For God So Loves the World

The Second Sunday in Lent, Year A
Sermon for March 1, 2026

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. I know that it has been a terrible week, a difficult month for many of us, but if you can remember back to last Sunday, I did promise you there would be snow on the ground again this morning, and you all groaned. Sorry about adding to our misery there. I won’t promise the same for next weekend; I think it’s supposed to warm up this week. Thanks to those of you who made it here today, some of you for the second time in two days. It seems like this is a season when we need to be together, when we need to rely on each other a bit more than usual, a bit more than we expected.

But the events of the last year probably have already told us we need a community like this, one based in love and mutual care, one focused on things holy and good and true rather than on the new horror we read in the news each week. We need each other. The events of this weekend, this last week, this last month have only solidified that need. We read the Great Litany and the Supplication to begin our service today in part because, for centuries, Christians have gathered together to pray when they feel the world is crumbling around them, to pray out of an overwhelming need for God to “grant that in all our troubles we may put our whole trust and confidence in God’s mercy.” This morning, we join with countless believers throughout the last 2000 years in praying “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Again, thank you for being here.

Yesterday, at Bneta’s funeral, I preached a brief homily about a new heaven and a new earth, about how much we as Episcopalians love the world, how we strive to bring a little bit of the kingdom of God to earth with what little time we have. That homily came from a beloved passage, Revelation 21, one that pops up at every funeral. I think I’ve preached from it three times now. Today, we have another familiar passage, as the second Sunday of Lent this year gives us John chapter 3, which includes the most quoted Bible verse there is. You might have missed it as I read it from the middle this morning, so let me point it out again, it’s John 3:16: “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.”

“May not perish, but may have eternal life.” Now, unlike Revelation 21, this passage is rarely read at a funeral, where someone we love has certainly just perished. It is hard to hear the words “may not perish” at a funeral. We know death persists after God gives us Jesus; this week, we know that too well. But we are promised here by Jesus that whoever believes in the Son of Man will have eternal life, and that’s a different kind of life than the one measured in years on earth. This life that is promised, it begins by being “born of the Spirit,” by being “born from above,” as he teaches Nicodemus.

This is foundational to our Christian faith: Jesus urges us to see our lives through a completely different lens, not as beginning at birth and ending with death, but as truly beginning when we accept the love of God and are fully reborn into that life of love. Christians for generations have marked that rebirth with the sacrament of baptism, an image of being born for a second time, born of water and Spirit, born into a new life marked by the love of God. And that life of love, he promises us, will never end. That life of love continues beyond the grave.

This is not a funeral sermon; sadly, there will be another of those this next weekend. So I’ll leave that point here: We are promised eternal life if we believe in Christ and live a life marked by the love of God, if we are “born again” as evangelicals are fond of saying. The dilemma for us today comes because some of us may be feeling angst this morning as we read these passages, angst because this verse, John 3:16 – held up at sporting events, written on placards on street corners, yelled by street preachers with microphones – John 3:16 has been used by many as a threat over the last 100 years or so of American church history. This angst, this threat may be news to some of you, but when we read the gospel in our Wednesday morning Gather & Grow group this week, Janet MacKenzie put it bluntly by saying, “I hate this verse.” How can you hate John 3:16? Well, we can come to hate it because it has been used as a threat rather than as a blessing for far too long.

You can read John 3:16 in the positive, as we have this morning: God loves us, God sent Jesus, if you believe in him you will never die. But you can also read it in the negative, as some seem inclined to do instead: God loves us, God sent Jesus, and if you don’t believe that, you will perish and you will never have eternal life. We/I prefer the positive reading there, as I know most of us would, but too many Christians read it in the negative light, with visions of eternal damnation, condemnation, and hell fire – though that’s certainly not mentioned here – hell fire awaiting anyone who does not believe.

You could argue this negative reading has produced some “good,” with missions bringing the gospel to the far reaches of the globe, but I’d argue it has brought far more “bad,” equating the gospel for those new believers and those who share the gospel, equating the good news of Jesus with future judgment and eternal condemnation for those outside our circles of belief. It has turned belief in Jesus into a relief, a “ticket to heaven” rather than hell, and it has turned everything about love of God and neighbor, Jesus’s teachings, into extra readings.

That is a tragic turn for Christianity, and it could have so easily been avoided if those gospel preachers had read just one more verse. Just one! John 3:17 follows up this good news of love and eternal life with: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.” God’s love is so incredible that God sends Jesus to live, teach, love, suffer, and ultimately die, as we all do, not to condemn us but to love us, to save us, to show us a better way, to embody love, to let us see what the world could be like if we all loved God and loved our neighbor as ourselves. John 3:17 takes that misguided, negative reading and makes it impossible. Oh, to not cherry pick verses when we preach the good news, to read just one more verse.

Here, we spend Lent giving and praying and fasting so that we can put the love of God and love of neighbor at the forefront of our lives… Jesus’s is the example we are to see and to emulate, never to condemn the world nor to prove we are better or more righteous than anyone, but to help make the world around us look more like the kingdom of God.

The rest of this passage in John argues that without this love, evil reigns, selfishness reigns, without belief in the Son of Man, well, you get what you see around you. We need this love. Again, we barely need to spend a minute looking around us to see the ways of the world that are corrosive and damaging, that are built on greed and selfishness. As we prepared for Bneta’s funeral here yesterday and discussed our grief about Father Jeff, news broke that the United States and Israel began bombing Iran in Operation Epic Fury. The first story I read was about how American bombs, our bombs, had struck a girls’ school in southern Iran, killing what’s now estimated at over 100 children. The story in the Guardian started like this: “Iranian parents had just dropped their children off for class on Saturday morning when they found themselves racing back to school gates, as bombs began to fall across the country in a joint US-Israel attack.” There will be more of these stories over the coming days, weeks, and months; war always produces tragedy on both sides, and yes, we will be asked to somehow “support our troops” amidst all of it.

But this morning, here, we have the example of Jesus, we have God so loving the world that he sent his only Son, sacrificing power and even life itself for its welfare, not to condemn the world, but to save it through Jesus. We are shown that viewing our life through the lens of the love of God, being reborn of the Spirit into that love, it means that our life will never end, and that our love changes the world while we are breathing and long after we stop. God invites us into a world-changing life, if we would let go of our greed, our selfishness, if we would love God and our neighbor. And if we choose that reborn life, we will ourselves be a blessing to others. Like Abram in our Old Testament reading, we are “blessed to be a blessing,” we are loved so that we can go out and love.

In this time of death, war, suffering, and uncertainty, may we so love the world, so that everyone we meet may believe and love and join us in this eternal life, bringing a small share of the kingdom of God to earth, that the world might be saved through love.

Amen.