John 3.14-21                                                                                                  22 March 2009

“LOVING DEEPLY WHERE IT MATTERS MOST”

Last Friday night I drove to Cambridge and heard the wonderful jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson. I had heard her before at the Blue Note jazz club in Manhattan.  Her smoky voice is dreamy and haunted. Her singing is childlike joy and mature grace. Wilson has this trademark of taking off her shoes and going barefoot during her show.  It reminds me of Moses standing on holy ground. Her singing makes me feel like I am on holy ground. She is the ultimate female jazz singer of our time.

That’s a strong statement, isn’t it? And it’s not to slight Diana Krall, Jane Monheit or Karyn Allyson either. They are all marvelous. So what is it about being human that we have this need to identify and lift up the ultimate expression of something? 

You know what I’m talking about. If you’re polishing your drivers for warm weather, then you track the comeback of Tiger Woods, the ultimate in golf. If you look for financial sense in this economic wilderness, you ears perk up when Warren Buffett says something.  He is the ultimate in investments.  If spring training captures your imagination, most here measure the baseball universe against the standard of the Red Sox, with a faint Yankee minority, and the odd Detroit Tiger hold out like me.

This morning I want to talk about love in the same way, in terms of its ultimate ex-pression by which all other forms of love are measured, appraised and arranged.  For that’s precisely what Jesus is doing in his nighttime exchange with Nicodemus.

The ultimate temple insider, Nicodemus, approaches the friend of all outsiders, Jesus.  Nicodemus, with his vast learning, can’t grasp what Jesus is talking about. So he comes by night for a tutorial. Jesus responds vividly, but no less inscrutably.  Nicodemus puzzles, “How can these things be?” If understanding being “born from above” and “born of the Spirit” are hard enough, Jesus then kicks it up a notch. He predicts he would be lifted up to a cross and lifted to heaven to unveil eternal life.

I can only imagine this learned teacher, Nicodemus, had an expression on his face like the one I had the first time my big brother tried to explain trigonometry to me.  At just that moment—perceiving how lost he was—Jesus compressed the whole Gospel into one tiny verse, memorized by Sunday School kids and placarded in NFL end zones ever since: “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.” If Nicodemus ached after an overarching summary, did Jesus ever provide him one!
 
For God so loved the world….God loved the world—all of it, not just the in-group, even those who killed him.  Like this, God loved all of the world so deeply as to for-ever gift us with never-ending life. You think you know a lot about love? Try wrap-ping your arms around that.  We are not only speaking here of the kind of love bet-ween equals, the love of friends, of brother for brother and sister for sister.  This is to love what is lovely and loving back toward us.  This love makes the world smile.

We are not only speaking here of the kind of love that is for the less fortunate. This is also a beautiful thing, to love those who suffer, those who are poor, the sick, the failures, and the unlovely.  This compassionate love touches the heart of the world.

We are not only speaking here of the kind of love that dares to love the more fortunate.  This love is so very rare, loving those who have succeeded where we have failed, to rejoice with them in the midst of their victories without envying or re-senting them; the love of the poor for the rich, the love of minorities for the majority. This saintly love bewilders a world whose sad way is to tear up our social betters.

Jesus goes so far as to proclaim God’s lofty love as encompassing our enemies.  For God loving means embracing the one who, rather than loving you back, mocks you.  Threatens you. Inflicts pain on you.  Takes your life or the lives of your family. This love of tortured even for the torturer is God’s love. And it conquers the world.

What I want to tell you today is this love is to other loves, what Cassandra Wilson is to other jazz singers and what Tiger Woods is to golf.  Except with a difference. Yesterday it was Ella Fitzgerald, now it’s Cassandra Wilson. Yesterday it was Jack Nicklaus now it’s Tiger Woods. But this transforming, self-sacrificing, other-em-bracing love with which God loves the good, the bad, and the ugly reigns eternally. It has not yielded the throne since it was first revealed on a cross and it never will.

Ironically, if we look toward the greatest form of hatred and evil, we might glimpse not so far off the greatest good and love. At times we hear it said the worst thing we could possibly do is destroy humankind and this earth through a nuclear war. And we all nod with that.  I do anyway.  But the other day I was thinking about that.

I believe it’s wrong. The worst thing we could do is something we’ve already done. We killed the perfect, sinless one sent from above to work our redemption. We executed as a criminal the Son of the true and living God for trying to rescue us. But in the darkness of our hate is where the gleam of God’s love shines brightest. 

For this God who so loved us despite our violent ways refused to let our “no” have the final word.  God refused to hold this horrible sin against us.  By raising Jesus from the grave—can’t you see it?—God has rejected our rejection of his love.  Removing from us our sad rejection of Jesus Christ, God instead gives us a fresh opportunity to be part of a new order, a new reign, and a new time in world history. In this era we might come to our senses and find accord with the One in charge.

During this new epoch in world history we’re given the grace of a fresh new space to learn to love one another so purely and selflessly as God loves us. Needless to say, with love so profoundly redefined and elevated, no room remains for speaking of love while we compel, coerce, or act violently against others. We can no longer kill some in the name of loving certain other things because the cross has revealed non-violence at the heart of God’s love. After all, rather than forcing our love, God in Christ died at our hands, then returned saying, “shall we try it God’s way now?” In God’s new era, responding freely to divine love, we can become new creatures.

So what does John 3.16 mean in the contemporary spirituality of America today? Maybe something like this.  Sometimes we make sense of our spirituality by talking about and sorting through our loves.  “I love the outdoors, the mountains and the sea,” we say.  “That’s where I meet God.”  God smiles at that, I believe. “I love my Jack Russell pups,” we say. “Their energy and unfailing companionship give me a sense of God’s presence.” God smiles again.  “I love working out because it brings me the peace that I know God wants me to have.” Or, “I love the arts, painting and theater, because they reveal what is and what is possible.”  And God smiles again.

Truly God is found in all of these places and all of these loves for all who seek God. But let’s keep things in perspective, shall we? In our Lenten run-up to Easter, we remind ourselves that there is one love around which all other loves are sorted and arranged. That is what Jesus taught Nicodemus as he sorted through his love of the law and the prophets in order to find room for what God was doing in Jesus.  That is why Jesus told him, “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.” This is the big love, Nicodemus, the big event.  Don’t miss it and let it pass you by.

Another transforming love has entered the world so vast that those who receive it sort and arrange all over loves around it. Another preeminent love has sought us our hoping we would put it first in our praise and passion, our serving and giving.

In contemporary America, with our self-styled spiritualities, hearing anew of God’s love supreme of in Jesus Christ, we realize lifestyle and discipleship are different.  Lifestyle is a patchwork of favorite panels—in my case, a love of jazz, restoring old cars, baseball and hockey, languages and politics—that we slowly piece together. Discipleship is much more than just one more of those pretty panels for Sunday.  Life in Christ is God’s gift of life itself just as everything was going down the tubes.

With our many meetings, I would like nothing more than our confirmands to grasp this. With our weekly worship, we adults gather here to remember and elevate this.

The Russian author Anna Sophie Swetchine said, “To love deeply in one direction makes us more loving in all directions.”  And it is true, whether we love the plants of our gardening or the movement of a symphony.  The good passion of those loves spills out to lovingly enrich other parts of our lives and the lives of others.  But the one greatest pathway for loving, the one Jesus named for Nicodemus, promises a breakthrough for love and peace, hope and joy that never existed before. God’s holy project of transforming the world in the love of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the one pathway that is head and shoulders above every other love.

That’s why I’ll attend worship on Sunday mornings for the rest of my love, though I would also love to have brunch and read the New York Times.  That’s why 90% of the giving I’ll offer in my lifetime will be routed though the church, though I would love to give more to the Amnesty International, PBS, the UNCF, and my college.

Francis of Assissi, known for his love of animals and nature, achieves the right balance when he says, “May the power of your love, Lord Christ, fiery and sweet, so absorb our hearts as to withdraw them from all that is under heaven; grant that we may be ready to die for love of your love, as you died for love of our love.”   Amen.