“Who we are as All Saints Church has everything to do with how we read John 3:16.”
“What does it look like for all Saints Church to trust that love is greater than fear — and to respond in a way that looks like God’s radical love lived out loud?”
Sermon by Mike Kinman at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, February 25, 2018.
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God so loved the world as to give the Only Begotten One, that whoever believes may not die, but have eternal life.
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That was John 3:16. It is perhaps the most known chapter and verse in the Bible – mostly because of how mainstream evangelical Christianity has used and promoted it. When Tim Tebow etched John 3:16 on his face in eye black during the 2009 BCS championship football game, about 92 million people Googled it. And I have to say, that makes me shudder. Not because I don’t want people reading the Bible or learning about Jesus but because when they Googled John 3:16, what they probably found was some pretty hideous theology.
John 3:16 is used to support not only Christian exceptionalism but a theology of sacrificial atonement, which not only has an understanding of sin based in a graceless transactional economic model, it turns God into a murderously abusive parent who tortures and kills their child in order to pay an overdue bill and then says, “This is what love looks like!”
Now I’m supposed to be giving my annual meeting address right now – and actually I am. Because who we are as All Saints Church has everything to do with how WE read John 3:16.
First of all, we DO read it. We don’t just throw it out because we don’t like the dominant interpretation. We engage it with our hearts and minds. We allow for various interpretations. We come together and we speak the truth to each other of how this text has been used in our lives and at times used against people in horrible ways, and we ask what love and healing look like. We ask how God is calling us to be with each other through it, and we ask how God is calling us to be in the world.
We read it trusting the truth of scripture is not static, transactional and legalistic but dynamic, grace-filled and revealed in new ways with each new generation. That truth is love and love is messy and is continually revealed in new ways as we receive the richness of the gifts of a community that is increasingly diverse in terms of race, culture, class, generation, gender, sexual expression and more.
So let’s take a few minutes and read this passage, and I’ll tell you what I find. And the beauty is you don’t have to agree with me. The beauty is we get to have the conversation. The beauty is we get lovingly to wrestle with it together. So, let’s break it down, shall we?
The verse starts with “God so loved the world.”
The word for love here is agapao. This is deep love. This is love no matter what. This is the kind of love that when you are apart you feel like you just can’t go on one more second. Do you feel me here? This is the kind of love that when the one you love is hurting, you want to scream “Please – let it happen to me instead!” not because you are such a great altruistic person but because you are truly in more pain watching the one you love be in pain than you would be with the pain happening to you. This is the kind of love that makes you long for wonderful things more for the one you love than for yourself because there is no greater joy than watching their joy.
That’s the kind of love God has for you, for me, for the person whom we have the most trouble loving, for everyone. That’s the kind of love that God has for the entire cosmos – in fact the Greek word for world here is kosmos – the whole created order.
And God does what any of us do when we love. God expresses that love. God gives. And what God gives – what any of us give when we love – is ourselves. Our time. Our presence. Our care. Our attention. God gets skin in the game. God lays God’s body on the line for you, for me, for the whole cosmos. Not to balance the books or pay a debt but because when you really love someone, you love with all of you, heart, mind and body.
And so, God so loved all of us that God gave and gives the divine self to us in love – totally, completely, without reservation, without bounds, no matter what. And yes, God did this in the historic instance of Jesus of Nazareth. And yes, we follow Jesus because in Jesus we find in some parts poetry and some parts prose the living embodiment of that love. Not because we believe Jesus is the only way or the best way but our way. Not because we can’t learn from and experience that love in countless other forms and on countless other paths but because for at least this moment in time, we are choosing this path and this path is choosing us.
And that’s important. Because the verse ends “that whoever believes may not die, but have eternal life.” And the hideous atrocity that has been proclaimed through the misuse of this verse by certainly not all but certainly quite a few Christians is that if you follow Jesus you are going to heaven and it you don’t you are going to hell.
Many of you are here at All Saints Church because you have found in this community a refuge from just this kind of abusive theology. So, it’s worth spending a little time on why this truly is a deeply damaging and manipulative misuse of scripture.
Let’s set aside for a moment that this sort of theology turns life into some sort of perverse version of Let’s Make a Deal, where if you choose Jesus you get the washer-dryer and the dinette set and if you choose what’s behind Door #2 – Johnny … show them what they’ve won … you get all-expense paid eternal trip to the lake of fire! Let’s set aside that any theology that assumes Gandhi is roasting in hell for his failure to claim Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior is ethically problematic at best. Let’s set those things aside and just ask the simple question – how in the world can this have anything to do with a God who loves everyone without end no matter what?
And, of course, the answer is – it can’t and it doesn’t. When you love that deeply, you don’t say “choose me or die.” That’s not love. That’s an abusively narcissistic family system and just looking around our nation and world today we can say we don’t need any more of that. No! When you love that deeply and expansively, what you want is not condemnation but for more than anything for everyone to accept that love, to trust in that love, to lean back in that love, to rejoice in that love, to let that love take root in their hearts and transform them into deep, courageous lovers of the entire cosmos themselves. That’s what this verse is about.
When we read “Yes, God so loved the world as to give the Only Begotten One, that whoever believes may not die, but have eternal life” what that is saying is that God loves us infinitely and no matter what, that God shares that love and in fact the entire divine self with us in that love in the most intimate, embodied and vulnerable way possible and that if we can trust that love – and the Greek word here is pistis, which is not the intellectual assent we usually think of as “belief” but the kind of trust you have when you are skydiving and you are trusting that parachute is going to open – if we can trust God’s radical all-inclusive, everlasting love, we will have not a life that is eternal in length – not eternal chronos – but eternal kairos. Life that is infinite in depth and richness. Life that is like biting into a peach at the absolute peak of its ripeness. Life that explodes in our mouths, spills out of the corners of our lips and drips down our chin. Life that is a natural consequence of living in the liberation of love and not in fear.
This love of God obliterates binaries and celebrates nuance. This love of God rejects any divisions of us vs. them and, in the words of Greg Boyle, calls us all to gather on the margins until the margins disappear under our feet. This love of God dismantles dominant cultures and systems and midwives into being communities of deep diversity without privilege where leadership and ministry is shared and the gifts of all are accepted equally and celebrated richly.
The Good News is that despite the broad proliferation of churches and theologies that twist and desecrate this message of love and turn it into a tool of fear for us to dominate and wound each other, this love is alive and well. It is alive and well in many places, many communities and many expressions. And one of those places is All Saints Church.
All Saints Church has always been, is now and always will be a community of God’s radical love not just for a chosen few but for the entire cosmos. In every generation, we have wrestled mightily, faithfully and joyfully to determine what it means to do what this passage yearns for us to do – trust that love, live that love, give ourselves to each other and the world in that love so we can share a life that is richer than we can possibly imagine.
This is nothing new for us. It is truly in our DNA.
In a time when Japanese-American members of our community were being loaded on trains and shipped to internment camps and the forces of empire told us to fear their wrath and stay out of the way, All Saints Church trusted that love was greater than fear and laid down on those tracks and said there is no us and them. What you do to one of us you do to us all.
In the face of those who said only some people should be able to come to the table, All Saints Church trusted that love was greater than fear and proclaimed “Whoever you are and wherever you find yourself on your journey of faith you are welcome to come to Christ’s table to receive the gifts of bread and wine made holy.”
In the face of a church that said if you treat gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons as beloved children of God deserving of dignity and the same sacraments as everyone else, you will destroy the church, All Saints Church trusted that love was greater than fear and proclaimed that being gay is a gift from God and that all God’s children get to claim the blessings of God’s love.
And so the question before us is, “What does trusting God’s radical love look like for such a time as this?” What does it mean for us to look not only around us in the world but within our All Saints community and see the binaries that need obliterating and the nuance that needs celebrating. Where are there still divisions of us vs. them and what are the opportunities for us to gather on the margins until the margins disappear under our feet. Where do we still have dominant cultures and systems and where are our opportunities more and more to become beloved communities of deep diversity without privilege where leadership and ministry are shared and the gifts of all are accepted equally and celebrated richly.
Someone kills 17 people in a high school in Florida, a young black man named Christopher Ballew is beaten to the point of a broken leg by two Pasadena police officers, a Pomona police officer and three mental health workers at a veterans home are shot and killed while just trying to do their jobs … all are part of a culture of violence and death fueled by the NRA and a weapons industry that sells power to black and brown people, fear to white people, and misery to all of us in the form of a gun. What does it look like for All Saints Church to trust that love is greater than fear and respond in a way that looks like God’s radical love lived out loud?
We continue to have space needs for our children, youth and families and are increasingly feeling the effects of deferred maintenance on our buildings. And – there is a crisis of affordable housing in our community. Members of our community are sleeping on the streets at night. What does it look like for All Saints Church to trust that love is greater than fear and respond in a way that looks like God’s radical love lived out loud?
The San Gabriel Valley right now is 74% Latino/Hispanic and Asian, and in the last census period the Asian-American population in Pasadena grew by 49%. The church is being reborn on the streets in movements of liberation for black lives, justice for immigrants and the rightful claiming of power for women. New generations are experiencing, exploring, wrestling with and celebrating queerness in radically new ways. What does it look like for All Saints Church to trust that love is greater than fear and respond in a way that looks like God’s radical love lived out loud?
We are still facing a substantial budget deficit. Put another way, we also have an abundance of more than $4,500,000 to use for God’s mission of radical love. What does it look like for All Saints Church to trust that love is greater than fear and respond in a way that looks like God’s radical love lived out loud?
What does it look like for us to be people whom God so deeply loves, who are continually offering ourselves, and who are being transformed by the most liberating, amazing love in creation?
What does all this look like? We will discover the answers together. We will continue our long history of being a wonderfully diverse, grace-filled circle of love. We will continue to come together in all our beautiful diversity around the radical love of God in Christ. We will be transformed by that love and by one another. We will ask ourselves the questions of what that liberating love combined with our lives looks like in a world of slavery and bondage. We will make decisions together based not on what is most comfortable but what is most loving and life-giving. We will be a community of truth-telling, courage, and fierce conversations; a community that strives to live holy, healthy lives individually and together. We will be a community of joy and hope and radical love that is so powerful that we will not only be changed ourselves but that the world will be changed by our presence.
We will be a community that falls in love a thousand times and holds each other when our heart gets broken. A community that believes we can meet the demands of the suffering – knowing that all of us are suffering somehow. A community that speaks our truth to power and that lives into the mission of our life.
Yes, God so loved the world as to give the Only Begotten One, that whoever believes may not die, but have eternal life.
How we read this passage, how we trust this passage and how we live this passage – that is our mission. And we have long since started. And I absolutely believe God has gathered us in this time and in this place for this work and that we are the right people for the job and that God will send us more and more and more to offer their gifts and share the labor. I wouldn’t be anywhere else. I hope you feel the same. AMEN.
