Community Church Sermons
June 11, 2006
John 3:1-17
When God looks out upon people, what do you suppose God sees?
In some of our religious traditions, what God sees is imperfection and sin – a product of creation so thoroughly blemished that God cannot accept us without putting us through some sort of spiritual scrubbing process that will make us acceptable. In these traditions, God sees a world full of fallen sinners. Many of US grew up in such a religious culture, seeing people in terms of their sin, and outside of God’s acceptance. Modern American Christianity is thoroughly soaked with this idea.
I think that’s why we have such a hard time accepting the alternative view of people that is represented in the life of Jesus and that lies at the heart of the historic Christian Faith. The third chapter of John is such a beautiful expression of this different way of looking at people – yes, there is the reality of sin in our lives and our world, but the problem is not that sin makes us unacceptable to God, but rather that it makes us unable to live into the full beauty of what God created people to be. Sin causes our humanity to be diminished or – as Jesus puts it - sin causes people to “perish.”
But the Good News of Jesus is the announcement in John 3:16 that as God looks out upon God’s children all over the world, God sees how sin dehumanizes us, and so God in complete love, does something about it by sending us Jesus. Can you recite John 3:16 with me?
“For God so LOVED
the world that He gave His only Son,
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
Jesus came into the world to redeem our humanity – to help us become again the beautiful creation God intends us to be. In other words, Jesus came to help us become FULLY HUMAN! And what FULLY HUMAN means is not what most people think it means. Because our minds have been poisoned by the bad religion so prevalent in American culture today, to be FULLY HUMAN has come to mean being weak, and inept, and without power.
If you have watched any of the Dateline NBC television programs on child predators – adults who use the computer to sexually hook up with vulnerable children – a common statement made by many of the predators when they are caught and asked why they’ve tried to do this is, “I’m just weak. I guess I’m just too human!”
No, that’s not true. People do these things not because we are too human, but because we are not human enough – because we have lost our humanity.
To be truly and fully human is to
be as we are described in Genesis 1 when God creates human beings – male and
female – and God joyfully shouts, “This is good! This is very good!”
To be FULLY HUMAN is to live fully into the beauty and the love and the goodness with which God created us when God made us in God’s own image!
And if we want to see what a FULLY HUMAN person looks like, we need look no further than Jesus. Jesus is the living model of what human beings are created to be! The most beautiful man who ever lived is the example God has given us of what you and I are intended to be!
What does God see when God looks out upon the world?
I think God sees His children – and the possibility of people like you and me – indeed all the people of the world - becoming as FULLY HUMAN as Jesus!
Which brings me to Mary Kate Hogan.
You’ve probably not ever heard of Mary Kate. She’s just a high school kid in St. Louis. Well, maybe “just a high school kid” is not the best way to describe Mary Kate because she is a person who is becoming an awful lot like Jesus. She is becoming more FULLY HUMAN!
Mary Kate attends a Catholic school called Nerinx Hall, and this is a school that has as a core value the importance of exposing students to the reality of poverty. The kids are encouraged to participate in any number of mission trips offered each year to impoverished areas of the world. That’s how Mary Kate found herself hauling water in a rural village in Mexico.
Did you know that in many developing countries women and girls spend most of their time collecting and carrying water for their families? In some places of the world, women spend up to six hours a day hauling water! The most common way to carry the water is in 5-gallon jugs, weighing about 40-pounds. The result, of course, is that many of the women and girls end up with serious back, hip and pelvic problems. And besides all that, the water they haul is loaded with pathogens and pollutants. Millions of people in developing countries – most of them children – die every year from drinking impure water.
So there was Mary Kate Hogan, hauling water with the women in a remote Mexican village. It was backbreaking work even for the girls from Nerinx Hall who were pretty strong and athletic kids. Mary Kate began to think – there had to be a better way – there had to be a way to help the women and girls who spend their lives collecting and carrying water.
That’s when the idea came. Maybe she could design a watercart that would make it easier for the women! And maybe the watercart could be built in such a way that the water would be filtered and purified as it was being transported back to the village! Mary Kate brought the idea to her high school physics teacher. A whole team of girls gathered around the project.
They started by building a frame around a big blue water barrel. They used PVC pipe for the frame, but it turned out to be too flimsy. They decided to use tubular steel instead. Some of the girls arranged to go to a local metal shop to learn how to fabricate the steel frame. Then they learned how to weld the parts together. They figured out what kind of wheels to put on it. They designed it so that the frame would fit comfortable around a woman’s body, and they determined after extensive research and testing that the best way for a woman to move the cart would be by pushing it. So with all those ideas, the watercart was constructed.
Meanwhile, other members of the team worked on the water filtering system. There’s a picture of it on the front page of today’s bulletin. There would be nine filtering components, and the key element would be a ceramic bowl made out of a mixture of clay and coffee grounds! Why coffee grounds, you ask? Well, first let me tell you that the girls fired the bowl with the heat from cow manure! Why cow manure, you ask? Well let me go back to the coffee grounds. As the bowl was fired, the heat caused the coffee grounds to burn off and disappear, leaving behind tiny microscopic holes in the bowl through which the water would trickle and filter in the final step of purification.
And yes – you guessed it – the reason Mary Kate and the others used simple elements like clay and coffee grounds – and cow manure to fire it - is because one of them came up with the idea that the women who will use the watercart can establish micro-enterprises that manufacture similar watercarts to sell to other villages – and all these ingredients are cheap and readily available where they live!
The latest report I’ve heard on Mary Kate’s project states that the mechanics of the watercart are pretty much complete, but the filtering system is only 94% effective right now and they want to get it to 100%. So they keep tweaking.
What an amazing thing! What a miraculous way to help others! What a beautiful way to make the world a better place! And not only the WHAT, but the WHY!
Mary Kate Hogan says this whole project flows out of her faith. As a teenager, she says, there are lots of things that confuse her about religion (well, join the club, right?), and she is not always sure of what to think about things going on in the Church today (sound familiar?). But, says Mary Kate, no matter how confused you might get about these things, one of things you can always go back to is your simple love for God and God’s calling to love other people.
How refreshing!
Mary Kate Hogan is growing into her God-given humanity – and into the highest meaning of the Christian Faith!
Jesus taught that the Holy Spirit will come to us and empower us to become fully human simply by loving him! That’s it! That’s the whole of the Gospel right there!
But what a strange thing to say! How will loving Jesus transform our lives?
Well, this is how:
Jesus said, ”If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
Jesus had only two commandments, you know – and they are so intertwined that they are spoken as one: “Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
And then Jesus said something wonderful. If we will go out and live those commandments, the Holy Spirit will blow into our lives and give us power beyond our imagination to make the world a better place.
The simple act of loving Jesus by loving your neighbor is the heart and soul of what it means to be a Christian. The test of faith is not WHAT you believe. The real test of faith is HOW you live.
Think about the world as it is today. Think about all the violence, the hatred, the killing. Think about 9/11. Think about the Middle East. Think about Darfur. Think about how people talk to each other today. Think about the political rhetoric. Think about how people are treated when they don’t conform to the majority image. Think about racism. Think about car bombs and suicide belts and chemical weapons.
And then think about what causes them.
At their root, they are all expressions of neighbors despising each other. And if you dare look more closely, you will see that underneath that neighbor-hate is religion – be it Christian, Jewish, Islam, or some other – religion that preaches that what God sees when God looks out at this world are bad people, rotten people, sinful people who are deserving of both death and hell. And hearing this message – as many of us have - week after week, Sabbath after Sabbath, sermon after sermon – we pour it into the lives of our children – and together we go and build a world based upon a fundamental disrespect for humanity.
The world we have is the product of the religion we live.
That’s why it is so important to listen to Jesus. That’s why it is so important to believe in him and his way. Jesus offers us another way: And we see that way lived out in beautiful human beings like Mary Kate Hogan – and like so many, many of you who also are discovering the joy of becoming fully human as you love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
That is the ONLY way we can build a better world.
And it is the only true fulfillment of John 3:16. Will you say it with me once more?
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life!”