Church 3:16

3-12-17 (Lent 2A)

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17

Church 3:16

If I were to stop you suddenly and randomly in the produce section at County Market, and ask you off the top of your head to quote a Bible verse off the top of your head, without any preparation, any time to genuinely think… what would that verse be?  Nine times out of ten, I’d bet any amount of money that your go-to answer would be John 3:16.

For God so loved the world…

By far, this is one of the most memorized scripture verses in the Christian tradition - it speaks in just about every denomination, every tradition, every experience.  And while it’s one of many such verses that fit this description, it’s commonly referred to as the “Gospel in a nutshell.”  It contains the basic message of God’s love, the significance of Jesus’ sacrifice, and our own call to faithful response in the light Christ’s salvation for us.

While it’s likely the first verse that a lot of us may have memorized in youth groups or in Sunday School, it’s a verse that has attained a much more popular and wide-ranging use in our greater society, and for that, we can primarily thank Rollen Stewart, better known as “The Rainbow Man.”  If you don’t remember his antics, or you weren’t around in the 70s and 80s, The Rainbow Man was a pretty famous fixture in the background of a huge number of different sports events.  He wore a bright, rainbow-colored wig, a t-shirt with “JESUS SAVES” printed on it, and held a large sign with “JOHN 3:16” printed on it in big block letters.  For a while there, he was everywhere and he drove the television sportscasters crazy as they tried to keep him off of the airwaves.

There’s also the more recent example of Tim Tebow, who wrote John 3:16 and other verses on top of his eyeblack during his time playing for the Florida Gators, made “Tebowing” a thing by his kneeling and genuflecting on the football field, and then somehow managed to play the “3:16 Game” in his showdown against the Steelers in the 2010 NFL playoffs, in which he managed to throw a career high 316 yards, an NFL record-setting yards per completion average of 31.6, and oddly enough, peaking the Nielsen ratings for that night at 31.6.

Needless to say, the John 3:16 movement is definitely quite the evangelistic phenomenon, to say the least - people like “Rainbow Man” and Tim Tebow utilized a powerful platform to deliver a quick and succinct Gospel message to the world in the hopes that just by exposing people to one verse of the Bible, that those people might be impacted by this message of God’s great love and come to know Jesus Christ.  The message might lack in great substance, but it certainly makes up for it in impact and exposure - according to various news articles reporting immediately after Tim Tebow’s sporting the Gospel verse on his eyeblack during the 2009 BCS Championship Game, Google users generated over 90 million searches for the verse in the immediate 24 hours after that game, making it the number one search term on Google for a while.  It's become such a popular go-to evangelism verse that it's made its way into some truly surprising places - next time you go to an In-N-Out, look at the bottom of the cup and there it is.  Shop at Forever 21 and it's printed on the shopping bag.  Various other consumer products have the verse printed succinctly somewhere on the packaging - it's everywhere and it's in the hopes that someone will see it and have their lives changed in the process.

The thing is… the more I look at this passage from John, the more I have to ask myself: what good does it really do us to put the Gospel into a nutshell in the first place?  “Rainbow Man” was so driven in proclaiming this short Gospel message because he believed the Rapture was imminent - that Jesus was coming back in a very short period to judge the world, so it was important to have as many people come to Christ and be “born again” as possible.

The problem is that, when we look at Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, being “born again” doesn’t seem like something as simple as seeing a Bible verse, suddenly believing in Jesus’ love, and being suddenly safe - Jesus talks about something that ultimately seems a little more complicated than that.  Nicodemus comes to Jesus as someone who has already seen the sign and believed - he’s sold, convinced that Jesus is filled with God’s presence and a powerful teacher capable of performing great wonders.  And yet Jesus doesn’t seem to think that’s enough - Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus pushes Nicodemus to seek something more than just a “come to Jesus” moment - Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be “born from above,” or “born of the Spirit,” and when push comes to shove, Nicodemus ultimately fails to understand what Jesus is really getting at.  Where Nicodemus seems to be looking for a “nutshell” kind of theology and faith, Jesus invites him into a deep and transformative relationship.  Where Nicodemus believes in a tradition that claims the Israelites as a people with a holy birthright, Jesus invites Nicodemus to be transformed so greatly that it’s as if he has been reborn as an entirely new person.

And that’s not a journey that we set foot upon lightly - nor is it a journey that happens in the span of one singular moment that we can then forever look back to and point toward as the point where we were “saved” or “born again.”  It’s a journey that lasts the rest of our lives.  Rev. Frederick Buechner, one of the more well-known Presbyterian pastors, theologians and storytellers of our time, puts it this way in his novel The Return of Ansel Gibbs:

“If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all...…I say you are either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine.  Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: “Can I believe it all again today?”  No, better still, don't ask until after you’ve read the New York Times, till after you've studied that daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible.  Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day.  If your answer is always yes, then you probably don't know what believing means.  At least five times out of ten the answer should be no because the no is as important as the yes, maybe more so.  The no is what proves you’re human in case you ever should doubt it.  And then, if some morning the answer happens to be really yes, it should be a yes that’s child with confession and tears—and great laughter.”

When we’re truly born again, or to be more faithful to the text, I’d say “born from above,” we learn to recognize that it’s never as simple as putting the Gospel into a nutshell.  Put the Gospel in a nutshell and eventually, you yourself become a little nutty in the process - just ask the “Rainbow Man” - he was arrested in 1992 after creating a hostage situation in a standoff with police in a California hotel and is now serving three life sentences for his actions.  Where the “Rainbow Man” let his own religious fervor and belief in an impending rapture cloud the very message of love that he was trying to proclaim, Jesus invites us into something deeper and more profound.  Jesus invites us into the kind of covenant relationship that understands that, even on those days when we wake up and read the newspaper and question whether we can believe in the Gospel of Christ, we nevertheless know that Christ’s grace is enough, and that Christ’s grace carries us and is perfected in our own weaknesses.  

God did not send God’s Son into the world to condemn the world - Jesus didn’t come to make people get violent in their proclamations of God’s love.  Jesus came to offer a completely new and redeemed way of living that exemplifies both the grace and the profound love of God for the world.  That God so loved the world, and God loved the world in this way: that God sent his only Son, that God became flesh and dwelt among us, in order that the world might know God and know God’s love once and for all.  And as we come to know God and know that love for us, as we come to know that love and to put our trust in the faithfulness of our creator… it’s that same love that ends up saving us.  May this trust, this love, and this hope continue to give us strength, not just on our journey together through Lent, but through all our journeys together.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.