Sermons

The Limits of Bumper Sticker Theology

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
March 26, 2006                            John 3:14-21

Writer Anne Lamott’s insights about faith and human life have been quoted many times from this pulpit. Admittedly no theologian, she has grasped the basic tenets of theology and made them poignant and humorous and accessible for many of us.

In an interview one time she called herself a “bumper-sticker Christian,” quoting two examples: “God loves you just the way you are but he loves you too much to let you stay like this” and “I don't know what the future holds but I know who holds the future.” I would not disagree with either.

Many of you will remember someone who in my youth I always called the “Rainbow Man.” The Rainbow Man showed up at nearly every big sporting event – Super Bowl, NCAA finals, the Masters – wearing a huge rainbow wig and carrying a sign. He managed to weasel his way into every shot, no doubt driving the TV producers crazy.

I always wondered about him – who he was, why he did what he did, and, more importantly, how he could afford those tickets. And that sign. Do you remember? It simply said “John 3:16.” I wondered about that as well. Did people actually get off the couch, go to their Bibles to find that passage? And why did he choose that passage? For him, it served as a summary of faith, the entire Bible in one verse, the ultimate bumper sticker.

John 3:16.

We’ve just heard it. “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.”

With all due respect to Anne Lamott and the Rainbow Man, ours is not a bumper sticker theology, for ours is not a bumper sticker life. The faith we proclaim reflects the lives we live – complex and nuanced, peaks and valleys. And if life cannot be reduced to simplistic and pithy aphorisms, then neither can our faith, nor the God it seeks to understand.

But if it could, then we are in the ballpark this morning. “God so loved the world…” is a good starting place, what Martin Luther called “the Gospel in miniature.”

Jesus is early in his ministry. He has just set its course by cleansing the temple. He has taken on the government by disturbing the peace and he has taken on establishment religion by suggesting that its practices were corrupt. Already we can see where this is heading.

He encounters Nicodemus, a curious Pharisee. Already we can see where this is heading.

And then this: God so loved the world.

This is eternal life that begins right now. This is eternal life that transforms everything, from this moment on, replacing darkness with light and death with love. Now.

Scholar Gail O’Day reminds us that all of it, Jesus’ life and death, his resurrection and ascension, is grounded in God’s love. (New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume IX, pages 552-555)

This verse itself has been used as a kind of theological football, a determination of who’s in and who’s out.

But it begins with love – God’s love for the world. And it ends, or rather continues, with love – Jesus’ love for us.

We know, because he says so, that this matters now, in the present, in this life. But we also know, because he says so as well, and because we know the story, that this matters always, in life and in death.

Ours is not a bumper sticker theology. The questions we carry with us day by day are complex and defy easy answers. What we seek is this, a set of foundational commitments by which we may search for meaning, and relationships, covenantal relationships, that offer comfort when needed and pushback when appropriate.

So that when difficult moments happen, even life and death moments, we have places to turn, and a community that will turn with us.

Writer Joan Didion sat down to dinner with her husband the writer John Gregory Dunne in their Manhattan apartment. Five minutes later, he was dead.

She writes in The Year of Magical Thinking: “Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends…”

Didion articulates on paper for all of us who have faced death. “Grief,” she writes, “when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.” (Page 26) She feels invisible, she writes, and everything appears fragile and unstable. “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it…nor can we know ahead of the fact…the unending absence that follows…dislocating to both body and mind.” (Pages 188-189)

She is Episcopalian; her husband was Roman Catholic. She writes very little of practiced religion, though his ashes are interred at St. John the Divine, in something, I suspect, rather like our columbarium.

What is clear from her experience, and ours, is that simple answers will not work, and when we try to shoehorn easy responses into moments of grief and mourning, it does not always help.

What does work is a phone call, a simple note, a warm embrace that includes no dialogue at all, a casserole. If we worry that we will say the wrong thing, don’t say anything at all. Simply show up.
The bereaved, if that’s the term we use anymore, is on a kind of journey with no fixed destination. We are simply privileged to serve as a kind of companion.

Writer Marjorie Williams was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer at age 43. Given three to six months to live, she lived nearly four more years, leaving a husband and two school-aged children.

She, too, was not a particularly religious person, or at least she did not write about it, but she did write eloquently about her experience.

She recounts the conversation with the doctor when the diagnosis is confirmed. “A lovely man, who’s doing a hard job with a patient he’s just met three days before. There are at least five large metastases of the cancer in my pelvis and abdomen (one of which she calls) – the mother ship…Tumors so widespread automatically ‘stage’ my cancer at IV (b). There is no V, and there is no (c)…

I call Tim (her husband) and tell him. We make it as clinical a conversation as possible, because otherwise there will be so much feeling it might stand in the way of acting.” (See “Hit by Lightning,” in The Woman at the Washington Zoo, page 319)

Later she reflects “Sometimes I feel immortal: Whatever happens to me now, I’ve earned the knowledge some people never gain, that my span is finite and I still have the chance to rise and rise to life’s generosity. But at other times I feel trapped, cursed by my specific awareness of the guillotine poised above my neck.” (Page 322)

What is clear from her experience, and Joan Didion’s, and ours, is that simple answers will not work, and when we try to shoehorn easy responses into moments of grief and mourning, it does not always help.

You will remember when William Sloane Coffin’s son died, drowned in a car crash. Soon thereafter someone sought to comfort him by asserting that it was all God’s will. Coffin, if I remember correctly, wanted to grab the person by the neck.

Life is a gift, a good gift given to us by a loving God. But there are moments we would not wish upon anyone. It is not luck, or fate. It is life.

And in those very moments, we turn not to easy answers, but rather back to the God…

· Who gave us life in the first place
· Who loved us into being and who loved us into new life.
· Who loved the world so much that against all odds and defying convention, struck a covenant with an unruly, cantankerous, disobedient people, a covenant never to be broken
· Who loved the world so much, that when we did not get it, Jesus showed up, not as a magical figure who lived above humanity, but a human figure who lived with us, for us, and who died that we might live
· Who loved the world so much, that in death, as well as in life, we would belong to this God

That love cannot be articulated casually or easily, though when hard moments come, when death comes, we do cling to words because we must cling to something. They may sound something like this:

· In life and in death we belong to God.
· The Lord is my shepherd.
· Lord have mercy and grant them eternal rest and perpetual light.

But always, the words we say, the lives we live, the actions we take, the deaths we die, point to this promise – God so loved the world – and the gift of eternal life made real by that very love. Amen.

(Followed by the Chancel Choir’s offering of the John Rutter “Requiem.”)