A sermon based on John 3: 14 - 22
Preached March 30, 2003

First Christian Church Corpus Christi, Texas

By Donald M. Tuttle

 

            When I was in elementary school, my mom went to college.  She started out in a program where teachers’ aides could get two-year associate degrees.  Then they decided to extend the program so that those who wanted could earn a bachelors’ degree in education.  It was a wonderful program, but it was not easy.  Mom would work days and go to school in the late afternoons and evenings.  And maybe most difficult was the fact she went to school all summer.  

            Of course, with that kind of schedule, there was little time for family vacations.  But for several years we managed, right before school started in the fall, to go away for a long weekend.  For me it really didn’t matter where we went, because I knew no matter where it was there would be a swimming pool.  The swimming pool was all that mattered.

            It was on one such trip that we rushed into the hotel, donned our bathing suits, and headed toward the pool.  Being anxious, I ran ahead of the group, through the gate, across the patio full of lawn chairs, straight into the water, cannon-ball style.  The problem was I didn’t know how to swim.  There I was, bobbing up and down, my arms flailing this way and that, drinking what seemed at the time gallons of heavily chlorinated water.  As Saturday Night Lives’ Roseanna Roseannadanna used to say, “I thought I was gonna die.”

            But then Dad jumped into the pool.  He grabbed me by the shoulders, and he said:  “Donald, stand up!”  It was then that I discovered that I had jumped into the shallow end of the pool.  The water was only three-and-a-half, maybe four, feet deep.  Even back then I could stand up in it and not even get my face wet.  Yet for those brief moments, I thought I was in real trouble, even though I wasn’t.

            That is a terrible feeling--to think you are in trouble, even if you’re not.

BRIDGE

            But there can be something worse.  What can be worse is actually being in trouble but not knowing it.  That is where we may well find ourselves today.

            For the last couple of years, we have had our parents working with their children in preparation for baptism.  One of their assignments includes reading the stories of the Creation and the Fall, the story of Adam and Eve and how they disobeyed God.  The point of the exercise is for our youngsters to see how sin broke Adam and Eve’s relationships. Their disobedience left them estranged from God, hiding when God came to call.  But they it also left them estranged from each other.  Remember how they recognize their nakedness and how Adam blames Eve.  Of course, they ultimately end up even estranged from creation because they are exiled from paradise.  Truly they were people in trouble.

But, of course, their story is humanity’s story.  History shows that.  It is not only written in the estrangement found in the story of Adam and Eve, it continued in

Ÿ         Abraham, Sarah and Hagar;

Ÿ         Isaac and Ishmael;

Ÿ         Jacob and Esau;

Ÿ         Joseph and his brothers;

Ÿ         the Hebrew people and the Egyptians and after them the nations that they drove from the Promised Land. 

Ÿ         We see it in David and his dysfunctional family

Ÿ         And later in the returning Jewish exiles and their Samaritan neighbors. 

            The biblical story recounts a history of people in trouble, their relationships broken by sin.

But it is not just the biblical story, is it?  It continues today, doesn‘t it?

Another exercise we have the children and parents do is to clip “bad news” headlines from the newspaper.  These are headlines that illustrate the broken relationships that plague humanity.  Even when they didn’t have a war dominating the front page, they could still find plenty of examples of estrangement:

Ÿ         The list of the divorcing

Ÿ         Accounts of family and gang violence

Ÿ         Stories of continuing tensions between racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.

Ÿ         Conflict between Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East.

Ÿ         Reports of damage done to our environment.

Ÿ         Even obituaries, where the cost of sin and separation from God becomes abundantly clear.

It is all there in black and white—color if you turn on the TV--signs of humanity in trouble, signs of our brokenness.  And yet I am not all sure that we are aware of it.  Oh, I don’t mean to suggest we don’t know that there is something wrong.  We have some vague sense of it.  Yet having lived with it for so long—having this brokenness virtually written into our DNA—we seem largely unconcerned about it, unaware of how much trouble we’re in.  For example, in the midst of our current international crisis, the solutions to the problem, depending on which side one is on, are reduced to regime change in Baghdad or a new president in Washington or a stronger U.N. in New York.  Or closer to home, we seem to figure that marital counseling or better laws or more dialogue between conflicting groups or better medical care will ultimately end the realities of division and death.  We naively seem to think that somehow the troubles that plague us aren’t that bad, that they will soon just go away.

POINT

But what our Scriptures teach us is that they won’t.  Our trouble is far too serious for that.  To heal our brokenness, to rescue us from the mess we are in, requires more. 

What is that “more?”

To paraphrase Jesus, it is a God who loves us so much that he would send his only Son to save us.  That word “save” is significant.  It means to rescue from trouble or to make well or whole. 

And that is what Jesus did and does?  He saves us.  He rescues us from sin.  He heals the broken relationships we have with God, each other and creation.  He makes it possible for us to know peace with God and one another.

EXAMPLES

            Our 2:7 Spiritual Development groups have been reading the Acts of the Apostles.  We see what Jesus did in that account of the early church. 

Ÿ         We see that in the disciples.  James and John had once vied for positions above the rest.  Peter had sought to tell even Jesus what he ought and ought not to do.  We can imagine how he treated the other disciples.  Yet after the resurrection, they are as one.  Jesus had healed their broken relationship to God and each other.  He had rescued them from the trouble they faced. 

Ÿ         At Pentecost, hundreds heard the story of what God had done.  They were a diverse audience, drawn from across the known world, bringing with them all the differences that you can imagine.  And yet, afterward we find them living at peace with one another.  Those who stayed in Jerusalem even lived as one, providing for all in need, treating one another not as strangers but as family.  Jesus had rescued them from trouble.  He had healed the broken relationships.

Ÿ         Later, when a dispute arose among those in Jerusalem, when Greek followers said the Jewish leaders were ignoring their widows, the disciples quickly and humbly offered a means to solve the problem.  They gave up their control of the food distribution system to those who the Greek followers trust.  Because Jesus had healed them, they could do what they needed to do to restore peace.

Ÿ         And still later, when Gentiles came to follow Jesus as Lord, some Jewish followers weren’t sure if it was OK.  Their old prejudices resurfaced.  The brokenness that had forever been a part of their relationship began to re-emerge.  And yet, ultimately, they came to embrace each other as brothers and sisters. 

            How was such a transformation possible?  Because all had been saved by the same Son, all had been rescued by Jesus, their brokenness could be healed.

And what happened then continued to happen through the ages.  Oh, it has not been perfectly embodied.  Sin continues to cause us trouble.  But because Christ came to save, families, neighbors and communities have been and can be reconciled.  Because Christ came to save, the brokenness that has separated people has been and continues to be healed.

 

SO WHAT?

            Those many years ago, when I was flailing away in that swimming pool, Dad didn’t just jump in and pull me out of the water.  He didn’t drag me to side and toss me on to the dry ground.  Instead, he held on to me and offered help.  “Stand up,” he said.  It was a command, but also an invitation, an invitation to trust him, to believe that salvation was near if only I would respond in faith.

            That is true of Jesus as well.  Our Scriptures not only say that God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son.  It also says “everyone who believes in him…will have eternal life.“   Jesus doesn’t save us against our will.  He doesn’t wave a magic wand to make it all right, whether we like it our not.  What he does do is come to us, here and now, and offer to save us, to heal our broken relationship with God and each other, if we will but trust him, if we but say “yes” to his grace and his guidance, “yes” to his word and his way.