest of our lives on earth, we go forth doing what God commands us to do. Which is what?

Saint John, by the grace of God and through his inspired inkpot, recorded for us what it is that God commands. John chapter 6, verses 28 and 29. I believe this is one of the most important texts in the Bible. Listen: “Then they said to Him, ‘What must we do to perform the works of God?’ Jesus answered them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.'” Period. End of quote. “Believe in Him.” It’s the same thing Jesus told Nicodemus in our Gospel for today: “Whoever believes in Him….” That’s the work of God. That’s what God wants you to do. That’s what it takes to respond properly and fittingly to the love God has for us. And remember that this isn’t a mere intellectual assent to the existence of God (even the demons go that far). Believing in Jesus is the kind of faith that is willing to fall backwards off the boat into the deep ocean of God’s love, trusting that the scuba gear you put on will let you breath underwater.

Workers deserve wages. In our Gospel Jesus goes on to describe the wages we get: “Whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life.”

Let’s call on our Epistle for today to help us remember that this idea is not isolated to John’s Gospel. Saint Paul writes starting in Romans 8:13 that “if you live according to the flesh, you will die” so of course we don’t want to do that. “But,” he continues, “if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” So that’s what we do.

“By the Spirit,” Paul says. That’s the same Holy Spirit who came into us and called us by the Gospel, enlightened us with his gifts, sanctified and kept us in the one true faith. The Spirit Who participated in our Baptism. The Spirit of Christ Who comes to us again when we eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist. “That very Spirit,” (quoting Paul again in Romans 8:16) who is “bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (imagine that! God’s very children!!) “and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”

Now think for a minute about what it means to be a joint heir with Christ. We inherit what Christ inherits. Amazing. He’s the Son of God. Everything has been placed in His hands. And we are co-heirs with Him. This is way better than winning the lottery. And way, way better than eating worms. It’s something to take home with you today. May our triune God bless you as you do that.

And may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

S.D.G.