John 3:1-17

Year B - Pentecost +1 (Trinity or Energy to Witness ¹ (Live Together)

May 31, 2015

John 3:1-17

We gather in the dark to tell scary stories to one another. We even go so far as to shine a flashlight from below our chin to distort our features. This goes on until who can tell what another really looks like. It goes even further until we don’t know what we look like.

How can anyone know whether they are coming or going from a previous stage of life? How do we make sense of the swirling experiences of life? If we can’t tell for sure about “now”, how will we ever know about “when”? Is there anything upon which we can find agreement as a starting point?

Wombs, winds, and expectations are all common experiences in life. Even so the line between what they denote and connote is dashed and very gray. We try living linear lives in a shifting universe and find only dismay. We are so easily blown off course and can only predict the worst scenarios without ever seeing predictable blessings.

We are so used to stopping with verse 16 and eternal life or verse 17 and salvation that we don’t go to the send of this section (verse 21) where we stop telling stories to one another and begin testing actions to see how they actually turn out. Here, in a land beyond speculation of where there be dragons, we find basic creativity and creation—what we do in partnership with one another and G*D. Stopping anywhere short of doing what we do “in G*D”, with one another and G*D, is to always set up a limiting and privileged judgment that creates winners and losers rather than a wholly-owned partnership.

Read to the end even though the temptation is to stop with the popular entertainment of simply saying “John 3:16” as though it answered something and wasn’t a rhetorical strategy to get your way.