Saturday, March 17, 2018

Eternal Life Means Living Now.

John 3:13-21
March 11, 2018

I.

“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.”  It is the most famous and loved verse in the New Testament.  I learned it when I was about 4. For many if not most Christians, it is the gospel.

This verse tells us first of all that God’s relationship to the world is one of Lover.  God loves the whole world and everything in it.  God is love.  God cherishes and caresses and values everything that God has made.  God is this outpouring of joy and delight, fullness and peace, communion and welcome in which everyone and everything is included and integrated.  God is the Light that shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.  God’s energy infuses and charges everything.  

The world itself, the whole creation, is an overflowing of God’s love, spoken into being in the beginning.  God is the Giver who is ever pouring out light and love, goodness and blessing, which condenses into the matter and energy of creation: stars, planets, the Earth, life, and people; it is all an expression of divine generosity and abundance.  God is the Source, Guide, and Goal of all that is.  It is all very good.

God’s love for the world is fully and finally revealed and completed in the giving of God’s own Self in the form of the Son, the Word through whom all things were made, made flesh in Jesus Christ, the Truly Human One, the sacrificial Lamb who takes away all our human delusions of separation and independence, the One who is lifted up to show once and for all the Way of God, which is self-emptying, being sent, being given, being offered, in order to be raised up in eternal life.

God sends him into the world so that all may share in God’s life and be saved, so that all may see and know the truth of God’s love, so that all may be real and connected.  In this God sets the pattern for us to imitate and follow to participate in the fountain of love at the heart of all things, which is always a dying and a rising, always a release and an ascent, always a letting go and a rising up.  This is the dance of life itself.  

Real life means participating in this pattern and placing our whole- hearted trust in the only Son whom God gave to the world out of love.  This means that if we really want to live, then we need to follow the One who is lifted up — first on the cross, then in his resurrection and ascension.  If we do that, not only will we know what it is to live, but we will live forever.  We will never die.  

This is what we are about.  This is the good news we have for folks.  This is our invitation.  It is a paradox.  Some say it is a contradiction.  We are basically inviting people to die so that they will never die.  It doesn’t make any conventional logical sense.  It expresses a bigger and deeper truth beyond and beneath the things we think are true and the way we think the world is.  To follow him is to die to our false idea of the world and ourselves, and be reborn in the truth of God’s love. 

II. 

The church has always emphasized the word “believe” in this verse.  It says that the way we participate in what God is doing is by “believing” in the One in Whom God is doing it: Jesus Christ.  

But we have allowed that word to be completely neutralized and rendered utterly inert by reducing “believe” to a mere matter of having a cognitive opinion that at most means that we say some words.  As if we only need to say out-loud that you have this opinion and you’re done.  Jesus does everything else.

But “believe” means far more than this.  Having a conviction and being able to articulate it is not unimportant.  We do have to confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior.  At the same time, believe means follow.  Having a “lord” means a relationship of obedience and submission.  You act differently.  This is not just something we think in our minds, but something we do with our bodies too.  Believing is participatory; it is immersive; we do it with our whole self.  We identify with and become the One in whom we believe.  

That’s why I prefer the word “trust.”  It is one thing to have an opinion about the safety of a rope bridge over a chasm, it is another to trust the bridge with our life by actually starting across it.  Jesus invites us on a journey.  The early church calls itself the Way because they sense they are going somewhere.  Jesus calls players onto the field, not fans to watch from the bleachers.    

This verse means that everyone who follows Jesus Christ, everyone who lives according to his life and commandments, everyone who participates in him and in this pattern he establishes of being sent, given, poured out, and lifted up through suffering and death into life, will not perish but will live forever.  Everyone who gives up their old, false, blind, lame existence will emerge with a new, true life in God’s light that starts now and lasts always.  Death becomes not an end, but a passage.     

The only way to prove this is to do it.  It is to realize that we are not our old self, and to separate ourself from it, and stop identifying with it, and identify instead with the love of God poured out for the world in Jesus Christ.  

That’s why Jesus uses that odd story from the Book of Numbers about the image of a snake that Moses puts on a pole so that the people were able to be healed from snakebite by looking at.  So also people are healed of their old selves’ addiction to death by integrating the lifting up of Jesus in his death and resurrection.  We become aware of both the murderous and ghastly consequences of our ego-centric, fearful violence, inflicted even upon the loving God, as we see in gory detail what we and our systems do to people.  This is what our fear and anger, our hatred and greed, our lust and gluttony do to life.  This is what we are however unconsciously spawning in the world by our participation in evil.  The cross ought to shock us into revulsion over what we have allowed ourselves to become.

III.

And at the same time we see that horror neutralized and disarmed in its subsequent resolution into glorious, resurrection life.  That life — eternal life — the life of the resurrection — is the ultimate realization of this passage and the center of Christian faith.  

Unfortunately, we have managed to distort and cripple this reality as well, reducing it to something that only happens either after we die or at the end of time.  The possibility of knowing eternal life now is discounted even though it is the whole point of Jesus’ ministry.  We have twisted it into merely our “heavenly reward” after death for our having the right theological opinion.  

But Jesus means much more than that by the term eternal life.  Eternal life is the way Jesus talks in John’s gospel about the Kingdom of God.  We don’t know it fully while we are in this mortal body, but in and through him by his Spirit we are able to see and participate in, and anticipate, eternal life even today on this side of death.  We begin to know it in the community of disciples we gather with in Jesus name to share in his Body and Blood, by which we ingest his life and become him.

Eternal life means living now in the consciousness of our integration into God and God’s creation.  It means identifying with Christ, and therefore with both God and with all people, as Christ is the Word made flesh, truly God and truly human.  Eternal life is an experience of holy oneness with everything God has made; it is profound joy in God’s goodness.  Eternal life is to fall on our knees in awestruck gratitude just for the privilege of being alive and conscious in a creation that is saturated with miracles.  It means that when our mortal frame finally does give out and return to its elements, we also merge into the light and love that is the deepest substance of everything, the Word by Whom all things were made, and we are free.

Eternal life means living now in this consciousness, and therefore in compassion and thanksgiving, unity and equality, joy and wonder, forgiveness and acceptance with everyone and everything, cultivating that kind of life with others in the gospel community.  It means being leaven that flavors all of human society and bends it however subtly ever more towards justice and non-violence, generosity and service.  It means walking lightly on the earth, seeing the humor in everything, and lifting up the lowest while gently bringing down those perched on pedestals.  It means dancing with laughter and delight in the light of God’s love.

IV.

We are living in what is called the “post-truth” world.  That means that the former consensus about what it true has broken down, and people are finding and inventing their own convenient truths to live by, most of which are just self-serving fantasies that will come crashing down when they hit the wall of reality.  

We know that the one truth that can be depended on is summed up in this verse.  This truth does not belong to us.  It does not exclude anyone — though many exclude themselves by choosing the darkness of fear and hatred.  And our response to them is always and only love.  Because if this verse is true, we have to be the proof.  We have to be the living proof of God’s love for the world, finally fulfilled in the giving of God’s only Son.  We have to be the living proof that in following, trusting, obeying, and believing together the self-expression of God in Jesus Christ, we begin now to live forever.
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