User Manual

Text: John 3:16
Other texts: John 3:14-21

For many Christians, John 3:16 is the most significant verse in the Bible. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that all who believe in him should not perish but may have eternal life. In one view, this verse answers all questions about the nature and purpose of Jesus and summarizes God’s plan. It is amazing because it bundles in a neat, small package the essence of theological cosmology, telling us all we need to know.

But in another view, this verse is amazing for the opposite reason. Rather than providing answers, it raises all sorts of important questions. The verse is significant not because it is the end of an important quest but because it is the start of one.

First, some context: The Gospel of John was the last of the four Gospels to be written. By then, followers of Jesus—no one was called Christian yet—had begun to coalesce into competing groups, organized into communities of like mind, background, or origin. John likely wrote for one of those communities. It was an sectarian endeavor. Like all such things, each group thought it had the truth and that the competition did not. John’s task was to define his community, encourage its members in their choice, to recruit new members to it, and to defend it against others. The dualism we hear so much in John—people described as inside or out, walking in the light or the darkness, condemned or saved—is largely the result.

John’s emphasis is on recruiting and encouraging more than it is excluding and judging. His portrayal of other groups as evil is more by way of contrast than condemnation. This is an invitation. John is arguing through the tactic of elevating one group while at the same time diminishing others. John is promising, more than he is threatening.

Seen in this light, John 3:16 seems to be a promise coupled with a method, or an instruction, about how that promise might be realized. Yet if that it so, it opens up some hard questions about how to go about things. For example, what is belief? What is it that people are to believe? Must they believe it all the time or can they have doubts from time to time? Or can they just believe it once and have done with it? Must they be fervent in their beliefs; or can they hold them grudgingly? And what if they do not believe; do they forfeit salvation? Must they perish?

This last question is central. There seems to be conflict here between—using the words of Reformation theology—between grace and faith. God so loved the world, Jesus begins. The world in John’s view is not a very nice or good place, and yet God loves it. God seems to wish to save the world from perishing. At the same time, the offer here is partially qualified by the necessity of belief in God’s son and a few verses later much more vehemently. Does God love the whole world or only those who believe in Jesus? Is this good news for the world or only good news for those who have faith?

We teach that God loves all of us unconditionally. This is grace: grace equals undeserved and unconditional love. Yet we also teach that faith—belief—is essential to salvation. But isn’t faith something we do, some work on our part? Is faith a condition, therefore, to God’s love? And if so, how can we call God gracious?

There seems to be a tension between these two teachings. We cannot resolve it easily because we can see the danger. If we focus solely on grace, then salvation is (possibly arbitrary and) independent of human action. And if we focus solely on faith, then it becomes a result of human action or accomplishment. If salvation comes through grace, then is faith good but redundant? If it comes through faith, is grace nice but unnecessary?

There are two things going on here that tangle us up. The first is that though grace and faith might be in tension, they are not in competition. The Bible is a story of the interaction between God’s love for the world and people’s response to that love. We know from our own experiences that our understanding of and gratitude for God and what God does affects what we do, which in turn affects our connection with God. We are in a relationship with God, which is sometimes rocky and sometimes sweet, but which is always developing somehow.

The second tangle is that belief is not a very good synonym for faith. For one thing, it is not the best translation of the meaning of the word used by Jesus here in John. For another, it is much more about doing something than thinking or saying something. In fact, and amazingly, the noun for faith never appears in this Gospel at all. Only the verb form. Faith is not intellectual assent. Believing in Jesus is not agreeing to something he said or naming what he is, but following his guidance. Doing what he said to do. The opposite of belief is not disbelief, but disobedience. To believe in someone is to trust them into the future. When you tell someone you believe in them, it means that you trust in the way the future will unfold, and, often, that you are willing to follow them. To believe in Jesus is to trust Jesus with your future.

The Bible is one long love story. A story about God’s love for us, God’s people, God’s creation. Even when we were acting like idiots, even when we did not repent, even when we did not believe God cared one way or the other. God’s love is not in question. It is not in short supply. There is plenty of it. That is grace.

This means that John 3:16 cannot be about a transaction, a trade, or a deal. God does not require us to believe in Jesus in order to gain God’s love.

In the Gospel of John, the phrase “eternal life” describes something that happens now, in our actual lifetimes. Abundant life, or the good life. Or life in Christ, as Paul says. Something not started by but also not changed by death. Not quantity of life but quality of life. A non-anxious or confident life, or a trusting one. To live in any other way is to perish. To be disconnected from God. That is the way most of us live much of the time. But it does not have to be so. That is what Jesus promises here.

What Jesus offers in John 3:16 is like one page from the user manual of the world. 1) Introduction: God loves the world. 2) Do this: trust in Jesus. 3) Get this result: eternal life. Believing in Jesus, trusting Jesus with your future, is a method, a way, given to us by God because God loves the world. Because God is gracious. It is not some kind of payment to God or requirement of God. It is not a moral issue. It has nothing to do with God’s righteousness. Rather, it is the physics of faith. It is something that Jesus tells us will work to get abundant life. If we want that. It seems that God wants us to.

John 3:16 is sometimes used as a weapon to attack others with. But it is not a weapon. It is instruction. Belief in Jesus is not a one-time event nor a one-time proclamation. It is an ongoing, sometimes uneven, often surprising, life-long development. As we respond to God’s gracious hope for us: trust Jesus; do not perish.

Remember the Sabbath

Text: Exodus 20:1-17

God leads the Israelites, already tired of wandering about aimlessly, to Mount Sinai. They have been freed from slavery in Egypt. The redemption they have long hoped for has been accomplished.

Now what? They are stuck in a place without boundaries. They are a people without definition. No longer slaves, free but uncertain. Who are they? What shall they do next? Where shall they go? Freedom can seem like chaos, a limitless landscape can make one feel agoraphobic.

The commandments given at Sinai are therefore a gift to the people. They are a confirmation of God’s presence, a reaffirmation of God’s promise, and a guide to being God’s people.

People of faith share the conviction that life is to be lived before God, in the light of God, with God in mind. Our actions come from more than the urgings of our consciences, from somewhere in addition to our moral reasoning. There is more to us than us. We hope to live our lives in alignment with God for our sake and the sake of the world. We are made complete and whole, as we say in Sunday worship, by conforming our lives to God.

We need guidance, as the Israelites did. We ask ourselves: Who are we and how shall we define ourselves? And also: how shall we live and what shall we do? And also: how can we save ourselves and the world from destruction? And, finally, how might we be a light to others, to serve our brothers and sisters?

The commandments—the top ten, which are called in the Bible the ten words or ten sayings of God, and the other 600 or so that follow—served to create boundaries in which the Israelites might best operate.

Commandments, like these but also the ones Christians learn from the teachings of Jesus, do a least three things. First, they define a people who belong to God and for whom this God alone is their god. Commandments create a community of those who acknowledge particular limits and procedures. Second, they are criteria by which the people judge their actions. Like gauges and warning lights, the commandments help people know when things are working well and when not. And third, they are guidelines to life in God, like roads and signs that make journeys of life easier and more predictable.

The Ten Commandments are customarily divided into two parts, or two tables: the first deals with our relationship with God and the second with our relationship with other people. But of course they are interdependent and make up one cloth. Loving God both enables us to love and reflects our love for one another. On the cusp, or at the hinge, of these, is the commandment regarding the sabbath, the one I want to talk more about today.

This commandment is unusual in many ways. First, it contains in itself a little essay about why we should follow it. The reason given in Exodus, in the version of the Ten Commandments we heard today, is that God the creator rested on the seventh day, and that therefore God blessed this day as special. The sabbath was created for us, God’s creatures, as part of the nature of the world. In Deuteronomy, however, there is another version of the commandments. It differs from the one in Exodus mostly in this commandment regarding the sabbath. In that version, we are reminded that God brought the people out of slavery. We are not slaves and do not have to live as slaves, working non-stop. Sabbath is thus the child of both creation and freedom.

Second, the commandment is unusual because before it tells us how to behave (as the other commandments do) it asks us to remember: Remember the sabbath. We need to remember that the sabbath is a gift from God, and therefore not to discard it or squander it. We need to remember that the sabbath is as important to us as the rest of creation is. It is as important as dry land to live on, food to eat and water to drink, companions to love. The commandment asks us to keep the sabbath holy, which means keep it separate or special, a day that is not the same as every other day.

This commandment respects God’s wish to interrupt our lives. Though the commandment tells us to rest, and though it talks about God’s resting, it is is more about carving out a special space (a holy space). It is certainly true that we need to rest, but this commandment is not so much about therapy as it is about obedience to God’s direction. God tells us to put aside the things that usually drive us—and that sometimes drive us crazy. On the sabbath we are to honor God’s request to think about God first.

Worshiping God with others is one good way to be mindful of God, but it is neither the only way nor the complete way to do that. Sabbath itself is worship. Sabbath gives us quiet and space to pray. It gives us a big chunk of time in which our thoughts can settle and our hopes and fears become clearer.

Sabbath is more than downtime. It purposely pushes away those things that make us most fearful and anxious. Things like performing well and having enough. For many people, days of sabbath are the days in which they feel most close to other people, to their families, and to the wonders of the world. We need some slack. which is the sabbath of everyday life.

Yet, we are forgetting the sabbath and letting the boundaries between the seventh day and the other six crumble and become porous.

Maybe that is because to observe the sabbath is inconvenient and annoying. It is visible to others. It brands you, marking you as part of a particular (and maybe peculiar) community of religious people. It requires that you trust God to provide for you even if you abandon work and commerce for 15% of the week. It demonstrates in humility that you need and welcome rest. Observing a day of sabbath is a spiritual discipline. It takes practice. It takes time to learn. It takes time to do. Its benefits are sometimes obscured at first by its drawbacks.

Or maybe we are forgetting because we are frantic because we are so afraid. We think perhaps our strong efforts and constant vigilance can make things less scary. But they do not. They have not.

We are forgetting the sabbath. And now our culture is starving for it. To have forgotten that we need a sabbath is like forgetting that we need to eat. We need to remember that God has created us to live and to be free. To remember who we are and what we are called to do. To remember the sabbath, and keep it holy.

Center of the Universe

Text: Mark 8:27-38

How misguided Peter seems to us from two thousand years away. We who read this story backward, so to speak, from the ending. We see it through the eyes of tradition, theology, and centuries of learned interpretation. Jesus is not to us as he was to Peter. And we know that Peter often played the fool to Jesus’ wisdom, a tool used by the Gospel writers to reveal a hard truth. Seen this way, with these eyes, history concludes that Peter got it wrong, that he did not see that Jesus was a new kind of messiah.

Yet let us try reading this story forward, as it is played out. Let us become as ignorant as Peter is, and see what it tells us. Let us forget the crucifixion whose story Mark is about to tell. Let us forget the resurrection that we celebrate on Easter and every Sunday, but which has yet to happen in Mark. Let us take things—as much as we can—as Peter saw them.

First, we have to know three things that Peter knew. One: Jesus is the Messiah. Peter has just identified him that way: you are the Christ, he says, the Greek word for messiah. Peter confirms what Mark has told us from the beginning: that this Gospel is a story about Jesus Messiah. Messiah means the anointed one. The anointed one is the one that will be king, for in the Bible, the prophets confirmed the king by anointing him. Jesus is a king.

Two: the Messiah, a king, rules in order to change the world. People’s hope for the Messiah was that he would be a king that would make the world better. People hoped for the Messiah to come to fix things. To repair what is broken in this world. When Peter talks about the Messiah, he is not talking about life after death. He is talking about life now, in times of trouble and pain. This world.

And three: The cross is an atrocity. Crucifixion is a horror. The disciples and Peter do not think about the cross as a symbol of life. That has not yet happened in the story. For disciples and Peter, crucifixion is simply hideous torture followed by death. There is nothing good about it. When Jesus says that his followers must take up the cross—that is a scary thing; that is not a good thing. He is not recommending it; he is acknowledging it.

The disciples are doing something really hard. They are doing something that is so compelling that they are willing to do it even if it means there is a chance they will be executed by hanging on a cross.

Starting from here—Jesus is the Messiah, the Messiah makes the world better, and following Jesus risks crucifixion—Jesus then instructs his disciples how it will be and what they must do if they still want to be part of the program. “If any want to follow me, …” he begins.

The Gospel of Mark is interested in discipleship—our word, not one that appears in Mark—interested in what a disciple is and what a disciple is called to do. Mark defines discipleship as a contrast between what humans value and what God values. Human values: being the greatest, sitting at the head of the table, being privileged, being served. God values: being the least, sitting at the foot of the table, eating crumbs, being a servant. You are thinking like a human, Jesus tells human Peter. Think instead like God.

Here’s how, he explains: If you want to follow me, deny yourself. That’s the first thing on Jesus’ list. To think like God seems to be to think of someone else besides you first. To live for the sake of others rather than your sake. To put someone besides yourself at the center of your concerns. Or everyone else. This is what Jesus did. This is what a Messiah does. This is what, ideally, a king does. This is what a leader of a nation should do. Jesus in John calls himself a good shepherd. This is what a shepherd does, risks all—even his life if necessary—for the sake of the sheep, Jesus tells us. Being a leader is not about the leader but about the led. Being a follower of Jesus is not about us, but about someone else. It is a contrast between human values and Godly values, for sure.

Deny yourself, Jesus says. The word he uses is used most famously to describe what Peter does when, on Good Friday, Peter denies knowing Jesus. To deny yourself is to ignore—to not acknowledge or agree to—the strong claims that you have on yourself in favor of the claims of others. Not, though, out of some creepy joy of suffering or modesty, but for the sake of the Gospel, an expression, according to Mark, of the kingdom of God, a better world.

Jesus is the Messiah. The Messiah makes the world better. The world is made better by the disciples who deny themselves. The kingdom of God can come to be when the followers of Jesus put others at the center of their concern. And cannot when they do not.

Putting others first has consequences. Sometimes pleasant ones, sometimes not so pleasant ones. How far can this go? Pretty far. Even to giving up one’s life for others. Those who wish to save their selves—the word Jesus uses here means heart or soul or psyche as much as it means life—it does not work so well if in the end you cannot commit yourself to others. If you wish to follow the Messiah and to help change the world for the better, letting go of your self might be necessary for the sake of the kingdom of God. Jesus is not asking people to plunge carelessly to their deaths; he is saying that there is nothing—even life, if it comes to that—that his disciples can finally value more than the Gospel, more than the kingdom of God.

Jesus does not teach that we should have no fun. Jesus was a fan of good food and drink and companionship. He liked a good argument. He seemed to enjoy the camaraderie of his friends and colleagues. But Jesus was not afraid of risk, risking as much as necessary, without calculation. The disciples are known as those who take risks in this way.

The season of Lent is a good time to ask ourselves and God how we should and can live as Christians. What is it that being Christian calls us to do? And more important, what is it that having the benefit of the life of Jesus, the death of Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus enables us to do?

You are thinking like the human you are, Jesus tells Peter. Think instead like God thinks. Is not that what we are trying to learn to do through our lives of faith: when we pray, and worship, and study, and talk to one another, and serve others? When we take little experimental risks for the sake of the Gospel?

Aren’t we trying to learn how God thinks? So that we may be followers of Jesus Christ, a Messiah who teaches his disciples how to help bring about a changed world, the kingdom of God.