Gary
Hall
Washington
National Cathedral
March
16, 2014 [The Second Sunday in Lent]
I love baseball,
and even as winter hangs on, I feel growing joy that spring training season has
finally arrived. At least they’re playing now in Florida and Arizona. Soon they will even be here—no matter that it
is supposed to snow tonight.
I have probably
spent more hours of my life than I care to count watching the national pastime
on TV. If you have watched baseball on
television too, you may remember a time, not so many years ago, when there
would regularly be somebody behind home plate holding a sign with the words
"John 3:16".
Canny baseball
functionaries figured out long ago how to muscle those sign-wielding
evangelists away from camera range. I'm
sure there were a lot of people who saw those signs on TV and had no idea what
they referred to. Indeed, if you're
watching an athletic contest and you don't know how to read a Bible verse, you
might think of "John 3:16" as a partial score. "Some guy named John
got 3 but some other guy got 16, so I guess John lost."
If you have always
wondered what John 3:16 means, then you’re in luck this morning. It is a Bible verse, and it's what Jesus says
toward the end of today's gospel reading:
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that
everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal
life." Those who are evangelically
minded are attracted to that verse, no doubt, because it summarizes
Christianity in a nutshell. It tells you
what is behind the Jesus event. God sent
Jesus into the world so that we might not die but live. God sent Jesus into the world not because God
hates the world but because God loves the world.
The world is a
complicated place for all of us—it carries a multitude of meanings. The world is the created order, the planet,
the human community, the totality of everything that God has made. The world is also everything else not us, “out
there”. It’s at once all that is and all
we are afraid of. Jesus uses “the world”
in the former sense, our psalm for today in the latter. If there’s a psalm other than the 23rd
which people know and love, it is Psalm 121, the psalm we sang this morning:
1
I lift up my eyes to the hills; *
from where is my help to come?
from where is my help to come?
2
My help comes from the LORD, *
the maker of heaven and earth. [Psalm 121]
the maker of heaven and earth. [Psalm 121]
As deeply as we
love that psalm for its depiction of God’s protecting love, many people love it
without quite understanding it on the literal level. Psalm 121 portrays the
world as a fearful, not a safe place. I lift
up my eyes to the hills not because the hills are beautiful but because that’s
where my enemies sit encamped all around me.
I’m like a sentry at a cavalry fort in the old west under attack by
warriors on horseback. Who is going to ride
to my rescue? Only God can get me out of
this one!
Those of us who
seek to follow Jesus will always find ourselves caught in the tension between
these two visions of the world: it’s a
beloved place, and it’s a scary place. God
so loved the world that God sent Jesus to save it. God knows how dangerous the world can be and
so sleeplessly watches over us. That
double vision of the world places us in a profound tension. How do we live in it together? How do we live in it personally? On this
Second Sunday in Lent, I invite you to join me in thinking about the world and
how we, as followers of Jesus, make our way in and through it.
How do we live in
the world together? This weekend we at
Washington National Cathedral are observing our second annual Gun Violence
Prevention Sabbath. Ever since the
shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut in December of
2012, our cathedral and diocesan communities have joined with thousands of
congregations around the country to see what we can do to end the epidemic of
gun violence in American streets, schools, and public places. On Tuesday Bishop Budde and I greeted the
Team 26 bicycle riders from Newtown as they made their way from Connecticut to
Capitol Hill to press for federal legislation that would keep guns out of the
hands of criminals and those with mental illness. On Thursday afternoon we joined other faith
leaders as we blessed the two groups of people who know the reality of gun
violence up close: the families of victims and the first responders (police,
fire, emergency medical teams) as they gathered near our t-shirt display
representing the 103 people who died by gunfire in the District of Columbia
last year.
“God
so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in
him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
“I lift up my eyes to the hills; *from where is
my help to come?” As we think about the world and what it means for us as
Christians together, two things stand out as powerfully true. First: Christians care about things like gun
violence because we believe God loves the world and wants all of its creatures
to live. Gun violence is like any other
threat to life that people of faith have always worked against. Gun violence and cancer are both threats to
human life. But only gun violence is
entirely of human origin. In the same way we have over time lessened the number
of yearly deaths due to smoking and car crashes, so can we reduce the number of
gun deaths. We Christians care about any
threat to human life and happiness because as God does, so do we also try to
love the world and all its creatures.
And there is a second
truth that emerges for us about the world.
It can be a scary place. But as dangerous as we feel the world might be,
the good news for us together is that we are ultimately safe in the world. But our safety does not come from our own
self-protectiveness. It does not come
from living in a gated community or from the barrel of a gun. It does not come
from our career successes, our social position, or our advanced degrees. Our
safety comes from God, the maker of heaven and earth. It is God who watches over us
sleeplessly. It is God who shall
preserve us from all evil. It is God who
shall keep us safe. As spiritual
teachers from the Hebrew prophets to Jesus himself, from Pope Francis to the
Dalai Lama would remind us, our weapons and castles will always fail us. When
we put our trust in our power and strength, we are always disappointed. The only one who will finally protect us is
God, and the only way we will ever really be safe is to live lives of justice,
humility, and compassion.
I don’t doubt that many
people believe that guns will keep them safe from the threats and dangers of
the unknown in this world. I do know,
from a lifetime of reading the Bible, that this belief is an illusion. Human life is fragile and finite. In one sense, we are never safe. We are all vulnerable. We are all mortal. If your definition of
safety entails living forever without any suffering at all, I’m sorry to tell
you you’re out of luck.
But in another sense we are
in luck—we are deeply safe, we are all finally OK. And that is because there is one who watches
over us, who is our shade at our right hand, so that the sun shall not strike
us by day or the moon by night. That one
watches over our going out and our coming in from this time forth for evermore.
That one is with you even in your fragility, your mortality, your loss and your
pain. That one’s love for you is finally
more real and more powerful than anything else that might assail you.
Both together and
individually, we hold on to those two truths of the Gospel. We will always be
vulnerable, and we will always be safe. Our guns will not save us. Our power will not save us. Our things will not save us. The only thing that will save us is the one
who came among us in love to assure us that God so loves the world that we all
might have eternal life. You lift up
your eyes to the hills: where does your
help come from? It comes from God, the
maker of heaven and earth.
As we move together through Lent,
let’s remember that its real destination is Easter, the ultimate celebration of
God’s love for the world and for you and me. Let us use this season to let go
of clinging to the things that won’t save us and to turn to the one who
will. Easter, like baseball, really will
eventually arrive. And when it does, may
we all be ready to begin to take in the depth of our safety in the one who so
loved the world that he came among us so that we might not perish but have
eternal life. Amen.
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