Not to Condemn the World, But to Save the World
Not to Condemn the World, But to Save the World
Preached on March 19th, 2023
for Wollaston Congregational Church
Scripture: John 3:1-17
This week we come to the third name for Jesus in the book “Freeing Jesus” by Diana Butler Bass. In chapter one, we met Jesus as our friend and in chapter two we met Jesus as our teacher. Now we encounter Jesus as savior. [1]
For each of these titles for Jesus we have a common struggle in the Mainline Protestant Church. Our tradition has done very little to engage congregations with the theologies around these designations. And so young people and other seekers alike are often left with the cultural default and a one-dimensional understanding of what they mean. This is particularly true for today’s theme: Jesus our savior.
As I read Diana Butler Bass’s book “Freeing Jesus” I’m tempted to over-identify with Bass. Our stories are very similar, and at the same time they are different and particular to each of us. Just as your story of encountering Jesus as savior will be particular to you.
Like Bass, I began to search for a new spiritual home as a youth and young adult. I was also pulled into “born again” Christian theology at a time when I was trying to find my way.
There came a time, during my teenaged years, when my home church experience began to feel inadequate. Weekly worship suddenly seemed staid and uninspired. I was going through a natural process of growing up. What I didn’t realized was I needed to leave home in order to return home. At the time it felt like a major crisis of faith.
Fortunately for me and my peers the ministers of our Methodist Church circuit focused their energies on youth ministry. They created opportunities for the youth of the various district churches to get together and talk about the deeper aspects of faith. This was a spiritual life-line for me. I truly appreciated being able to connect with others of my age who were asking the same questions as me.
About the same time, I attended a large ecumenical service with my parents at the cathedral in the city. Something about the great many people gathered singing, accompanied by the magnificent organ and choir stirred me. The final hymn was “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” It was not sung to the slow and ponderous tune in the Pilgrim Hymnal.
The tune English churches use is one that you can really sing! You might say I had a spiritual reawakening. Why hadn’t anyone told me before? I was responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. He had taken on my wrong doings, my sins, my mistakes. “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”
And so I left for college with a quest to find a campus group that really lived and worshiped with the kind of faith I thought I needed to have. I started with the Protestant chaplaincy: Church of England, Methodist, United Reformed Church. And then complemented this with the Christian Union – known as CU - an evangelical campus group that included Baptists, Brethren churches and something called free church. I had no preparation for the theological tug of war that would be going on between these different Christian groups in my college.
The students I met at CU all opened with the same question: “When did you become a Christian?” The answer was a little awkward. They had stories of radical conversion experiences, and reformed lives. All I could only say that I was baptized at the age of 2 months. I told them I had always been a Christian and they looked doubtful. Clearly I was in need of conversion in order to be “born again.”
In our gospel reading this morning, we heard the story behind the notion of being a “born again Christian.”
Nicodemus is an elder: a religious leader and a Pharisee. He has heard of the miraculous signs manifest in Jesus and he is curious. Perhaps, also, he is seeking something. Maybe there is something lacking in his life, and he doesn’t feel quite whole. And so he comes to Jesus at night embarrassed by his uncertainty. Or he’s fearful that the other leaders will shun him if they know that he is secretly consulting with Jesus. Jesus tells Nicodemus that “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born (again) from above."
In order for Nicodemus understand what Jesus is all about, he needs to let go of his first half of life understanding. He needs to be born again, from above. And yet, in spite of his years of study and his seniority among the leaders, he cannot grasp the metaphor. He can only hear literally. He tells Jesus that going back into his mother’s womb at his age is ridiculous.
Jesus talks to him about the Spirit, like the wind, who is not confined in the way that rigid religious leaders are confined. The Spirit has new truths to reveal to those who are willing to listen. She blows where she will, no one knows where she is coming from or where she is going.
Jesus begins by addressing Nicodemus directly, then he goes on to make one of the very few gospel references to his own work as savior saying “… 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. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” This passage is not about Nicodemus and his eternal life with God, is about God’s passionate love for the whole world. It’s about God’s desire to save a world that is overrun by violence and oppression.
These are beautiful verses. Yet, sadly, they have been turned into a weapon.
How did “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” become “God condemns trans-people” “God hates gays”?
How did Jesus’s statement give Christians the permission to condemn others?
And how did this statement become: “the only thing that could appease the anger of our righteous God at human sinfulness is the sacrifice of his only Son”?
And how has our beloved-ness of God become “you miserable sinner – you are the cause of all this – so you’d better be grateful. You’d better get born again and believe, because if you don’t it’s to the fiery furnace of hell for you!”
The story about the rigidity and literalism of religious leader, Nicodemus, has been interpreted with rigidity and literalism for years. This has become the dominant theology in the west. And we, in the Mainline Protestant Church, had better start talking about what Jesus as savior means to us. Otherwise, the story of an angry God, who calls for the sacrifice his sinless only child will be the only one going around.
Like Diana Butler Bass, I heard alternatives to the “angry God, righteous Son as sacrifice” story of salvation while I was in college.
Marc, the protestant chaplain in my college, who introduced an intellectual liberal theology to the chaplaincy group. He told us that the word salvation is derived from a word meaning wholeness. In saving the world through Jesus, God offers health and wholeness in our present lives. Followers of Jesus join the movement that seeks to bring health and wholeness – by means of the work of justice and peace – to the whole world.
I remember that much and it made sense to me. But the rest of what Marc said got buried in the weeds of a theological argument between the students. He insisted that we had to choose our side in the Christian tug of war: radical liberal or conservative evangelical.
A number of the students wanted the relationship with Jesus offered by the CU group and, at the same time, they felt called to follow him by engaging in social justice work with the chaplaincy. It took me many years to come back to the notion of salvation as meaning wholeness and to make sense of this in the context of Jesus as our savior.
As Bass writes “The word ‘salvation’ comes from the Latin salvus, which originally referred to being made whole, uninjured, safe, or in good health. Salvus was not about being taken out of this life; it was about this life being healed. In this sense, salvus perfectly describes the biblical vision of God’s justice and mercy, peace and well-being, comfort and equanimity.” [2]
This understanding of salvation is sprinkled throughout the Bible. The emphasis is on God’s desire for humanity – and indeed all the world – to be restored to health, wholeness. God’s desire for the world to be reconciled with God. And so, God does not send his beloved son, Jesus, to the earth to be sacrificed and to die.
There is no violence in the saved world imagined by Jesus as the kin-dom of God.
The United Church of Christ’s Statement of Faith describes God’s saving work eloquently as an ongoing action:
“God seeks in holy love to save all people from aimlessness and sin … In Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Lord, God has come to us and shared our common lot, conquering sin and death and reconciling the whole creation to its Creator.” [3]
In Jesus, God saves us from the fear that our wrongdoings condemn us. In the story of Nicodemus, Jesus emphasizes that God does not condemn world: God loves the world.
And, so, like the rigid old religious leader, we are to be born again: born to a new understanding that frees us to be our best God-created selves.
There’s more to say about the cross, of course and about Jesus, as Lord, Way and Presence. These will be our themes as we move toward Jerusalem on our Lenten journey.
But for now, may all God’s people say,
Amen
[1] Diana Butler Bass, Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way and Presence (New York: HarperCollins, 2021)
[2] Bass, Diana Butler. Freeing Jesus (pp. 76-77). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
[3] UCC Statement of Faith, Adapted by Robert V. Moss UCC Statement of Faith