Relating is Believing

Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 11, 2018

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon:

[Jesus said:] ¹⁴“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
  ¹⁶“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.
  ¹⁷“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. ¹⁸Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. ¹⁹And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. ²¹But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” – John 3:14-21

Let us consider for a moment what young children believe about their parents. A growing and exploring toddler might believe parents have powers and skills that seem almost superhuman. A survey of 6-8 year-olds in the UK revealed that as many as 55% believe their parents are actual superheroes, including such powers as telepathy, super-strength, and healing. Nearly a third thought their parents had a secret lair where they kept their capes. They might believe that their parents have lots of wisdom and know lots of things. We recognize these things to be true in one sense and not in another – children eventually realize the very real limitations and faults of their parents and yet their perceptions mean something true about the relationship that exists. It speaks to their daily experience of care and love.

I wonder that our belief in God isn’t more like the beliefs that young children have about their parents. Because those beliefs are based in relationships rather than in intellectual assent or getting it right, about trusting the power of the one whose strength and wisdom is beyond ours. The extent to which children can articulate the belief is only an imperfect and imprecise description of the daily relationship they have with their parents. They may believe all kinds of things, but fundamentally they know that these people are their parents, because their daily reality of being together speaks what a creed about the parent-child relationship never could.

And so we come to this famous verse about belief: “God so loved the world as to give the Only Begotten One, that whoever believes may have eternal life.” We have so often gotten this verse all tangled up because we think that belief is about deciding particular theological principles, making a choice for this idea over that idea, or for understanding something about God. We worry about who believes what and what is considered enough in bounds to count for salvation. And even if we don’t worry about others, maybe we worry about ourselves. Do I fit in if I struggle to believe this thing or that thing about God?

But throughout John’s gospel especially, Jesus is interested in being in relationship with people. Though he has profound theological things to say, and he can sometimes sound very heady in the discourses that follow his encounters with people, it’s all about the people. This most famous verse comes in Jesus’ response to Nicodemus, a Pharisee of Pharisees who comes to him in the cover of night. It is when Nicodemus recognizes how impossible it is to understand much less believe what Jesus is telling him that Jesus speaks this most famous verse about God’s profound love. It is almost as if the belief itself isn’t the central part, but the relationship in which the questions are asked and the power experienced.

When we confess the creed each Sunday in worship, we say we believe. I wonder if we take seriously the claim we make in saying that word. Surely many Sundays the words wash over us, they fall from our lips with the comfort of familiar phrases, and this is good. Surely some Sundays a word or phrase strikes us and invites us to deeper wonder or curious investigation. But too rarely for me does it invite me to remember the relationship with the one about whom we are speaking. Which is really what we mean in the creed – that we are in relationship to the God of creation, redemption, and sanctification.

I believe that the daily living that my body does for me, the created goodness which fills my table and creates beauty outside my window, the wonders that we have mined and developed with our God-given creative powers all speak to a daily interaction with the God who created all things.

I believe that my interactions with my fellow embodied human beings, perhaps especially the ones who are born into unusual circumstances, into poverty and suffering, speak to me about the relationship I have with God. That my experiences of pain and suffering are shared by the body of Jesus and the whole body of Christ and brought into new life in the church shows me the promise of something stronger than death itself, and helps me to understand being in relationship with God.

I believe that in my daily experience of community something more than my own power and breath shape my experience, that I feel God leading and guiding in ways I cannot understand or explain. And where all that is leading I can’t describe very well, but it is surely the renewal and resurrection of all things.

That’s still a lot of words to try to describe what it is to live in daily relationship with God, but living in daily relationship with God is eternal life. “This is the judgment…” Jesus says after that famous verse. This is the moment, the crisis point, the time that matters. The here and now is the opportunity for that daily relationship, here and now is eternal life. So look, not just to Jesus and to the cross, but to the moments of joy and frustration and everything else to see God there living those moments with you. Nicodemus never assents to all that Jesus says, but he comes back at the end of the gospel to help lay his body in the tomb. He never says yes to Jesus with words, but something of that conversation keeps him in connection to Jesus such that at another moment of judgment, another crisis point, he is there in relationship.

The power of this most famous verse is that it grounds all of this, the whole relationship we have with God and the relationship that all of creation has with God, in God’s tremendous self-sacrificing love for the whole world. It does not start with our understanding or our recognition of God, for surely that is imperfect at best. Instead it starts with the love of God. It starts with God’s saving action. It starts with God’s claiming us in Christ not the other way around. Whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, we have God’s freedom-giving, life-affirming, boundary-respecting love. And we have today the invitation to turn our eyes to that, to that love, to that relationship and in doing so find for ourselves now and always in God’s eternal life for the whole world.

-Pastor Steven Wilco