The Heart of the Matter
Lent 4, March 22, 2009
John 3:14-21 with Numbers 21:4-9 and Ephesians 2:1-10 in b.g.
I have had the amazing privilege of listening to people who are working at recovery from addiction as they do their 5th step in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. During this 5th step they share with one other person the moral inventory of the wrongs they have done to others that they can remember. Even compiling such an inventory stems from their personal admission that their lives are out of control. They have come to realize that what's in their hearts and minds needs to change if they are ever to stop engaging in the kind of destructive behavior that's been killing them. By the time they are in a position to do their 4th and 5th steps they realize that it's not just the boozing, the drugging, and all that comes with that, that's their problem. Rather it's what's going on in their heads and hearts that literally drives them to do the boozing, the drugging, that is their problem. They also are beginning to realize that they need help from beyond themselves to change.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn came to a similar conclusion on a much larger scaled after ten years of imprisonment and enforced exile that were followed by 20 years of banishment to Europe and Vermont as the consequence of exposing the Soviet penal system: "When I lay there on rotting prison straw … it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil, passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties but right through every human heart … and through all human hearts."
Or as astronauts sometimes said when things had gone seriously awry during the heady days of the Apollo space program, "We have a problem Houston".
But unlike their statement our problem isn't with our external equipment, it's with us! Hatred, violence, envy, jealousy and apathy all arise from within us, individually and collectively. Unbridled, these forces from within us lead us consciously or unconsciously to exclude and even eliminate others, while carrying out rampant damage much of creation.
We need to know this about ourselves! If we refuse to acknowledge the sickness of our own hearts and minds we will act as if the symptoms of our behavior or of others' behavior are the problem. Then we lay the blame on others or simply on our behavior, as if were external to ourselves. We eat too much. We buy too much. We don't exercise enough. Sometimes we even "doctor" the truth a bit – a little white lie here and there. Sometimes we get too angry. But when these symptoms are all we see and blame we aren't wrestling with our reality, of the causes of our behavior.
God sees our reality. God seeks to help to change our reality. God sends prophets to show us the truth. But we have often paid them little heed. Eventually God chooses to fully enter our reality. God takes on flesh as Jesus is born. Jesus lives honestly, lovingly in His interactions with others. Because of his actions we human beings could not let him continue to live. So, He is "lifted up", executed cruelly on a cross. We need to see Him there, for what we as human beings can do to God. God wills to show us ourselves as we are. But we don't want to see these important parts of ourselves. We wish to carry on our pretense. We don't want radical change, even though radical change on so many levels is needed, both within ourselves and beyond ourselves.
If you don't think that you need radical change I challenge you to monitor your thoughts and feelings about others, about yourself for one week. Monitor your actions or inaction towards others and creation for one week. And if you still doubt that you need change read some history beginning close at home in your own family and spreading out to Canadian history: the unjust interment of Japanese Canadians during WW II, to the treatment of so many aboriginal Canadian children in boarding schools. And if you think that we Christians are somehow exempt from this need for radical change read the history of the Crusades, the Inquisition. Even attend a church meeting. We all need transformation.
Seeing Jesus hanging on the cross can cause us to see ourselves as we are. But the reality of Christ's horrific death is also intended to lead us through that to another very important reality. The cross of Jesus also allows us to begin to glimpse God for who God is. On the cross God empties himself because God loves the world. Observe what Jesus does while He is dying at the hands of those who hate Him. He asks the Father to forgive those who are executing him. He refuses to hate or blame them. He refuses to act in violence towards them. Jesus even calls upon his followers to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecute them, and love themselves. This is a different kind of life from ours. This is what John's Gospel calls eternal life. This is a quality of life that comes in and through Jesus that begins now and affects all the parts of our living.
We need this gift of eternal life. This is the essence of following Jesus. Not to escape this world to another –but to follow the One who loves this world so much that he was willing to even die, so that in Him all people could see themselves and God and be brought to trust in God to live in new ways.
The Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall writes in the book, 'Why Christian': "the object of God's love, according to Biblical faith, is not first of all the church. It is the world. God so loved the cosmos (that is the world). The church is only a means to the end, not the end as such. The end – the goal that this faith envisages – is the 'salvation' of the whole world." And Hall notes that the world translated salvation in English is the Greek word "sozo" which means that God wants to make the world whole, to fulfill its promise, to mend its torn and tattered life.
So then "If God so loved the world" is in anyway about "me" as in an individual way, its about me in relationship to the world that is loved by God. How will I, as a child of God, relate to the world – its people, its resources, etc.? This indeed is THE question for all who will follow Jesus.
We don't need to worry about the next life for we can trust God for that in Jesus Christ. Instead our energy, our focus is to be living from the presence of Christ here and now as part of God's call on our lives for the whole world. This is what will take our energy, our gifts, our all. The energy, the ability to live such life comes from the One who goes to the cross out of love for all people and all creation. May we trust Him as we seek to live even as He calls us. Amen.