REJOICE IN GOD'S LOVE

A Sermon for the 4th Sunday in Lent, Year B
by Pastor Laura Gentry

Numbers 21:4-9 • John 3:14-21

Today is already the fourth Sunday in Lent. And it actually has a name. It is called Laetare. This term comes from the Latin word “rejoice.” So we are right smack dab in the middle of the somber season of Lent and yet the word that describes this day is rejoice. Does that make any sense to you?

It seems a bit odd since this is a season of penitence and sacrifice. It is a season so serious that we don’t even get to sing our alleluia verses. Yet in the ancient church, the prayers for this day always began with the word rejoice. Why? Because we have now passed the halfway point. Lent is more than half done and we are well on our way to the great joy of Easter. And today’s scripture lessons are filled with joy as well.

It begins with the story from the Exodus where the people of God begin to get grumbly. They are on a journey to the promised land but they seem to have forgotten about the greatness of this destination. All they can see now is the present discomforts. They are in the middle of the wilderness and the food is awful. So they get mad at Moses. Never mind the fact that he led them out of slavery and he has helped them find water, manna and has even argued with God on their behalf. Still, they feel sorry for themselves and he’s the most convenient one to blame. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” They ask Moses.

God does not appreciate their ingratitude and so poisonous serpents show up and start biting and killing the Israelites. So where is the joy in this story? It sounds like a horror movie. In a 1999 poll, 40% of Americans listed snakes as that thing in life that they feared most. Snakes beat out speaking in public and spiders. Now we have to deal with a snake story in the bible? It seems too awful.

It certainly reflects our human nature to want to fuss about things. We often grow impatient with God and feel that our wilderness experiences are lasting too long. We grumble and complain and embrace negativity instead of hope.

But back to the Exodus. Despite the fact that the people brought the snake problem on themselves by their negativity and ingratitude, God proves to be merciful. The people acknowledge their sin and ask for help. So God instructs Moses to make a bronze sculpture of one of the very serpents that had bitten them and mount it on a pole. Then, whenever someone is bitten, they simply look up to the serpent and they are healed. This is a great grace given freely to these unworthy wanderers.

Then, in the gospel lesson from John, we come in at the middle of a conversation that Jesus is having with a religious leader named Nicodemus. Jesus is trying to get through to this man that God is offering a new covenant through him. He says, “And 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.” You see he is making reference to the story we just heard. In the same way that God provided healing for the people through the serpent sculpture, God was now providing healing for all through Jesus who would be soon be dying for all on the cross. This cross is not just for the “insiders” who already have a relationship with God, but for all.

Then, comes John 3:16, the verse that everyone knows. “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.” It is known as the gospel in a nutshell. You see it written on the scoreboard and baseball games, on billboards and bumper stickers. I once saw a man holding a sign with this verse as he was protesting a concert of the Rolling Stones. It made me laugh to see him using it as a condemnation of those awful people going to see a rock band. I laughed because that is exactly the opposite point this scripture passage is making.

Look at the very next verse. Jesus says, “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.” The message is that the cross is lifted up to liberate people, to draw them to God with the cords not of guilt and condemnation but of unconditional love.

For we are the all the ones who chose darkness over light. We are the ones, like the Israelites, who like to complain even while we are on the road to freedom. Even when we don’t want to be this way, we end up being this way. Paul understood this internal wrestling when he wrote: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:19-21) And it is not just the sins we commit that is the problem, but the sinners that we are at our very core.

Yet Paul also understands that while our nature is sinful, God’s nature is one of love and grace. “Where sin increased,” he writes in Romans 5:20, “grace overflowed all the more.”

Out of God's unsurpassing love for us, Christ is lifted up on the cross. And this love is for the whole cosmos. The author of John’s gospel wants to make this abundantly clear. Love is the theme that dominates the whole book. We hear that God is love (1 Jn. 4:8), that the relationship between Jesus and his father is love (Jn. 15:9-10; 17:23), and that the nature of discipleship is love (Jn. 13:34-35; 15:12-14).

This love of God is all in all. That is why they call John 3:16 the gospel in a nutshell: 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. This is the reason we can rejoice today, even as our Lenten journey continues.

God woos us into a relationship through love and grace. In the book Surprised by Joy, the famous theologian C.S. Lewis claims that he came into Christianity kicking and screaming. He says that as a young man he was “very angry with God for not existing.” He had no intention of embracing faith in an unseen God. But the love of God drew him in against his own will. Of the night he accepted Christ, he writes this:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

As God offered healing to the Isrealites, God offers healing to all in Christ. The word “healing” comes from the same root as “wholeness” and “wellness” and they all refer to being “full” or “complete.” When we look at our own lives, we know that we are broken. Like Humpty Dumpty, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put us together again because we are just the broken by our own sinfulness and the sinfulness of the world that has run us over time and time again. Yet, Jesus comes to us in our broken state and offers healing and wholeness because of God’s great love for us. We are called to faith in Christ who heals us.

The theologian Paul Tillich wrote: “Faith is being seized by a power that is greater than we are...one that transforms us and heals us...Surrender to that power is called faith.” We are not required to heal ourselves, but simply to surrender to the Savior who can.

And so today, we hear again that powerful message of grace. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. We are saved by grace through faith in him and set free to do the good things God has planned for our lives. That is why it is Laetare—a day of rejoicing. We rejoice in God's love. Let us surrender to this power called faith that we may have eternal life. Amen.