“God So Loved the World”
Rev. Dr. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
April 25, 2010
John 3: 1-17
At our home, during Holy Week, we had a fence installed in our back yard to keep our dog, Callie, in. We didn’t realize when we moved into our house in late fall that there were rabbits living in the backyard too. The rabbits weren’t used to the fence so the first weekend it was up, Easter weekend; Callie chased them all around the yard, much to the delight of our two little children, until the rabbits figured out how to get out under the fence. I brought Callie to the early service today for the blessing of the animals and I joked with one of you earlier that she be encouraged to take part in a prayer of confession for chasing the Easter bunny. At one point that weekend our youngest son, Brendan, was sitting in his high chair when his older brother, Andrew, was yelling about a rabbit running in the backyard. We brought Brendan down from his high chair and instead of looking out the back window with Andrew; he started charging down the hall towards the window by the front side of the house. My wife and I said, “Where is he going? The rabbit is in the back, or at least was last seen there. Brendan’s running as if the bunny is just going to be sitting out front in the middle of the street.” Brendan got to the window, started pointing and screeched - he can’t really talk yet. Sure enough, the rabbit had come under the fence and was just sitting there out front in the middle of the street. Brendan was so proud of himself for finding the bunny on Easter weekend.
Ah to be a kid again. Some of my earliest memories of nature include the times when my parents came home with a rabbit; we named him Twinkles, who was my first pet friend. As a child, I would also go to a place called Carlton Smith gardens near my home. Sitting on the grass, in the sun, among the flowers, I would watch the dragonflies jump from pad to pad on the pond. It was one of my early spiritual experiences.
In our second lesson, we read of a man who had a special spiritual experience sitting with Jesus. In John chapter 3, one of the most frequently read chapters in the Bible, we read of a conversation between Jesus and a Pharisee named Nicodemus. We read it because during this season of Easter, during this creation care Sunday, John 3 has something important to say about God’s love for our world. Reading from God’s holy word.
This week we as a nation celebrate Earth Day and as a church we praise God’s creative process in our world through lessons like Psalm 148. Our congregation is helping lead our Presbytery in focusing on renewing the earth. Members of Bradley Hills have written books on environmental issues. Our adult education classes are focusing now on stewardship of the earth.
The reason we as a Congregation take seriously our care of our part of the world is because we believe that God takes care of the world seriously. In John chapter 3, we read of the Pharisee, Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish council called the Sanhedrin. He was mature, wise and respected. He was also attracted to Jesus’ message and sought Jesus out at much risk to himself. Jesus shared with him the familiar words that John records, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son.”
When John includes references to the word “world”, or kosmos, in his Gospel, the references are not always positive. Yet here John records Jesus as saying that God “loved the world.” How much did God love the world? So much that God gave God’s only son. The use of the words “so,” “gave,” and “only,” signify the significance of God’s sacrifice.
John wrote at the turn of the 2nd century, around the time when he and the early church faced the heresy of Gnosticism. There were several strains of Gnosticism, but many of these religious people believed that only the spiritual part of creation was good and that the physical part was bad. They rejected that a supreme and good God would have created the imperfect world. Instead, many thought that a lesser God must have created it. Some Gnostics even rejected the idea that Jesus was a physical being; rather they thought Jesus was only a spiritual being. They thought the world was not good.
It’s like Ivan Karamazov put it in Dostoyevsky’s classic, "It's not God that I don't accept, I do not accept the world that God created.” Too often we have been guilty of rejecting the world. Of not caring for it. For not taking seriously that God has created it. In this season of Easter, though, we proclaim God’s love through Christ for the world. Just as God does not give up on us at Easter, so we are called to not give up on the world. That is the theology of our tradition. In fact, the earliest councils of the Christian church, at Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedon, rejected the Gnostics (and Karamazov philosophy) and affirmed that Jesus was fully divine and fully human, born of humanity, and was part of this physical world which God had created. Word became flesh, human flesh. For the physical world matters too. God so loved the world, despite its flaws, that God gave of Godself to care for it.
So if we take God’s love seriously, we should think about how we might love the world as well.
Poet Mary Oliver wrote:
“Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain. All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of spring. I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water. There is only one question: how to love this world.”
“There is only one question: how to love this world.” How we answer that question says a lot about how we respond to the God who loves our world.
How do we learn to love this world that God loves? We learn to love the world by seeing God in the natural world. There are many people who say they find God in nature, in the general revelation of God and in the natural surroundings. We affirm that Christ dwells inside of us, that God has put a part of Godself in us by creating us. Well, God has also put a part of Godself in all of creation. The Psalmist saw God in the world. He wrote, “The Heavens tell of God’s glory, the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.” Even Woody Allen saw God in nature saying “only God can make a tree – probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.”
Millions of people, including many in our congregation, were stranded in Europe last week because of smoke from a volcano in Iceland. In natural events, both good and challenging, we see the awesome power of God. We look at the cherry blossoms in Washington or the azaleas and dogwoods around our church and see God’s handiwork. We see God in the instincts of animals to care for their young, in the amazingly complex patterns of spider webs and in the simple patterns of grass.
Last weekend, we visited my family in southwest Ohio for my uncle’s annual daffodil party. Over a period of years he has planted more than 75,000 daffodil bulbs on his farm. When they are in bloom they are heavenly.
Within the last month, two of you have sent me photographs you took of sunrises and sunsets that connected you to God. And I can see why.
We learn to love the world by finding ourselves in the natural world. We began Lent on Ash Wednesday by proclaiming our connection to God’s creation saying that we are “dust and to the dust of the earth we shall return.”
For many of us, we find not only God, but ourselves, in nature. Last week I was talking to a person who said that in the past they had felt most alive and authentic, their true self, when they are hiking mountains in this country. The person also shared with me that they had an important decision to make at the time. So I told the person to go “take a hike.” I didn’t mean to get out of my office. I meant literally to take a hike. For this person feels closest to God when they are part of God’s natural creation. Walking up steady hills lifts our spirits to the heavens. The sounds of rushing water connects us to the rush of the Holy Spirit. The colors of cardinals, robins and blue jays connect us to the colors of the rainbow that for Noah was a sign of God’s covenant.
We learn to love the world by realizing that we do not own the world. The Psalmist wrote that “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.” We talk about creation stewardship using that same term, “stewardship,” that we use for financial stewardship because the concept of stewardship is about using well property someone else has entrusted to us.
This physical world is not something we inhabit forever. It is something we have an ability to influence, abuse, or improve over a period of time. Caring for God’s creation is an important task that benefits not only ourselves, but those who will come after us. We care for it for the sake of our children, for their children and for all the wonderful animals who were with us this morning for the blessing of the animals.
We learn to love the world by taking seriously the human damage being done to the environment and our responsibility to manage the resources of the world. Our production of energy results in a variety of harmful impacts on the world that God loves. We are called to care for our church in ways that protect its environment. We are called not to litter, but to clean up the church and to pick up trash when we see it. We are called through our garden guild to care for our grounds. Traudie Holman has worked for years to help care for our beautiful surroundings and as she moves away to be with family this summer, we need to step up. Several of our lay ministries are working together led by Property Management and Church and Society to make our church more environmentally sustainable. The more I got into writing this sermon I found myself trying not to print out copies so as to save paper. What we do at home matters. How we recycle, how we turn off lights, as my wife frequently reminds me, and how we use energy efficiently matters. What we do collectively matters too. It’s up to us to at least educate ourselves about the environment and about the issues surrounding it. Whether it’s the reading what our local papers this week have to say about how we can conserve energy, or Time magazine’s article this week on “The Perils of Plastic.” Or for those of us who are strongly looking for civility in the public square, of all major areas of public policy, the one at the federal level with the most real bipartisanship in the U.S. Senate might be the environment. As the best hope for the passage of an energy and climate bill is likely from liberal John Kerry, conservative Lindsey Graham and moderate Joe Lieberman working together. However you feel on the issues its worth becoming educated about them.
We learn to love the world by reading the Bible. For the Bible tells us of God’s love for our world. Poet Wendell Berry once said, “I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is best read and understood outdoors and the farther outdoors the better.” I was hoping to read the Bible outdoors at our 8:30 service and it rained, but this week I challenge myself and you to take your Bible and read it somewhere outside. Look for connections between what you read about the world that God loves and the act of Christ in the resurrection. Our passage, John 3:16, makes the link between God’s love for our world and Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection for us at Easter. John 3:16 is fundamentally about God’s love for the world, Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection and our opportunity to respond. We can think of our care of the environment in the same terms. Because God loved the world, God gave God’s son and through his love give us the gift of life on this amazing planet. Our opportunity is to seek to conserve it so our surroundings can flourish beyond our mortal lives and so that we might resurrect parts of our world that need attention in gratitude to the God who gives us hope for life beyond this world.
William Jennings Bryan wrote, “To every created thing God has given a tongue that proclaims a resurrection. If God deigns to touch with divine power the cold and pulseless heart of the buried acorn, and makes it burst forth from its prison wall, will God leave neglected the soul of humanity? If God gives to the rosebush, whose withered blossoms float upon the breeze, the sweet assurance of another springtime, will God withhold the words of hope from us, when the frosts of winter come?.......Rather let us believe that God -who wastes not the raindrop, the blade of grass or the evening’s sighing zephyr, but makes them all to carry out God’s eternal plan – has given immortality to the mortal.” Thanks to be God. Amen.
