Text used – John 3:14-21

• A little over a week ago, we took the kids to a concert up in the cities – the TobyMac concert.
  • TobyMac = long-time Christian recording artist
  • 4 other opening acts before Toby → each used a different part of the stage so the venue staff could continue to set things up while the opening acts were playing → In particular, there was one woman, Tasha Layton, who did her set at the front of the stage – the part closer to the audience – and did her set in a very stripped-down sort of way. It was just her, a few instrumentalists, and a spotlight.
    • Rest of the Target Center was dark while she was singing → Julia was fascinated by the spotlight as it cut through the darkness over our heads and illuminated the woman on stage
      • Powerful beam
      • Doused the singer in a bright white light (definitely an LED bulb in that thing!)
      • Lit up all sorts of unintentional things in its path from that spotlight stand to the stage → dust motes, mostly … maybe a few bugs
      • Julia kept turning around in her seat and looking for the source of that beam of light. I kept looking at the performer thinking, “Man, that bright light has to be blinding.” Such is the difference between childhood innocence and adult experience, I guess. Julia looked at the spotlight with wonder. I looked at it with discomfort.
• Our Scripture reading this morning not only speaks of light, but it also shines the spotlight of grace on us and for us – a spotlight that can be both wonderful and uncomfortable all at the same time.
  • (Obvious) acknowledgement: today’s Scripture reading includes probably the most famous passage in all of Scripture – John 3:16 – which says … [cue congregational recitation] Exactly. None of y’all needed to look at your Bibles or the text in the bulletins to recite that. But the thing about Scripture is it’s never just one verse. The word of God is words in context. You can’t pull one single sentence or one single verse out without looking at and considering the verses that surround it. Life doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and Scripture wasn’t written in a vacuum. Scripture builds layers upon itself. It references other passages. It tells the same stories from different angles. It weaves the same overarching message – the ultimate message of God’s love for all people – into so many different types of texts that the message becomes inescapable. So today we’re going to consider the context of that one verse that people like to pull out: God so loved the world that he gave is only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.[1]
  • So let’s back up.
    • Beginning of today’s passage: Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so must the Human One be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life.[2] → references story from First Testament – Num 21
      • Part of the story of the Israelites wandering in the desert for 40 yrs. after being turned away from the Promised Land for lack of faith
      • Text: They marched from Mount Hor on the Reed Sea road around the land of Edom. The people became impatient on the road. The people spoke against God and Moses: “Why did you bring us up from Egypt to kill us in the desert, where there is no food or water. And we detest this miserable bread!” (referring to the manna that God had continually provided for them) So the Lord sent poisonous snakes among the people and they bit the people. Many of the Israelites died. The people went to Moses and said, “We’ve sinned, for we spoke against the Lord and you. Pray to the Lord so that he will send the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. The Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous snake and place it on a pole. Whoever is bitten can loo at it and live.” Moses made a bronze snake and placed in on a pole. If a snake bit someone, that person would look at the bronze snake and live.[3]
        • Formulaic story in the First Testament: people complain against God → God causes something terrible to happen → people repent → follow God’s instruction once again → Moses and others worship
        • Now, we may hear this story and think, “They’re worshiping the snake for healing them. This is idolatry.” But the thing is, it’s not about the snake. It’s about following God’s direction … following God’s plan … even when that plan is hard or it doesn’t make sense to us. – scholar: The point of the comparison between Jesus and this quasi-magical totem is that the serpent had to be lifted up so that the Israelites could see it and receive its life-saving benefits. So too the Son of Man must be lifted up so that those who believe might have eternal life.[4]
  • Rest of the passage speaks to how we go about seeking that eternal life – text: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life. God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.[5] → We’re going to pause on these two verses for a minute, friends, because they’re really, really important together.
    • God sent Jesus into the world for the sake of pure and unconditional love → love so strong and so unrelenting that God desires eternity with us to continue living into that love → “God so loved the world … the whole world … that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.” Whole. World. Everyone. All. Each. There are no parameters in this much-loved, often-wielded verse. There are no “except for the”s. There are no exclusions, no escape clauses, no parameters defining people that God doesn’t love.
      • Bumper sticker: God loved the whole world. No exceptions.
      • Sentiment reiterate by the following verse: God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.[6] → Here’s the thing, friends. If God sent his own treasured, beloved, holy Son into the world not to judge the world but to love and redeem it … what on God’s green earth makes us think it’s our job to do that judging? If God didn’t even send Jesus – God’s own Son, God’s own self incarnate – into the world to judge, what makes us think that God is calling us in all our broken, flawed, human imperfections to pass any kind of judgment.
• Basis of the rest of the passage – the part about judgment and belief, light and dark, actions and truth, evil and fear
  • John uses a lot of dark/light imagery throughout his gospel. It’s there in the very beginning – What came into being through the Word was life, and the life was the light for all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light.[7] → idea introduced here that the ministry of Christ was a light to shine on the hearts and lives, words and actions of all = idea further developed in our passage today → It’s the idea that Jesus’ life and ministry and love and grace are the spotlight on our lives – a light that illumines our whole selves, hiding nothing before God.
    • Translation makes it sound simple enough: The light came into the world, and people loved darkness more than the light, for their actions are evil.[8] → And we think to ourselves, “Well, that can’t be us. Our actions aren’t evil. Evil is deep. Evil is intentional. Evil is a great big thing.”
      • Gr. is much more nuanced than that – “evil” = spoiled, vicious, painful, degenerate, arrogant, envious → There are plenty of subtle ways to engage in this “evil” that John speaks of – ways in which we chip away at the world around us, judging others without knowing or understanding their circumstances … celebrating (internally or externally) when someone gets “knocked down a “peg” because we feel they deserve to be “put in their place” … putting ourselves above others because we tell ourselves that we’re better in some way … causing pain to others, not necessarily in any big way, but in a thousand small, passive aggressive ways.
  • You see, friends, we know in our hearts that none of these things are the ways that Jesus would go about being in this world. We know that they stem, not from our faith, but from our brokenness. And it’s a whole lot more comfortable to keep that brokenness in the shadows so that other’s don’t discover it. Maybe we even fool ourselves into thinking that God won’t discover it if we keep it well-hidden enough. → 2 problems with that
    • FIRST, nothing is hidden from God → God knows us better than we know ourselves. There is not a part of our lives, our hearts, our spirits, or our minds with which God is not intimately familiar.
    • SECOND, trying to hide these things from God is only counterproductive because all we end up doing is hiding them from grace → One of my favorite phrases when it comes to Church life is “you can’t protect people from their own generosity.” It’s about presenting people with opportunities to give and to serve in unexpected ways because we can never truly know just how generous others are willing to be. Grace is similar to this idea in that we never truly know just how generous God is willing to be with grace until we present God with the opportunity to lavish that grace on our whole selves. But in order to do that, we can’t hold anything back. We have to bring it all into the light.
      • Brandan Robertson: This is the profound paradox of grace: in order to receive it, one must go through the painful process of exposing one’s inner brokenness and sinfulness. Until one’s sins are exposed, there is no reason to seek out grace. But stepping into the light, even with the promise of grace and forgiveness, is hard to do. … Lent is a season of owning our brokenness, taking an account of the impact our wrongdoing has on our lives, on our world, and on those around us. It’s a season when we set aside time to go through the painful process of bringing our dark and ugly parts into the light of God’s truth, allowing ourselves and others to see all the ways that we are in need of healing and grace. It’s a terribly difficult process, but it is also liberating. Once we step into the light of God with every part of ourselves exposed, we have the profound gift of hearing Jesus proclaim the words that he says early on in our Gospel reading: “I have not come to condemn the world, but to heal it!”[9]
• Want to end with the song that that opening act artist sang in one of her songs – picture her standing there on a dark stage in a dark stadium lit up by the dazzling brightness of that spotlight and belting out these words: “Singing in the Dark” by Tasha Layton[10]

https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/18rRb189sPhZJWzrJMHmNT?utm_source=generator

• Because in the end, even as we struggle in the darkness … even as we strive toward the light … even as we cringe away from all the light may reveal, the spotlight of God’s grace is the light of love … of hope … of forgiveness. It’s a light that keeps us singing praise … even in the dark. Amen.

[1] Jn 3:16.

[2] Jn 3:14-15.

[3] Num 21:4-9 (clarification added).

[4] Jouette M. Bassler. “Fourth Sunday in Lent – John 3:14-22 – Exegetical Perspective” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary – Year B, vol. 2. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 117.

[5] Jn 3:16-17.

[6] Jn 3:17.

[7] Jn 1:3b-5.

[8] Jn 3:19.

[9] Brandan J. Robertson. “Lenten Series: The Power of Sacrifice” in A Preacher’s Guide to Lectionary Sermon Series: Thematic Plans for Years A, B, and C, vol. 2. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019), 103, 104.

[10] Tasha Layton, “Singing in the Dark.” Released Nov. 3, 2023 by Sypher Music.