READ! John 3:14-22
I have this series of really helpful commentaries. Many of you have probably heard of them. They’re called “Feasting on the Word,” and they’re this huge collection of lectionary-based reflections for each passage that is highlighted in the Revised Common Lectionary. I like to follow the lectionary, because it’s like getting an assignment - I have to wrestle with texts that are hard, texts that don’t make sense, and texts that have become so cliche that we’ve forgotten how very radical and life changing they can be. Dan gave me every volume of this commentary as an ordination gift, and it has been so helpful. What I like most about it though, is that they’re mine, not a library’s, so I write and scribble and underline and cross out right there in the book. I can desecrate these texts however I want because they’re mine. I mean, you’re welcome to borrow them any time, but they will come prepackaged with my questions, my doubts, my frustrations, my strange conspiracy theories, and my weak attempts to make metaphorical connections where there simply are none. It’s a place to test things out, and, since the lectionary cycle rolls around every three years, it’s also a place to go back to what I was thinking about and struggling with three years ago.
Well. Three years ago, in the section marked John 3:14-22, I wrote, “God doesn’t talk to me.” And then I proceeded to scribble down quotes about doubt and belief and darkness from thinkers such as St. Augustine, Paul Tillich, Madeleine L’Engle, Mother Teresa, and Frederick Buechner. Three years ago was a not-so-fun year in my life, it was pretty dark; if you cut down the tree of my life and examined the rings, you would notice some definite disease and atrophy in one particular ring, and you could clearly label that ring the years 2017 and 2018. It feels so long ago, and yet I can bring particular horrible moments to the front of my mind as if they happened yesterday. Time is weird like that.
We’ve turned John 3:16 into such a cliche. We see it painted on bedsheets at football games, we slap bumper stickers with this verse onto the trunks of our cars, we use it as a scripture bomb to lob over to someone who doesn’t believe the same way we do so that we can somehow prove that our way is the best and only way. It’s become our get-out-of-jail-free card, our hall pass to get us out of the hell of first period wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Just agree to this verse, logically assent to the series of propositions that it presents, and voila, instant heaven. That’s it. All of your worries about your regrets and your fears about what happens after we die, are, poof, gone. Simply agree to the veracity of this verse, and that’s it, you’re done; you’re heaven bound. Now you just have to suffer through the inconveniences of this life until you get to the end and then you cross over the rainbow bridge where everything is peace and light and perfection and halos and harps and angel wings.
Three years ago, I was clearly not in the mood to acquiesce to a simple test to determine whether I was in or I was out, nor did I have the capacity to see beyond my own pain and my own darkness. I was in no place to accept an easy answer to put me out of my misery, or to at least say, “well, at least there’s heaven in the future.” Nor was I strong enough to wrestle with, come to terms with, and to find peace in my past. I was just in this middle spot. Maybe God exists. Maybe God is good. Maybe some kind of salvation is real. But all I have is right now, and right now, “God doesn’t talk to me.”
I was in the middle of this process of healing my brain from all the damage my thoughts had caused over the last few years. I knew I couldn’t go back to my old way of thinking, I knew I had dug ruts to fast track me from one negative thought to the next, and if I went down that road in my mind, it would lead to no good. But I hadn’t yet formed new connections, linked new synapses, developed new thoughts with which to replace the old ones. I couldn’t go back. But I didn’t have the tools I needed to go forward, either. I was sort of stuck in the present moment, in the present thought, where the past was too painful to carry and the future not only didn’t exist yet, but was too amorphous to even imagine. My days consisted of taking one step at a time, one breath at a time, surviving from one minute to the next. I was living off of coffee in the mornings and sleeping pills at night.
This middle place, this place of neither past nor future, was the place I needed to be. I needed to be present in the right now. In fact, it was the only safe place that I could be. I just tried to pay attention, to be here, right now, and when I couldn’t do that, well, I just went to bed. Life was in the now, not in the heartache of the past, and not in the unknown, formless future.
So I just stayed there. I stayed there, and I healed. Or God healed. Or we healed together.
See, I think we maybe get it a little bit wrong, or we miss something important, when we cast this very important verse solely into the realm of where we’re going to end up when we die. Does it bring you comfort about what comes after this life? Excellent. Do you hope for a heavenly state where you are reunited with loved ones and pain has ceased and you’re singing the praises of your savior until the end of time? Awesome. Hold on to that. Don’t give that up.
But. Or, rather, and.
There is an eternal life that is right here, right now, that we so often miss because we’re so occupied with the regrets of the past, or we’re so obsessed with escaping into the future.
Paul Tillich calls this the “eternal now.”
He says our existence is defined by time. We have a beginning and we will have an end. There was a time before we existed. And there will be a time after. And some day, even time will end. Just as the darkness was separated from the light and the earth was formed and the soil created and time began, so will the soil disappear, and the earth will fall away, and darkness collapse back into the light. There is a beginning. And there is an end. But, he says, the God who enters time is also the God who is also outside of time. Time will end, but there is an “eternity above time,” there is an “eternal as the ultimate point in our past.” And, likewise, there is an eternal as the ultimate point in our future. Or, stated a little more simply, time is just a construct, as we have just illustrated today when we some how “lost” an hour of sleep last night and suddenly the sun will stay out an hour “longer” tonight.
There is something even beyond time, outside of time, that isn’t defined by a past or a future, but that just is. We call this reality, “God.” God, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. And just as we believe that God became flesh and entered into the temporal now of human existence, Tillich says that God enters into our own temporal nows, our own “right here”s. A sort of incarnational two-way bridge is formed, where the incarnated, fleshy, earthly, timely world of human existence reveals the ethereal, transcendent, timeless, eternal ultimate love of God. When this happens, the “temporal” now, and the “eternal” now overlap, and we encounter God. He says, “Not everybody, and nobody all the time, is aware of this ‘eternal now’ in the temporal ‘now.’ But sometimes it breaks powerfully into our consciousness and gives us the certainty of the eternal, of a dimension of time which cuts into time and gives us our time.”
It’s in this eternal now, in this present moment that surpasses all moments, that we experience forgiveness, “belief”- whatever that is - and light in the darkness. It’s in the eternal now that God is present and “lives” and meets us where we are. But it’s not some escape, some other place, where we can leave behind the messiness of our lives. In the eternal now, the facts cannot be changed, what has happened has happened, but the meaning of what has happened can change, and when the meaning surpasses the pain of the past, that is forgiveness. The meaning of the past is changed, and that makes all the difference for our future. But that only happens in the time that we actually have, and the only time that we actually have is right now, in the present. The past is gone. The future’s not here. We just have right now. And it’s so fleeting, that the second that I say “right now” the present is gone, poof, never to be seen or experienced again. But there are those moments that seem to last longer, that seem to be more real, that seem to transcend time, and those moments are “eternal now” moments, those moments are encounters with God, and in those moments, we are saved. In those moments we are not perishing, but we have eternal life.
Ok. I’m sure I’ve lost you with all this existential philosophizing. I apologize. I get all excited and I just can’t help it, and it’s really cozy and comfortable in the world of theory and thought and the hypothetical. John 3:16 is so much easier to handle if we just project it into our futures and make it all about an afterlife. John 3:16 is so much easier to handle if we keep it at arms length and simply say that it’s about belief and unbelief, or assenting to the right creed, or marking the “yes” or “no” box on the “Who gets in to heaven list." But, more and more, as I experience the healing force of being in the present, of being in the now, of being centered and mindful of what is right here, right in front of us, I am starting to believe that John 3:16 is more than a litmus test for believers; it is an experience of something more, of something eternal, even as it is a present “here-ness.” God so love the world that God entered into limited bounded realm of time so that everyone who believes may not perish in the right here, in the right now, but have eternal life.
This is all I really want to say to you today. God does talk to me. God does speak to you. God is with us, right here, in this eternal moment. This is eternal life. That’s the eternal life we can tap in to. Not some distant, far off, nebulous vision of us reaching the pearly gates and checking our names on the John 3:16 list, and forgetting about all the hurt we’ve caused and the pain we’ve suffered, but in the right here, in the right now, God, incarnate, present in this presence, in meaning-making forgiveness that God offers.
My spiritual director has been trying to get me out of my “head” for months now. Every time I try to experience God or have some kind of an encounter with God, every time I try to pray or meditate or try some contemplation technique, I jump into my logical mind. I end up asking all kinds of questions, I want to know the Greek, and I want to know the Ancient Near East Palestinian context and I have this sudden urge to dig out the commentaries and talk to scholars and head to the library. I want to check the boxes to make sure I don’t miss anything. I want to get it right so that I don’t need the forgiveness in the first place.
But “no,” she says, "don’t do that. Stick with the image. Take the risk. Use your imagination. Experience what God is trying to say to you today.” Well, one day we were supposed to connect with Jesus in his childhood. We were supposed to listen and watch and explore Jesus as a young child. And as many of you know, we don’t get a whole lot about Jesus’s childhood in the Gospels. It’s all left up to our imaginations. Ugh. There’s not a lot to ask about when there’s nothing there, and I didn’t have any Greek to look up or context to fill in, there was just this vast expanse of time that nobody really knows anything about. So, instead of giving up, and instead of looking for another reference book, I took Jesus to my own childhood, to my own backyard, and to the overgrown lot next door. And I showed Jesus the best climbing trees and all the times we started building a treehouse but never finished. I showed him where we buried a time capsule full of Pepsi clear and a box of Runts and Lisa Frank stickers and a picture of Molly Ringwald. I showed him my swing set and the thin row of grass where I tried to plant a garden but the rhubarb was the only thing that survived and only Dad liked rhubarb.
I told him about the time I fell off the neighbor’s shed and another time when I jabbed my elbow into the window well and needed rows and rows of stitches. We ate mulberries right off the branches. And then night came. And the fireflies started glowing. And we sat together on my front step. And we watched. I was listening hard for God to speak to me. But, we just sat. We just waited together. We weren’t even sure what we were waiting for. And I swear. I promise. For half a second. For a split moment that was beyond moments. For the briefest of time that was truly outside time, in the remembering of a hot summer night in the late 1980s, I swear, in that present moment, in my 42 year old body, in that eternal now, I could hear the cicadas singing.
Thanks be to God.
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