March 22, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

Boundary-Breaking Love

Sarah A. Johnson
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 107:1–3
Numbers 21:4–9
John 3:14–21

Not only is another world possible, she is on her way.
On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.

Arundhati Roy

I spent this last week reading a beautifully written and insightful book, The Unforgiving Minute by Craig Mullaney, about a young man’s journey through West Point, Oxford, and the war in Afghanistan. The book’s title, drawn from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If,” traces Mullaney’s struggle with the weight of his hard-earned knowledge and his task as soldier who carries the burden of other men’s lives, a burden that most clearly reveals itself in the disorienting minutes of battle. Mullaney’s journey teaches him some hard lessons about discipline and leadership, but even more so it ultimately exposes him to painful scars left by a journey through war.

And yet real-life battles and wars fought with tangible weapons are not the only things that have the ability to inflict wounds and leave scars that last a lifetime. Religion (and perhaps Christianity in particular) is certainly no stranger to the battlefield. Religion has an uncanny ability to create boundaries and use scripture as a weapon to wound and to hurt others.

Today’s scripture passage is one that has often been used as just such a weapon. Boiled down to its simpler form, John 3:16, this passage attempts to cut clear boundaries between those who religion deems are in and those who are out; a scriptural admonition to the world to accept Jesus or suffer the consequences of damnation. Over the years it has increasingly become a slogan for exclusive theology and thus a source of misunderstanding and division.

Knowing or having experienced the uncomfortable and harmful ways in which this passage is used, it might seem better to ignore it or to pull a Thomas Jefferson and cut it out all together. Jefferson spent a good deal of time cutting up the Bible like an origami project, removing all the parts of scripture that he didn’t like. Unfortunately Jefferson was left with only eighty-six lousy pages of scripture to work with—a reality that I think speaks volumes about all of scripture’s uncomfortable and challenging spaces and our need to examine them more closely to see if we cannot gain a better understanding, rather than leave them be or cut them out.

The Gospel of John is written in a completely different fashion than the other Gospels, and it presents a unique picture of Jesus, one in which God is mysteriously and intimately present and in which Jesus offers ethereal discourses about water, bread, birth, lambs, light, and himself.

Tying together these uniquely Johannine images about who Jesus is, is the regularly repeated phrase “Amen and amen, I say to you.” A phrase that in most translations is more commonly worded “Very truly, I say to you,” it is John’s way of alerting the reader that what is about to be said next is intimately connected to what just came before.

Leading up to our passage for this morning, Jesus has uttered this phrase three times, connecting his words from our passage to the encounter with Nicodemus that immediately precedes it.

Nicodemus, a religious leader in the community, appeared before Jesus in the cover of night to reveal to Jesus his understanding of who Jesus is. Nicodemus wisely recognized Jesus’ ability to perform “signs” or miracles as a sure indication that God’s presence is with Jesus, something reserved for the great figures in the history of God’s people. In the conflict with Pharaoh and during the exodus from Egypt, God assured Moses that the miracles he was able to perform were a sign that God was with him. Recognizing Jesus’ connection to the great “I AM” of the Exodus, Nicodemus uses his previously gained knowledge and typical religious categories for understanding who Jesus is.

In other words, Nicodemus walks out into the night toward the one whom John has identified in the prologue of his Gospel as “the life and the light” (John 1:4), and using the categories that are familiar to him, Nicodemus steps ever so carefully and fragilely toward a life of faith.

But then Jesus launches into the beginning of this long discourse about birth and water, eternal life and the kingdom of God. Nicodemus is utterly confused. Attempting to use his usual categories of understanding, he cannot see where Jesus is leading him; he cannot move away from his categories into this new life in the Spirit that Jesus is offering.

But in his speech, Jesus does not condemn Nicodemus for this; he only beckons him further. Jesus attempts to take what Nicodemus knows and build on his understanding of the kingdom of God and what it might look like, to show him that the God who made promises to Abraham and to Jacob and who appeared to Moses in the wilderness is also the same God whose power is mysteriously present in the one standing before him and whose crucifixion will strangely be his moment of exaltation.

Just imagine yourself standing there in the dark beside Nicodemus, his sandals nervously tapping the dusty dirt road as he speaks to Jesus, recalling the stories of his ancestors, those things that are familiar to him, those things that make sense to his categories of understanding, only then to have Jesus offer something completely unfamiliar and confusing. Nicodemus, perhaps without intention, blurts out, “How can this be?” Jesus smiles and, without rejection, encourages Nicodemus a little bit further; he encourages him to see something new. Jesus beckons—“Keep looking, keep pushing, and keep expanding your notion of God’s kingdom, where it might be found, and what it might look like.”

You see, this passage was never meant to be an exclusive religious prescription for who is let into the kingdom of God and who is kept out. It was never meant as an invitation to create boundaries. It was meant to encourage Jesus’ followers and those whom he encountered along the way to never settle with where and with whom they thought that God’s kingdom might be found and what the categories and boundaries of that kingdom might be. The incarnation is about the possibility of new life, an invitation to discover the unending presence of God in new ways in the here and now. It is not an invitation to create boundaries; it is an invitation to extend them.

Recently I discovered the powerful work of two Furman University graduates, Catherine Larson and Laura Hinson. The two women have, respectively, written a book and filmed a documentary entitled, As We Forgive. Both works tell stories of reconciliation and restoration happening in Rwanda following the 1994 genocide. While in Rwanda, the two women uncovered the expected horrors that follow the systematic slaughter of literally millions of people: churches filled with the bones of those who had been murdered while trying to seek refuge from their killers; the hollowed brutality of torture and rape; children left to grow up without the embrace of a parent or a family member (Joe Sandvig, Furman University Magazine, Winter 2009). Influenced by unstable governments and hateful rhetoric that encouraged deep ethnic racism, neighbors and friends literally turned on one another with machetes.

But something else that the two women discovered while in Rwanda shocked them even more. In order to eliminate the gross overcrowding of Rwanda’s prisons, Rwandan President Paul Kagame ordered the release of more than 40,000 prisoners, many who had been members of the death squads, back into the communities and neighborhoods where their victims lived. Government officials and citizens alike feared what would happen when murderer and victim collided, sometimes living next door to one another. A Tutsi man who had lost 142 family members in the genocide spoke the fearful question so many others wondered: “This time, will they kill us all?” “Would Rwandan society, still barely functioning, now collapse entirely?” (As We Forgive, p. 17). Tormentors and victims alike feared how they would manage.

The only thing more stunning than the brutality of the violence and the mind-numbing circumstances of this story are the acts of forgiveness that fill its pages.

Drawing from the concept of restorative justice, community leaders began slowly introducing into several village communities the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation. Local leaders convened a series of reconciliation meetings in which survivors and perpetrators alike were invited. The goal of the meetings was not to “force forgiveness on the part of the survivors, but instead to create a place for perpetrators to offer apology, some form of restitution, and a declaration of changed behavior and attitudes. For families it was a chance to express their emotions, regain some sense of control and dignity, and often to learn details that they wanted to know about the crime” (As We Forgive, p. 39). Slowly perpetrators and victims have begun to rebuild community—forgiveness often bleeding into reconciliation, and reconciliation into seemingly inconceivable friendship.

The stories defy every biological and rational category of human behavior, and they invite us into a story where the boundaries of what is possible for our lives have been extended.

This past week, the Chicago Lights Elam Davies Social Service Center here at the church unrolled a trial run to move the Sunday Night Supper meal, which this church provides to guests who come through our doors, from the Dining Room in the basement of the church to Anderson Hall. Part of the change that accompanies moving the location of the meal is the attempt to bridge the gap between the community of people who typically receive the meal and those who typically serve it. Instead of guests and volunteers remaining separated as those dining and those serving, all would sit down and join in a meal together. It would be a chance to create new community between people whose circumstances would normally keep them apart.

After the meal, those Deacons who had participated sat and reflected on this new way of doing things. One Deacon remarked, “Before we tried this tonight, I was afraid, nervous. What would I say to others at the table? But having experienced this, I realized how much I learned in such a short time about myself and about those who are my neighbors.” Another Deacon remarked, “Just sharing a meal in a new place opened me to different ways of thinking about community.”

It is only the beginning of an experiment that may hit bumps and snags along the way. But it also might just be another place where Jesus will challenge and encourage us to extend our boundaries, to see and experience the possibilities of his kingdom in new and different ways.

Throughout history, the institutional church has struggled to confront and extend its boundaries—on slavery, women, the ordination of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. Jesus calls us to extend our previously conceived notions of God’s kingdom, to push ourselves to see differently. Jesus’ invitation to extend our boundaries permeates every space of our lives big and small. Some of those things will be more difficult than others. Change, seeing things differently, pushing our categories of understanding in light of the gospel, is never easy.

John’s Gospel, more than any other, calls us to extend our boundaries. John makes clear that a follower of Jesus can never rest easily within a “closed system” of religious belief and commitments, however well articulated or precious they may be. New worlds are forever challenging the believer to experience the old story in new ways. Jesus repeatedly demands more from those who claim to come to believe and understand the God he makes known.

In the end, the judgment is not God’s; it’s ours. We condemn ourselves to a smaller life, a smaller faith, when we refuse to see past our own narrow categories of belief.

Standing before Jesus, Nicodemus asks, “How can this be?”

Jesus answers, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that we might not perish but have abundant life.”

All thanks be to God. Amen.