Fourth Sunday in Lent, B; March 15, 2015; The Rev Pamela L. Werntz

O God of grace, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

I’ve spent most of this last week without a voice – a terrible malady for a singer or a preacher! Imagining that I would need to be prudent with my speaking today, last week I asked Clark if he would preside. He offered to preach as well, which was generous and great, but I already had a head of steam building about the readings, about some of the translations, and about punctuation and so I was too greedy to talk, to explore these heavily freighted scripture passages that some Christians cling to and some want to get as far from as possible. Emmanuelites are often in that latter group of saints! To many here, the passage from John seems like one more description of a divine sorting mechanism to decide who is in and who is out of God’s realm. One esteemed member of our community has called our Gospel reading a shakedown.

When the Tuesday morning Bible Study conversation group sat together to wrestle with the Gospel reading this past week, it was someone else (not I) who suggested that a different punctuation would shift the focus and meaning of this famous passage. Imagine my delight at this pedagogical victory. It’s a hard thing for us to question sentence structure, especially when reading Holy Scripture, but punctuation and sentences are medieval inventions applied retroactively to ancient texts to make them easier for us to read. The problem is that punctuation is an editorial decision, and with scripture, a theological decision. You can’t see it very well in your bulletin, but the New Revised Standard Version translation gives the famous verse John 3:16 its own paragraph! Why on earth does that sentence need its very own paragraph? This past week, Biblical translation blogger, D. Mark Davis, called that particular editorial choice a “Billy Grahamification.” [1]

John, chapter 3, verse 16, is sometimes called “the Gospel in a nutshell” and is often found on bumper stickers and billboards, posters at professional sporting events held by people who hope to be caught on camera for the television and the jumbo-tron. (What a name). It’s printed on the bottom rim of paper cups in the fast food chain “In-N-Out Burgers” and on the shopping bags of the clothing retailer “Forever 21”? (Really. Would anyone want to be 21 forever? That sounds awful to me.) “John 3:16” is printed on the boxes of Tornado Fuel Savers too (for you city-folks, a Tornado Fuel Saver is an automotive part which doesn’t work at all, according to consumer watchdog groups). I joke, I think, because that kind of zealous religious faith frightens me, especially because it is often used against me and people I care about.

When I stop to think of what verse of the scriptures I might choose for my “Gospel in a nutshell,” if I could only choose one, I realized, to my chagrin, that it would have to be John 13:34 in which Jesus says, “Just as I have loved you, you are to love one another.” Jesus actually says, “love one another” four times in the Gospel of John – he really meant it, as far as I can tell. And my poking fun at other people’s piety is not at all loving. I know I shouldn’t do it. Religious arrogance is ugly whether its face is progressive or conservative, whether it manifests itself in a believer or an agnostic or an atheist. It’s always particularly ugly from a pulpit, so I hope that anyone who I offended a few minutes ago, has stayed in the room long enough to hear my acknowledgement of one of the ways in which I miss the mark.

So how might we engage this Gospel passage without shame or arrogance? Looking at the context of this passage, we learn that Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus, a well-educated community leader (a Pharisee), who comes to speak with Jesus at night. He seems sincere enough about his desire to know Jesus. He starts out, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.” Our passage today is the conclusion of their conversation. Right after this, John says, “Jesus and his disciples went into the Judean countryside, and he spent some time there with them and baptized.” What’s interesting about that is that this is the only place in all four Gospels that says that Jesus baptized people. Then it says that “John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim because water was abundant there; and people kept coming and were being baptized – John, of course, had not yet been thrown into prison.” Those three verses never get read in church in anybody’s lectionary cycle – probably because they conflict with the meta-narrative that Jesus picked up where John left off.

So back to what is read in church. My complaint about translation is the word that gets translated condemn (krino) is a much more neutral word like evaluate or adjudicate. Condemn seems like an unnecessarily harsh translation choice even if it isn’t completely wrong; it sounds like a threat, especially following so close behind the words “eternal life,” which always sound like a euphemism for heaven to our 21^st century ears. Listen to this: Indeed God did not send the Son into the world to adjudicate the world. (period) And in order that the world might be saved through him, those who believe in him are not adjudicated. (period) But those who do not believe are adjudicated 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. (period) The light of the love of Jesus, that is, the light of love is shining and exposing those places where there is no love. Those whose deeds are not at all loving, who prefer not to be exposed, are scurrying for cover.

It’s hard to notice the last sentence in our reading because most of us have already gone somewhere else in our heads by the time we get to hearing verse 21, but I beg you to notice that according to John, truth is not something to be known, truth is something to be done. “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.” It’s an invitation, an encouragement, an assurance. Believing, once again, is not intellectual assent according to the Gospels. Believing is beloving. And eternal life is not about life after death, it’s about life before death.

Eternal life gets talked about in the Gospel of John about three dozen times. That’s almost three times as many as all the other Gospels combined. Usually John is writing about “having” eternal life. To our ears, eternal sounds like the future – or more specifically, the future after death. The Greek word that gets translated “eternal” is also the root of the word eon. To our ears, that sounds like the distant past. The word covers the distant past and the distant future. The word also has a qualitative distinction and carries implications of relationship to the divine. Some translators render it “unending real life.” What I think we miss when we hear the word eternal, is that it includes now: unending real life right now. Later in John (11:25-26) Jesus says that eternal life has already begun. Eternal life in this case is about a timeless now, not never-never land. The life that the Jesus community is offering is real and it is available right now.

I wonder if, like Moses, we might take this passage from the Gospel of John that has bitten (and killed) so many, and put it on a pole and hold it up as a symbol of hope and affirmation and encouragement for those who do what is true, that is, whatever is kind, whatever is loving, whatever is good. I wonder if we held it high, it might heal people who are still getting bitten by exclusion and condemnation because of who they are, how they love, what they do or do not profess. We could proclaim that here is strong evidence of Jesus as God’s messenger of reconciliation and well-being, of dignity asserted in non-violent ways. We could proclaim that anyone who does what is true, what is kind, loving, and good, can have a whole-hearted and meaningful eternal life. That is the grace of God, given freely, according to the Letter to the Ephesians.

Listen to my favorite poem of the late feminist theologian Dorothee Soelle. It’s in our own Jane Redmont’s wonderful book, When in Doubt, Sing. [2]

“When He Came (10.)”

I don’t as they put it believe in god
but to him I cannot say no hard as I try
take a look at him in the garden
when his friends ran out on him
his face wet with fear
and with the spit of his enemies
him I have to believe

Him I can’t bear to abandon
to the great disregard for life
to the monotonous passing of millions of years
to the moronic rhythm of work leisure and work
to the boredom we fail to dispel
in cars in beds in stores

That’s how it is they say what do you want
uncertain and not uncritically
I subscribe to the other hypothesis
which is his story
that’s not how it is he said for god is
and he staked his life on this claim

Thinking about it I find
one can’t let him pay alone
for his hypothesis
so I believe him about
god

The way one believes another’s laughter
his tears
or marriage or no for an answer
that’s how you’ll learn to believe him about life
promised to all.

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