Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

“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) A poignant, well-known summary of God’s act of salvation through Jesus Christ for humankind and all of creation and the cosmos.

Many Christians have come to the Christian faith in connection with this Bible verse, being led to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. Such personal decision has changed lives for the better in many cases. But it has also led people to struggle with themselves, to focus on each little mistake or mis-stepping, has led to feelings of unworthiness, or to false security, “I have Jesus in my heart, I am secure, I am forgiven, and I can do what I want.”

It may either confirm your thoughts or challenge them, but John 3 verse 16 is not the base text for a theology of personal decision to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. From what I have learned from the Holy Scriptures, in every case that looks like it would be upon us to decide in favor of life or death, God’s decision for life, for salvation, for covenant has already preceded every one of our human responses. To be sure, the sentence “For God so loved the world...” is a core sentence of the Christian faith and faith will be our focus today.

It will not be about accepting Jesus but about the intricate process of recognizing that this world is God’s creation and God has yet not retreated from it; even loves this world, still; and makes us face our own judgment while letting us live, - through forgiveness. The issue is not deciding for or against God and Jesus, but how to recognize God’s presence and acts of love and mercy. Which is what the passage from Ephesians puts in a nutshell for us today: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:8)

In order to better figure out the intricate process of recognizing and receiving God’s truth, light and life, let’s go back to the story of Nicodemus and Jesus which precedes our passage. Nicodemus opens the conversation with a nice compliment: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. No one can do the signs that you do apart from God.” After this opening Jesus does not wait to be asked a particular question or given a topic, but he launches right in: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” And then follows an exchange full of misunderstanding on Nicodemus’ part. Jesus’ closing comment is rather sharp: “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?”

There is obviously something that Nicodemus does not get. In the speech that follows Jesus puts it this way: “We speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony.” Here is the charge to Nicodemus: You do not understand, and you do not receive.

Jesus tries to help Nicodemus by giving him an example how such receiving might work, how one must position oneself in order to be able to perceive and recognize the true presence of God: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)

Nowadays we can mostly predict from where the wind blows, southerly, or northeasterly or anywhere else. But the metaphor still works: The wind blows where it wills. God’s presence is unexpected and fleeting. Faith seems to be the same way.

Jesus is encouraging Nicodemus and really anyone to relax into a certain free-ness of mind and spirit and remain open for God’s spirit to move in.

A good illustration for open and flexible minds are very young children. Around the church here, I have crouched down to follow the eyes and fingers of toddlers and marveled at a spider or a moth hiding in a corner of the wooden cloister ceiling. We have carried the wings of a dried up bug, shimmering in the colors of the rainbow, into the narthex to be with us for devotions before Wednesday Night Alive. Had the children not shown them to me, I would have been so much poorer for the beauty of God’s presence in even a dull moth or a dead bug, and in those very lively children. Children receive God’s presence and love by their sheer being and breathing. No decision, no questioning, no acceptance of God involved.

Jesus is trying to invite Nicodemus to allow himself an aha-moment. He wishes for him to ease up a bit and have a light bulb turn on, that God is present, made flesh in this Jesus of Nazareth in front of him. All he needs to do is see it, recognize it. But just such a simple thing can be the hardest thing when we are boxed in, hardened, disappointed in life, in health, in love, in faith.

The light bulb moments, the aha-moments that we know from our own lives, when afterwards the world is not the same anymore as it was before, happen also in the process that we call faith. Often only in hindsight do we recognize God’s hand in particular, important times or situations in our lives.

Once the aha moment happens, which it did not for Nicodemus that night, a whole process of recognition starts. It is this process that Jesus is describing in the passage we heard today.

(1) So, first, the light bulb - o, this is what God has been wanting me to see: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in me may have eternal life.” Which leads to the next two steps:
(2) Joy, joy of salvation, gratefulness, exuberance, exhilaration. The psalms are full of examples of such joy.
(3) The next step is a rather sobering moment of recognizing what kind of love God has shown in the ironic act of humiliation in the lifting up of Jesus to die on a cross.

In the light of seeing which has been granted us, we now clearly understand and know that we have not helped advance the cause of God and God’s love for this world much at all. We see all of a sudden that the judgment that we would deserve, would crush us, completely, but in the cross Christ has taken all of the judgment there is upon himself. Christ carries for us the verdict for the whole world, creation and cosmos. He has taken upon himself all of the injustices and crises, the suffering and crying for which we pray every Sunday and every day. For us to know and see that is judgment enough. We have Lenten hymns that sing about this moment of sobering understanding: What have we done, what have I done?

(4) The person who has progressed thus far in the process of faith is not far from another step. That is the experience to be still alive, to have survived the judgment surprisingly, undeservedly. God’s love does not want us dead, immobile, god-less, lonely, but alive, seeing and welcoming God’s love. This is the experience of forgiveness. We are forgiven because God decided so. We only have to open ourselves and welcome this gift. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Faith is work, dear congregation, a life-long process. God has acted, decided on our behalf, a long time before we were born and we could know it. The experience of forgiveness then propels us to do good works, in gratitude and joy for God’s work for us. Just as Ephesians says: “We are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”

In the meantime, Nicodemus was granted the moment of recognition: At the very end he returns to Jesus after his death, and it is not too late. He helps Joseph of Arimathea balm his body in an overabundance of spices, so we may clearly see that his deeds have been done in God.

May the peace of Christ which surpasses our understanding guard your hearts and your minds. Amen.