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02.17.08

2nd Sunday in Lent

BLUE MARBLE PERSPECTIVE

PSALM 121; JOHN 3:1-17

• Looking Down On Planet Earth
• The View From a Distance
• What do you see when you look at the world around you?
• Do you see a world full of mystery and majesty created by a loving and compassionate God, or do you see a world in chaos that’s on the fast track to self-destruction?
• What do you see when you look at life?
• Do you see life as an accident with no rhyme or reason for what happens, or do you see things that happen as intricately connected and part of a meaningful and purposeful design?
• What do you see when you look at people?
• Do you see people as hopelessly flawed, selfish and egotistical and not worthy of love, or do you see them as children of God, a people who need to be loved by us because they were created and are loved by God?
• How we answer these questions depends upon our perspective
• We’ve all seen pictures of the earth taken from space showing the earth as a blue marble
• Neal Armstrong, the first person ever to set foot on the surface of the moon, tells how he stood on the lunar surface with his arm outstretched in front of him, and how he simply moved his hand so that his thumb blocked the earth from his view
• Rather than experiencing a sensation of power at being able to “obliterate” the earth with the movement of his hand, he describes that experience as extremely humbling
• From that vantage point, he saw how small the earth really was in the grand design of space, and how small his life was in the scope of God’s creation
• From that distance, the whole world is a blur
• Even the delineation of the continents are difficult to see
• What one sees most clearly are the vast oceans separated by smaller parcels of land, which give the earth that blue marble effect
• There is no clear delineation from continent to continent, and divisions between countries are impossible to see since many of them are imaginary lines drawn on maps
• What Armstrong and others who have traveled into the reaches of space saw was one world without barriers or boundaries
• From that distance, the earth is one and all the peoples are one
• Most of us will never have the opportunity to see the world from that perspective, to see the full picture of God’s grand and glorious design
• Our view of the world is up close and personal
• From that perspective, we see all of the world’s flaws
• We see the inhumanity inflicted on humans by other humans
• We see the devastation caused by acts of nature, the destruction caused by war, the divisions created by injustice
• So it’s difficult for us to see the world as a place full of mystery and majesty, to see life as part of a meaningful and purposeful design, or to see people as children of God needing to be loved
• The View of God and the View of the World
• What does God see when God looks at the world?
• For that question even to make sense, we first have to buy into the idea that God is “out there” somewhere at all
• And for some people, that’s a hard sell
• Seeing all the horror that occurs in this world—all of the death and sickness and suffering and pain—some people are convinced there is no God
• If God existed, there would be no sickness, suffering, pain or death, but since these things do exist, God does not
• Others acknowledge that there is a God, but God has turned God’s back on creation
• God is indifferent about what happens in the lives of people, and God’s indifference is the cause of all that’s bad in the world
• God is too far removed from creation to care what happens to it
• If God cared, God would step in and fix things
• The Christian perspective on how God views the world is radically different from these other two perspectives
• First of all, the Christian believes that God did create the world , and God created it to be good
• The evil that exists in the world exists, not because there is no God or because God turned away from the world, but because we human beings, who were created to live in the image of God, have chosen to turn away from God’s will for us
• The Christian believes that human life is not a random game of chance (roll the dice and see what happens), but that it is an integral part of God’s meaningful and purposeful design
• The Christian believes that all people are children of God and need to be loved because they are created and loved by God (although we don’t always act as if we believed this)
• An Up Close and Personal View
• How God Views the World
• According to the Bible, the way God sees the world is through the lens of love
• “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” says John 3:16, the most well-known verse in the whole Bible
• It’s been called the “gospel in miniature” because it conveys the heart of the gospel message
• And when we hear these words, our minds tend to translate it to mean, “God so loved the people who inhabit the earth.”
• But John is saying so much more than that as he writes these words
• The word John uses here as he writes this is the Greek word kosmos, from which we get our English word cosmos
• Kosmos can mean the world in the broad sense of the earth and all that’s in it, or more narrowly mean just the human inhabitants of the earth, but these are secondary definitions of the word
• The primary definition of kosmos is “orderly arrangement”
• In the Greek of John’s day, there was another word, oikoumene, that can also mean “world” but specifically referred to the part of the earth that’s inhabited
• John could have used this word, but chose to use kosmos instead
• Perhaps he did so for two reasons
• One reason certainly must have been that, although oikoumene could be used to refer to all the inhabitants of the earth, it was more commonly used to refer to the Roman world, the lands inhabited by civilized people, excluding those areas where barbarians lived
• John did not use this word for world because he didn’t want to imply that God loves only the beautiful people, the cultured class, to the exclusion of the marginalized, the poor, the uneducated, the outsider
• John used the word kosmos because he wanted to be clear that no one anywhere was outside the realm of God’s love
• The second possible reason is that John wanted to say that God wants harmony and order instead of chaos
• At the beginning of time, the first thing God did was to create order out of chaos, and at the end of time, in God’s new creation, life will be free of suffering, pain and death—all marks of chaos in our life
• The point is that order—the state where things work out as God wants them to—is the existence God wants for all of us
• God loves us so much that God sent God’s Son to save us from the chaos of sin, the chaos that ultimately causes us to perish
• God sent God’s Son to restore the righteous, orderly arrangement of life for us, the way that leads to eternal life
• The Transformative View
• It’s interesting to note that kosmos is the root from which our word “cosmetic” is derived
• We often use that word today to mean something superficial, something that doesn’t go beyond the surface
• But kosmos means to put things in beautiful order, and that is what God does by coming into the world through Jesus Christ
• God comes to create order out of the chaos we’ve created
• God comes so that we might be born anew
• God comes to fill us with the Holy Spirit so that we might have the power to live life differently than we have in the past
• God comes to change our perspective, to help us see the world, life, and people as God sees them
• And God comes because God loves
• What John says in this passage is that God’s view of the world is one that is close-up and personal rather than one that is distant and removed
• God isn’t “out there’ somewhere seeing the earth as a blue marble that God can obliterate with the thumb of God’s hand
• God sees the world as one of us, experiencing all of the world’s hardships and difficulties and working from the inside to transform it from what it has become to what God wants it to be
• If God so loved the world, God also loves each and every one of us since we are part of the world
• That God watches over us is the point the Psalmist makes five times in the eight verses of Psalm 121
• God watches over us by day and by night because God never sleeps—God is always on duty
• God watches over us to provide comfort and protection and shields us with God’s hand
• God watches over us when we come in and go out, so wherever we are, God is
• God could not do that if God was distant and removed
• And God does this because God loves us
• Love implies relationship
• God loves the world by loving each of us one by one
• And God sees us, not only for what we are, but also for what we can become
• The most powerful force for change is the power of God’s love
• Changing Our Perspective
• In certain ways, it is advantageous for us to see the world from the blue marble perspective
• We need to lose sight of the artificial boundaries that divide us and see the world, and all the people in it, as one creation, united and loved by our common God
• Yet we also need to see the world from the perspective that God takes—to see the world up-close and personal
• It’s difficult for us to see the world in this way and to love the world as God loves it
• It’s hard enough for us to love those who love us, and harder still to love our neighbors and even our enemies
• It’s difficult, but it’s not impossible
• We see the world differently when we learn to look for its mystery and majesty, rather than focusing on the chaos, knowing that is was created and ordered by a God who loves us
• We see life differently when we seek to understand that we are intricately connected and part of a meaningful purpose and design
• We see people differently when we are able to look at them and know that they, too, are children of God as equally loved by God as we are and in need of love from others
• God’s Son can save the world only as people come to know that they are loved by God
• And people can only know that they are loved by God as they are loved by others
• “God so loved the world,” and God demonstrated that love by entering the world personally and getting involved in human life to show us that God cares
• When we, who are God’s people, care enough to get involved in the lives of others, to help bring order to the chaos of their lives, to love them even when they are most unlovable, to minister to their needs, then we demonstrate the full measure of God’s love for the world