Reading: John 3:16
The words we have just heard constitute for me some of the most important words in the bible – but not in the way they are usually presented and interpreted. They way they are usually presented is that all we have to do is to say ‘I believe’, and we are ‘saved’ and we go to heaven without being judged. Such an interpretation is I believe a travesty of what is being said here.

Our starting point is that we and the world are perishing. We are on our way to destruction, to nothingness, to extinction. Personally, each of us knows that our lives are a process towards death. This goes for the world too. It is becoming clear that the world also is perishing. Global warming and nuclear warfare, for example, could very easily have us end up with a very different world to the one we know now. Some assert that we would never be stupid enough to allow global warming and nuclear warfare to wield their destructive power. To such an opinion I would simply say ‘Who are you kidding?’ A quick look at the way we are handing global warming and nuclear warfare don’t exactly fill one with confidence. ‘No one would be stupid enough to drop an atomic bomb!’ We have! No one would be stupid enough to let the world self destruct through global warming! We are! Last year CO2 emissions rose 3.5%. Last week 2,500 scientists from 80 countries said that global warming was going to strike sooner and harder than expected. Self destruction always has been and is a real possibility – personally and globally. There is a very real possibility that the world as we know it shall cease to be. As Sally McFague points out, the world won’t cease to be. Nature is never spent. But humankind’s part in the evolutionary process may well cease. We may well become a dead end on the tree of life, a dead twig on the evolutionary tree – a simile that I find striking in the light of Jesus words about the vine and the branches.

On the day that the British Prime Minister announced the bail out of the financial system and the huge amounts involved, a teenager was listening to the news broadcast. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Who is going to pay for all of this?’ His mother quickly replied ‘You are.’ That is precisely what the situation is. We are mortgaging our children’s future – financially, ecologically, socially, indeed any way you like. The present financial crisis is but a very small instance of the nature of self destruction. Two answers are being proposed at present

(a) More regulation – and I hope you saw what John Hewson said in the paper last week: ‘I have yet to see a regulation that can’t be circumvented by market forces.’
(b) The second approach is so called fiscal stimulation, the hair of the dog that bit us, offering the drunk a shot of whiskey to get the party going again. The party is over! It never ceases to amaze me when people are surprised at executives paying themselves bonuses out of public bail out money, of Bernie Madoff the darling of Wall Street swindling people out of $100 billion. What needs to be heard are Madoff’s words ‘It’s all been a great big lie.’ They need to be heard in the context of the words attributed to Jesus in John’s gospel. ‘If you stand by my teaching, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.’ (John 8:32)

This is the story line of the scriptures – a story line which is set out so clearly in the Letter to the Ephesians. Six chapters with a ‘therefore’ plumb in the middle.

Chapter one: God has allowed us to know the secret of his plan, and it is this: he purposes that all human history shall be consummated in Christ, that everything that exists shall find its fulfilment and perfection in him. And the staggering thing - that we have a part to play in the working out of his purpose.
Chapter two: His purpose is the creation of a new humanity
Chapter three: This is to be made known through the Church.
And then right in the middle of the letter, the word ‘Therefore’
Chapter four: Therefore my brothers I beseech you to live lives worthy of your high calling

And then there follow three chapters of what it all meant in those days. The first three chapters of Ephesians remain of permanent significance, the last three chapters do and must change with the times.

Our gospel reading this morning is a distillation of this story line. God, the life force within and among us, the Spirit of Life, the evolutionary impulse urging us to fullness of life, so loves the world (such an important emphasis) that Jesus appears, that through him the world might be saved. This is the essential story line not that we individually are saved from the world into some kind of fairy tale heaven. Salvation has nothing to do with being saved from the world as so many fundamentalists proclaim. It is about the salvation of the world of which we are a constituent part. Sin as Tillich defined it is ‘the structure of self destruction’. Sin isn’t about sex. It’s about self destruction and the gospel is about being saved from self destruction.

The other theme in this passage is judgment – how after we die we will all have to stand before the great Judge God on his throne and receive our reward or punishment according to how we have lived our lives, and go to heaven or hell as a result. Not really! That is just one picture of what judgment day is like – and you will find it in quite a few places in the bible. But there is another picture which is in our reading for today and which is very different. It is that judgment is a present reality and that we judge ourselves. ‘This is the judgment that the light is in the world and men and women prefer the darkness.’ In other words if we choose not to turn the light on, if we choose to walk in the dark, consequences follow. You can expect to stumble, you can expect to lose your way.

So let me read these great words again ‘God so loved the world that he gave us Jesus so that everyone who has faith in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ Eternal life as we have said so many times before is not about life after death. It is a quality of life here and now that is unaffected by death. ‘It was not to judge the world that God sent his son into the world but that the world through him might be saved. This is the judgment – the light is in the world and men and women prefer the darkness to the light.’ We judge ourselves according to how we react to Jesus of Nazareth. The train pulls into the station and the question is whether or not we get on the train. To get on the train opens new vistas and experiences; not to get on the train means staying where we are. Judgment is a present reality and we in effect judge ourselves according to how we react to Jesus. Yes, there will be another train. The trains are always running but you don’t want to leave it too late or you will not see much before it is dark – and one thing is sure you can only carry into the dark what you have seen in the light.

‘If you stand by my teaching you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.’ What is his teaching? It is summed up in the words Loving God and loving one’s neighbour as one’s self. In this is contained all the law and the prophets. And from this flows a whole host of other things like loving one’s enemy, doing good to those who spitefully use you, the centrality of non violence and so on.
But, and it’s a very big but, it isn’t a matter of just about absorbing the teaching in our heads, it’s about discipleship, about following the way of the teacher – ‘He who would come after me, he who would be my disciple, let him/her take up the cross and follow me.’ That, as Jesus knew, and we should now know, is where the rubber hits the road. That’s what discipleship is: following, taking up the cross and following.

This was highlighted for me in a statement of Ron Sider giving the final address to participants of a conference on non violence.

‘To rise to this challenge in history, we Christians need to do three things:
(1) To reject ways we have misunderstood Jesus call to peacemaking
(2) We need to embrace the full biblical understanding of shalom
(3) We need to be prepared to die by the thousands.’

It is that third insight that for me so vividly reflects Jesus call to take up one’s cross and follow to the death and at the same time constitutes the greatest disappointment I have ever experienced. It happened some three years after the Iraq invasion when four Christian Peace Team workers were kidnapped in Iraq. Christian Peacemaker Teams are small groups of Christians who go to trouble spots to identify with the suffering there. The body of one of those kidnapped was found on a rubbish heap. The question then was what should happen as far Christian Peace Team was concerned? The question was, ‘Should they stay or withdraw.’ I had had quite a bit to do with Christian Peacemakers when in Iraq and when this happened I immediately wrote to them urging them to stay and saying that I could provide at least four other people including myself who would be prepared to go and be part of the Team. The idea was that as one person was struck out another would be ready to take their place at the plate. They eventually decided to withdraw – and I believe one of the really great moments of history was lost – the opportunity for Christians of the world to die by the thousands if that is what was required. In our lifetime there was the opportunity of presenting the gospel – and we blew it. We blew it! The opportunity of a life time, of an era, of a century, of a thousand years – and we blew it. Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.

I’ve been around long enough to know how many of you will react to what I am saying this morning. ‘The old man sings an ugly song.’ The last time I preached along these lines someone asked me if I was depressed. No way! I am not singing an ugly song. I am singing a song of hope and alleluias in the face of destruction. I sing of the Kingdom of God. I sing of the cross and resurrection. I sing of the saviour of the world, of a God who so loves the world that he gives us Jesus of Nazareth that those who believe in him should not perish but find a new quality of life. Jesus did not come to condemn the world. He lived so that the world might have new life through him – a life expressed and found in his life and teaching about the Kingdom of God. As Denis said last Thursday in our Lenten studies ‘A saviour is the opposite of a destroyer’. And what these verses maintain is that Jesus is the saviour of the world – not in the sense of taking us off to heaven when we die – that is the kind of self centred concern that he opposes every inch of the way. That is the ugly song and it constitutes for me a gross distortion of the good news of Jesus of Nazareth. The good news is that the world has a saviour. Alleluia!