In the words Mary read this morning, words from John that are familiar to many of us, there is more than a hint of ambiguity.  On the one hand, the words describe God’s love for the world, which is overwhelming and expansive.  It extends beyond humankind to embrace the whole cosmos, the totality of life.  Yet, beyond the good news, there is a “but”.  God does not send the Son to judge, but those who don’t believe, well they are already judged.  Push me, pull you.  Which raises a lot of questions – a lot – about divine love and judgement, and the ways humanity’s tragic and predictable affection for darkness can blunt or impede God’s good intentions… and love.

At some point I realized that, when I read the words “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,” I absorbed the assumption that God does condemn the world – it’s just that that was not Jesus’ primary focus.  In fact, Jesus seems to say here that God’s love is conditional.  So, shading everything loving is this underlying instinct that God does not really like us.  It’s like there’s this undercurrent that runs between the lines of the Bible: You don’t deserve this love, and in fact God doesn’t much like you.  But God (perfect and holy!) sort of puts up with you.  And me!

But, what if God does, in fact… like you.  And me.  As a straight white Canadian cis male like me, or as a Black Ugandan lesbian woman, or a trans male from Indonesia… what if God kind of likes us?  All of us!  I’ve been surprised a number of times in life, caught off guard, to discover that there are people who simply like me. Even though I haven’t done anything special to make them like me, or for me to deserve to be liked.  So, the thought that God might feel the same leaves me— I don’t know how to say it…

But it’s true.  God likes us.  All of us.  It has nothing to do with whether we are good or bad.  Indeed, I gather that God takes it for granted that we are all more or less imperfect, and sometimes far from perfect.  In teaching after teaching Jesus makes the same point:  all are invited, bad and good.  Because “bad” and “good” are our categories, not God’s.  God’s category for us is “created” – and “created” for God means “liked a lot, delighted in, wanting to spend time with, get to know better, a little proud of.”

We call it grace – a simple yet mystifying word for something you can never get, but only be given.  There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about, any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream, or earn blue eyes, or bring about your own birth.  The smell of rain is grace.  Somebody loving you is grace.  Loving somebody is grace.  Have you ever tried – really tried – to love somebody?

The grace of God means something like:  Here is your life.  You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.  Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don’t be afraid.  I am with you.  Nothing can ever separate us.  I love you.

And, like any other gift, the gift of grace has to be received.  You can’t force it on someone.  You have to reach out and take it.

Thanks in large part to Billy Graham, John 3:16 became a short-hand for Bible-believing Christians who held it up on signs in sports arenas for the cameras to catch. A few years ago, billboards went up around the US quoting another Bible verse, one that most Christians pretend isn’t in the Bible.  It said:  “Slaves be obedient to your masters,” from Ephesians.  The Bible does say that, and the atheist group wanted people to read it and understand why, in their eyes, religion and belief in God are wrong.

Taking one verse, pulling it out of context, slapping it on a billboard, or waving it around on a sign in the endzone, and saying that it speaks for all of Christianity – well, clearly it doesn’t.

There used to be this bumper sticker:  “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.”  But the Bible says a lot of things, some of them contradictory, and we have to wrestle with that.  It’s not easy.  It’s nuanced, and sometimes uncertain – even tenuous.

But it helps when we seek to live the chapter, not the verse.  To live the book, not just the chapter.  And live beyond the book, because, for a God who so loves the world, that God wants us to love back with our heart, and soul, and mind.

Following Jesus is not a programme for individual self-improvement, or “salvation.”  It’s an invitation to community.  It’s a dislocation from social structures and networks that perpetuate injustice, death, and alienation so that we can be knit into a network of relationships that bring healing, reconciliation, and abundant life rooted in God’s new age.

But in an effort to make the gospel simple and accessible, Christians have been tempted to reduce it to a formula.  We forget that when Jesus spoke these words to Nicodemus — one of the more erudite men of his day — Nicodemus found Jesus’s words incomprehensible.  If Jesus really intended to draw in Nicodemus by this pithy soundbite that night, he failed.  What Nicodemus the seeker experienced was not transformation, but bewilderment!

So, I wonder – how does this text confuse or mislead us today?  What does it prevent us from seeing about Christian faith and life?  People do lean hard on the second half of the verse — the role of an individual’s need to believe — and minimize the shock of the first — that God loves and longs for all of creation.  Christians treat the verse as a litmus test, threatening unbelievers with divine condemnation rather than God’s relentless compassion and love.  We’ve allowed the verse to flatten and distort the meaning of “belief,” reducing it to mere intellectual agreement, or assent.

The problem is that this promotes a transactional kind of faith.  “For God so loved the world that God gave his only Son, so that…”  It comes across as a form of quid pro quo.  So long as we agree to “believe” in Jesus, we get the prize.

What does it even mean to say, “I believe in Jesus?”  Growing up, many church-goers were taught that faith was to believe that certain statements about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, and the Church, were true.  To be a mature Christian was to have one’s theological ducks in a row.  But surely there more to it…  Does all of Christian faith really come down to my accepting certain propositions about Jesus to be true?  Is that why we’re here?

It’s no wonder that for many people today this way of believing has fallen apart. Assent doesn’t foster the meaningful relationship that people seek to have with the holy, with God.  If anything, people today have the impression that intellectual assent has functioned as a smokescreen, a substitute for many church-goers to avoid the intimacy of a full-on encounter, of relationship with God, with Spirit.

To believe is not to hold an opinion, but to trust.  To hold something as beloved.  To believe in something is to invest it with my love.  The Bible isn’t about an intellectual surrender to statements.  The stories, the poetry, the prophets, are all about fidelity, trust, and confidence.  To believe in God is a matter of placing our confidence in God, throwing our whole selves – heart, mind, spirit, and body – into it.

When I ask my family or my friends to believe in me, I am not asking them to believe certain facts about me.  That I’m 63 years old, need a knee replacement, prefer red wine to white, and love hot sauce… No.  What I am saying is, “Please bear with me, because I need you.  Dare to believe that I won’t let you go.  Trust me with your heart.”

Conversely, when a relationship falls apart, the breakdown is never just intellectual. What breaks between me, and another person isn’t facts.  What breaks is vulnerability, intimacy, and values.  What breaks is the deep, abiding trust that makes love and safety possible.

So, what does it mean to believe in Jesus?  To trust him?  For Nicodemus, it meant starting anew, letting go of all he thought he understood.  It meant something like being born all over again, becoming vulnerable, hungry, and ready to engage reality in a brand-new way.  It meant taking the risk to step into the light.  The work of trusting Jesus was mind-bending, soul-altering work.  It took time.  And it involved setbacks, and mis-steps.  So, Nicodemus walked away baffled that night.  Jesus was calling him to so much more than a recitation of a creed – Jesus was calling Nicodemus to fall in love, and stay in love.

Richard Rohr puts it this way – “Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity – it did not need changing!  Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.”

Rather than creating a belief system that saves some and rejects others, John simply expresses the depth of God’s love.  And, it has been my experience that I feel closest to God when I participate in community, when I care about others, and when I let go of my certainties, and remain open to the dance of God’s Spirit in the world around me.

In the old King James words, “God so loved the world… that whosoever…”  And there it is in a nutshell.  Whosoever… it’s inclusive.  No distinctions.  Neither Jew nor Gentile nor any other ethnic group.  Neither Catholic nor Protestant, nor those of any other faith, or no faith at all.  Neither Black nor White nor Brown nor any other race. Neither straight nor 2SLGBTQ+.  The list goes on.  God loves the world, whosoever.

So, how does this become real in our life and ministry?  As communities of faith, in the flow of our activities and in the midst of good work… we pause.  “For God so loved the world …”  How do we recognize the opportunity here for a turning around, and being born anew, from above – something like what Nicodemus experienced – in response to those words?  Recalibrating, reimagining the ways we engage with 2SLGBTQ+ communities, with Black, brown, Asian, Indigenous, and Hispanic communities?  With women in this International Women’s Day week.  With people who are impoverished, hungry, disabled, mentally ill, or illiterate.  Well, I think maybe we ask ourselves questions that matter:

Do we include, in how we plan our worship, and the ways we like to come together week by week, the voices and experiences of people who identify in some of those ways?  What about in our leadership team, in our decision-making and our priorities, when it comes to resources?

And, in what specific ways do our congregations reflect the love of God for the world back – back into the communities and neighbourhoods around us in our approach to the work of justice and peace?  Reflect that love in our capacity to listen and learn?

For Jesus it was never about him – not about becoming a Christian.  It’s about walking in Jesus’ way and discovering that love dwelling within you, and with you. It’s not about the next life, it’s about freedom and transformation in this life!  It’s why the cross represents the place where human and divine meet and are transformed – because God too is changed in that moment.

In September 1954, a young Martin Luther King Jr. moved from Boston to Montgomery, Alabama.  His first week in the pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he preached on John 3:16. “God’s love has breadth,” said King.  “It is a big love; it’s a broad love… God’s love is too big to be limited to a particular race.  It is too big to be wrapped in a particular garment.  It is too great to be encompassed by any single nation.  God is a universal God.”  King leaned into John 3:16 as a source of politically activated theology:  “This unlimited love has been a ray of hope and has given a sense of belonging to the hundreds of disinherited people” who proclaim to one another, “You ain’t no slave… You’re God’s child.”

This is the story we live – not just the verse, or the chapter, or even the book, but the whole way we bring it all alive in our living, infusing our understanding of how broken things are healed, how weary and disillusioned churches are reborn with vitality and hope… and how the world is made new in love.  And that matters.  It really matters.  Amen.