The Light of God’s Love
March 18, 2018
Lent 4B/5B
John 3:1–21
Brookside Community Church
The Wind Blows and the Lights Go Out
“You’ve been living underground. Eating from a can. You’ve been running away. From what you don’t understand. Love… She’s slippy. You’re sliding down. She’ll be there. When you hit the ground. It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright. She moves in mysterious ways.”
— U2
I’m a little nervous these days talking about the mysterious wind blowing. After storms have knocked down trees these last few weeks, it sounds a little dangerous. Thank God we are all safe and warm today. Amen?
Sometimes, being in the dark can reveal how much of the world we take for granted and how little we are actually paying attention. Zion and I have moved around a lot and this past few years; it has been hard finding the time and resources to fix things like we would really want. As most of you know, we took a trip to Seattle a couple of weeks ago. We came back on a Friday night in the middle of the snow storm, only to walk in to a cold and dark house. I scrambled to find light, heat, and clothing. We had this one great lantern in our closet bedroom, so I pulled it out only to find that the batteries were corroded. Our return to New Jersey became a season of darkness where we couldn’t do or find anything. It only took a few moments scrambling in the dark for us to gain a new sense of clarity about how messy and disorganized our life had become.
When the lights finally came on, we saw things more clearly. It wasn’t just because we had been living in darkness for a few days and finally saw the light; it was because we were forced to see the world we had been living in in a whole new way. Our things were all over the house. Clothes, shoes, blankets, boxes and all sorts of things—even things that were hidden and forgotten in the back of closets—somehow made their way to the center of every room. We realized that we had been living in a world filled with “light” all this time, but it was a world where we hadn’t been really paying attention. Now, having spent some time in the dark, we were prepared to let the light show us things we hadn’t been ready to see before. We had too many things, and too few of them where in places they belonged. So we got busy doing some early spring cleaning and reorganizing. The first step on our list, by the way, was to get a new set of batteries and battery-powered lanterns.
The love of God is like a light. It shines on us and shows us who we really are. It helps us see things that we have ignored or taken for granted. And it inspires us to see who we might become.
Teachers At Night
The Gospel of John is filled with symbolism and oppositional dualities: good and evil, heaven and earthy, flesh and spirit, light and darkness. This is at work all over the Gospel of John, and it is important to notice it when we hear that Nicodemus approaches Jesus at night. It is in the darkness of night that Nicodemus prefers to approach Jesus, not in the light of day. Interesting though, Nicodemus calls Jesus teacher because of the signs he can perform. But Jesus charges Nicodemus with being a teacher who can’t understand the basics.
Nicodemus is one of those people that prefer to confront the most important challenges in the dark because confronting the world in the light is too risky. Perhaps he was risking his career talking to Jesus. Perhaps he wanted to explore things with Jesus he was not comfortable letting other’s see. Maybe he was hoping to discover for himself what Jesus was really after so he could take it back to the rest of the Judean elite, either to speak on his behalf or to condemn him. No matter the reason, they are two teachers talking in the dark, and only Jesus understands the light — the foundational truth of God’s deep love for the world!
Jesus says, “You can’t see the kingdom unless you are born again.” In other words, to see the kingdom of God, you have to turn the lights on and be willing to begin again. Too many of us are like Nicodemus, we have invested too much into the world as it is to let the love of God shine on us and show us how it could be. We are unwilling to start over again.
The light of God’s love shines in the darkness, and that allows us to see the truth of who we are and who God is calling us to be. When the light of the love of God shines on us, it calls us to reorganize, to begin again, to find those places in our life and our world that are not consistent with who God has made us to be.
“For God so loved the world…”
When we let light of God shine on us as individuals and then as a community, God’s light shines through us and begins to transform the rest of the world.
Practicing the Teachings of Jesus in Public
I believe that the light of the love of God begins to shine on us and through us as we begin practicing the teachings of Jesus together. For those of us who want to let the light of God shine on us and through us, the least we can do is spend some time wrestling together with the teachings of Jesus. My appeal to you is that we take the teachings of Jesus seriously enough to find ways to practice them in public. That means we do not come to Jesus in the darkness and say, “I know you are a teacher from God, and I’d like to see you perform a few of those signs you are famous for.” Instead, it means that we come to Jesus in the light and say, “I’m willing to take my whole perspective and way of life and start over again…”
When we let the love of God shine through us — wrestling together and learning to practice the teachings of Jesus in public — then the light of God not only begins to transform us, it begins to shine through us to the rest of the world.
As a congregation here at Brookside, we’ve spent a lot of time reading the teachings of Jesus together. A few of us have even been reading the gospel and taking apart specific passages so we can wrestle with what it might look like to let the teachings of Jesus shape the way we live together. And it is not easy work! If you overhear the conversation, it sounds a lot like: “What about this?”; and “Maybe Jesus meant that?”; or “Surely he didn’t mean this.” But one thing is clear, we all walk away saying, “Wow! I thought I knew something about the gospel, but now I’ve got to go and rethink this whole Jesus thing.”
When we let the love of God shine, and we begin taking the teachings of Jesus serious enough to wrestle with them together, we might hear Jesus saying to us what he said to Nicodemus, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being reborn,” without the willingness to start over again, from scratch.
The Example of Clarence Jordan
You might ask, well what does this look like to let the light of God’s love shine, to practice the teachings of Jesus in public?
I submit to you the one concrete example, the story of Clarence. As a young white country boy, Clarence grew up with the Talbot County Jail in Maryland just a hundred yards outside of his bedroom window. He walked past it regularly, and he befriended several black prisoners, including the cook and some workers. He learned about a torture device called the “stretcher” which was almost exclusively use on black men. Men would have their feet fastened to the floor and their arms were stretched toward the ceiling with a block and tackle hoist. New at church, Clarence heard the voice of the bass in the choir — the prison warden — stirring up the congregation while singing “Love Lifted Me.” That night, he heard moans coming from the prison. As one biographer tells the story, “He knew not only who was on the stretcher…but who was pulling the ropes — the same man who only hours before had sung his heart out to God.” “That nearly tore me to pieces,” Clarence told years later.
That boy, Clarence, grew up to be Clarence Jordan. (My friends Hillary and Mitch tell me that the folks at Koinonia Farm in Georgia pronounce it “Clarence Jurden.”) That event as a young child allowed Jordan to see something that many Christians miss — the contradiction between Christian claims about the love of God and the way most Christian’s lived. Jordan said that he always felt there was a disconnect between the teachings of Jesus and the society he lived in.
He went to school and studied agriculture so he could go back and help farmers. Then he went to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky and got a PhD in New Testament so that he could teach people to read the Bible in their own language. (His translation of the “Cotton Patch Gospel” is really extraordinary!) He began to refer to the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus’s “platform for the God movement.” He began to use it to “critique of materialism, ecclesiasticism, and militarism, which he saw as the most powerful forces competing for people’s minds and hearts.”
Jordan wanted to learn to practice Jesus’ teachings in public! In the 1940s, Clarence met a former missionary and decided to buy a 440 acre farm to start a racially integrated farming community in Georgia. As you can imagine, it wasn’t without trouble. Many of the members were kicked out of the local Baptist Church, since it was not a place where people of color were welcome. By the mid-1950s, Koinonia Farm was a community with forty-one people, and over half of them where children. The desegregation of schools increased racial tensions, and Koinonia Farm was the target of hatred. Their roadside market was bombed, and then boycotted, and members began talking about abandoning the community. But most refused to give up. Florence, Clarence Jordan’s wife, said “We knew we wouldn’t be the first Christians to die, and we wouldn’t be the last.” To abandon the farm would be to give up and leave people people without hope.
Clarence Jordan changed the world. You have probably heard of one organization that was the result of his efforts to provide low-income housing: Habitat for Humanity. Koinonia Farm still exists today too, by the way. You should give it a visit if you ever find yourself down and around Americus, Georgia. (Be sure to say hello to my friends, Hillary and Mitch.)
Clarence Jordan wanted to let the love of God shine by taking the teachings of Jesus serious enough to live them out in public. Unlike Nicodemus, Clarence Jordan was willing to begin the world over again and begin a community that could learn practice the teachings of Jesus in public.
What if We Let the Love of God Shine in Us?
The question I want to leave us with this morning is this. What would happen if we let the love of God shine through us? What if we began to take the teachings of Jesus seriously and wrestled with them until we could find a way to practice them in public? I’m sure it would not look like Clarence Jordan’s answer, but his example might inspire us to have the courage to be creative with our answers.
Perhaps we would not have things we allowed to remain in the darkness — but we would be willing to tackle the harder things, things that the rest of the world has tried too hard for too long to keep in the darkness, things that we are not supposed to talk about in church, like racism, or sexism, or homophobia, or even gun violence. But if we want to be born again, if we agree to be reborn by the love of God, to begin the world over again, then there is nothing that we are unable to bring into the light, nothing we are unable to wrestle with together. Only then can the light of the love of God begin to transform us. Only then can we see what that ever important verse really means that begins, “For God so loved the world…”
Only then can we begin to let that love of God shine through us to the rest of the world and finally see the kingdom of God unfold.
— Amen
