Hilton Head Island, SC – July 29, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 12:1-9; John 3:16-21
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. – John 3:16 (RSV)
Throughout the Bible, there are numerous instances where God is reported to have chosen certain individuals or certain peoples for His own purposes. Almost always in those instances, God doesn’t give His reasons for doing what He does. He just does it.
For example, God seemed to favor Abel over Cain, because God was more pleased with Abel’s offering than Cain’s. Cain was a shepherd, and he brought a sheep to God as a burnt offering. Abel was a farmer, and he brought some grain to God as a burnt offering. So does God prefer farmers to shepherds? In other words, does God like agriculture better than “agniculture”: the growth of grain more than the growth of sheep? Genesis 4 offers no explanation for God’s choice; it just states it.
Genesis 12 begins by declaring that God called Abraham to be the “father of nations,” which is what the name Abraham literally means. It doesn’t say that God chose Abraham because he was more righteous or faithful or honest than anyone else; God just chose him - - - period. Did God favor Abraham because he was more righteous than others, or did Abraham become more righteous than others because God favored him? It doesn’t say! So who knows?
God chose Jacob over his twin brother Esau. Why? We aren’t told. God favored Joseph over his eleven brothers. Why? We aren’t told. God ultimately favored David over Saul. Why? There we are told. Saul wasn’t cutting the divine mustard anymore, and God decided Saul had to be replaced.
The greatest example of divine favoritism in the Hebrew Bible is seen in the selection of the people of Israel to be God’s people. Why did God do that? Nowhere is that explained. He did it because He did it, and that’s that.
But it isn’t only the Old Testament which declares the favoritism of the Almighty. The New Testament does the same thing, but in a slightly different way. This is especially true of the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John. John goes out of his way time after time to suggest that God’s choice of the Jews had been abrogated, and that now God favored everyone who believed in Jesus. That is seen particularly in John, chapter 3, and in the most widely known of all New Testament verses, John 3:16.
The circumstances behind John 3:16 were as follows: We are told in the first two verses of that chapter that a “ruler of the Jews, named Nicodemus” came to see Jesus at night. “Ruler” in this case means a religious official, not a civil or governmental official. Nicodemus, incidentally, is not identified in any other Gospel; he is found only in John, and only in two places in John. Anyway, Jesus and Nicodemus had a fascinating if also mystifying conversation about being born again. It is from that conversation that the expression “born-again Christian” comes. The upshot of it is explained in John 3:16: God loved the world so much that He gave the world His only Son. Whoever believes in him (meaning Jesus, not God, and I think that is both bad theology and bad Christology, but John couldn’t ask me for my opinion) will not die eternally but instead will have eternal life.
Most Christians have always believed that God favors Christians. However, most Jews believe God favors Jews, and most Muslims believe God favors Muslims. But the real question is this: Does God play favorites with anybody? Does He shower His affections and His blessings on certain individuals to the exclusion of all other individuals, and does He bless particular entire peoples to the exclusion of other particular peoples? Did God love Eleanor Roosevelt or Mother Teresa more than Ethel Rosenberg or Tokyo Rose? Does God love Americans more than Germans or Japanese or Vietnamese - - - or Israelis or Saudi Arabians or Nigerians?
Either consciously or subconsciously, I suspect most of us assume that in fact God does favor certain ones or groups of us over other ones or groups of us. Surely He favors people who follow His law and the law over those who constantly break the laws of both God and humanity. How could God favor the murderers of a young man in rural Beaufort County or of American soldiers in Afghanistan over the rest of us? Surely He favors us over them, doesn’t He? And when you compare the behavior of the USA over the past century to that of, say, Russia or Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan or the Islamic Republic of Iran or Iraq under Saddam Hussein, He must love Americans more than these others, mustn’t He?
The Bible is generally so unambiguous on this! God does favor some people more than other people, He does love some more than others! That’s what we want to believe, and that’s what the Bible says, so it all seems to work out just fine!
On the other hand, there appears to be either an explicit or an implicit understanding behind how this process operates. “If you do this and this and this,” God tells us in the Bible, “then I will do this and this and this.” If you follow the rules, I will favor you. If not, watch out.
This tacit understanding turns God into a kind of “quid pro quo” God. You get this and that if you do this and that, and if you don’t, you don’t. God favors those who favor God, we are led to believe, and He doesn’t favor those who don’t favor Him.
Does that therefore mean that if somebody gets sick, God doesn’t favor that person? If he had followed the rules, he would never get sick! If someone is born with a handicap, or develops a handicap long after birth, does it mean God doesn’t favor her? If people suffer as a result of any kind of accident, does it indicate God does not favor them?
When those kinds of questions are asked, it casts the favoritism of God into murky shadows, doesn’t it? Both the righteous and the unrighteous suffer. Both the good and the bad get into bad situations. Intuitively, if we are honest with ourselves, we all know that to be true.
Then why do we also tend to believe that God plays favorites? Why do we suppose that in general good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people? Or perhaps more to the point, why do we suppose we are better than anyone else, and therefore that God is obligated to favor us more than them?
I will never forget an incident that occurred in Madison, Wisconsin last summer at the sixtieth reunion of my high school class. A group of classmates and I were having pizza following an afternoon get-together. These were some of my best friends from way-back-when. Through the passage of time, by chance we all became moderately religious freethinkers compared to the days of our relatively orthodox youth. Some of my fellow geezers had remained very active in church, and some not. But it would be safe to say that none of us would win the Pope Benedict XVI or the Jerry Falwell II Award for Doctrinal Purity.
As luck would have it, we got into a lengthy and vociferous discussion about whether the existence of God can either be proven or even strongly validated. I want you to know I didn’t initiate the discussion, but I happily waded into once the others did start it. (Maybe they were just trying to bait me; I don’t know.) Anyway, all of us agreed that the existence of God can be neither proven nor verified to everyone’s satisfaction. Further, we proffered the opinion that those who think God’s existence can be proven are sometimes palpable pains in the neck. We were also all in agreement on that.
Not long before we finished our pizza, a distinguished couple got up from the next table to leave the restaurant. With a kindly smile the lady gave a hand-written note to me, as she and her husband left the restaurant. Because I was so startled to receive the note, I kept it. Here is what it said: “John chapter 3 verse 16. For God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son (the Lord Jesus Christ), that whosoever believes in Him, will not perish but have everlasting life. [New paragraph] You can’t prove God with your intellect, it’s by FAITH you will know Him. Believing is Seeing!! X”
From this experience I learned three things. One. We had all obviously been more audibly expressive in our opinions than I might have thought. I was sitting in a place to watch this couple during dinner, and I noticed they seemed to say not a word to one another, but ate in silence. Obviously they were listening intently to what the apostate members of the West High Class of 1957 were saying. Two. This lady was not a palpable pain in the neck, because she was so gentle and so loving in offering her written observations concerning our conversation. She even signed her note with an “X,” which I took to mean either a kiss or a hug. She didn’t look a smarmy, smug know-it-all but like a warm human being trying to assist some other human beings along life’s circuitous and sometimes tortuous path. Three. I decided to keep her note, because I knew sooner or later I would be preaching a sermon on John 3:16.It is such a well-known verse, and I thought it would be a useful illustration for what I would say when the time came to preach such a sermon. This is the time.
That lovely evangelical lady meant well by her kindly missive to that vociferous assemblage of the unorthodox. Encountering evangelicals in Madison, Wisconsin is harder than in many other communities, although it is easier now than it was when we were growing up there. And every evangelical who believes the content of John 3:16 as the writer John intended it means well by reciting that verse widely and often. But that famous quotation clearly implies that IF we believe in God, God will favor us by granting us eternal life rather than eternal death or even eternal damnation. And by any other definition, that is an undeniable quid pro quo notion of God’s nature. If we do this (believe in Jesus: not in God, but in Jesus), then God will welcome us into heaven.
Therefore is it only Christians whom God favors? Does He favor Protestants more than Catholics, or Catholics more than Protestants? I hope not. I trust not. I believe not. In truth, I am convinced that God plays favorites with no one. It is God’s nature to love everyone and all peoples equally, and never to favor one over the other. That goes for Christians as well. We are not God’s favorites, and we delude ourselves if we imagine that we are.
Many Israelis believe God favors only them. Many Palestinians believe God favors only them. The Ayatollah Khameini believes God favors Shiite Muslims, especially of the Iranian variety. The Taliban believe that God favors their kind of extremist Sunni Afghan or Pakistani Muslims. Many evangelicals believe God favors evangelicals.
Is “favor” even the correct word to use in this context? If I am attempting to suggest that God favors everyone equally, can that linguistically or logically mean that He favors anyone? If we favor anyone or anything, doesn’t that mean, by definition, that we hold others in less favor or disfavor or no favor? If a parent has a favorite child, the other children are therefore not so favored. If someone favors double fudge chocolate ice cream, that means every other flavor is not as positively favored.
Whether or not God does not play favorites, He does love all of us to an ultimate and unlimited degree. But His love is not based on our merit or our reciprocity of His love or our worthiness of His love. It is based solely on His nature. God cannot not love or favor all of us.
Is it really a favor to anyone if God favors everyone, serial killers and rapists and pedophiles as well as people serving in soup kitchens for the poor or free medical clinics or centers for those who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease? Shouldn’t God favor those who do good over those who do evil? Is it not a disfavor to the clearly good if God also favors the clearly bad?
God’s favor, by which I also mean God’s unconditional love, is good for everyone, because God has more than sufficient reason to hold all of us in disfavor. All of us fail Him much more frequently than we are willing to admit or even to contemplate. We tend to think well of ourselves and ill of others. But God thinks well of all of us, regardless of the ills in which we so readily or so heedlessly engage.
You may ask: “How do you know you aren’t projecting your notion of God’s nature on us? Or how do I know you are not projecting a faulty notion of God’s nature onto God?” I unreservedly admit that I am projecting my notion of God’s nature onto you, and I also am projecting my concept of God onto God. Furthermore, if your idea of God is fundamentally at odds with what I am here attempting to convince you of, I am hoping to chip away or even seriously to challenge whatever it is you do believe.
Here is the best news, however. Whatever you or I believe or don’t believe about God or about anything else, He favors all of us anyway. And Good News doesn’t get any better than that.