December 3, 2006

For God So Loved the World
John 3:16

Of all people, Judy Garland must have felt appreciated. She must have known that she mattered a great deal to other people. Do you remember when she played Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz? That contagious and bubbly little girl from Kansas. Protected by her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry when that nasty neighbor, Miss Gulch, came to take her dog, Toto, away. Miss Gulch still gives me the creeps, watching her stuff Toto into the basket on the rear fender of her bicycle. Or Dorothy’s three famous friends—the scarecrow, lion and tin man. And what about listening to Dorothy sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow”? What a moving experience. Both the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts selected Dorothy’s version of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” as the song of the century, and the American Film Institute voted it as the number one movie song of all time. Dorothy—that is, Judy Garland—must have felt appreciated and cared for.

Yet Judy Garland’s life was one of inestimable insecurities and tragedy. In spite of her endless awards—she even appeared on a postage stamp!—Garland never felt at peace with herself. Embarrassed by her diminutive stature, she felt hopelessly unattractive and exchanged make-up artists like one might swap baseball cards or favorite recipes. So increasingly severe was Garland’s sense of inadequacy that she buried her cares in a drug addiction, suffered multiple nervous breakdowns, made various attempts to take her own life, and eventually died of a drug overdose in June, 1969. One week short of her 47th birthday. On one occasion not long before her death, Garland responded to a popular assumption with these words: “If I’m such a legend, then why am I so lonely? Let me tell you, being a legend is all very well if you’ve got somebody around who loves you.”

An extreme case? Granted. But an extreme case of what is nevertheless a universal condition. Feeling unwanted, uncared for, unloved. Feeling unloved causes innumerable marriage break-ups, creates rifts between parents and children, fans the fires of lethargy and depression, and relegates people to the margins of perceived insignificance at work, school, and, dare I say, church. Feeling unloved, I read just recently, even lies behind many of the labor disputes that we hear about in the news with some regularity. The sense, typically unsettling and at times overwhelming, that in this vast world of our, no one cares. I don’t matter to anybody. I’m all alone. No one loves me. “I think the biggest disease this world suffers from,” Princess Diana once said, “is the disease of feeling unloved….”

And it is hardly a theoretical discussion, is it? It runs rampant. Many of us no doubt know from experience just what feeling lonely and unloved “feels” like. We at times feel unloved because of how we were treated during the most formative years of our lives. We couldn’t do anything right. The people who were most influential in our lives either kept their distance or failed to affirm us in any appreciable way. The extent to which our families of origin can shape us will never cease to amaze me. Deep-rooted feelings of insecurity, rejection and general worthlessness—I hear it again and again.

We feel unloved because of what we look like; the abilities that we possess or, more likely, lack; our standing within the community; our hidden secrets that we believe, if ever revealed, would cause people to care about us even less; or the sins that we have committed. In recent weeks, I’ve spent time with:
a young woman, beautiful but broken, who has been severely scarred by her overbearing and emotionally abusive parents
a young person on the fringes because of his sexual orientation, even though he wants nothing less than to live a godly life
a middle-aged person despairing over unethical activities that she has been involved in that have left her, in her words, beyond forgiveness
a first-time pastor whose congregation is struggling—what church doesn’t struggle from time to time?—leaving him feeling woefully ungifted and even unappreciated by church leaders
a young man longing for a wife but sensing that no one is interested in him
an elderly man who feels that he has nothing left to contribute—life has passed him by
a rock star at a concert near Boston acting alarmingly childish and broadcasting with every word and movement, “I’m lost and without meaning”
any number of people who, although their lives are seemingly together, feel isolated, disconnected, inadequate, uncared for, and unloved.
“Loneliness,” philosopher James Park writes, “is an aching void in the center of our being, a deep longing to be loved, to be fully known and accepted by at least one other person.” “Doesn’t anybody really care about me?” people ask while listening to all of the love songs that fill the airwaves. “Do I matter to anyone?”

And here is the irony of it all. With all of this loneliness going around, all of these feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, inferiority, and worthlessness dominating so many of our world views. With such a pervasive sense of guilt and at times an overwhelming urge to earn the approval of others—to belong. With a lingering knot deep within our souls, a longing to be cared for and loved. A longing to genuinely matter to someone else. With all of this, isn’t it ironic to read that the one who is infinitely more important than anyone else—the God who fashioned us and holds our very lives within the palms of his hands—loves us?

Thomas Long, the renowned preaching professor at both Emory University and Princeton Seminary, once suggested that preaching from a biblical text that everyone is already familiar with is among the greatest challenges that any preacher faces. That is precisely where I find myself this morning. You’ve read this verse or at least heard it many times before. For many of you, John 3:16 was the first verse of Scripture that you ever memorized. It is, in my estimation, the clearest and most succinct statement of the good news of the Gospel found anywhere in the Bible. So what more remains to be said?

Should I parse the verb once again and inform us that God’s love is complete and unending? Should I distinguish between the various types of love in the New Testament and remind us that God loves us, not because we are particularly loveable, but because it is his very nature to give himself away to even the worst among us? Should I perhaps explore John’s understanding of “the world” throughout his writings and assure us that every human being on the face of the earth is included here? Or should I point out something new that perhaps only a few of you would notice when reading the account in which this verse occurs? Would it help, for example, if I told you that what initially appears to be a private conversation between a Pharisee named Nicodemus and Jesus actually turns out to be an address to everyone? Three times here, in verses 7, 11, and 12, Jesus uses the plural pronoun “you” when he speaks to Nicodemus about spiritual things. Jesus—or John—uses this conversation with Nicodemus as an opportunity to deliver the stirring news of John 3:16 to everyone. Would more information help?

Or might it be better for me to simply stand here before you, acknowledge my almost impossible task, and say, “God loves the world. God loves everyone in the world. God loves people of all shapes, sizes and colors. God loves clean-shaven people and crusty street-dwellers. God loves people who think they are good and people who know they are bad. God loves the world.” Or, if I dare be so bold—forgive me if I get a bit too close—perhaps I should look each of you directly in the eye and, as a representative of God, say, “Regardless of who you are, what you’ve done, what others may think of you, how you’ve been treated, what you are good at, what you are not so good at, or what secrets you are hiding, God loves you.” “God cares about you.” “You matter to God. You matter to God more than I can begin to say.” “God loves you.”

In fact, God has always loved us. He loved us when he created us. He showed his love for us when he delivered our ancestors from Egypt. He loves us, Hosea reminds us, as a deeply devoted spouse who stays true to his covenant vows through thick and thin. He loves us, Hosea continues, like a parent applying antiseptic to our bumps and bruises (11:1). And he loves us, Jeremiah writes, no matter what we have done. In the same way that Paul concludes that nothing can separate us from the love of God (Rom. 8:39), so Jeremiah announces on God’s behalf: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” So striking is the love of God in the Old Testament, well before John wrote his gospel, that one of the words often associated with it—hesed—knows no parallels in any of Hebrew’s earliest sister languages. While Israel’s neighbors typically worshipped unpredictable and often uncaring deities, many of whom were representations of the natural world around them, the Israelites themselves entered into relationship with a God who loved them like no other could. A God who forgives the unforgivable, transforms the unchangeable, and loves the unlovable.

A few years ago, a Canadian singer named Jann Arden wrote and sang a song entitled “Unloved.” After three rather dreary verses in which Arden describes the pathetic loneliness that haunts so many people in our world today, she closes with what amounts to a prayer:
…hoping that the kindness will lead us
past the blindness and
not another living soul will ever have to feel
unloved…unloved…unloved
Each of us might be many things as we sit here this morning. Some might be less talented than they would like to be. Some might feel abandoned by parents or friends. Some might be tired of their jobs and longing for a change. Some might wonder how they are going to pay the next bill. Some might be struggling with a particular sin and feeling hopelessly lost. But no one here is unimportant. No one here is unloved. Even if we feel as though we don’t matter to anyone on the face of the earth, each and every one of us matters deeply to God. “For God so loved the world.”