Sermon onJohn 3:14-21

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

During Lent this year, our readings from the Hebrew Bible remind us of some of God’s promises.

We started by reading about God sending the rainbow as a permanent covenant of peace.

Two weeks ago, we read about God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah: that their numerous descendants would be God’s people forever.

Last week, we read a third covenant: the 10 Commandments, which illustrate how God’s people will be in right relationship with God and other people.

This week, in both the Hebrew Bible reading and the Gospel we have stories of God intervening to bring healing.

In Numbers, the freed Israelites were wandering the wilderness and getting hangry. They started griping about God and Moses and the situation they were in.I don’t blame them—I’d be pretty stressed out if I were them. It’s so very human.

Do you notice how even their complaints contradict themselves? “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” It feels so much like when I open my closet full of clothes and go, “Ugh! I have nothing to wear!” How quickly we grow bored of what we have!

God had provided manna—divine food in the wilderness—for the Israelites, and yet they complained that there was no food and the food was miserable.

So very human. And that’s what sin is like—the sin that we are all subject to, that’s part of the human condition. Sin is missing the mark and curving in on oneself and turning against God. It’s a disruption of the relationship between humans and God, humans and each other, and humans and nature.

It's certainly not limited to the Israelites in the wilderness. That’s why Jesus referred to this story in the Gospel of John.

A religious leader named Nicodemus had come to see Jesus after dark to ask him some questions. Jesus gave him some confusing teachings about being born again or born from above, and Nicodemus wasn’t following. Then, Jesus alluded to our story in Numbers and used it to describe himself.

In our perpetual state of falling short and hurting each other, we humans couldn’t successfully maintain right relationship with God, other humans, and the earth. We couldn’t live up to the beautiful image of right relationship we talked about last week in the 10 Commandments and the rest of the Law. And we reap the consequences of those broken relationships.

I know our reading from Numbers says that God sent the serpents, and that’s troubling. I don’t believe a God of love who created the world and called it very good would do something so petty and vengeful. Surely complaining does not deserve death! That’s not the God of love that I know.

But God did create us as meaning-making creatures. It’s how we get art and science and so many amazing, beautiful things. But also, whenever there’s a natural disaster or a tragic accident, we start wondering if we did something to cause it.

From people cruelly theorizing that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for people practicing the Voodoo religion in Louisiana to the mildly disturbing child’s rhyme about stepping on a crack will break your mother’s back, we make meaning about everything, but the conclusions we come to are not always true or helpful.

In our Numbers reading, I see meaning-making people interpreting the snake infestation as God’s punishment for their complaining and distrust of the God who rescued them from Egypt. This reinforced their distrust of God.

But the next thing the story says about God does line up with God’s character: God brought them healing. God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and put it on a pole so that anyone who was bitten by the poisonous snakes could look at it and be healed. There was no requirement to promise to stop complaining or even to apologize—they could just look at it and live. That’s our God. That’s the promise this week: a promise of healing.

And that’s the story Jesus pointed Nicodemus to when he was trying to explain who he was and why he was here. Nicodemus had come to see Jesus, thinking there might be something special about this guy but he wasn’t sure. Jesus tried to explain to him the kingdom of God, the Beloved Community, but Nicodemus was thinking too literally. So, Jesus used scripture to illustrate his mission to Nicodemus:

“just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

Jesus came so that we complaining, ungrateful humans who go around hurting each other could be healed. And Jesus went on to explain why and what that healing would look like. It’s John 3:16, one of the most famous verses in the whole Bible.

Why did God send Jesus? Because God loved the world—the whole cosmos.

How would that healing happen? By giving us complaining, ungrateful humans eternal life.

And contrary to how John 3:16 is often used to talk about individual salvation, John 3:17 goes on to say that Jesus was there so that “the world might be saved through [him].” Jesus was there to restore right relationship throughout the cosmos.

God became human in Jesus to bring healing and reconciliation to the whole world and everything in it.

That’s what Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection accomplished. And still, we don’t see it in its fullness yet. The Beloved Community is both now and not yet.

For now, we still complain and hurt each other, ourselves, and the earth.

One of the ways we do that is by breaking the Sabbath commandment. I’m not talking about being lax about upholding a specific 24-hour period of not doing specific things. I’m talking about when we don’t honor our need for rest, our neighbors’ need for rest, or the earth’s need for rest. It damages our relationships—the way that God created us to be in community.

I preached on this text the week before the 2020 stay-at-home orders. My internship congregation and I pondered how best to care for our neighbors in a time of COVID before we knew what that was going to mean.

I remember Facebook posts saying that if you didn’t use your two weeks of staying at home to flatten the curve to learn a new skill, write a book, or lift weights until you were ripped, you were lazy and undisciplined.

This, beloved, is “grind culture.” Grind culture is the opposite of Sabbath. Grind culture says that we are what we do, that we are not worthy unless we accomplish things.

It gives no grace for life circumstances, lack of resources, chronic physical or mental illness, or the ebbs and flows of being a human. It convinces us that if we are not operating at maximum capacity 24/7, that we are weak, lazy, and worthless.

It is a lie.

It wants to keep us exhausted, shame-filled, isolated, and striving to consume more and more in hopes that we will live up to its impossible and ever-changing standard.

During the stay-at-home order, we didn’t need to learn a new skill; we were navigating a frightening new reality. What we needed was healing, rest, and gentleness.

Grind culture will never let us have those things. It will continue to whisper in our ears that we are not enough.

Sabbath is how we quiet that voice. Sabbath gives us time and energy to listen to God instead. The voice of our God of love and healing says,

“I made you. I love you.

You don’t need to do anything to make me love you.

You are more than enough just as you are. You are my beloved child.”

God’s voice is always there telling you these things. It’s easier to hear it when we’re practicing Sabbath.

Practicing Sabbath will look really different for each of us and our life circumstances—whether we’re recovering from surgery, or going to school, or caring for loved ones, or working fulltime. And grind culture is everywhere, making it hard to practice rest.

But we’re not meant to do it alone. Jesus came to reconcile the whole world’s relationships. We’re not meant to be islands—we’re meant to be part of rich ecosystems that share and support each other. Church should be about living that out.

Grind culture resists that level of connection, because we’re supposed to be “self-made people” who can “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.” But grind culture is full of lies.

Our God is Triune. Godself is a community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are created in God’s relationship-loving image.

Jesus came for our healing, to restore the harmony God intended for creation from the beginning. He accomplished that healing in his life, death, and resurrection, and we will experience its fullness in the completion of the Beloved Community at the end of time.

As we await that completion, resist grind culture. Practice Sabbath. And look to Jesus, who was lifted up on a cross and rose again to reconcile the whole world that God loves so much. Look to him and live.