God So Loved The World

March 14

Readings – 2 CHR 36:14-16, 19-23; EPH 2:4-10; JN 3:14-21

Truth be told, I often struggle to make sense of the scriptures and today’s readings are no exception.   Here’s what I see going on.

Our first reading from Chronicles is trying to make sense of the collapse of Israel and its being conquered and captured by a foreign power (Babylon).  In exile, the people reflect that it must have been because of something that they had done or failed to do.  They had strayed from God.  They hadn’t listened to the prophets.  And so they conclude that God grew angry and did not spare them punishment.

I am not sure that’s how God works, but I can relate.  When bad things happen to us, we might find ourselves thinking, “Why me?”  And sometimes we search through our experiences and try to figure out a reason.

The reading from Ephesians, however, immediately gives us another lens.  Paul reminds us that God is a God of love and mercy and that it is by grace alone – not what we do or didn’t do – that we have anything good in our lives (or even have life at all).  God is not upset with us, growing angry with the world or looking to punish us.  We are God’s handiwork, and God is pleased.

And if we didn’t hear that message strongly enough, Jesus tells us that God isn’t trying to condemn the world.

But…

Jesus does acknowledge that people make choices that can go against God’s plan for the world and that our choices (personal and collective) have consequences.  Some that may be apparent to us, but some of that may also be hidden from our view.

And this loops us back to our first reading.  It is my sense that Israel had been making collective choices that left them very vulnerable and weak.  I don’t mean in a military sense.  I mean in a moral/ethical sense.  They had strayed from “the covenant” and this had collective consequences, and Jesus reminds us that these must be accounted for at some point.  I might suggest that our country is in a similar situation.

It reminds me of the quote by Robert G. Ingersoll, “In nature there are neither rewards or punishments.  There are consequences.”  What we do and fail to do has impacts.  Our God is not trying to punish us or catch us acting poorly.  But neither does God does magically swoop down and spare us from the consequences of our actions (or maybe even the actions of others…).  Those must be reckoned with and have real implications in the world.

So what might this all mean for us?

First.  Please hear that God is not upset with you.  Period.  God loves you, and the primal energy of the universe is love.  Bad things happen for a lot of reasons, but not because God is upset with us.

Second. God’s kin-dom is not a meritocracy whereby we’re rewarded for good behavior, working harder than others, etc.  Grace is the name of the game, and we are only stewards of things that were freely given to us.  If we have good things in our lives, it’s not because we’re more favored (and may, in fact, be very closely linked to systems of power and privilege that humans created).  Many of us have been raised to believe that heaven and capitalism operate under the same principles.  Paul reminds us that everything traces its origin back to God, and it was God’s generosity that brought it all into being.  Our job is to give as freely as it was given to us.

Third. Actions have consequences that we have to account for- personally and collectively.  Jesus quotes the story of Moses and the serpent, and I think this is an important reference for us.  In the desert, Moses held up a serpent (the image of what had bitten the people), and they were cured.  So, too, we’re being invited to turn our attention to the consequences of our actions and to make amends, reconcile and account for what we have done (personally and collectively).

Love. Grace. Consequence.

For today, just sit in the grace of your own life – whatever is going on right now in that life.  Today is a new day.  You have breath and consciousness.  You are precious (and so is everyone else) and there’s nothing that you can do to have God love you any more – or any less.  As you move through your day, try to act in a way that respects your own preciousness and the preciousness of others.

Final note: Today’s gospel has often been used to judge and condemn people who didn’t “believe in Jesus.”  It is the quote you see people holding up in the end zone at football games (John 3:14), “For God so loved the world…”  I think we need to constantly address this idea of Christian triumphalism.  We’re not the “best” or most “enlightened” religion.  There are a lot of paths to God, and the way of Jesus is one of them.   And truth be told, most of us who profess to be Christian are not actually basing a lot of what we do on the gospels.  Mahatma Gandhi, a devout student of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, once said, “If it weren’t for Christians, I’d be a Christian.”  This should give us some good pause for reflection.