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‘B’ // Lent 4 // 3-22-09 // Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian, Ann Arbor, MI
Scriptures Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22 Ephesians 2:1-20 John 3:14-21
Primary Source
It might come as a shock to some of you. But I’ve shared with this congregation before that I once preached a tent revival service.
Actually, it was one of many tent revival services over a period of a week in September 1995 that was planned by the ministerial alliance in the small Oklahoma town where I was serving. I had Sunday night – the second night.
A Presbyterian pastor, one year out of seminary, preaching at a tent revival. Scary, huh?
But it wasn’t all that hard. All I really had to do was reach back – way back. Back to my Southern Protestant upbringing. Growing up Presbyterian, I may not have been immersed in the sweaty revivalist culture of the South that Flannery O’Connor once called “hardly Christ-centered … most certainly Christ-haunted.” But thanks to the urgent fervor of high school and early college parachurch activity, I had more than a passing acquaintance with a faith that was less about enlightenment and more about inspiration. I may not have borne the smell of sawdust in my nostrils, but neither had I bathed in the aroma of the Enlightenment. I had not inhaled. Not fully.
For based on a chronically troubled young adulthood and the new life I experienced out of it all, I knew – I really knew –the language of sin and salvation. And it did not – and does not – make me feel uncomfortable.
Thanks to my immersions in the Peoples Republics of Berkeley and Ann Arbor, such language today sometimes makes me squirm. Yet, there’s something to be said for the ever-human narrative of sin and salvation: the agony and the ecstasy of it all. There’s something to be said for the gospel as a rescue story.
Indeed, when we consider the plight of Jesus’ first century peasant audience in the Roman Empire, rescue may in fact lie at the gospel’s very root. For when we reach a point in life where the Spirit is all we need because the Spirit is all we have … then, and only then, we can begin to face what we do not wish to face in this world:
Our futilities. Our heartbreaks. Cultural and spiritual forces over which we have little control … that tap us like sap from our tree of life. Forces which take courage to face – yes. But more than that: Forces we can only face when we realize that even our most steadfast faith in God’s grace is not a work – in the words of the Apostle Paul today, “not of our own doing.” But that our faith is simply a response to God’s gracious rescue of us all. Our faith is simply a response to what primarily sources us all.
“For God so loved the world” – the whole world – to the point that “whosoever believes in God shall not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Now this is primary source material – with the benefits of a direct dependence upon that source!
Anyone who has ever done research on a university and especially a graduate level know how professors emphasize going to the primary sources to do that research.
But none of us has to attend a university – much less a graduate school – to understand the importance of the primary source. Anyone who has ever played the “Pass It On” game in elementary school knows of what I speak.
“Pass It On”. It goes like this: The teacher – the primary source – whispers a sentence to the first student in class. That student whispers it to the next and so on, till the final student hears it and then announces with a youthful degree of certainty what has originally been said.
I can remember to this day my second-grade experience of this game. The last student trumpeted, “Mrs. Wilson (our teacher) is going to tell us a story!” Then, Mrs. Wilson asked the first student to stand and tell everyone what she really had said: “Andy went to the store to buy some apples.”
Friends: As with countless students today who rush to Wikipedia rather than dig and irrigate around the roots of truth, we all find great comfort in life in sitting toward the back of God’s classroom and waiting for someone else – often, many someone elses – to pass along to us the word from the primary source. It’s safer that way. It’s more comfortable that way. We can hide out that way.
We can hide … behind the knowledge that John the Evangelist is almost assuredly constructing words and putting them in Jesus’ mouth today – at least four generations after Jesus walked the earth. The best biblical scholars are almost certain this is the case.
And yet – regardless of whether Jesus said these words or not – here they lie before us, in all their unvarnished and primary glory: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, and whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
“The Gospel in miniature,” the Protestant reformer Martin Luther called this verse. Not because of our practice of creedal purity unto God. But because of God’s practice of love unto us.
Love, from our primary source. Love that we miss, when we look first to the interlocutors – their great minds and books and that occasional great sermon notwithstanding – whispering and hence garbling that love meant directly for our ears,. When we look first to these and other entertainers – from the Latin, “those who hold themselves between others” – simply because the intimacy of God loving each of us in a more unmediated, unadulterated, unfiltered way is too powerful a notion to directly comprehend, much less embrace.
Or is it? Or else: Why should we – each of us – practice the primary sourcing of our primary source: something that is known as the practice of prayer?
Talk about moving beyond your current “entertainment” – the one you are presently looking at, if your eyelids aren’t presently closed.
As I prepare to leave Northside, please know this: This pastor – as with all other pastors before and after – need never stand between you and God and become anything close to a precise and accurate whisperer of God’s love to you. Not to put too fine a point on the matter: but I am not your God-whisperer!
This past week, a big-steeple Presbyterian pastor I know announced that he is leaving his congregation in less than three weeks.
Uncoerced. And on Palm Sunday. In order that he might be ensconced in his new pulpit 1000 miles away one week later, on Easter Sunday. Gee: How symbolic.
It may be just me. But if it were my church that that pastor was coming to, and I were to walk into the door of my church on Easter Sunday morning to welcome the Good News of the risen Lord once again in my life, I would not like to have the welcome of a new pastor to compete with that Good News!
To use a term once associated with Microsoft and its internet browser: Talk about a pastor bundling himself with his primary source! Or at the very least, not stepping aside to let the primary source love his new parishioners – each and every one of them – into new life on her own universal terms …
But that’s what happens when we go about entertaining others, i.e. holding ourselves between others, and God’s unvarnished love. When we formally educated sorts have had all the silly pieties and pronouncements of our childhood so drummed from our souls that we can then set about diminishing or diluting or even dismissing the directness of God’s love so brazenly … so blithely … so “intelligently” …
Hear now these words from one who is not only intelligent, but more importantly one who is wise: an outstanding preacher and seminary professor of such named Tom Long:
Recently a popular theologian declared, “The Jesus who ‘died for our sins’ has simply got to go … Christianity must move beyond a rescuing Jesus.” Part of me wants to purr like a kitten in relieved agreement. Yes, let’s sweep away the cobwebs clinging to Jesus the rescuer. But then I realize that I am face down on a linoleum floor somewhere in my life, powerless, praying like mad, “You’ve done it for others, God. I am begging you, do it for me.” And when I find myself lifted up into new life and hope, I am more grateful than ever I can say (in the words of the Apostle Paul today), “by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing.”1
Not our own doing – but God’s. Our primary source.
The frequent use and misuse of John 3:16 by our more scrupulously zealous sisters and brothers begs me to leave you with these two questions:
· Is what frightens you the most about this famous verse in scripture the litmus test attitude – the creedal certainty – brought to bear upon it?
· Or, is what frightens you the most the universal sovereignty of the actual verse: that “God so loved the world” and “whosoever believes”?
As for me: I’m more afraid of the power of the latter!
Only when I realize that that sovereignty is all about the intimacy – that my primary source is just dying to love me, regardless of what anyone else says or does not say about that source – that I can be set free. Free to be afraid of that power no more.
For it’s not the love of power: believe, or be damned! That, my friends, is secondary to it all.
It’s all about the power of love: for “the world”, and “whosoever believes”. That, my friends, is primary to it all.
And that Good News is the best news of all!
2Thomas G. Long, “Just as I am”, reflection on Ephesians 2:1-10 in “Living the Word”, Christian Century, March 21, 2006, Vol. 123, No. 6, p. 18.
Benediction …
According to John 3:16, God loves.
God loves the world.
God loved the world so.
God loved the world so that God gave.
God loved the world so that God gave God’s flesh.
What to do, but believe.
What to celebrate, but life – forevermore.
Go out into the world in peace,
and pass that best of the Good News on.
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