Second Sunday in Lent Sermon
So let us begin this sermon where this gospel reading left off:
“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17).
Regardless of the many ways the church through the centuries has developed its doctrines to explain how the world is saved through Son, let us simply start with this foundational premise: God’s intention is not to condemn the world, but to save the world. And, if this is what God intends, then this is what shall be. For who can stand in the way of God? What evil force? What theologian? What preacher? Nothing can stand in God’s way if what God intends is salvation.
And today, especially, this is the hope we need to hear – for a world most in need of salvation:
On Tuesday, the news began filtering in that a 32-year-old man had stabbed to death his mother and four neighbors on a quiet cul-de-sac just beyond the Purdy Bridge.
Yesterday morning we woke to the news that the Israeli and US militaries were bombing Iran. By day’s end, we knew their Supreme Leader was dead. Today the bombing continues.
And this, in an age already saturated with fears and anxieties of an increasingly unstable world.
Yes, we most definitely need to hear that what God intends is salvation, not just for us as individuals, but for the whole world – for every individual and for the world itself. We’re all in this together, all needing the same thing.
I sat down alone yesterday for Morning Prayer, soon after hearing the news of the military attacks in Iran and the deaths of the schoolgirls there. The prayers began with the Confession of Sin, the same one we often pray on Sunday mornings. And I was so struck, while I prayed, of that simple pronoun: we. “We confess that we have sinned against you, in thought, word, and deed…” As I made the confession, I realized – yes – I was making it for myself, and my own sins. And I was making it for my country and our corporate sins. And I was making it for Iran and the atrocities of that regime. And in so doing, there was no spirit of finger pointing: “You bad people.” It was corporate. It was “we.” We are in this together, sharing this broken life, complicit together as broken humans, whose brokenness sometimes explodes in hideous ways. Like it has this week.
We, as a whole, are in need of God’s salvation. So, thanks be to God, that is exactly what God promises to be doing.
It’s hard, of course, in moments of tragedy, to believe this is true – to believe there is anything even remotely close to God’s salvation occurring when what we see before us is its total opposite. And it is reasonable in moments such as these, for anger and despair to rise stronger. That’s fine. It’s best to be honest, especially in prayer.
And then we seek the deeper consolation of faith.
On Wednesday evening, I sat in a circle with several St. John’s children. We were getting ready to begin the work of filling the cracks in those tiles behind the altar.
“Let’s start by being quiet for 30 seconds,” I told them. “And in the quiet I want you to think of one thing in your life that’s not working well, that feels broken.”
And we were quiet together.
“Got it?” I asked. They nodded, “yes.”
“So these cracks we’re going to fill in, they’re your broken things. And we’re going to fill them with little pieces of gold. And do you know what the gold is?”
They looked up at me.
“It’s God’s love. All the cracks get filled with God’s love.”
And then I asked, “So is the crack still there?” They talked it over and concluded: Yeah, the crack didn’t go away. But it’s filled now. And what it’s filled with is God’s love.
And so, we took off our shoes and walked behind the altar – a sign that we were entering the sanctuary to do this holy work, this prayerful work, of filling in the cracks. And that’s what they did. It took over half an hour. And they were so focused, and so proud. And when we were done, we all sat huddled beneath the altar together, looking up at this big work we’d just accomplished.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“It’s so beautiful,” they said. They were amazed by what they’d been part of.
And then I said, “Okay. Let’s be silent again – for 10 seconds this time – to remember what the cracks were in our lives that we’d thought of before we started.”
So we quiet.
“Do you remember?” I asked. They nodded.
And one boy said, “Can I share?”
“Of course.”
“My friend just had brain surgery.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s a big crack. Look up at the work you just did. Can you pick one of the cracks that you can name as the brain surgery crack?”
And he did. He pointed it out to us.
“And what’s it full of?” I asked.
“God’s love,” he said.
Then someone else asked, “Can I share?”
“Of course.” And she shared something very honest and very vulnerable.
“Oh,” I said, “that’s a really big crack. Can you see it up there?” And she pointed it out.
“And what’s it full of?”
“God’s love,” she said.
For so it is in this world – it is full of really big cracks. And the cracks – they don’t all go away. But this is what we see of God, through Jesus, the Son. God enters this world, this fractured and fracturing world, and meets us here – joining us in these cracks, joining us in love. Even when that crack is his own cracking body; even when that crack is the tomb that received his now dead body; even when the crack is the fissured earth and Christ’s descent into hell…he goes to every crack, filling it with God’s love.
This is the way of Christ.
And this is the way we, still, will find God at work in our fracturing world. Wherever love is filling in the cracks, that is where God is – alive and true and beautiful. For God is love.
And we are seeking to be Christ for this world. Just as Jesus never taught his followers where evil came from, nor can we explain the origin of all these cracks. But we can do what he did, which is to bring love and healing to every broken and breaking place. This is the greater power. This is the power that remains ours.
In the early days of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, there was a 27-year-old, Jewish woman named Etty Hillesum. And while her world was descending into chaos and fear, she was on a reverse journey of spiritual discovery – a discovery that would have been totally lost to history, were it not for the journal she kept that was published some forty years later.
Her journal began on March 9, 1941, nearly a year after Nazi invasion of her country. She saw it as a “dialogue,” she wrote, “with what is deepest inside me, which for the sake of convenience I call God.” [1] As the Nazi restrictions on Jews increased, Etty was discovering a freedom in God’s love – a love informed by both Jewish and Christian scriptures, but even more importantly, from her own spiritual practices of meditation and prayer. In the language of Jesus, she was being born of the Spirit. Through it, she was being set free from hatred. “It is the problem of our age,” she writes. “Hatred of Germans poisons everyone’s mind…. But indiscriminate hatred is the worst thing there is. It is a sickness of the soul.”[2] Watching a group of German soldiers training outside her window one day, she writes, “God, do not let me dissipate my strength, not the least little bit of strength, on useless hatred against these soldiers. Let me save my strength for better things.” “The only way to truly fight wars, she says, is ‘by releasing, each day, the love that is shackled inside us, and giving it a chance to live.’”[3]
She sought beauty wherever it remained and was nourished by it, letting it become part of who she now was. One day in her journal, she reflects on the particular beauty of the jasmine growing on her balcony. But weeks later, after a storm had destroyed the last of its blossoms, she writes, “But somewhere inside me, the jasmine continues to blossom undisturbed, just as profusely and delicately as ever it did. And it spreads its scent round the House in which You dwell, O God….I bring You not only my tears and my forebodings on this stormy, grey Sunday morning. I even bring You scented jasmine.”
In July 1942, Etty took a job in the Jewish Council of Amsterdam. Created by the military regime, Jews were tasked with implementing the Nazi demands on them, including choosing which Jews were to be deported to Westerbork, a holding facility from which they’d be sent to Auschwitz. Those on the council used their privilege to try to save their own lives. But Etty chose instead to accompany the first wave of deportees. For nearly a year, she was given special permission to travel back and forth between Westerbork and Amsterdam, carrying letters and medicine. Eventually, that permit was revoked, and she became just another deportee.
Certainly, during this time, there was deep anguish. “My heart is a floodgate for a never-ending tide of misery,”[4] she writes. And yet, especially at night, amidst a barracks filled with the sounds of girls and women, groaning, snoring, crying, she writes, “I was sometimes filled with an infinite tenderness, and lay awake for hours letting all the many, too many impressions of a much-too-long-day wash over me, and I prayed, ‘Let me be the thinking heart of these barracks.’ And that is what I want to be…the thinking heart of a whole concentration camp.”[5]
And she was. Her love for her fellow inmates and for God never abated. And so she became God’s love, the gold now filling that hideous crack. “Sometimes,” she writes, “I might sit down beside someone [in the camp], put an arm round a shoulder, say very little and just look into their eyes….and at the end of each day, there was always the feeling: I love people so much.”[6]
She was killed, of course, like so many others – gassed at Auschwitz on November 30, 1943. It was evil that killed her. But it was a force of evil proved weaker than the force of God’s love forged within her, still bearing witness to the greater powers that remain.
And it is this power of love that is, and ever shall be, God’s salvation of the world.
[1][1] Quoted in Newell, John Phillip, The Great Search: Turning to Earth & Soul in the Quest for Healing & Home, p. 144.
[2] Ibid, 149.
[3] Ibid, 149.
[4] Ibid, 154.
[5] Ibid,154.
[6] Ibid, 156.