God So Loved the World

​I am headed towards a sermon
on what is probably the most famous single verse
in the entire New Testament:
God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son,
so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish
but may have eternal life.”
 
It’s a beautiful and a powerful verse.
But it can become so familiar
that we no longer hear just how good this good news is.
So this morning I am going to back up
and then work my way towards
the good news of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ.
 
I’m stepping back.
Several of us have been participating
in a really wonderful program called Sacred Ground,
a “film-based dialogue series on race and faith.”
To get ready for each session, we watch videos and read a bit.
Then we gather—on zoom, of course--
to talk about what we’ve learned.
 
One of our “core books” in Sacred Ground
is called Jesus and the Disinherited,
by an African American theologian named Howard Thurman. At his death in 1981, Thurman wasn’t particularly well known,
at least not as best I can tell.
Thankfully that seems to be changing.
That’s good because Thurman is well worth knowing.
 
The middle part of Jesus and the Disinherited,
the part we are now reading in Sacred Ground,
covers what Thurman calls the three “hounds of hell”:
fear, deception, and hate.
Right now we are doing fear.
 
 
 
Thurman grew up as a Black person
in segregated Florida during the lynching years,
so he knew fear first-hand.
He knew what fear could do to individuals
and what fear could do to whole communities of people
vulnerable to horrible violence.
 
In those circumstances, fear was a rational response.
Fear, and the behaviors it motivated, helped people survive.
 
But, Thurman notes, fear can also harm us.
Fear causes chemical changes in our bodies.
Fear can eat away at people’s sense of who they are.
In the end, Thurman says,
fear can become a kind of living death
for the people it controls.[1]
 
Thurman was talking about the impact of chronic fear on Black people.
 
But Thurman had the wisdom and the empathy
to see that fear was not only a problem for Black people
in danger of being lynched.
 
Fear is a human problem.
Fear was a problem for white people, too,
including the ones who were doing the lynching.
Indeed, Thurman says,
and I am fully convinced that he is right on this,
fear was a big reason lynchers lynched in the first place.
 
A lot has changed since Thurman published his Jesus and the Disinherited.
Our fears today are not exactly the same
as the fears of the people, white or black,
around whom Thurman grew up.
 
But from where I sit,
fear looks just as pervasive in contemporary America
as it was 70 or 100 years ago.  
 
We worry about the future.
We worry about the pandemic.
We worry about finances,
our own and the finances of our government.
Whichever political party we belong to,
we worry about the other one.
 
We worry about our parish,
our membership, our finances, and our ministries.
I worry about our new livestreaming equipment!
 
We worry about our families,
especially if we happen to have twenty-something sons
who are tired of limiting their social activities
or eighty-something fathers who feel about the same.
 
I carry, I assume all of us carry,
a constant, chronic, low-level anxiety
that can blossom into full-blown fear anytime.
 
That’s true for people like me,
who are pretty well insulated
from the trials and tribulations of our time.
I assume it is even more true
for the most vulnerable among us.
 
That is the problem of fear.
 
Thurman asks what the religion of Jesus offers
that can help us with this problem,
the problem of fear in our lives.  
            What is Jesus’ solution to fear?
 
Thurman answers his own question at length and with great wisdom.
But his answer boils down to this:
God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son,
so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish
but may have eternal life.”
 
 
Or, as Paul puts it in our other reading for this morning,
“God, who is rich in mercy,
out of the great love with which he loved us
even when we were dead through our trespasses,
made us alive together with Christ
—by grace you have been saved--
and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him
in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”
 
Now, I am a lot of things.
I am a son and a husband and a father.
I am an Episcopal priest
and a white, middle-aged, middle-class man.
I am occasionally faithful.
I am a sinner.
Some of the time I am loving.
Other times I am selfish and mean-spirited.
And a lot of the time I am afraid of this or that,
sometimes reasonably, sometimes foolishly.
 
But what Howard Thurman says,
what the Apostle Paul says,
what the Gospel of John says, is that,
more than anything else that I may be,
I am a beloved child of God.
I am a beloved child of God,
despite being dead through my trespasses.
 God loves me so much
that God sends His only-begotten Son
so that I can have life anyway.
 
And, of course, the same is true for all of us.
That’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.
God’s love as revealed in Jesus Christ is guaranteed.
And if God is for us,
it doesn’t matter who or what may be against us.
We can let go of our fear.
We know that.
We know God loves us.
We hear it all the time.
But that message of God’s love doesn’t always sink in.
It doesn’t always make it from our heads to our hearts.
Even when the message of God’s love does sink in,
it doesn’t tend to stay there inside.
God keeps loving us,
but somehow we forget that God loves us.
We still know the words,
but it is as if the words stop meaning anything to us in practice.
 
And here’s how you can know if you have lost sight of God’s love.
Fear starts to take over again.
 
You know, because wherever fear rules, love does not.
It is like First John says. “There is no fear in love,
but perfect love casts out fear;…
whoever fears has not reached perfection in love” (4:18).
 
We live in scary times, and we are a fearful people.
All you have to do to see that is look at the news.
 
Christians aren’t immune to that fear.
Some Christians are so aggressive
that you know they are terrified deep down inside.
 
But we have an antidote to all that poisonous fear.
The antidote is God’s love.
 
And so we come back, again and again,
to the simple truth of John 3:16.
God loves us.
God loves us enough to do anything to save us.
 
Knowing God’s love, we don’t have to be driven by fear,
or by its companion emotions hate and anger.
Knowing God’s love, we, too, can love.
And that is my prayer for us:
that we can really hear the good news of God’s love,
that we can let go of our fears,
and that we can get a little better at loving each other.
In Christ’s name. Amen.


[1] Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949): 35.