Lent 7: What I'm Not Preaching About Tomorrow

It's Saturday evening, and tomorrow's sermon looms as it always does. The Revised Common Lectionary this week gives preachers an embarrassment of riches, from God's promise to Abraham in Genesis 12 to Psalm 121 (solidly in the rotation of psalms that may be my favorite on a given day) to some of Paul's finest theological musing on justification in Romans 4 to the story of Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3 that includes the most famous passage in Christian Scripture. Each of these texts deserves to stand alone in a place of honor, perhaps on display in a museum where awed throngs pause in silent wonder at God's revelation set forth for all to see.

Six years ago I first preached on this set of lessons in the midst of my second year of Divinity school, at Resurrection Lutheran Church in New Haven as part of my part-time internship. Flush with theological education and Lutheran language, how could I not preach on Romans, where this very text struggles with such central concerns as justification and righteousness, faith and law and promise? This week I have chosen not to look back at that old sermon; either it will be embarrassingly crude or naive, or it will hold together well and I will wonder whether I've learned anything in the past six years. A lose/lose situation, by all means.

Tomorrow I will preach on God's promise to Abraham, absolutely one of the most essential and exciting turning points in all of Scripture, in which God tries a new thing and the course of history is forever altered... OK, you don't get to read the whole thing here. Suffice to say these few simple verses are among my favorite in all the Bible, and I can only pray that my sermon hints at its importance. 

Which brings us, of course, to Jesus' encounter with Nicodemus.
In this conversation John records perhaps Jesus' most famous words, in the 16th verse of chapter 3: “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." Luther Seminary professor David Lose penned a very interesting article this week in which he addresses a current controversy among certain Christians about this Rob Bell video, and he finds Jesus' words to Nicodemus enlightening in the debate. For those of you about to be disappointed that I will not preach on this central text tomorrow, I offer the Lose article as food for thought. I expect in another three years I may be ready to tackle it head-on (note to self: save this Lose article for 2014!) 

For my part, I will only say that there are very, very few questions in all of Christian history and theology that are less interesting to me than the question of who goes to hell, or heaven, or whatever. Thirty seconds spent reading the comments on either the Lose article or the Bell video remind me why I've avoided this sort of pointless, impossible-to-win argument for at least a decade. What happens to us (and perhaps more importantly, to "them") after death is God's business, not ours. If God is who our tradition tells us God is - a God of love, of mercy, of kept promises and undeserved forgiveness - then all we can do is trust God to be who God is, and to go on being who we are. And who are we? Faith tells us we are God's children, created good in God's image, yet broken and imperfect and struggling and constantly failing, and also forgiven and freed to live for God and for one another. Bell and Lose agree that the long story of the Bible tells us God's love is more powerful and radical than any limits we put on it, and beyond that central truth what certainty do we need?