What I saw when I looked at him was a piece of garbage. To me, he was the left-over scraps of creation, thrown together with a little bit of cheap glue that caused him to be abrasive around the edges. No one liked him. I, obviously, did not either.
The kid would pick his nose and fling the discharge your way. In the second grade he was already talking like an industrial pipe-fitter who drinks on the job and sleeps around on the weekends. He would hit and kick you if you were unfortunate enough to be found alone in the bathroom when he entered. If people’s faces had left a smeary imprint on the mirrors, you knew who was responsible. As I said, he was nothing but a piece of trash.
He was to me what John, the evangelist, describes as “the world.”
When John talks about “the world” he is not referring to the beauty of the mountains and streams, and the infectious laughter of innocent children running around the water’s edge.
No, when he says, “the world,” he means the garbage that does not give a rodent’s posterior about God, decency, or other people. He is talking about all those who not only lack the Spirit of God, but seem to have an active dark void in their souls that seeks to suck in others.
So, you have to understand my surprise when I walked into the coffee shop with my dad for a cheeseburger and I saw the piece of garbage talking with my pastor over a milkshake.
My pastor!
It did not make any sense. What would such a good guy like my pastor be doing hanging out with Satan’s illegitimate step child? My grandma had always told me that you are who you hang out with, but I had a hard time believing that my pastor was a piece of garbage.
Other people started to question him though when they saw him carrying a casserole into the home of the local, suspected, drug house. What was he doing?
You have to understand, the town I grew up in was a little bit of a Mayberry-ish type of town. It was wholesome in that old-time way where children would walk by themselves to the bowling alley and get an ice-cream after the baseball game. No one would question the safety of the children because adults looked out for all children as if they were their own. Well, almost everyone, except for the trash…except for those few people with their worldly ways.
When my pastor preached Jesus’ famous words, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life,” I am quite certain that most of us heard two things. Number one: we heard that Jesus loved us. We were pretty good people after-all. We were not perfect of course, but we were a community that was certainly worthy of love. And, the second thing we heard were those words; “that everyone who believes in him may not perish.”
As regular church attendees, no one would accuse us of being anything but believers. I even tucked my bible into my duffle bag on family trips when I was young. I did not read it of course, I was not that good, but at least I packed the thing…you know…just in case I needed it in a freak Christian emergency or something.
But, the garbage of the town did not even attend church. They did not care. They clearly did not believe. They were simply a vortex of darkness who had already decided that they, proudly, would be the ones to perish. Or, so I thought.
So, what was my beloved pastor doing hanging out with them? This is the loving, fun guy who would roll down the grassy hill behind the church with all the children just because it is a fun thing to do. What was he doing, putting his reputation and maybe even his soul on the line by hanging out with the worst of the worst?
You already know the reason, of course. You are all intelligent Christians who can see beyond what the eyes of my childhood self could see. You know that he was merely doing what Jesus did; eating with sinners and showing love to the unloved.
I am truly happy if you can clearly see what the pastor was doing, because the human tendency to divide people into categories of acceptable and unacceptable is incredibly strong. The smallest infraction on the part of someone is enough for most people to want them far, far away. Like the old westerns, we put tighten our white hats beneath our chins and force black hats on those we dislike or do not understand.
I read an article this week about a young woman who grew up in a fundamentalist church that, to this day, spews hate towards all the “sinners” in the outside world.
For years as a little girl she carried signs with words of hatred, but she thought that she was showing love. She truly believed that all those in her community were those who were saved, and that if the cardboard signs scribbled with hate for "the world" shocked any of the garbage outside of her community into waking up and turning their lives around, then all the better.
For years she saw the world outside of her church as hostile garbage, and the outside world usually obliged that image by tossing back their own hate-filled words and carrying signs that returned hate for hate.
Things started to change, however, when a handful of the garbage started talking to her seriously and debating her views politely. One Jewish man, with whom she had had good conversations, even came out to one of her church’s protests, handed her a nice dessert to eat after a long day of protesting, and asked how her day was, all while she held a sign spewing hatred for the Jews.
Soon, she started to question the walls she and her church had built against “the world.”
She also started to read the scriptures in a new way and realized that John 3:16 did not say, “for God so loved the church,” nor did it say, “for God so loved the believers.” She realized that it said, “for God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son…”
She read about Jesus eating with the sinners and caring for the forgotten.
All of this made her realize that she was the one who needed to repent and turn from her ways. And, what it took for her to get to this point of holy love was for someone to sit down, take her seriously, not treat her like garbage, and love her seriously.
Jesus knew that we would likely take his words the wrong way. He intimately understood that we have the tendency to exclude rather than include.
He knew that we would get hung up on the words, “so that everyone who believes in him may not perish.” He knew that we would use those words like a chainsaw to cut away those who did not appear to be believers. He knew that we might throw those people away like garbage and not trust that God just may send the Spirit their direction, blowing where it wills, to land in even the darkest of nooks and crannies.
Jesus knew all of this, so he added one sentence just for us believers. The line in John 3:17. It reads: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Theologian David Lose, in his March 6th, 2017 In The Meantime article encourages us to re-read these two verses as John the Evangelist intends us to hear them.
“For God so loved the God-hating world, that he gave his only Son…” and “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn even this world that despises God but instead so that the world that rejects God might still be saved through him.”
That is how much God loves. That is the love that saved you. And, that is the love that reaches out to the garbage of the world; the garbage that is otherwise known as “children of the creator.”
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