Last year I preached a sermon at Grace Episcopal Church during Lent. Several people have asked about this sermon recently. Here’s the full text from last year:
Eternal life.
How in the world did I come to be preaching on the day when the lectionary gives us what is arguably the most famous verse in the Bible?
Now most of the Western world would know “the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” They’d know “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” They’d know “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” If they went to Bible school, they’d know that famous shortest verse: “Jesus wept.”
But they’d KNOW John 3, verse 16. In the immortal King James language, “ For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosever believeth in him should not perish, have everlasting life.”
And then we go Baptist: [sing] “whosoever surely meaneth me.” It sounds vaguely like the theme from Hogan’s Heroes when I sing it today.
As I pondered this week what to say about this text, what words have not been said before, I thought it best to tell a personal story and see where that leads.
I’m a preacher’s kid. I grew up in church, three times a week, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. I was born while my dad was in seminary. We moved back to Missouri fairly early in my life, not too long after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I remember an early realization, just after I turned five years old, that this hell thing I was hearing about at church was scaring me. And so, one November Sunday night, I walked the aisle at an altar call, and got saved.
Speed forward through nearly fifteen years of church camp, youth retreats, evangelism training, mission trips, and thrice-weekly church services. I’m in college now, at a school very much like Taylor or Indiana Wesleyan, one that mandates chapel attendance and enforces a number of rules that legislate morality. I’d already given up my music major and moved to a major in religion.
It’s January 1981, and I’m taking a J-term course over a three-week period. The course, taught by my philosophy professor, deals with the uniqueness of religious language. To my rather literal mind, the realizations were coming fast and furious:
* God maybe doesn’t have six wings, even though God is described that way in some prophetic terms.
* Maybe part of the Bible is poetic, or representational, rather than concrete.
* What if God is genderless, rather than He?
All of this from a conservative Southern Baptist ordained minister who had a PhD in philosophy.
Then came this zinger: the Hebrew minds that wrote the Old Testament probably thought in different terms and concepts than the Greek-leaning minds who wrote the New Testament. The Hebrews thought in hyperbole and overstatement to an extreme degree. They tended to think in terms of extremes without qualification, in black and white without shades of gray. Greek minds think a bit more in gray, in contrasts, in possibilities.
Here’s an example. The Hebrew Pentateuch, Exodus 15, verse 8, is literally ‘with the blast of your nostrils.’ The Greek Septuagint, dating from a few centuries before the Christian era, translates this as ‘with the spirit of your anger.’ Notice that the Hebrew ‘blast of your nostrils’ gets the message across, poetically and powerfully, while the Greek makes it a bit more literal, leaving it up to us to define the anger.
So we come to that day in January 1981 when Dr. Dan, my philosophy professor, was talking about John 3.16. As clear as day, I remember what he said. “Maybe when Jesus says ‘eternal life,’ he’s not talking about a quantity of life. Maybe he’s talking about a quality of life.”
Dr. Dan left it there. I didn’t. I went back to my room before lunch, and didn’t leave my room until I’d wrestled with a nagging, unsettling question. When I had my so-called conversion experience at age five, was I just buying insurance against a loss of life, a loss of quantity? Had I ever dealt with the concept of a Godly quality of life?
Before that Friday afternoon was over, I’d knelt by my bed. As I saw it then, I had an Emmaus Road experience, one in which I let God into my life in a real way for the first time. As I look back now, with benefit of years of understanding of the human condition, and the power of emotion, I see that at age nineteen I was doing what we hope our kids do when they’re confirmed. I was taking on an adult understanding—and thus an adult responsibility—for something that I’d heard literally all of my life.
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We’re more than half-way through Lent. These forty days of spiritual renewal, of wilderness-style self-examination, are continuing. The question before us today comes from all three of today’s readings.
Are we wandering in the wilderness complaining, like the Hebrews are in today’s reading from Exodus? Are we being bitten by snakes, like the Jews? Are we being attacked by jealousy, rage, anger, bitterness—all truly human emotions that leave their venom just as surely as a serpent? Are we in need of a Moses to raise up a model of those sins in our midst, to remind us to repent?
As I work with the students of University Singers, one of the lessons I sometimes have to teach them is how to graciously accept compliments and applause and kudos. Paul speaks of accepting the grace of God in our New Testament reading today. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” Just as my kids sometimes have to learn to accept something positive, so do we. God has given us an immeasurable and inexplicable gift, one that our finite minds can’t fathom—the gift of life, not just of long life, but of untold riches of quality of life! Have we accepted that? Have you gracefully accepted the gift that God gives you?
There’s a bit of a wrinkle here. Paul reminds us that works—good deeds, right living—a result of our own acceptance of God’s grace. John puts it even more bluntly: “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.”
Here’s the deal: if God has given us a quality of life, and if we accept that quality and start living it out, our lives will inevitably show God’s grace. We’ll show God in our deeds, in our works, in our relationships…..in our smiles, in our inner glow, in our care for even the lowliest person we meet each day.
The works don’t save us. God does. But the deeds are the proof.
Believe in Jesus. Call him the Son of God. Profess your faith. Claim that eternal life. And then, by the grace of God, go live it out.
Claim God’s quality, not just God’s quantity. And then go live it out.
It’s a pretty swell deal.
