March 1, 2026
Lent 2 Year A
John 3:1-17
Epiphany, Winnipeg
For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only son, …. I’d say that’s probably the Bible’s greatest hit. Most of us know it, I know that a lot of us have it memorized and I know that it’s the first verse from the Bible that I memorized. I don’t know if this still happens, but it used to be the case that at every football game, on every baseball game right behind home plate, or at car races or the Olympics or any number of sports on TV there would be someone with a sign that just said, “John 3:16.” The sign didn’t even say what any of the words were, because there’s a good chance that most of the people seeing “John 3:16” would just know what it says. It seems to me that often the person holding the sign would be wearing a rainbow clown wig; I could never figure out what that was all about. Here’s something you need to know about that verse, and if you didn’t know you needed to know it before, well now you know that you need to know. It’s a Greek lesson, and the New Testament was written in Greek. The Greek word for “world” here in the reading today is Cosmos. Cosmos is really big. Cosmos could mean all the peoples of the world, so we talk about a city being cosmo-politan, with people and cultures from all over the world, all over the cosmos. Cosmos can also mean everything, the universe, everything that exists. Cosmic rays radiate through it and there are stars and galaxies and planets that fill the cosmos and that are the cosmos. God so loved the cosmos that God gave God’s only son….not to judge the cosmos, but in order that the cosmos might be saved by the son.
From now on I’ll say “world,” but it’s so much bigger than me, or you, or what anyone might expect. It’s cosmic. It’s everything. All the way from the smallest organism and dust particle, to two kids playing in the playground right out here, to the farthest star in the most distant galaxy: God so loves the world. God’s love is bigger than ours.
Jesus talks about God loving the world while he’s having a quiet and private conversation with a man named Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a respected religious leader, one of the group known as the Pharisees. Now Pharisees aren’t bad people, or just enemies of Jesus, although what’s how they’ve come to be remembered. Pharisees are teachers and scholars who want to know how to live most faithfully as God’s people, and they want to help the people understand and live that way. Nicodemus is a leader in this movement, and he comes to Jesus under the cover of night. He might come at night because he doesn’t want to be seen with Jesus, or maybe he comes at night because he was so busy all day and this was the first chance he had to get together with Jesus. Maybe “coming by night” is just symbolic, as though Nicodemus is kind of in the dark, and he can’t really see what’s going on with Jesus. Whatever his reasons for coming at night, Nicodemus ends up in this conversation about lofty things, like being born from above - some call it being born again - and about a serpent lifted up in the wilderness, and about God’s love and about seeing the Kingdom of God and entering the Kingdom of God.
And while he has this face to face conversation with Jesus he never really seems to get it. He just seems more confused, more in the dark, and the only thing he ever really says is “How can these things be?”
Nicodemus almost disappears from the story after this, but he does show up two more times. Later on in the story the rest of the Pharisees seem to have decided that Jesus doesn’t fit with living faithfully as God’s people, so they think Jesus should be arrested, and they’re all riled up because nobody’s arrested him yet. But Nicodemus says, “Doesn’t he deserve a fair hearing? Shouldn’t we hear him before we judge him?” Even if Nicodemus still doesn’t get it, he does think that Jesus deserves to be heard.
And then Nicodemus almost disappears from the story again, but he does show up one more time, right after Jesus has been crucified. This time it all happens in the plain light of day. Nicodemus goes with someone else named Joseph, and they ask Pilate – the one who condemned Jesus to death – if they can have the body. Pilate says yes, so Nicodemus and Joseph come to Jesus in the light of day to take his body down from the cross. Then they give him a decent burial, according to Jewish custom, just like anyone would deserve.
That conversation with Jesus never leaves Nicodemus. We never really hear whether Nicodemus believes. As he and Joseph lay Jesus to rest he might still be asking himself, “How can these things be?”
Have those ever been your words? Or mine? Something we hear in church is hard to believe or make sense of, and we ask, “How can these things be?” We’re mystified by a world that seems to have gone so wrong, from violence to violence and from war to war…”How can these things be?” Even when we hear someone talk about having hope for the world we might ask, “How can these things be?”
God so loved the world. God so loves the world; the world that is full of people like Nicodemus and like anyone who sometimes can’t seem to say anything but “How can these things be? I just don’t get it.” And when nobody seems to get it, God so loves the world. God so loves anyone who says, “How can these things be?”
Right at the start of this conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus says that no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above, or born anew, or born again. Then he says that no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. A lot has been said and a lot could be said about what all this “being born from above, or born again or born anew or born of Water and the Spirit” could mean. Nicodemus just asks, like any of us might, “How could this be?”
For now, let’s just ponder this. A newborn child comes into the world with brand new eyes, and they begin to see things they have never seen before. It takes time for those eyes to develop and to distinguish things and recognize things; I don’t know the timelines but I do know that it’s all new. I’ll never forget that morning when we walked into our oldest son’s room – he was still an infant – and he had discovered his hand. Always seeing something new.
Even someone born without the ability to see is born into hearing new things; tasting and touching and smelling new things. Everything is new when you’re a newborn, and you enter a world you’ve never known before.
To be born from above, or anew, or again, or from water and the Spirit, might not be as dramatic as the new life of a newborn. But we see differently. We forget and we need to be reminded along the way. But we see something new, and maybe it’s as simple and as deep as this: God’s spirit has moved in us in our baptism. God’s Spirit can move even if you have not been in that water yet. God’s Spirit gives a new set of eyes to see the kingdom of God, which might just mean that we learn to see the world as God’s beloved. For God so loved the world. We see the beauty all around, we see the trouble all around, we see the division all around and we see the love all around and we know that this whole world is God’s beloved. And we enter that world, reborn; reborn every day, like Luther said; surrounded by the beloved of God. The people, the world, the creation, the cosmos, the beloved of God. And we – you and I, we – are beloved of God too.
We began this season of Lent with a sign of ashes on our foreheads and a simple word: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Throughout this season we’re called to be honest about that, and that’s OK, because when we remember that we are dust we remember that God is all in the business of breathing new life into beloved dust.
We began this season with a long confession on Ash Wednesday and we keep on with shorter confessions where we confess the same things. We remember our sin together and are honest about it, which is good because it’s so tiring trying to pretend that our hands are clean and everything’s OK. And when we remember our sin and allow ourselves to be honest about it, it’s OK because we hear again that God is always ready to forgive the beloved. Or like Jesus says, to save the world, not to judge it.
This season of Lent will take us to that day when the mystery of God’s love is revealed. The mystery, that we can’t map out or turn into a chart or a diagram.
The mystery of a cross, where God’s beloved world puts Jesus to death. The mystery of an empty tomb, where light bursts into the cosmos – cosmic rays! – and God’s beloved is raised from the dust, and God’s beloved world is made alive, and made new.