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Elma United Methodist Church |
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A Global Vision |
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Elma United Methodist Church |
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A Global Vision Dan Shelly Elma United Methodist Church March 26, 2006 (John 3:14-21, Ephesians 2:1-10)
Our Scripture reading today includes the verse John 3:16 and that is perhaps the best known verse in the entire Bible and this is due in no small part to the work of Rollen Stewart. You may not be too familiar with the name Rollen Stewart, I didn’t know his name but I’ve mentioned him once before and sports fans who watched TV from the 1970’s to the early 1990’s most likely saw Rock’n Rollen Stewart. (Hey youth, you thought our leisure suits were bad in the 70’s well you haven’t seen anything yet…) Rollen’s major claim to fame came from wearing a rainbow striped afro wig and jumping up at just the right time during a sporting event to be seen on national TV. After watching a television evangelist and converting to Christianity, Rollen began carrying a sign with the words JOHN 3:16 on it. Soon his mission in life, getting seen on TV with his sign, so obsessed him that he ended up divorced and began to live in his car traveling from one sporting event to the next. Over time, literally billions of people saw the rainbow wig man and his JOHN 3:16 sign. In researching Rollen Stewart I found out that in 1992, he became convinced that the World would end in another 6 days and in order to inform people of this, he wandered into an empty hotel room, held the maid who was cleaning the room hostage at gunpoint, and was captured by force only after he threatened to begin taking shots at passing airplanes. Sadly, Rollen Stewart is today in Federal prison serving 3 life sentences for his hostage episode.
But for many years he considered it his mission in life, to make everyone acquainted with that single Bible verse JOHN 3:16 because he thought that it summed up the entire Gospel message.
And a single verse or small section of the Bible taken out of context can often be used to support almost any position or argument. As I thought about that, I recalled the story of the young man who had just gotten his driver's permit and inquired of his father, the local church pastor, if they could discuss his use of the family car. His father said I'll make a deal with you. You bring your grades up from a C to a B average, study your Bible a little more often, and get your hair cut. Then we'll talk about your using the car."
Sometimes the pieces of Scripture we use to support a particular argument change in meaning when we look at the larger context in which they’re written. And I think that the same thing is true when we look at Rollen Stewart’s use of John 3:16. ‘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.’ This verse taken alone provides a strong argument for a fundamentalist view of Christianity that believes the entire reason and the ONLY reason for Jesus’ birth, Jesus’ life, Jesus’ death, and Jesus’ resurrection was to provide a guarantee of salvation, eternal life, a one-way ticket to heaven and those streets of gold after death. And not for all people, but only for those fortunate few, those select individuals who hear about Jesus and believe this new covenant made between God and humankind as atonement for our sinfulness. In Jesus, God provided this covenant - sealed by Jesus’ blood at Calvary. For some folks, this is the whole meaning of the Bible and the complete Christian message.
I know that message well because growing up it was the message from the Bible that I heard week after week when I went to Sunday School and week after week in Sunday Worship service (both the morning and the evening versions). And it’s a message that causes those who believe it to fervently try to bring everyone they know to this individual point of decision for Christ because if they don’t then they, along with all of the rest of the people throughout all of God’s creation, will be forever lost and condemned by God to hell and damnation for all eternity. This view can portray an image of a wrathful God who can only be satisfied by vengeance and blood, NOT the God of Love who cares so much for his children that he’s numbered the very hairs of our heads and wants only good things for us.
But John 3:16 can take on a much broader meaning when we put it into a larger context. The very next verse of this passage, John 3:17 reads:
‘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.’
When you put these verses together, we see the writer of the Gospel of John explaining that God sent Jesus because God so loved the world, all of God’s creation and all of the people in God’s creation, and God did not judge or condemn the world, but through Jesus, God wished for the whole World to be saved. And another translation for the Greek verb used here is healed. Through Jesus, God wished for the whole world to be healed. This Scripture doesn’t say that God sent Jesus for just a select few to be saved. And I suspect that if Jesus walked into some of our Christian churches today, he might be reaching for that rope whip again and kicking over the comfortable padded chairs saying “My message was to get out into the World and show God’s Love to your neighbors. Instead you’ve turned this into a religion that creates pew potatoes!” I often ask myself, “If Jesus came back to Earth today, would he even consider himself a Christian?” So many churches have narrowed down Jesus’ radical message of God’s extravagant and inclusive Love to a message of exclusion and exclusiveness – a One Way or No Way message that leaves the majority of the World’s population out in the cold. There’s no way I’m about to put the infinite God of the universe into that small of a box and tell God exactly how he may and may not bring salvation to all the people of the Earth. And I’m not even sure that Jesus could recognize this as the same open and accepting message of love he preached.
The Gospel of John tells us that Jesus came as a light into the darkness. He came to illuminate and reveal God’s healing love to a dark and cold world, a world consumed by the sickness of greed, power, oppression and alienation. Jesus came as a light to reveal God’s love for all of creation and he began to not only teach about this but to heal those who were afflicted – to demonstrate the power of God’s love over all of the powers of darkness that dominated the world. Then what did he do? He taught his disciples and sent all of them out to do the same thing. He sent his disciples out to bring healing and the good news of God’s reign over darkness in the World. The role of a disciple was not just to talk about Jesus, but to bring God’s light and God’s healing to the world. And that is what the Apostle Paul explains for us in our reading today from Ephesians:
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
We are saved, healed, by faith and that healing depends on nothing that we did but is a gift from God. But there’s more to this story. We are also recreated, as Paul often says through Christ Jesus our old nature has passed away and we’ve been made a new creation, created in Christ Jesus for the good works which God has prepared to be our way of life. As Christians, disciples of Christ, we aren’t just handed a one way ticket to heaven and told to hang on until our ride arrives, instead just like those first disciples, we too are sent by Jesus to be about the business of bringing the good news of God’s healing to all of God’s creation – in this life, right here and right now. God’s healing was not instantaneous for all of creation, but it grows like a sprouting seed. A seed planted by Jesus and a seed watered by the Holy Spirit. As Christians we understand that we are created as joint heirs with Jesus, created to tend this garden, and help God’s healing to grow and to flourish.
When we, like Rollen Stewart focus only on one piece of the Christian message, this responsibility of discipleship becomes lost. We end up instead with an easy message that requires no cost of discipleship and never brings about God’s intended healing for all of creation. Instead we end up sitting around waiting for God to drop a new heaven and a new earth out of the sky. Imagine the difference that the rainbow wig man might have made in our World if he had spent that same amount of energy working to bring healing and wholeness to all those around him, helping to establish the Reign of God here on Earth. Each week as we pray together “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven,” can’t you almost imagine God saying “OK, so when are you going to get busy and start bringing this about?”
And I’m not promising that this work will be easy. What I’m describing is a vocation from God that calls for us to get our hearts engaged and our hands dirty as we share God’s healing with all of God’s creation. And remember the Gospel of John tells us:
For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.
There will be struggles, there will be setbacks and even apparent failures in our discipleship. But Scripture also tells us that we are all created in God’s image and that means there is a divine spark within each individual no matter how rough, how cruel, or how unresponsive they may appear on the surface, there’s a spark that recognizes and responds to the light of God’s love drawing us out of the darkness. The World’s darkness no matter how strong it may appear can never overcome the light of God’s love and eventually the darkness will have to flee from the light and God’s true healing will prevail.
So reading our Scripture for today again, listening to the full message of Jesus, it might instead sound something like this:
For God so loved the World that he Gave his only Son, to heal us, to lead us, and to grow us up into the very image of Christ himself, that we too may share the light of God’s healing with others, that others might see our good works and give thanks to God who heals and sends us out to care for all of God’s creation. |