Sermon onJohn 3:14-21

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

During Lent this year, our readings from the Hebrew Bible remind us of some of God’s promises.

We started by reading about God sending the rainbow as a permanent covenant of peace.

Two weeks ago, we read about God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah: that their numerous descendants would be God’s people forever.

Last week, we read a third covenant: the 10 Commandments, which illustrate how God’s people will be in right relationship with God and other people.

This week, in both the Hebrew Bible reading and the Gospel we have stories of God intervening to bring healing.

In Numbers, the freed Israelites were wandering the wilderness and getting hangry. They started griping about God and Moses and the situation they were in.I don’t blame them—I’d be pretty stressed out if I were them. It’s so very human.

Do you notice how even their complaints contradict themselves? “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” It feels so much like when I open my closet full of clothes and go, “Ugh! I have nothing to wear!” How quickly we grow bored of what we have!

God had provided manna—divine food in the wilderness—for the Israelites, and yet they complained that there was no food and the food was miserable.

So very human. And that’s what sin is like—the sin that we are all subject to, that’s part of the human condition. Sin is missing the mark and curving in on oneself and turning against God. It’s a disruption of the relationship between humans and God, humans and each other, and humans and nature.

It's certainly not limited to the Israelites in the wilderness. That’s why Jesus referred to this story in the Gospel of John.

A religious leader named Nicodemus had come to see Jesus after dark to ask him some questions. Jesus gave him some confusing teachings about being born again or born from above, and Nicodemus wasn’t following. Then, Jesus alluded to our story in Numbers and used it to describe himself.

In our perpetual state of falling short and hurting each other, we humans couldn’t successfully maintain right relationship with God, other humans, and the earth. We couldn’t live up to the beautiful image of right relationship we talked about last week in the 10 Commandments and the rest of the Law. And we reap the consequences of those broken relationships.

I know our reading from Numbers says that God sent the serpents, and that’s troubling. I don’t believe a God of love who created the world and called it very good would do something so petty and vengeful. Surely complaining does not deserve death! That’s not the God of love that I know.

But God did create us as meaning-making creatures. It’s how we get art and science and so many amazing, beautiful things. But also, whenever there’s a natural disaster or a tragic accident, we start wondering if we did something to cause it.

From people cruelly theorizing that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for people practicing the Voodoo religion in Louisiana to the mildly disturbing child’s rhyme about stepping on a crack will break your mother’s back, we make meaning about everything, but the conclusions we come to are not always true or helpful.

In our Numbers reading, I see meaning-making people interpreting the snake infestation as God’s punishment for their complaining and distrust of the God who rescued them from Egypt. This reinforced their distrust of God.

But the next thing the story says about God does line up with God’s character: God brought them healing. God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and put it on a pole so that anyone who was bitten by the poisonous snakes could look at it and be healed. There was no requirement to promise to stop complaining or even to apologize—they could just look at it and live. That’s our God. That’s the promise this week: a promise of healing.

And that’s the story Jesus pointed Nicodemus to when he was trying to explain who he was and why he was here. Nicodemus had come to see Jesus, thinking there might be something special about this guy but he wasn’t sure. Jesus tried to explain to him the kingdom of God, the Beloved Community, but Nicodemus was thinking too literally. So, Jesus used scripture to illustrate his mission to Nicodemus:

“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.”

Jesus came so that we complaining, ungrateful humans who go around hurting each other could be healed. And Jesus went on to explain why and what that healing would look like. It’s John 3:16, one of the most famous verses in the whole Bible.

Why did God send Jesus? Because God loved the world—the whole cosmos.

How would that healing happen? By giving us complaining, ungrateful humans eternal life.

And contrary to how John 3:16 is often used to talk about individual salvation, John 3:17 goes on to say that Jesus was there so that “the world might be saved through [him].” Jesus was there to restore right relationship throughout the cosmos.

God became human in Jesus to bring healing and reconciliation to the whole world and everything in it.

That’s what Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection accomplished. And still, we don’t see it in its fullness yet. The Beloved Community is both now and not yet.

For now, we still complain and hurt each other, ourselves, and the earth.

One of the ways we do that is by breaking the Sabbath commandment. I’m not talking about being lax about upholding a specific 24-hour period of not doing specific things. I’m talking about when we don’t honor our need for rest, our neighbors’ need for rest, or the earth’s need for rest. It damages our relationships—the way that God created us to be in community.

I preached on this text the week before the 2020 stay-at-home orders. My internship congregation and I pondered how best to care for our neighbors in a time of COVID before we knew what that was going to mean.

I remember Facebook posts saying that if you didn’t use your two weeks of staying at home to flatten the curve to learn a new skill, write a book, or lift weights until you were ripped, you were lazy and undisciplined.

This, beloved, is “grind culture.” Grind culture is the opposite of Sabbath. Grind culture says that we are what we do, that we are not worthy unless we accomplish things.

It gives no grace for life circumstances, lack of resources, chronic physical or mental illness, or the ebbs and flows of being a human. It convinces us that if we are not operating at maximum capacity 24/7, that we are weak, lazy, and worthless.

It is a lie.

It wants to keep us exhausted, shame-filled, isolated, and striving to consume more and more in hopes that we will live up to its impossible and ever-changing standard.

During the stay-at-home order, we didn’t need to learn a new skill; we were navigating a frightening new reality. What we needed was healing, rest, and gentleness.

Grind culture will never let us have those things. It will continue to whisper in our ears that we are not enough.

Sabbath is how we quiet that voice. Sabbath gives us time and energy to listen to God instead. The voice of our God of love and healing says,

“I made you. I love you.

You don’t need to do anything to make me love you.

You are more than enough just as you are. You are my beloved child.”

God’s voice is always there telling you these things. It’s easier to hear it when we’re practicing Sabbath.

Practicing Sabbath will look really different for each of us and our life circumstances—whether we’re recovering from surgery, or going to school, or caring for loved ones, or working fulltime. And grind culture is everywhere, making it hard to practice rest.

But we’re not meant to do it alone. Jesus came to reconcile the whole world’s relationships. We’re not meant to be islands—we’re meant to be part of rich ecosystems that share and support each other. Church should be about living that out.

Grind culture resists that level of connection, because we’re supposed to be “self-made people” who can “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.” But grind culture is full of lies.

Our God is Triune. Godself is a community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are created in God’s relationship-loving image.

Jesus came for our healing, to restore the harmony God intended for creation from the beginning. He accomplished that healing in his life, death, and resurrection, and we will experience its fullness in the completion of the Beloved Community at the end of time.

As we await that completion, resist grind culture. Practice Sabbath. And look to Jesus, who was lifted up on a cross and rose again to reconcile the whole world that God loves so much. Look to him and live.

Sermon on Exodus 20:1-17 & John 2:13-22

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

Focus: Just as Jesus showed righteous anger, we can discern whether our anger is righteous by rooting ourselves in the ways God shows us to live in right relationship with God and other people.

Function:This sermon will help hearers learn to befriend and learn from anger.

During Lent this year, our readings from the Hebrew Bible remind us of some of God’s promises.

Two weeks ago, we read about God promising to never again flood the whole world, creating a permanent covenant of peace.

Last week, we read about God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah: that their numerous descendants would be God’s people forever.

This week, we read a third covenant: what we know today as the 10 Commandments. They’re the big ten among the over six hundred instructions in the Law given to God’s people.

God gave the newly freed Israelites a new way to live in right relationship with God and with one another.And, as we’ve been talking about all year, that way of life includes Sabbath.

The Sabbath commandment reminds them of who created the world by using God’s own Sabbath rest as the basis for the instruction.God rested after working for six days, and we should rest too.

God also uses the Sabbath commandment to remind them of their freedom and who freed them. Every week they took a day off to remind them that they were no longer enslaved in Egypt. They were free people who reveled in free people’s rest.

By remembering who created the world and freed them, they remained in right relationship with God: a relationship of love, gratitude, and joy. They also remained in right relationship with each other and the land by taking a day off from their labor. They had time to enjoy each other and gave their land and animals a break.

We’re focusing on Sabbath, but all God’s instructions here provide a framework for right relationship with God and other people. Respect God’s name and put God first. Don’t murder, steal, or lie about others. And between those: remember to take a break to enjoy God and each other. It’s all about relationship, and rest is the centerpiece between the instructions about how to love God and those about how to love neighbors.

I want to share a recent story of how I did not uphold the Sabbath commandment. I’m not sharing this story to humble brag about how much I do or to make anyone worried about me. I love my work, and in general I take very good care of myself. I’m just also human and sometimes misjudge how much rest I need.

The week before last was a busy week. Not unreasonably busy, but busier than usual. I took my usual Friday off, hung out with friends, and did things that fill my cup. Then, Saturday was our church council retreat, which was wonderful—it was exciting to spend time with our amazing leaders discerning what God is up to in this place for this next year. But it was still work on a day when I normally don’t.

By Monday, after a joyful but very loud family birthday party on Sunday afternoon, I was done. I woke up on Monday morning tired and cranky. I should have taken Monday or at least Monday morning off, but I didn’t think I could afford to because of what needed to get done this week.That was a poor choice, because what happened instead is that I spent Monday morning getting very little done and being angry about it. I was angry about stuff in the news. I was angry about not being productive. I was angry at myself for not listening to my needs.

The problem was that I did not give myself rest when I needed it.

It wasn’t my anger that was the problem, though I spent many years trying not to show anger. I was afraid I would hurt people with my anger.

But we see an angry Jesus in our Gospel reading, so surely anger itself isn’t bad. It’s part of the beautiful variety of human emotion. Emotions themselves aren’t bad—they just are. What matters is how we react to them.

If in my anger, I had picked a fight with my spouse or started insulting people on the internet, those wouldn’t have been good choices. I would have been hurting my neighbors.Anger can be used to hurt others, but it can be used for good, too.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus turned his righteous anger into something like a street performance, a form of protest decrying systemic religious problems. I admit I was unsatisfied with the information I found about what exactly Jesus was angry about. What I found relies too much on speculation or could easily drift into anti-Jewish thought. So, I’m not going to spend more time today trying to explain something I don’t fully grasp.

But what I do see is that Jesus’ act of righteous anger here either commenced his public ministry, as John portrays it, or was the beginning of the end, as Matthew, Mark, and Luke portray it. Jesus’ anger was a tool that he used to defy the authorities who opposed his message of Beloved Community.

Again, anger itself isn’t bad—it just is. Anger can help us recognize when our boundaries are being violated. Anger can let us know when our expectations are unreasonable or not clearly communicated. Anger can energize us to defend our hurting neighbors or work to right an injustice in the world.

For me this week, there was some righteous anger about things going on in the world, but for the most part, my anger was letting me know that I hadn’t respected my own need for rest. I wasn’t in right relationship with myself, which made it harder to be in right relationship with the people around me.

But even though I didn’t fulfill God’s instruction to take rest and honor my relationship with God and other people, God sent me love, in the form of my best friend. I had messaged her during the day, complaining about the state of the world. So that evening, I got a text asking if I was up for getting ice cream. My best friend knew what I needed, and so did God. It wasn’t about the ice cream (though it didn’t hurt). It was about my need for connection. God was bringing me back into right relationship with the world, even when I missed the mark.

That’s what the 10 Commandments are about—not an ultimatum that threatens punishment, but a description of what our lives look like when we’re in right relationship with God and our neighbors.

1.    If we’re in right relationship with God, our love for God comes first.

2.    If we’re in right relationship with each other, we’ll be looking out for our neighbors’ needs instead of coveting, stealing, or lying.

And when we inevitably fall short of those perfect relationships, God is there, loving us no matter what.

So, do your best to take the rest you need. Let that fill you up with love for God and your neighbor. And trust that God is there to catch you in God’s arms when you fall. Rest well, beloved.

Sermon on Mark 8:31-38

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

During Lent this year, our readings from the Hebrew Bible will remind us of some of God’s promises.

Last week, we read about God promising Noah that God would never again flood the whole world. Indeed, that God’s weapon, God’s bow, was hung in the heavens, never to be wielded again. God made acovenant with humanity—a promise and agreement founded in relationship. It was a covenant of peace for all time.

This week, we read about God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah: that their numerous descendants would be God’s people forever.

These two promises, as well as the ones coming up in the next few weeks, all connect to baptism.

When we see a rainbow, we remember that God saved Noah and his family from the flood. In baptism, we remember that God saved us by becoming human, living and dying and rising again,to restore our relationship with God. Baptism is a reminder that God has already saved us.

And when God made those promises to Abraham and Sarah, God gave them new names, new identities in God. Baptism reminds us of our identities as children of God.

All of this—salvation and identity as children of God—comes through God’s grace. We don’t do anything to deserve it. God loved us before God made us. There is nothing we can do to make God love us any more or any less.

Still, we are sinners—we mess up and hurt each other and ourselves. By God’s grace, we are also saints—people who love God and let God’s love show through the way we live our lives. Martin Luther said that we are simultaneously saints and sinners. We can’t escape either side of that paradox, but God loves us exactly as we are.

On this side of death, we will never stop messing up and hurting each other, but God chose us, knowing that full well and loves us no matter what. We mark that in baptism, because God knows we need physical things like water to remind us of the truth: that we are part of God’s family forever and God’s love will never leave us.

In baptism, we are reminded of God’s covenants with humanity: that God saved us and that God’s family is vast and includes us.

When we remember these truths, we are freed and strengthened for the work ahead: the co-creation with God of the Beloved Community.

We’ll need that strength, because when we get to our Gospel reading, Jesus has some harsher words for us. He tells his disciples of the sufferings he must undergo and warns them that following him means being willing to suffer and even die for the cause.

Jesus isn’t glorifying suffering or saying that his followers should seek out suffering or meekly put up with abuse. Christianity isn’t about trying to suffer. Jesus here is just being realistic about the path he was on. He was saying and doing things that the occupying Roman Empire wouldn’t like. He was defying the emperor and upending society. He didn’t need to seek suffering—it was coming to him, and he knew it.

And if his followers were really learning from him, there was impending suffering for them, too.

But again, the point wasn’t the suffering. The point was that living out the Beloved Community means living in a way that upsets the people in power, the people who benefit from keeping things the way they are.

There’s no freedom for captives, food for the hungry, or good news for the poor without changing the way the world works. And that’s what Jesus was here for. And he was preparing his followers for what that meant.

That kind of world-changing justice comes out of freedom. Freedom like we receive in baptism. The freedom to see what Jesus is up to and decide we want that love and freedom for others too. And so, we take on the task of helping the Beloved Community become a reality, which upsets people who benefit from the status quo and puts us in danger. We live in a society that doesn’t actively persecute Christianity, so we are likely not going to lose our jobs or be threatened or be subjected to violence, like Jesus was warning his disciples.(Though, there have been people like Martin Luther King Jr. who were 20th-century American martyrs.) In general, we’re more likely to suffer awkward family holidays or raised eyebrows from neighbors or getting asked to step down from leadership positions.

But even our Sabbath theme might earn us the names “lazy” or “irresponsible.” We’re going to disappoint people who want us to do things. It might earn us the resentment of our colleagues and friends. It’s very easy for people who aren’t taking care of themselves to resent the people around them who are. Rest is countercultural and so needed.

And when we are restored by resting, we might feel moved to advocate for rest for others. And the people who benefit from cheap or unpaid labor will feel threatened by the prospect of people being paid better or having more paid leave or having more support to care for their families. That’s the slippery slope of following Jesus.

It starts with God’s grace rooting us in our identity as beloved children of God, which frees us to live without fear or shame, which stirs in us a longing for others to live that way too, which leads us to take costly action for others’ freedom and wellbeing, which contributes to the Beloved Community. And if that costs us everything, it’s entirely worth it.

All of that starts with God’s covenants with us. God’s promises of peace and grace and love allow us to follow Jesus and make the world a little more as it is in heaven.

A commentary by the organization The Salt Project reframed God’s covenants that we’re reading during Lent not as “a series of separate covenants here and there, but rather that God’s covenantal relationship with creation unfolds in salvation history, like a single flower blooming over time…helping to reveal the inner depth and beauty of what was there all along.”[1]

So instead of reading this series of covenants over the course of these weeks as individual episodes, we can see them as a collective unfurling of God’s grace, each helping us to understand God’s love for us better.

Beloved, we don’t earn God’s love through works. We are free to rest in God’s grace. God has already saved us, and there is nothing we can do to change God’s love for us.

And still, a hunger may creep into your life for others to experience that freedom and love too. That’s when following Jesus becomes both costly and powerful. That’s when the Beloved Community becomes more real for us. That’s the road that leads to the cross and the resurrection.

Remember always that you are a beloved child of God, saved by God’s grace and included in the flower of God’s covenants.

And when that hunger for following Jesus stirs you to action, take up your cross and follow him. The Beloved Community is always wort

[1]https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2018/2/20/cross-purposes-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-lent-2