3.10.2024 | ...SO LOVED... | Rev. Andrew Chappell

John 3:14-21 | Confirmation Sunday

 

It’s not just about believing God is who God says God is. It’s about believing and trusting and having confidence that God can do what God says God can do. 

 

Movie Quote Trivia.

If you don’t know this about me, I’m a big movie fan. For some reason, I can remember movie lines better than a lot of other things. Often, I can remember movie lines after seeing a movie once better than I can remember what my wife just said to me ten times this morning. (Something about the trash.) 

 

But I love movies, I love movie quotes. I love good lines. And growing up, my family loved to play movie quote trivia. And all that is, is simply, in the middle of a conversation, you could be doing anything, and something makes you think of a quote from a movie, and you just call out: Movie Quote Trivia! And then follow with the movie quote, seeing who might name the movie it comes from first. That’s it. It’s not much of a game. But for anyone who loves a game, or trivia, or sudden interruptions…it’s great. 

 

Let’s try it… see if you can get a few. 

 

Movie Quote Trivia: Some people are worth melting for. (Frozen)

Movie Quote Trivia: If you build it, he will come. (Field of Dreams)

Movie Quote Trivia: To infinity and beyond (Toy Story)

Movie Quote Trivia: There’s no crying in baseball. (A League Of Their Own).

Movie Quote Trivia: Remember who you are. (The Lion King)

Movie Quote Trivia: Show me the money (Jerry Maguire)

Movie Quote Trivia: When life gets you down, you know what you gotta do? Just keep swimming. (Finding Nemo)

 

Some of those are pretty easy. Others may be more difficult for you. And I think if the Bible were a movie, John 3:16 would be one of those easy ones, one of those unforgettable lines. Most could get it, right?

 

AND, if I were to yell…

BIBLE QUOTE TRIVIA: “The time is surely coming…when the one who plows shall catch up with the one who reaps and the treader of grapes with the one who sows the seed”...that’s harder isn’t it? Because not a lot of folks read the book of Amos.

 

How about, BIBLE QUOTE TRIVIA: “Like a city breached, without walls, is one who lacks self-control.” Maybe a little easier, because it sounds like it would come from PROVERBS.

 

But if I were to yell out 

BIBLE QUOTE TRIVIA: For God so loved the world…

I think many of you could name it: John 3:16.

 

Those words were a part of my growing up. That was probably the first verse I ever memorized (other than John 11:35 - Jesus wept). John 3:16 is the most famous verse of scripture, the most popular, and I’m sure many of you could quote it. 

 

Harder to recall though are the details surrounding that verse. Who Jesus is talking to, and what the subject of the conversation is. And until recently, I had no memory about the snake thing that we just read. 

What is that??? What is Jesus talking about there? 

 

A Snake in the Wilderness. 

(Well confirmands, I’m glad you asked!)  Jesus is in the middle of one of his more famous back-and-forths, in which he tells the Pharisee Nicodemus that he must be born again, not literally, but reborn by water and the Spirit. His inward, his Spirit has to be transformed. And Jesus reprimands Nicodemus for being a teacher of Israel and not knowing this. And then Jesus makes a weird reference to Moses.

 

Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life. 

 

And to any of us who don’t know Moses or the stories from the Torah – the first five books of the OT – this is a bizarre reference. And one that we often don’t even remember. 

 

I felt that way a few years ago when I traveled to the country of Jordan, and I visited Mt. Nebo, where Moses is said to have looked out onto the promised land. And in present day, at the lookout point, placed by the historical society, is a huge bronze statue of a snake on a stick. And as I got my picture next to it (because how often do you see that?!), I remember thinking, I do NOT remember this from seminary. (Probably because trying to study and cram the book of Numbers at 11pm at night is not the best way to read that book).

 

In the book of Numbers, Moses and the people of Israel are wandering on the road, and the people get angry at both God and Moses for continuing to allow them to wander and not enter the promised land. 

 

They yell at God and Moses (I don’t know if you’ve ever yelled at God – don’t worry God can take it)...they yell at God and Moses: 

 

Why did you bring us up from Egypt to kill us in the desert, where there is no food or water. All we have is this awful bread to eat.

 

And all of a sudden, in the midst of their complaining, a bunch of poisonous snakes appear and start biting people. Isn’t that a wild way to deal with complaining people? Send a couple of cobras on em? Hide a couple of rattlesnakes in their shoes? 

 

(Makes me think of a little MOVIE QUOTE TRIVIA: “Why’d it have to be snakes?” -Indiana Jones)

 

So the snakes appear. And the snakes are biting people and people are dying. And so the people come to Moses and say, “Will you ask God to get rid of the snakes. We’ve sinned. Ask for God to save us?” So he does. 

 

And God tells Moses, “Here’s what you’re gonna do. Make a poisonous snake and place it on a pole. If someone is bitten, all they have to do is look at the snake on the pole and they will live!” So Moses makes a bronze snake and puts it on a pole. And so when a snake bit somebody, they would look at the snake that Moses raised up on the pole, and they were saved from the snakes’ poison.

 

And the point of that story seems to be that the snake that was raised up was the method by which God chose to save the Israelites in that moment. In other words, in a sort of cooperative moment, God gave them a manner by which to be saved and the people BELIEVED that God could save them in that manner. So when they looked at it, they were saved from the poison.

 

Back to John. 

Now–for years, after their wandering in the desert, and throughout the OT, the Hebrew people asked God for salvation from various things, from sins, from empires, from suffering… 

 

Perhaps you’ve prayed a prayer asking God to help you or save you from something. I remember in middle and high school I always had a save-me-from-this-test-prayer: “Dear God, if there is a way for the teacher to push this test to another day, that would be great. I really don’t want to take a test today.” 

 

Maybe you’ve prayed a prayer like that. OR Maybe there are other things you’ve asked God to save you from. Things like pain. Regret. Sadness. Busy work. Sickness. Something scary. Snakes…(Maybe even death).

 

The people of Israel asked for salvation from a lot of things – from Rome, from corruption, from exile.

 

And concerning their salvation, in John 3:14, Jesus says that similar to the event of Moses and the bronze snake, where Moses lifted up a snake and the people were saved from painful snake bites when they LOOKED at the statue, Jesus too will be lifted up on a cross as the method of God’s saving action for the world, and any who look to him (like the snake on the pole), and any who believe that God can save through that action of sacrifice will be saved. 

 

Except this time, salvation is not from poisonous snake bites or the Roman Empire, it is from ourselves, from our selfishness, from our ability to alienate ourselves from one another, from our sin.

 

The founder of the Methodist movement (you remember confirmands?) John Wesley referred to sin as a sickness. An illness. And the less we do to acknowledge it, the more it works itself into our system and into our systems. It’s not just an individual thing, it’s a systemic thing too. And the more it sickens us. The worse we get. Kind of like that poison from the snake in the wilderness. If we do nothing when we are bitten, sooner or later, it isn’t going to end well. The same is with sin. If left untreated, we turn into people that God did not intend. 

 

But we also (and Wesley too) believe in an antidote to that toxin, we believe there is a holy medicine to our sickness. And THAT medicine is the one that was raised TO SAVE US. Like the snake on the pole. But better. 

 

And John says, just like the Israelites who believed that they could be saved by simply looking at the statue, we need to believe. 

 

Belief.

The Greek for belief is a word that means to have faith in, to trust, to affirm, to have confidence in. And in the most famous verse of Scripture (John 3:16-17), Jesus explains what he means:

 

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him (who affirms, trusts, has confidence in him) may not perish but have eternal life. 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. 

 

I love that verse. I really do. But what does it mean to believe, to trust in, to have confidence in Jesus? Well, according to Jesus, and according to the comparison he is making to the snake pole, part of what it means to believe in Jesus is to trust that God can actually DO God’s saving work through Jesus!

 

Like the snake on the stick, the Israelites believed/trusted God that to look upon the statue was indeed the antidote to the poison that they needed. So it is for us. Jesus is inviting us to believe, to trust, to have confidence that God can actually use the torture, the sacrifice, the criminal’s sentence of crucifixion to save humanity. 

 

It’s not just about believing God is who God says he is. 

It’s about trusting that God can do what God says he can do. 

 

But it’s also deeper than THAT.

 

John 3:16 says that the intention of God’s cosmic saving act on earth is love. “Go SO LOVED the world. God SO LOVED you. God SO LOVED me. That God raised up Jesus, himself, a manner by which we might be saved from the toxic sin that alienates us from one another and from God. And God invites us to believe, to have confidence in, to trust that God actually LOVES us that much.” 

 

In our ladies Bible study on Wednesday mornings, (a few weeks ago) we were talking about capital punishment and the massive amount of people in prison and incarcerated. And someone in there made the comment about how many people in those situations have never heard someone tell them “I love you,” have never known from the beginning that they are loved. 

 

Jesus invites us to believe that God so loves us. AND Jesus also invites us to trust that God’s love is enough to save us…from ourselves, from our sins, from our wandering, even from snakes…

 

Wesley at Aldersgate.

I talked about this a few weeks ago, and I’ve mentioned this a number of times from up here. (And many of you confirmands heard this story in the fall I think.) John Wesley knew Scripture, he knew how to pray, he knew how to care for the poor and imprisoned. He knew HOW to follow Jesus. He knew the right things to DO. 

 

And then one night, when he was particularly low, he went to a prayer meeting, and something was said there, something happened, and because of it, he felt different. JW would later write that he KNEW (in that moment) that God loved him. Even him. He knew it. He trusted it. He had a new confidence in it. He believed that God SO LOVED him. He believed that God’s love was enough to save him. And out of that feeling, he wanted nothing more than to love GOD back. And he responded by letting his actions morph and transform, his inward life had been so affected by this love of God that it HAD to shape his outward life!

 

In John 3:20-21, Jesus says (MSG), “Everyone who practices evil, addicted to self-denial and illusion, hates the light and won’t come near it, [for fear of] painful exposure. But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes the light so the work can be seen for the God-work that it is.” That’s just another way of saying what Wesley experienced. Having a confidence in and a trust that God loves you causes you to want to work, to do, to live that love in such a way as to respond to God’s love with a simple, “I love you too.”

 

And ultimately, Paul would tell a church in Colossae, that this is what it means to be “in Christ.” The term Christian rarely appears in the Bible. People are more often referred to as ones who live “in Christ.” 

What does that mean? 

 

Eugene Peterson says, “‘In Christ’ means that [we] are those who have heard the call of God’s love and grace, responded to it, and consequently entered into a union of fellowship with God.” We are no longer spectators. We are players. And “[We] are [now] in the arena of God’s working love, redeeming grace, and delivering power. [We] are in Christ.”

 

And when we are IN CHRIST,  we develop and pursue a trust…

 

1-that God truly SO LOVES us

2-that God could ACTUALLY used a cross and an empty tomb to save the world

 

And (3), when we are IN CHRIST, we seek to love God back in the way we live our lives.

 

Confirmation Introduction.

Today, in the life of the church, is Confirmation Sunday.

What that means is that for 13 students, they have been working together all year with Paul and others to better understand faith in Jesus and the vows of membership in the United Methodist Church (and these vows are how we love God back).

 

Confirmation is something that occurs in conjunction with baptism. For some of our students today and for many of us, we were baptized as infants. Other students will be baptized today!

 

For any who are baptized (whether today or years ago) through the sacrament of baptism we are initiated into the church. We are incorporated into God’s mighty acts of salvation and given new birth through water and the Spirit. And this gift comes without price. In baptism, God essentially embraces us, gives us a hug, and says to us, “I SO LOVE you.”

 

And in confirmation, we renew the covenant declared at our baptism, and we acknowledge what God is doing for us (that God is working in us, sanctifying us, and we affirm our commitment to Christ’s holy church (essentially saying, “We’re in!”)). And if baptism is God’s embrace of us, giving us a hug, telling us “I love you,” Confirmation is my decision to embrace God back, hug God back, to respond to God’s “I love you,” with our own, “I love you too.” 

 

This is an embrace, a partnership. God wants us to know that we are SO LOVED…and God desires for us to join in on his work in the world. And if we believe, have faith, set our feet in the direction of God, then our LIVES truly will show the evidence of our heart. 

 

The confirmands will make some promises, parts of a covenant, that don’t just focus on our heart, on our belief. They focus on the DOs and DONTs, our actions. They focus on the HOW of loving God back.  

 

QUESTIONS LIKE: Do you repent? Do you accept the freedom God gives you to battle evil and injustice and oppression?

 

BUT after THOSE questions, THEN comes the confession of Jesus as savior and in our UMC Hymnal, faith/belief is characterized as TRUST in his GRACE. 

 

In the end, what we do is important, but it cannot eclipse who God says that we are. And who does God say that we are? SO LOVED. 

 

And for many, the question soon becomes, “How could I not want to love a God like that? How could I not want to be a partner in that? So that others might know that they too are SO loved.”

 

John Wesley: “What is salvation? The salvation which is here spoken of is not what is frequently understood by that word, the going to heaven, eternal happiness. …It is not a blessing which lies on the other side of death…it is a present thing…[it] might be extended to the entire work of God, from the first dawning of grace in the soul till it is consummated in glory.” And it all stems from the fact that GOD SO LOVED YOU. AND GOD SO LOVED ME. 

 

How could I not let that LOVE flow from me into the world?

 

Amen.