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You see it at football games and basketball games, you see it at bus stops and train stations, and I told you once before where William Willimon saw it. He was driving through the mountains of western North Carolina, making his way carefully along a narrow mountain road with hairpin turns, when, on a white rock in large letters just before a particularly treacherous curve, he saw the sign. "PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD!" it read. "READ JOHN 3:16." Maybe it's because Willimon's a preacher himself, but he says that he is sure that the sign maker chose his location carefully, just as a preacher chooses carefully where to put certain things in his sermon. Because just beyond the sign, the curve took Willimon to the very edge of a cliff, and the sign maker had put his message at that particular place knowing that drivers would soon come to the cliff. Perhaps, like Willimon, you have to have been reared in certain parts of the country in order to recognize a sign with a tone of voice. It was meant as a warning, he says: Prepare to meet thy God, because, who knows? Who knows what's up ahead? Who knows when the day and the hour will be when you will meet your God? The implication is an implication of danger. Perhaps just around the next curve your tire will blow as you approach the cliff, and there you will be face to face with your God, like it or not. Are you prepared for that? Read John 3:16. We Episcopalians, of course, don't go around writing religious warnings on rocks. It must have been Pentecostals or Baptists who painted that sign. Besides, we Episcopalians already know John 3:16. Or do we? Isn't Lent the Church's equivalent to the painted rock on the hairpin turn - a forty-day season of penitence and self-examination, a seasonal, breast-beating period of preparing to meet our God? "No "alleluias" in the liturgy, "Lord, have mercy, Christ, have mercy," a seasonal reminder of our sinfulness. "All we, like sheep, have gone astray; there is none who is righteous, not one," we remind ourselves during Holy Week. Prepare to meet thy God. What will it be like when you come face to face with God? What do you expect when you read John 3:16? I wonder what the person who wrote the sign finds in John 3:16, and in John 3:17, the verse that follows. I agree with Willimon that the sign has a tone of voice. "PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD!" - with an exclamation point! It sounds to me as if the sign maker expects to find a rather severe God, a God like the mean old rancher, a tough old man who didn't take nothin' off nobody. The mean old rancher especially didn't take nothin' off nobody who would stoop so low as to break the eighth commandment and steal one of his cows. Well, one day one of his own cowhands rustled a cow. When they finally caught the cowhand, they dragged him before the mean old rancher. And the rancher looked down at the poor, frightened, quivering cowhand and said, "Hang 'im. It'll teach 'im a lesson." I wonder if the God the sign painter sees in John 3:16 is like that. Believe in God, or else! The God of the spiritual mugging - your belief or your life! All through Lent we recite the Ten Commandments, the Ten Words of freedom and life. And we consider how we have not kept them, and how "all we, like sheep, have gone astray." We consider how "there is none who is righteous, not one," and we pray, "Lord, have mercy, Christ, have mercy." What do we expect God's response to be? Do we expect God to say, "Hang 'em. It'll teach 'em a lesson"? Or do we expect that God will hear our prayer, and answer it as is best for us? Fortunately, the mean old rancher's word wasn't the last word. Years went by, and the old rancher finally died. It was his turn for judgment. When they dragged him before the throne of God, the old rancher thought of all the mean things he had done in his life, and as he approached the throne he shook in his boots. And Almighty God looked down on the mean old rancher and said, "Forgive 'im. It'll teach 'im a lesson." In some churches, John 3:16 is the Gospel reading for this Fourth Sunday in Lent, and it reminds us of God's purpose in sending Jesus at Christmas. John 3:16 tells us that even here in the midst of Lent - even for us who have not kept the commandments, even for us who are not righteous - the intention of the God we are preparing to meet is not condemnation, but mercy: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who trusts in him may not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved." It was for love that Jesus came among us. It was for love that Jesus stood beside us and became sin for us and died for us. It is for love that he dies with us and saves us. For love, not for retribution. "God is rich in mercy," St. Paul tells us this morning. "And because of his great love for us, he brought us to life with Christ when we were dead because of our sins. It is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up in union with Christ Jesus, and enthroned us with him in the heavenly realms, so that in ages to come he might display how immense are the resources of his grace, and how great his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith. It is not your own doing. It is God's gift, not a reward for anything you have done. There is nothing for anyone to boast of. We are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the life of good deeds which God designed for us." Notice the past tense. "It is by grace you have been saved." When we stood beneath the Cross it was a word of grace we heard from the throne of heaven: "Forgive 'em. It'll teach 'em a lesson." Oh, I know how we don't like to hear that! "But what about justice?" we ask. "You still have to do something, don't you? Why would God save us if we don't do something to deserve it?" But St. Paul persists, overruling our objections: "There's nothing to boast about. There's nothing to deserve. It's a gift." And notice, in our own Gospel reading this morning, how St. John tells us the same thing. We were lost and hungry because we had no food of our own, John says. We ourselves had brought nothing to the picnic. But Jesus took the meager rations offered by a child, and fed us. And we all had as much as we wanted, and more. There was food left over. God's love and mercy, John tells us, is a love and mercy that overflows and is more than sufficient for any circumstance, even the most unlikely. Why is the feeding of the multitude the only miracle that all four Gospels share? And why is this miracle reported not just once, but twice, in two of the Gospels? Do you suppose it's because it is the central miracle of the Gospel. A miracle. Miraculum in the Latin, "something to be wondered at." That's what the word really means. Not a trick of some kind, but something to be wondered at. And what is more to be wondered at than a love that is so great that, even on the Cross where the unrighteous crucified the righteous and where we were so dead in our sins that we couldn't believe or do anything else, the righteous Lord looks down and says, "Forgive 'em. It'll teach 'em a lesson." Oh yes, we say at mid-Lent, now we remember. It was for this that we began our Lenten journey. It was not for sackcloth and ashes. It was not for the sacrifice of a martini or chocolate bar that we began our Lenten pilgrimage. It was the incredible love and mercy of Christ that brought us to where we are this morning. Some of you will remember that the 1928 Prayer Book instructed us to kneel to receive communion. And then in the present Prayer Book - almost thirty years ago now, when the present Prayer Book was then the "new" Prayer Book - the rubrics suggested for the first time (through silence on the matter) that we might stand to receive communion rather than kneel. And I had a friend at the time who was young and newly ordained, and who was enormously fond of all the liturgical change. He was certain that the Standing Liturgical Commission in New York, like governments in Washington and Denver, must surely know what's best for those of us out in the provinces. So my friend set out single-handedly to change the Anglican Communion and the Church catholic in his first two months as vicar of St. Mark's Parish. "Don't you get the point?" he asked his parishioners. "Christians don't have to grovel around on our knees before the Lord's table. We are the forgiven ones who, by God's grace, can stand on our own two feet before the altar of the Lord!" "But we enjoy groveling around on our knees!" they told him. "WE DON'T LIKE CHANGE!" is what they meant.1 Do we, on this or any day, kneel and grovel at the altar rail to receive the Body and Blood of Christ as miserable worms? Or as dogs searching for a crumb that's been tossed from the table? Or do we kneel because we are brought to our knees by the sheer wonder of the gift, brought to our knees by the sheer abundance of the grace? John 3:16 and 17. It was not to condemn us that God beckons us closer to the foot of the Cross, but to save us. We are here at his Table not as the lost, but as the found. You and I will walk up the aisle this morning not as strangers, but as returning sons and daughters. "Forgive 'em. It'll teach 'em a lesson," we hear once again. "Forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing" are the words we will sing about later this morning: Just as I am, without one plea,"Forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing" are also the words George Herbert recalls in his wonderful verse:
Lent is only half over. There is still plenty more confessing and repenting to be done. It doesn't take much of a preacher to prove that we are sinful, fallen people who need saving. You and I already know that. What we may not know, deep inside, is the miracle of the loaves. What is the miracle? What is there to be wondered at but the sheer extravagance of the gift, the sheer extravagance of the gift of mercy that is sufficient for all circumstances, a mercy so great that even after all have been fed there are basketfuls of mercy left over? "God is rich in mercy." This is what St. John and St. Paul and Charlotte Elliott and George Herbert all remind us of this morning, because this is the lesson of this Sunday in mid-Lent. "Because of God's great love for us, he brought us to life with Christ when we were dead because of our sins." Past tense. "It is by grace you have been saved." Past tense. "It is not your own doing. It is God's gift, not a reward for anything you have done, or anything you can do. There is nothing for anyone to boast of. We are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to display, through the life of good deeds which God designed for us, how immense are the resources of his grace and how great his kindness to us in Christ." Coming down the aisle this morning, you prepare to meet your God. And you shudder at the thought of standing face to face in the awesome presence of the One you have betrayed in thought, word, and deed. You tremble at the realization that you are finally face-to-face with the Holy One you have spent so much of your life avoiding. And then, at his Table, you indeed meet your God in the bread and wine, in the Body and Blood of the One on the Cross who looks at you across the Table and says, "My dear, then I will serve; you must sit down, and taste my meat. I came into the world not to condemn, but to save." If that drives us to our knees this Lenten season, then let's spend some time thinking about the reason, and let's offer thanksgiving for the meal and the blessing. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. ______________ 1The practice of standing to receive communion was not new in 1979, of course. It just seemed new to Episcopalians and other Anglicans of the 1970s who had "always done it that way." To stand for communion has been the practice of Catholic Christians for centuries |