[Jesus said:] “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 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.
John 3:14-21
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. Those 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. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But 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.”
My sermon from the Fourth Sunday in Lent (March 14, 2021) on John 3:14-21.
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So for today’s sermon, I want to begin with a question that I’ve been sitting with for awhile: how do we hold the fullness of the past while still living into the future?
You might know that I didn’t grow up in Northern New Jersey. And if I wanted to visit my childhood home, I’d need to drive about 1,792 miles west. My hometown of Littleton, Colorado, was once the southern boundary of the Denver Metropolitan area. But over time, suburban sprawl pushed the boundary outwards. And new cities with hundreds of thousands of people now exist in places where I once watched antelope graze. Now, my high school was Arapahoe High School and it was larger than Pascack Valley and Pascack Hills combined. The school was known for its academics and it has a pretty good soccer team. It probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that I was one of the more nerdy kids while there. And while high school was definitely not perfect, they at least didn’t want our 4 years there to be the peak of our lives. A few years before I attended Arapahoe, there was a bit of a controversy. For decades, their mascot was the Warrior – which could have been very generic. But since the high school was named after one of the Native American tribes that once called the area home, the decision was made to make the mascot a caricature of what white Americans imagined indian warriors to be. The mascot was typically depicted as a face turned to its side. He had piercing anger filled eyes, a high forehead, strong nose, and a mohawk on top. He also wore feathers and other accessories that were actually part of Eastern Native American cultures rather than anything out West. No effort was made to have the mascot fit the Arapaho nation. And for decades, that mascot told a story that remembered why it was called Arapahoe but one that wasn’t interested in looking past its founding. And that’s because the Arapaho nation had been forcibly removed from the area in the late 1870s after the United States broke treaty after treaty it signed with the tribe. Some of its members were eventually moved 500 miles north, to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. But sometime in the late 1980s, members of the student body, some alumni, and administrators decided to dig deeper into its story. They dug deeper into a vision of history bigger than just the students who ever called Arapahoe High School home. That journey eventually led to the Northern Arapaho Tribe and Arapahoe High School forming a relationship. The relationship included a kind of truth telling, where the school reflected on how the mascot wasn’t telling the full story of its past. It had appropriated a version of an identity while ignoring everything that made that identity what it was. The Tribe told the school they could continue using the Warrior as its mascot but the tribe would teach them what a warrior was all about. A new logo was designed by a member of the tribe, Wilbur Antelope, and was a portrait of their tribal elder, Anthony Sitting Eagle. The two communities promised to visit each other every-other-year, sharing their stories, traditional dances, celebrating accomplishments, and mourning together when crisis struck. Each year, the tribe provided a scholarship for the valedictorian of the high school even though Arapahoe High School is in a very affluent area and the Northern Arapaho Tribe suffers with generational poverty. In the words of Lone Bear, “To [the Northern Arapaho Tribe], being a warrior means going to battle for what’s right, taking care of your family, and passing on knowledge.” And what’s passed on is a full story that does not sugar coat, romanticize, or ignore how the past forms our present and our future. Rather, it faces who we are so that we can become something more.
Today’s reading from John is part of a conversation Jesus had with a man named Nicodemus. The conversation took place at night and I like to imagine it beginning with Jesus sitting alone in a room. The glow from a small oil lamp illuminated his face and he was trying to wind down after a busy day of preaching and teaching. Suddenly, there was a knock at the door and instead of blowing out the lamp and pretending he wasn’t there, Jesus opened the door and Nicodemus walked in. The conversation began with Nicodemus making one of those statements that was really a bit of a question. He said he recognized Jesus’ connection to God because “no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Now that affirmed a little of Jesus’ own identity but it might also have been an attempt by Nicodemus to get Jesus to do what we all love to do: and that’s talk about ourselves. By affirming his connection to God, Nicodemus might have wanted some more backstory of how that was possible. Jesus could have then shared his story like we share ours: making himself look a little more faithful; a little smarter; and definitely a lot cooler than he actually was. But he could probably have done something we can’t do: step outside the bounds of history and see how different actions by different people over different time periods formed the complex reality we’re just trying to live in. We’re not always good at holding together the parts of our story we are active participants in and the other bits we are given: like our culture, our background, our opportunities, and those things we assume are just how things are. Nicodemus might have expected Jesus to do the same – to tell a cherry picked version of what it means to be the Son of God. But if Jesus had done that, he wouldn’t have been able to tell his full story – one that was going to include the Cross. So instead of talking about himself, Jesus instead turned the conversation around. He poke and prodded at Nicodemus until Nicodemus suddenly found himself in a fuller version of God’s story; one that wasn’t over quite yet. Because Jesus’ ministry wasn’t only centered on where he was from but, rather, on where he was going. What mastered wasn’t that Jesus was part of the Trinity or that he was there when creation came into being. What made Jesus’ story Jesus’ story was that God entered our lives and our world because God’s love couldn’t do anything less. God wouldn’t let the partial stories of our past, our present, and what we imagine our future to be – to limit what God knows we can be. The story of God’s love can hold the truths of our past and the reality of our present while propelling us into a future that is full of hope.
As followers of Jesus, we sometimes struggle with the fullness of our story. When we examine bits and pieces of our history – the parts that are personal and the parts that include the people who came before us – we’re not always ready to celebrate its true beauty or admit how harsh it actually was. We tend to add a buffer to the story so that we can be isolated ourselves from history. Yet we seem to know how interconnected our stories actually are because we take personally any judgment leveled against the past. It’s okay to be proud or sad or indifferent or excited about the story of who we are and the story we tell about ourselves. But that story of our past was never meant to justify the future God already has in mind for us. Because when you were baptized and graced with faith in God – you were given a promise that your yesterday and your today will not be the limit of your tomorrow. Rather, the love of God would be gifted to you and the Son of God – Jesus Christ himself – would be a companion with you through whatever life brings your way. No longer are you limited to the story you tell about yourself. You are wrapped up in the story of God who sent Jesus not to condemn the world but to save it. And that future doesn’t begin tomorrow – it begins today. We get to tell a fuller story of who we are; where we’ve come from; and how we inherited things beyond our control. Yet we don’t need to be limited by what the past says we can be; instead, we can embrace the future as God declares it will be. And that future is full of love; full of welcome; full of inclusion; full of new life; and full of people just like you – those who have sometimes made bad choices; sometimes denied the dignity of others; sometimes failed to see the image of God in their neighbor; and – at our best – have loved complete strangers just like Jesus loves us. We get to be oriented towards God’s future rather than by our limited view of our past. And we get to live that way right now – because your eternal life has already started.
Amen.