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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
John 3-16: that verse from today’s Gospel Reading is probably one of the most well‑known and most beloved of all Bible passages. I thought for sure that signs with “John 3‑16” written on them would have been seen during the recent N‑C‑double‑A basketball games, but an avid sports fan told me he hardly sees the John 3-16 signs at any sporting events any more. A quick check of the internet did not prove or disprove his experience, but one internet post I read suggested that John 3‑16 most‑recently has been popularized by both the paint under Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow’s eyes and the new A‑B‑C television drama titled “G-C-B”. We may rightly call John 3‑16 “the Gospel in a nutshell”, but too often people forget the verses that surround it, which verses arguably speak a lot of law. Building on themes laid out in the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel account, parts of which Prologue we heard on Christmas Day, today’s Gospel Reading’s excerpt of that same account offers much that we could consider: the lifting up of the serpent and the Son of Man, believing and not believing, perishing and living eternally, God’s love and human love, being sent, condemning and saving, light and darkness, the Light’s coming into the world and our coming to the Light, and working evil and doing what is true. We could consider all of those things, especially if we wanted to be here longer, but instead I have chosen to focus our briefer thoughts primarily under the theme “Condemning and Saving”.
Do you ever come into a conversation already underway and not know what the people are talking about? The Gospel Reading today is essentially like that, coming into a conversation already underway between Jesus and a Pharisee named Nicodemus, who came to Jesus at night. The miraculous signs Jesus had performed intending for people to believe in Him apparently had led Nicodemus to the conclusion that Jesus was a teacher Who came from God and had God with Him. When Nicodemus said that to Jesus, Jesus responded that one cannot see the Kingdom of God unless one is born from above. Almost like someone today who rejects infant baptism, Nicodemus then asked Jesus how one can be born a second time. Jesus clarified that He was talking about birth by water and the Spirit, but Nicodemus still did not understand and asked how such things could be. Jesus answered that Nicodemus and others like him did not believe Jesus’s testimony, and then Jesus spoke the words of today’s Gospel Reading, emphasizing that faith in the crucified Son of God is intended to save the people of the world and through them produce God’s good works.
The internet post that I mentioned having read about John 3‑16 was written by Dr. Margaret Aymer, herself a Presbyterian but a New Testament professor at Atlanta’s so‑called “Interdenominational Theological Seminary”. In part, she discussed John 3‑16 in relationship to the recent flap after Billy Graham’s successor and son Franklin Graham said President Obama’s Christianity was not real. As I mentioned, Aymer’s post also referred to that new A‑B‑C television drama “G‑C‑B”, and, perhaps only coincidentally, one of the show’s stars, Annie Potts, Friday took Republican Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich to task for his saying her show is anti‑Christian, while, for her part, Potts ridiculed Gingrich’s Christianity. Of course, Franklin Graham’s statement about President Obama, the controversial TV show (from what I have read), and Gingrich’s affair all illustrate something that we know to be true from our own experience—that the works of Christians do not always match up with their claims to have faith.
If something bad happens in the dark, what is the first thing you and I do? Turn on the light to see what happened, right? In the Gospel Reading Jesus says everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come into the light, lest his or her works should be exposed. As The Rev. Dr. Luther in 15-38 wrote on John 3-20, we all hate the light because none of us want our stories written on our foreheads. Jesus says people love the darkness more than the light because their works are evil. The Greek word St. John’s account uses there for “evil” ultimately gives us our English word “pornography”, and by “evil” Jesus surely means that specific evil, along with all gross immoralities, all forms of ungodliness, all self‑righteousness, all religious perversions, fleshly and material religious hopes, and every action and practice that displays such inclinations. Can you or I say we are not thereby indicted of sin? Since Jesus says that God the Father did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, we might think that for that reason we escape judgment for such sins. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus may have not been sent to condemn or judge the world, but, as Jesus Himself says later in St. John’s account, the word He has spoken does condemn or judge.
In the Old Testament Reading, the Lord’s sending the fiery serpents led the people of Israel to repent, and, in the Gospel Reading, Jesus calls Nicodemus to repent, and He also thereby calls us to repent. As St. Paul writes in today’s Epistle Reading, by nature we are dead in trespasses and sins, children of wrath, living in the passions of our flesh and carrying out the desires of the body and the mind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, as we all deserve, but have eternal life by grace through faith in that Son, Jesus. As the people of Israel looked in faith at the serpent lifted up in the wilderness and lived, so we look in faith at the Son of Man lifted up on the cross and live.
The group that hands out the Grammy awards is next month going to honor singer John Mayer for his efforts to improve musical education programs. That story about Mayer topped philanthropy headlines this past week, but, as important as musical education is, a far greater deed of helping those in need is God’s love for us sinners in His Son, Jesus. God is the greatest philanthropist (etymologically, a “lover of humans”). God’s love for us humans resulted in Him giving His Son for the purpose of everyone who believes in Him’s not perishing, as we all deserve, but having eternal life. God earnestly wants all to have eternal life, though He ends up willing the destruction of those who do not believe, precisely because they do not believe. And, we are not talking about some vague, undefined belief, but we are talking about a specific, defined belief—belief in the Name of the Only Son of God, the God-man, Who, as God prophesied through Isaiah, was lifted up on the cross for us and for our salvation. Jesus Christ, and Him crucified as the cost of our sin, Who attaches His blessings to physical objects, is the object of our faith. That faith is more than accepting the facts of Jesus’s death and resurrection as historically true without understanding their significance; that faith is our heart’s relying on the promises of God’s grace. We each use our sanctified human reason to deduce that, since God loves and offers to save the world, and since we as individuals are part of the world, then God loves and offers to save us as individuals.
When God saved the people of Israel in the wilderness by having Moses lift up a serpent on a pole, God did indeed attach His promises of salvation to a physical object, and God does the same for us today in Holy Baptism, Absolution, and the Supper. The whole context and content of Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus is about Holy Baptism. We are born of water and the Spirit at the Baptismal Font. There we confess faith in the Triune God, and that Triune Name is put upon us. That same Triune Name is recalled in Holy Absolution. We individually confess to a pastor the sins that trouble us most for the sake of our privately receiving absolution in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We in no wise doubt but firmly believe that by such absolution our sins are forgiven before God in heaven. Before confessing their sin, the impatient people of Israel complained about their bread from heaven, but we gladly feast on the true Bread from Heaven, the Bread of Life—bread that is Christ’s body and wine that is His blood, given and shed for the life of the world. Jesus says unless we eat of this body and drink of this blood, we have no life in us. Whether our faith is weak or strong, faith is what makes us worthy to receive such a meal, those who do not believe are already condemned.
Some of you may have read the article about me in this past Wednesday’s Kilgore News Herald, based on my remarks the Wednesday before to the Kilgore Rotary Club. People I know who were aware of my remarks, both before and after I gave them, asked why I said what I said about the divisions between different denominations. I said what I said because the Church is like her Lord Jesus. Even though Jesus was not sent to condemn the world, as He says in today’s Gospel Reading, His coming to save nevertheless as a result brings division between those who believe and those who do not believe. Likewise, His Church proclaims the saving truth in part by condemning error, and as a result there may be divisions between those who believe the truth and those who believe otherwise. Such proclamation—whether formally from the pulpit or informally from the deeds and words of our individual lives in our vocations—is ultimately God working in us what is true. These true or good works flow naturally from our faith and are the good works that God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
In the end, the Holy Spirit has used and will continue to use today’s Gospel Reading to show us our sin, even though that is not its primary purpose. Such condemning of the law serves the saving proclamation of the Gospel, that we might daily turn from our sin in sorrow and look in faith to the Son of Man lifted up on the cross and thereby live eternally. We know from what St. John reports of Nicodemus’s words and deeds that ultimately he believed. Your and my deeds and words will not always match up with our claims to be Christian—much less, perhaps will the deeds and words of Tim Tebow, Franklin Graham, President Obama, Newt Gingrich, Annie Potts, or the characters on “G-C-B”. But, we, at least, live in the forgiveness of sins, and, with or without reminders in the world of John 3‑16, we look forward to the fullness of the eternal life it promises, to “the coming ages”, as St. Paul describes them in the Epistle Reading, when he says God will show us “the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +