“Let’s consider your age to begin with—
how old are you?’
’ I’m seven and a half exactly.’
’You needn’t say “exactually,”‘ the Queen remarked: ‘I can believe it without that. Now I’ll give YOU something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.’
’I can’t believe THAT!’ said Alice.
‘Can’t you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.’
Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said: ‘one CAN’T believe impossible things.’
’I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
That would of course be the White Queen talking with Alice in the Through the Looking Glass, which was written by Anglican clergyman Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. Hopefully you’ve already had breakfast by now, but just in case you haven’t yet believed enough impossible things, let me try out another well-known literary passage on you—
“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.”
John 3:16 is something of an American creed. If you didn’t happen to grow up in a church that taught it as a memory verse—which I did not—you probably still encountered it on a banner when the television camera panned across the end zone, on a t-shirt where a youth group was gaggled in an airport terminal on their way to the mission trip, or on the bottom of a disposable cup at an In N Out burger.
Normally I would not recommend preaching a single verse of Holy Scripture outside of its context, much less building an entire soteriology—which is what theologians call a doctrine of salvation—around it. But because John 3:16 is so culturally ubiquitous, I want to spend a moment considering what it might mean to hold a sign or wear a shirt that proclaims belief in the Son as the way to eternal life.
That proposition may sit well or poorly with your theology, may leave you wondering if your beliefs are the right ones, or may have you worrying about all those apparently left out of this promise because they don’t believe in or never heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But whether you read the second half of this singular verse as good news or bad, I do want to point out that—interpreted as a mandate for belief—John 3:16 does conveniently answer two distinctly American and individualist questions. Which are (1) how do I pass the test, and (2) how do I avoid death.
These are legitimate questions in their time and place. We need to ask these kind of questions when we are going to the DMV to get our drivers’ licenses renewed or crossing a busy street. But as existential questions, I think they set the bar awfully low. Rather than asking what we can do to pass the belief test and live, what if we asked who God is and what God does. With those questions in mind, listen again—
“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 loves, God gives. That is God’s nature and character, and it is profoundly Good News. Full stop.
But what of this iconic verse? Did John want us to hear Jesus proclaiming God’s limitless love and capacity for self-giving, or was he giving us instructions about how get ourselves right with this God? If all we had to go on was 3:16, I would have to answer yes. And yes.
God’s unconditional love and our faithful response hang in dynamic tension in this verse. It matters what God does, and also what we believe that God is doing and why. The word ‘belief’ appears more frequently in John’s Gospel than in any other, while the noun ‘faith’ is conspicuously absent. Which suggests to me that John is at least as concerned about the enacting of belief as the having of it.
Our own Book of Common Prayer echoes John in this sense. When we affirm our Baptismal vows, we make a series of creedal affirmations about out Trinitarian God. Actually if you take out a BCP and turn to page 304 you’ll see how this works. There are three “do you believe” questions followed by five “will you” statements. Believe according to the ancient tenets of the Apostle’s Creed and then adopt a set of ethical behaviors, and that’s how you know you belong to the Body of Christ.
Maybe. But as a kind of antidote to the pop culture use of John 3:16, imagine with me a Church that asked not that we believe and behave in order to belong, but rather invited us to belong and then let the Spirit shape our behavior and beliefs. In some ways I think John 3:16—and indeed all of John’s Gospel—suggests this pattern of initiation and incorporation. Because the statements about God’s love always precede expectations about human response. Before we believe anything or do anything, John insists that God loves us and gives himself for us. In the beginning was the Word…
The truth is, sometimes it really is hard to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Or anything before that first cup of coffee, if you are me. And frankly, it is harder to believe something that you haven’t experienced or risked for yourself, which may have been why Alice argued with the White Queen. But if you recall the story, the Queen lived backwards in time. She bled before she pricked herself. She could remember the future. So who knows what she may actually have seen and done from evening to morning by the time she finally got to breakfast and believed those six impossible things.
Which may also be both our challenge and our opportunity as a church, because in a sense we too are called to remember the future. As Paul pointed out in his letter to the Ephesians, which was our second lesson this morning, “we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” So what if we were to live right now into the way of life which was prepared in the past for our future, and loved the world and gave of ourselves following the extravagant example of God?
We may discover that those who can’t believe will take a second look, and we may even discover that what we don’t believe becomes as important as what we do. My friend Karekin affirms a kind of anti-creed that goes like this:
“I don’t believe in God the mender of broken toys; the personal valet; the meta-Santa; and the bestower of sports victories and Oscar statues! I don’t believe in God the policy-enforcer; the record-keeper; or the preserver of status and giver of success. I much prefer the God who fills me with what I’m lacking in Charity so that I can see the world both in its splendor and in its need.”
Amen.
