God is love. So the Bible says, and that is, in a sense, all we need to know. God is love; and just as when you love someone you do not abandon them, so also the love of God, richer far than tongue or pen can ever tell, reaches to the highest height and to the lowest hell, and keeps on going from here to eternity. God is love, and in that love He wants to keep us alive not only all our lives long, but even beyond this life.
I take you today to a place you likely do not want to go. I take you to a funeral home. In the parlor of that place there is a middle-aged man, with his wife and daughter. In the room next door, is the body of this man’s mother. That very morning, only a short while before this moment, I had been asked by the funeral home if I would come over and do some sort of service for this woman. Why me? Because, said he, the family thinks Momma may have been a Baptist back when, and so, as an afterthought to her life, maybe the nearest Baptist minister ought to provide some sort of ceremony. I asked them to tell me a little about their mother and grandmother; they looked at each other and shrugged, and finally the man said, “Well, she was a nice person, I suppose.” Not much for the preacher to go on; and not much to summarize a life either. And so I said something or other to the grand total of eight people who showed up to commemorate this life. Clearly death had come with no preparation; and clearly this life had not meant very much either. She lived, she died, and that was that.
By contrast, I take you to another place. I take you to a church building. In the parlor of that place there is an older man and his daughter, his son-in-law, and three grandchildren. Around the corner before the altar is the body of their wife, mother, grandmother. In the eyes of each there are tears; but on their faces are smiles. Smiles! For only a few days before all of us had gathered around a hospital bed, where the medical crisis had deepened. Around that bed we had spoken words of love; around that bed we had heard the Scripture; around that bed, with choking voices, we had offered our prayers and had wept openly while the son-in-law sang, “Amazing Grace”. And around that bed, a short while later, we had held each other when the ventilator was removed and life ebbed out. There we had wept; but a few days later we smiled and celebrated her life with hundreds of others. How can that be? How can these things be? And why such a profound difference between the lonely family in the funeral home and the close-knit and well-supported family at the church?
You might venture a variety of answers to that, but one way to look at it is to draw contrasts between the two families as they understood life and death and life beyond this life. There are two attitudes here, two sheer and stark postures, as different as night and day.
I describe these two ways of understanding life and death and life beyond this life as, on the one hand, “This is all there is” and, on the other hand, “There is more to come.” Some people live with the assumption that this life is all there is, and when you are dead, you are dead, and there is nothing more to say. You are just a lump of flesh decaying into dust, so let go. Be done with it.
But others live with the confidence that there is more beyond this life, and when you die, that is not the end of it. You are something more than a speck of dust living on a small planet orbiting around a minor star; you are a child of God, and there must be more than just this life.
Between those two attitudes there is no middle ground. There is no reconciling them. Either you live with the assumption that this is all there is, and so live it up, do what you feel like doing, because you won’t get any more; or you live with the faith that there is more, and so live in the light of eternity, do what your Creator wants you to do, because He has vastly more in store for you. Two ways to understand life and death and life beyond this life.
Jesus dealt one day with a man who operated out of the “This is all there is” syndrome. But Jesus made him consider whether and how there is more. The man’s name was Nicodemus. He was a scholar, a smart man, a good student, after a fashion. He knew lots of things. But he didn’t know the one thing he most needed to know – that God had in store for him more than he could measure, more than he could grasp with all his learning.
Maybe I can help you get the differences between Nicodemus and Jesus if I use a couple of props. Maybe you can actually see the two different ways of thinking if I wear them for you. Let me see if I can bring up Nicodemus first.
I
A
The sweatshirt says, “So many books, so little time.” I got it from a bookstore. It suggests that the spread of the world’s knowledge is vast, and if only we just had more time we could read enough and learn enough to figure out life. The assumption is that if I just thought more deeply and knew more stuff, I would understand my life. For, after all, this is all there is. My mind, my knowledge, my, my, my. Me, myself, and I.
So Nicodemus comes to Jesus and says, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God.” Key words – we know; you are a teacher. Information, reason, understanding. Nicodemus has assumed that anything worth knowing is something he has thought about. “We know …” And he has also assessed Jesus as a teacher, as someone else who lives his life in rational, thought-out ways. The best compliment that Nicodemus knows how to pay Jesus – “you are a teacher come from God.” And, by the way, Jesus, we know all there is to know about God. We have studied the Word, we have listened to the tradition, we have been in church all our lives, and so we do not expect to have our breath taken away by some new idea, thank you very much. “We know”. “So many books, so little time” – and if I get more time, I will know. More degrees, more success. More information, more control over life. More calculations, more certainty. I will know. That’s all there is.
But Jesus senses an emptiness in Nicodemus. Jesus interrupts the flow of his language and goes in an entirely different direction. Jesus does not pick up on the “We know” or the “teacher sent from God” verbiage. Jesus takes Nicodemus off at another angle.
B
So this sweatshirt: “Believer” One simple word, one arrow shot through space: “Believer.” For Jesus is not going to talk with Nicodemus about rationality. He is going to talk about relationships. Oh, please hear this. Jesus is not about rationality – “so many books, so little time”. Jesus is about relationships – “believer”. Jesus is about that mysterious and wonderful interpersonal dynamic between God and man, between the Creator and the created. Jesus will not let Nicodemus rest on his reason; Jesus takes him to the radical realm of relationships,
“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Friends, that is about the mystery of relationship. That is about what God wants to do in us and for us. God wants to give us something so powerful that it is like being born all over again. God wants to give us a fresh start, and it is not something we can reason out or calculate. My late father-in-law, originally a nuclear physicist and then a very fine theologian, used to say that the scientist is someone who presumably could describe his wife as a very complex series of chemical reactions and differential equations, but if he is a wise man he will not do so to her face! What is the point? That life is really not about information and reason; life is about relationships, and relationships are full of mystery. And so when there is a new and commanding relationship in your life, it is like being born again. It is like starting all over.
I well remember a day whose anniversary we will celebrate this very week. April 17, 1964. On April 17, 1964, two important things happened: the Ford Motor Company gave birth to the Mustang automobile, and my wife gave birth to our son. I remember looking at that tiny, helpless, squirming bundle of flesh and saying, out loud, though I knew he could not grasp it intellectually, “I love you. I love you, Bryan Eric Smith.” It was not about information, because he couldn’t take that in; but it was about creating, from the very beginning, an atmosphere of love, an air of trust. I wanted him, from the day of his birth, to love and to trust me. And so I offered him the gift of my love. And guess what – this coming Thursday I will call him up and say it again. Love does not have limits. Love never ends.
And so Jesus is saying to Nicodemus: believe, trust. Let the relationship happen. You do not control it; God does. You do not command it; God does. But if you trust God, He will do something in you that will change you from the tip of your head to the soles of your feet. It will be like being born from above. It is not about reason, it is about relationship. It is not about religion; it is about relationship. It is not about ritual; it is about … what? Relationship. It is about trusting God to do in us what we cannot do for ourselves. It is about trusting God to be with us in every circumstance, especially the ones we cannot grasp. Like life and death and life beyond this life. God will be there for us. God is love.
Now if you are a Nicodemus, wanting to know many things, don’t throw away your “So many books …” sweatshirt. You are to love God with heart and soul and MIND and strength. But put on the “Believer” shirt too. Let God bring you new life. Not reason but relationship.
II
A
Ah, but Nicodemus is not yet satisfied. Nicodemus doesn’t get it yet. Nicodemus is quite literal minded. Let’s go back to the Nicodemus shirt again, “So many books, so little time.” Nicodemus thinks he can figure it all out. Nicodemus supposes that the scope of his knowledge is all there is to know. “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
Poor old Nicodemus. So literal minded. If it does not fit his worldview, he cannot accept it. If it does not compute, there is no poetry in his soul to interpret it. I’ve heard people say, about the Bible, if I find anything wrong in it, I cannot believe any of it! No, no, what a mistake to base everything on an inerrant Bible as others do on an infallible pope. It’s the same problem either way – we want intellectual certainty. We expect hard and fast rules. We think we can nail God down and understand Him. But God is far more than our ability to understand; God is love. God is love. God is mystery.
Nicodemus, I am afraid, lives in a lot of places in this world. Not only does Nicodemus live in the academic world, so proud of its intellectual attainments; but also Nicodemus lives on the streets, where lives are snuffed out in an instant by those who seem to care not at all that their eternal destiny is at stake. They have never seen or heard God, so He does not count for them.
And Nicodemus lives not only in the Christian world, where airtight theologies are spun out, designed to prove that we in our sect know God better than other groups do, but Nicodemus lives also in the religious world at large, where zealots suppose that God will reward them with paradise if they take out a few infidels. Oh, that the Nicodemuses of this world could get it – that when the spirit of the Living God enters into our hearts, He comes to affirm life. He comes to bring love. He comes to offer hope. He asks not that we accept a bunch of theological ideas; He asks that we love one another. For, always, it is not about reason, religion, or ritual; it is about relationships.
B
And so it ought not to surprise us that Jesus is quick to respond. We’d better get that other shirt on quickly! Here comes Jesus with His rejoinder, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” Nicodemus, you have learned the Bible from cover to cover, but you do not know the God of the Bible. You have studied and thought, but you have stayed within the world of your own mind. And you have not yet seen what God offers you.
For what God offers is not law but love. What God offers is not drudgery but delight. What God offers is not a system of ideas or a table of doctrines, but God offers His redeeming love, a love that reaches down to the last, the least, the lost, and the lonely, a love that finds the ignorant as well as the learned, a love that encompasses all those who will become like little children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
And that love will persist. That love will never be diminished. That love will hold on to us, not in this life only, but forever.
How do we access it? How does it come to us? To echo poor old Nicodemus, “How can these things be?” The answer is so incredibly simple we generally miss it; the answer is so wonderfully straightforward we just imagine it has to be harder than this: Believe. Trust. Receive. Accept. That’s it. That’s really it.
Believe – not ideas, but Christ. Trust – not your mind, but the mind of Christ. Receive – not a set of doctrines, but a person. Accept – as one theologian puts it, accept the fact that you are accepted! And when we do this, the gift of eternal life becomes not only accessible, it becomes a way of living. When we understand that the love of God for us is constant and powerful and inalienable, then our lives take on meaning. Our energies and our efforts take on significance. We want to give rather than to keep. We want to share rather than to gather. We don’t care if our energies are exhausted and our dollars are done, because, guess what, we have life! Abundant life, meaningful life, yes. But even more, we have eternal life.
Either you live with the assumption that this is all there is, and so live it up, do what you feel like doing, because you won’t get any more; or you live with the faith that there is more, and so live in the light of eternity, do what you know your Creator wants you to do, because He has vastly more in store for you. Two ways to understand life and death and life beyond this life. Which will it be?
One day, on a green hill far away, two men hung in agony. In his pain, one spat out his life view – that this is all there is. “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.” Come on, let’s die, so what? But the other spoke for all our needs, “Do you not fear God? … Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.” And from the cross in between, Jesus remembered him. For Christ Jesus always remembers us. The cross is the sign that Christ Jesus will always remember us. “In the cross of Christ I glory, towering o’er the wrecks of time; all the light of sacred story gathers round its head sublime.”
For we know, not because of book learning or ideas or education or institutions. We know deep down, in the heart, that one thing can never be taken away. “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.”
God is love. So the Bible says, and that is, in a sense, all we need to know. God is love; and just as when you love someone you do not abandon them, so also the love of God, richer far than tongue or pen can ever tell, reaches to the highest height and to the lowest hell, and keeps on going from here to eternity. God is love, and in that love He wants to keep us alive not only all our lives long, but even beyond this life.
Trust Him. And you will live. L’chaim!
