Anne Vouga St. Thomas
Lent 2, Year A Ps. 121; Jn 3:1-17
March 19-20, 2011
You may have heard Karl Barth’s famous quote that a preacher should prepare sermons with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, but this week, that has been difficult to do. We have beautifully comforting readings in Psalm 121 and in the famous proclamation of God’s love for the world in John 3:16. But the images going through my mind this week, in the light of the headlines screaming about the “Crisis in Japan,” were of the people whose whole towns had been suddenly swept away by the sea. I kept picturing them lifting up their eyes to the hills, begging for help from God. How would they hear the words of our psalmist that “The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; it is he who shall keep you safe”? And then, when I read John’s metaphor about the wind blowing where it chooses, “but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes,” the immediate image that went through my mind was not of the Holy Spirit, but of invisible clouds of radiation, the unseen, uncontrollable menace wafting into homes and schools. How does the Good News of Scripture speak to a crisis of such haunting magnitude?
Sister Joan Chittister writes that crisis “is the junction of the ordinary and the cataclysmic, the place in life where change comes with a vengeance.”[1] Crisis is a turning point, a moment or series of moments out of which we cannot emerge unchanged. We have all dealt with the quiet desperation of personal crisis, such as life-changing illness, divorce, job loss, or the death of a loved one—but the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Japan symbolize and magnify traumatic change for us. The earth breaking into pieces beneath our feet, the sea pouring onto fields and towns at 100 miles per hour, a ferocious meltdown of atomic forces beyond our control—these are visible crises played out for the whole world to see. Japan, for better or for worse, will never be the same. And the world stands in witness to this violent, unwanted transformation. Crisis frightens us because it forces us to act and to change. As Bishop Westcott wrote, “’As we wake or sleep, we grow strong or we grow weak … and at last some crisis shows us what we have become.’”[2]
God does not shield us from crisis, nor do I believe that God subjects us to crisis as correction or punishment. What today’s Psalm tells us, however, is that God “keeps” us in the midst of crisis, that no matter how change shatters us, the transformed self that emerges will be the same beloved self that has always been the “apple of God’s eye.” While that might sound like puny consolation to someone who has just had his heart torn out, those of us watching the present crisis in Japan from afar are still whole enough to reflect on what it means to belong to God. Over and over again in Psalm 121, the Psalmist repeats that God “keeps” us, that God “watches over” us. In the same way that your parents’ love sustained you as a young child, creating and shaping the sense of self that you will keep all the rest of your life, God’s love shapes each of us, “watching” us, “keeping” us, surrounding and molding us. As we know from those tragic news reports from foreign orphanages, a baby who is unloved, untouched, left alone in a crib, will shrivel up and die, at least on the inside. As the Russian linguist Bakhtin writes, “’I myself cannot be the author of my own value, just as I cannot lift myself by my own hair.’”[3] The Good News of Psalm 121 is that our souls can never shrivel and die, because God’s unfailing love gives us our self-worth, our priceless value. Crisis might bring change and pain—and even death of this physical body—but God will not cease to preserve and keep us, as the beloved individuals that we are. Of course, Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in our Gospel lesson points out this confusion that we have between the body and the self. When Jesus talks about spiritual birth into the new life of God’s Kingdom, poor Nicodemus scratches his head over how someone could be physically born two times. The “life” that matters for God, however, is not the life that begins as we come into the world from our mothers’ wombs, but it is life as a child of God, life lived in the depth and breadth of God’s hands. We are who we are because of God’s love for us, and that is the one thing that will never change.
“How do we know for sure that God loves us?” you might ask. It certainly doesn’t look like God loves us sometimes, when we look around at our lives in this dangerous and messed-up world. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son … so that the world might be saved through him.” St. John tells us in our Gospel that Jesus, lifted up on the Cross, is the sign of God’s love for us. I was interested to be reminded this week that, for John, “the world” is a negative term, referring to those who turn against Jesus and God.[4] The Cross is therefore a sign of God’s love for all people, even for those who hide from God. Even more strangely, Jesus is not just “lifted up” on the Cross so that we can all see him better, but Jesus is “lifted up” on the Cross in the sense of being exalted.[5] For John, Jesus is glorified not only in his Resurrection but also in his crucifixion--the very shame and weakness of the crucifixion show forth the Glory of God. In the Cross, then, crisis itself is glorified—crisis becomes not the undoing of the world but the saving of it. Not only is the Cross a time of crisis for Jesus, but it becomes a sign of our supreme crisis as well: it indeed “shows us what we have become.”
In verse 19, right after our Gospel passage, John writes, “And this is the judgment [or in Greek, the “crisis,”] that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light.” God’s love, poured out abundantly, yet illogically, upon the dark world, puts us all before a painful and inevitable decision: to embrace that love and the kind of lives that it implies, or to turn away from it. As preacher David Lose writes: “God's love -- surprising, all encompassing, unasked for and undeserved -- is also given unconditionally. God loves us, that is, whether we like it or not. In the face of that kind of love, we will likely either yield to God's love or run away screaming, for no one can remain neutral to such extravagance.”[6]
Humor me by imagining something strange and perhaps unsettling for a moment: Imagine God’s love—God’s unfailing and sustaining love—to be like the invisible fog of radiation spewing from that broken nuclear power plant in Japan. Think about its unstoppable yet hidden power. Picture it blowing where it will, completely free of human control. Imagine the mutations that its presence brings, the painful changes that it must wreak on all of the wicked ways of the world. Instead of bubbling deep within concrete towers, though, imagine this strange Love stirring and leaking from a broken man on a Cross. In that man, at regular intervals, it explodes like a ticking time-bomb out into the world, transforming life as we know it, covering us with joy, surely, yet stripping away all of the dark places in which we like to hide. We do not know when the final explosion will occur. As a worker beneath that seething Cross, will you stay on through the crisis? Like the 50-some brave employees who remained behind at the reactors in Japan, risking their lives when everyone else fled, will you brave transformation by remaining to do the work of love that you have been given by the Crucified One? For such is the crisis placed before each of us who set our eyes upon the Cross Raised High.
[1] Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams, Uncommon Gratitude (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010), 136.
[2] Ibid., 138.
[3] Patricia K. Tull, “Preaching Psalms,” Chapter 1, unpublished manuscript, 5.
[4] Gail R. O’Day, The New Interpreter’s Bible: Luke, John (vol. IX), 552.
[5] Ibid.
[6] David Lose, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?tab=4&alt=1.
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