On Tuesday morning he chose the topic, text, readings, and hymns. On Wednesday morning he did his ruminating and researching. On Thursday morning he composed the first half of the sermon, and on Friday morning he completed the task.
However, when this sermon was prepared, Read wasn’t typing in his study on Friday morning. As we learn from the sermon itself, he was standing in a gale-like storm in Battery Park. Pope John Paul had recently been installed in office and was visiting New York. Along with thousands of others, David Read was braving the elements in the hope of getting a glimpse of the new leader.
The sermon that resulted should warm the hearts of Catholics and Protestants alike as it throws bright and engaging light on a beloved text that speaks to almost every churchgoer regardless of their ecclesiastical background. Indeed, I am confident that the Pope himself would have found this sermon on John 3:16 deeply moving.
God’s Love—A New Pope And An Old Text
A Sermon preached by David H. C. Read at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church on Worldwide Communion Sunday, October 7, 1979
Text: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16
Readings: 1 Corinthians 13; John 3:14–21
What happened to our city last week? We had a visitor—a distinguished visitor. But we have had many before. We have saluted heads of state, war heroes, astronauts, athletes; and, for a few hours, the city has seethed with excitement. This time it seemed to me that there was a unique quality about the reception given to our visitor. It was not only that he came with the nimbus of a holy office, one of the most ancient and celebrated throughout the world. (It is a little surprising in 1979 to see ticket-tape raining on the head of one who bears the title of His Holiness.) But it was not the office that electrified this city. It was the man. This was a new Pope, and we didn’t really know him till he was right here with us. We are told in the Gospels that when Jesus came into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday “all the city was moved, saying, Who is this?” Like everyone else, I wanted to know. I am willing to pay my respects to any leader of a venerable, worldwide religious community, but it was not mere ecclesiastical politesse that made me stand for two hours and be literally drenched to the skin, in order to be near him last Friday morning in the gales of Battery Park.
Of course our Roman Catholic brethren turned out in thousands to cheer their Pontiff. Of course, there was curiosity that made many want to get a glimpse of the new Pope—“Who is this? What is he really like?” But what emanated from beneath that sea of umbrellas was something far more than the enthusiasm of one Christian community, or the desire to catch sight of one who has been much in the world’s news in the few months of his tenure. I can describe it only as a yearning for something different from the passing excitements of our secular city, a longing for someone who expresses another dimension of our human condition, for a living symbol—not of political power or material success, or the affluent society—but of the missing element in our restless, consuming, and undirected world—faith and hope and love.
Let me put it simply. This man exuded Christian love. And by that I don’t just mean that he seemed to be a genial, kindly man with an encouraging word for everybody. I’m speaking of that formidable and revolutionary Agape that is at the heart of the Christian Gospel. It proclaims, against all evidence to the contrary, that God loves us—and not only us but every single human being on this planet. It soars towards God with an answering love for him, and it finds expression in a warm compassionate caring and concern for every man, woman, or child who crosses our path. The Pope was among us as a man of high intelligence and profound experience of the tragedies of our age who openly declares in every word and gesture: “God loves us.” And without qualification he summons our generation to express again our love to God in worship, prayer, and a holy obedience. It is this divine love for which so many hearts are aching. But what brought it down from the clouds where so many Popes and prelates, and Protestant preachers have hidden it, was the sight and the voice of a real human being with a twinkle in his eyes, a man who obviously preferred the gift of a t-shirt from a teenager to listening to official orations. So with all the Scottish covenanting and Ulster Protestant blood in my veins, I salute him as a man for this season, a very human symbol of the divine love from which our generation longs, and as a loyal servant of Jesus Christ our common Lord.
With gratitude for this irruption of the holy and the human into the drab procession of the sordid, the violent, the self-centred, and the callous that seems to fill the headlines and the TV screens, let me turn to the most familiar and best-loved text in the entire New Testament. Perhaps it’s not as familiar now as it used to be. Perhaps, even to those for whom it is familiar, it no longer speaks with life-changing power. Can we hear it again, as if we had never heard it before? For here is the answer to the question we are sometimes asked: What is this Gospel that churches talk about? What is the Good News that all who call themselves Christians are supposed to believe and to live by? Is it just that God is love, and we are supposed to love him and our neighbor in return? That is true—but it is not the Gospel. We don’t need the New Testament to tell us this: it’s all there in the Old. Is it, as some would put it, that we ought to be more like Jesus? That’s true, too, but I don’t call that Good News. In fact for me to be told that God expects me to be like Jesus and will judge me accordingly could at times be very bad news. No; the Gospel isn’t a message about what God is like, or what you and I ought to be like. It’s about what God has done, and what he keeps on doing. It’s not a formula to give us a guilty conscience. It’s a way to get that conscience clean. It’s not another demand upon us but a word of hope and liberation. It’s the news of God’s rescuing love. Listen: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Something happened. In this Gospel God’s love is not idea but action. When we say “God is love” that can be just an idea. And we often accept it as such—just as we accept the idea that the sun is always shining out there even though we may be fogged in or passing through the hours of darkness. But the moment someone constructs a house that is warmed by solar heat, the rays of sunshine are trapped and concentrated on one specific place and become the energy we need. So the Gospel gives us far more than a vaguely comforting thought that the whole of creation is being sustained by the love of God. It tells us that this love is a divine energy that came to a burning focus in Jesus Christ. “God so loved that he gave his Son.” The Lord of the universe cared enough about his human family to give us his human Self. At one particular time and place Christ came. The love of God was translated into flesh and blood and visited our planet as one of us. And he came without security guard, one of the poor and powerless with no weapon but that love. And we know what happened. For a few short years this concentrated energy of love blazed warm and then it seemed as if the switch was pulled, and Jesus died. But Easter morning broke the news that he was alive again and that love was released into the whole world by the little company that believed in him. And this morning there is hardly a tiny corner of the world where his Church is not celebrating the feast that commemorates his victory.
We may often wonder why God tolerates the antics of the human race with all its cruelties and horrors. This summer a French friend of mine who has nothing to do with any church but loves to grow crops, tend animals or float in his little yacht under the Mediterranean stars, said to me with sudden vehemence: “I consider the human race the dirtiest and most villainous species that ever soiled God’s world.” The trouble with such judgments is that we are always tempted to exclude ourselves. Let God obliterate Ninevah, we say with Jonah, but keep my little Jerusalem safe. But God, you remember, did not destroy Ninevah—and God has not yet wiped out his human family. For God is love, and obliteration is not the way of love. And God so loved that he let Jesus come and die—why? Just to show us up in our selfishness, our hatreds, and our indifference? No. He tells us why he sent his Son—“so that everyone that believeth should not perish but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world,
