Sunday in the Church Year: 4th Sunday in Lent
Gospel Reading: John 3:14-21
My home sits on a corner with the house right in the middle of a large lot. Nearly four years ago when I first purchased the house, I started planting bushes and trees. Rubber vines and bamboo first, then peach trees and citrus, then deciduous trees. A garden of greens and beans, radishes and tomatoes. After that came a brilliant bougainvillea, a yellow bells, agave, and a variety of cacti. Later, a bank of wildflowers, a fig tree, a mulberry, a pomegranate. Later still, a honeysuckle, flowers in pots, rosemary. 14 trees in all, a full foot of mulch on every inch of the yard except for the garden, a compost bin to supplement every planting. And of course, chickens! Right now, seven hens and three young chicks provide eggs and entertainment, but the chickens are not the only creatures living in the backyard. Orange Cat sneaks her way over the concrete wall to nibble on garden produce, and Gray Cat settles into her spot across from the chicken coop door every day so routinely she could be going to work. From time to time, Fluffy Cat makes an appearance atop the chicken coop. Collared doves and hummingbirds, curve-billed thrashers and house sparrows, and these tiny birds whose name we do not know fly about, splash in the water dish, find refuge in leafy trees, compete with the chickens for food scraps. Birds and bees, flies and butterflies pollinate flowers and garden plants and gift us with dropped seeds that spring to life in random places. Before I settled into my home four years ago, I never imagined the life of the world, specifically the life of Earth, to be as complex, rich, and diverse as I do now...and this is just one corner lot on the boundary between a historic district and an industrial area in one of the largest cities in the United States.
Of course, we know that the United States is just one nation among many on Earth and Earth just the beginning of the cosmos. We can hardly fathom the expanse of the universe. We put a man on the moon, but the moon is only 238,000 miles away. Our solar system, the planets that rotate around the sun as we do, is generally measured in astronomical units or AUs. 1 AU is 93 million miles, the distance from Earth to the sun, and our solar system is about 2,000 AUs in diameter. Our solar system hangs on an arm of the Milky Way galaxy which is 106,000 light years across. The Milky Way galaxy is part of a “local group” comprised of 2 clusters of galaxies, and we are further part of the Virgo Supercluster, superclusters being groups of clusters. In the observable universe, there are 10 such superclusters. Physicists are still not exactly sure, but there may be multiple universes. And there you have it, the cosmos.
I share both an intimate portrait of a piece of land and the vast expanse of the universe because the most familiar and beloved verse of the Bible begins: For God so loved the world… But how the Greek reads is For God so loved the cosmos… As humans consumed by our own glory and, at the very least, our own activities, we can forget that God created more than simply us. The life of the planet in its rich diversity teems. There may not be life anywhere else in the universe, but planets of iron and hydrogen and methane and bundles of hydrogen and helium, called stars, extend beyond our wildest imagination. This is the cosmos God loves. We humans are but a small part of it. Certainly, the creation stories from Genesis tell us that we hold a special place on Earth, that of tilling and keeping Earth, of stewarding its resources, but when we imagine the love of God for the world, what may fill our minds is our corner of the known universe, the people we know and love, the matters important to us. Naturally.
When the gospel writer John composes his testimony of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, contrary to the authors of the other gospels, John begins at creation. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God. Jesus, the Word of God, appears at the beginning of all time. John’s scope is larger than Matthew’s, Mark’s, and Luke’s, so how very appropriate that, when John relates Jesus’ teaching to Nicodemus about the love of God, Jesus uses the word cosmos. Jesus proclaims the good news of God’s love for the whole cosmos, for all creation. God sends the Son into the world not to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. The posture of God toward the whole cosmos is one of love, not condemnation.
I wish there were a more sophisticated point to my sermon. But quite simply, God so loves the cosmos, us and all creatures, plants and trees, vegetables and grains, sun and stars, moons and planets. Our question of the day is: What difference does it make to you that God so loves the world and not simply you? To read the community’s reflections, go to the Facebook live stream feed for Sunday, March 14.
We in our busyness, in our humanness, can forget that God created the cosmos, a cosmos of rich diversity and unending expanse. We can forget that God created the cosmos, a cosmos that God so loves that God sent the Son into the world to save it. For that, we say: Thanks be to God! Amen.