Read: John 3:1-17

“God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world …”

Our focus this year is on community.

Did you grow up in a world of tattletales? In a family with multiple siblings, it was easy to note what sundry members of the family were doing wrong at any given moment, especially growing up in such tight quarters as we did. Mom had a rule of thumb that guided us: Is anyone in danger of dying? If not, she wasn’t interested. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested, of course, but that she wanted us to develop a sense of working out our problems constructively. There was no hitting, fighting, or screaming. Just: Fix it! Don’t fight over the last piece of chicken. If you want it, offer it to others first. If there’s a spill, don’t call for room service. Clean it up.

Jesus reminds Nicodemus that it is God who gives birth to God’s children. It is very much an image of God our Mother (in whom we are conceived, carried to term, born, nurtured, and under whose wings we are protected). If we ever want to know what love is, Jesus points out the maternal side of God and says, “There it is. Her love is unmistakable. It is sacrificial every step of the way!”

Mother gathers US. Not me. Not thee. US. As Jesus said, “God didn’t send me to rat you out or tattle, but to let you know dinner’s ready. The table’s set. There’re drumsticks for all. Come!” Like Nicodemus, Jesus bids us to perceive that God is mother to us all. We need only look up and see she is there, healing, restoring, and loving the world, one child, one community at a time.

Let us pray. God, you did not bring us here to be condemned, but nourished, healed, and strengthened by your Spirit. Fill us with joy and help us to feed and love others just as we have been fed and loved by you. Amen.
-Fr. Keith Axberg

Read: John 3:1-17

Four years ago, I went to the emergency room at Skagit Valley Hospital in respiratory distress. I had been treated very badly by an ER physician the year before when I refused oral steroids for a respiratory infection, so I was loath to return there. Unfortunately, I had gone from zero to seriously ill in three days as a result of Daniel fake-sneezing on me, and I was starting to get really scared. When they took my temperature, I had a decent fever and my ECG showed signs of tachycardia. My x-ray showed signs of pneumonia, and I was admitted to the hospital the second my ER physician saw my blood test results. Apparently, my hemoglobin levels were half of normal, and my room was flooded with people who started putting in another IV for CT contrast, taking even more blood to test, and performing an obnoxiously ticklish swab of my nose for influenza that left me wanting to shove a screwdriver up my sinuses. It turns out that Daniel had given me metapneumovirus, a cold virus mostly affecting children, and my body was unable to fight it off due to me being so severely anemic. The next morning, I woke up to a nurse telling me that my hemoglobin had dropped even more during the night, and they would be transfusing me NOW. A series of unpleasant ultrasounds followed as they tried to figure out if I was bleeding internally.

During the three days I spent in an isolation room at the hospital, my family and I were recipients of agape in a serious way from the people at St. Paul’s. Fr. Paul was there almost daily to check on me, and both Penny Worrell and Bob Johnson came to sit with me. I had phone calls from Sandy McDougall and Carol Boss while Cathey Frederick invited people to post kitty pictures on the church’s Facebook page to cheer me up. I came home to get well cards from numerous people in the church, and Barb Cheyney was on-call in case Daniel refused to eat by mouth for my parents and my parents needed to be taught how to tube-feed him.

None of this surprised me. Thirteen years earlier, the same love was shown to my grandparents when my grandfather Lloyd Cooley was in hospice, and it was the catalyst for me joining the church when I moved to Mount Vernon in 2016. I love being part of a church that shows this much love to everyone who walks through the door.

Lord, thank you for opportunities to show love to others in times of crisis and for those who show the same love to us. Amen.
-Jen McCabe

Read: John 3:1-17

Jesus, speaking to Nicodemus in John 3:10 asks, “You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things?” As a lifelong educator, I can relate to Nicodemus’ quandary. So many times, while teaching something I thought I understood thoroughly, I would gain insight from a student’s question or a student’s need to have something explained in another way. So, it seems to me, must be our experience of agape. Our understanding is continually evolving through study and our experience with others.

C.S. Lewis, in his treatise “The Four Loves,” identified unconditional love as agape, a selfless love either between human beings or between humans and God. He states, “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” Writing in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, he tells us, “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.” And finally, in Mere Christianity, Lewis advises, “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”

In community, we have many opportunities to practice and try out agape. We worship together, sing together, share our stories, pray for one another, and reach out with food for the sick. We study together, welcome newcomers, and visit shut-ins. We act out our mission statement, “We believe that God is healing and restoring the world, and that we are recipients of and participants in that healing and restoration.” The key is that we do these things together – in community.

Hymn 577 provides a lovely summary -“God is Love and Where True Love is, God Himself is there.” (Click here for it.)

God, we thank you for loving us and for helping us love you and one another. We thank you for a supportive community in which to grow and practice agape. Amen.
-Cathey Frederick

Read: John 3:1-17

…For God sent the Son into the cosmos not that he might pass judgment on the cosmos, but that the cosmos might be saved through him. (Excerpt translated by David Bentley Hart)

How can we show agape to one another? How can “a divine and soul-changing love” be transmitted through us?

This will happen naturally as we personally accept the truth that it is the whole cosmos that God loves, a realization that creates in us the desire to love everyone and everything for the sake of God. This involves a discipline of prayer, quite simply. One has to trust Divine Love, to pay attention and listen. Richard Meux Benson describes this process:

The Divine love enlarges the heart in proportion to the correspondence of the saint with the Sanctifier. The more we exercise God’s love, the more does he strengthen us with the capacity of doing every thing in love to Himself. We grow to that which God Himself is until we lose ourselves in God. (Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, p. 449)

We can’t transmit that which isn’t in us to transmit. But God is ready at all times to fill us with Love, and then we’ll overflow.

Jesus, I can’t even get my head around the idea of the cosmos, but maybe I could start by getting my head in a space to accept that you really love me completely, and maybe things can go from there. I’ve heard that prayer at church about how you are always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and to give more than we desire or deserve, and so what the heck, do your thing with me. I think I’m ready for that. Amen.
-Fr. Jonathan Weldon 

Read: John 3:1-17

Not really knowing the definition of agape, I checked out the Google version to find that “in Christianity, agape is the highest form of love, charity and the love of God for man and of man for God. It embraces a deep and profound sacrificial love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstances.”

I also found another interesting tidbit: “Agape (visceral love) is the love you have for all living things without a question, that you extend knowingly without expectations for anything in return. It’s a very pure and conscious love, it’s similar to what we refer to as unconditional love.”

So with all that word salad, I thought of a person that fit that description, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, better known as Mother Teresa. She was born August 26, 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia and died September 5, 1997 in Kolkata, India. Besides being made a saint for two miracles that she performed, she dedicated her life to serving the sick and the poor, established the Missionaries of Charity, opened the Kalighat Home for the Dying, opened a charity to care for homeless children, was awarded the Bharat Ratna (the highest civilian honor in India), helped to evacuate thirty-seven children during the siege in Beirut, and received numerous peace prizes including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

She lived and worked in India for twelve years and had a deep compassion for humanity. She helped the poorest of the poor once saying that “they lived like animals but die like angels”.

Dear Lord in heaven, thank you for your servant Mother Teresa for her work with humanity and her mantra “We are all God’s children. We have been created for greater things, to love and be loved.” Amen.
-Mary Ann Taylor

Read: John 3:1-17

There’s an awful lot to unpack in this passage from John. Even if your knowledge of Biblical verse doesn’t extend beyond signs held up behind the goalposts of sporting events, you are likely familiar with the fundamental Christian credo expressed in John 3:16. But the part that speaks most to me is in the middle of this passage, and the Greek word that translates as both “wind” and “spirit.”

When my son, who recently turned 44, was in high school, one of the bands he introduced me to was an LA-based ensemble known as Tool. These days, I tend to describe them to the more staid among my peers as a “guilty pleasure” — although as time goes by I wonder what I have to feel guilty about. All these many years later, they are still around and producing some amazing music. Despite their being lumped into the genre of “Heavy Metal,” their songs have always struck me as nearly symphonic in their composition. Their most recent album, released in 2016, includes a song called “Pneuma”, which translates from Greek as “the vital spirit, soul, or creative force of a person.” I share some of its lyrics as another way of thinking about what Christ had to say to Nicodemus.

“We are spirit bound to this flesh
We go round one foot nailed down
But bound to reach out and beyond this flesh
Become Pneuma
We are will and wonder
Bound to recall, remember
We are born of one breath, one word
We are all one spark, sun becoming
Child, wake up
Child, release the light
Wake up now
Child, wake up
Child, release the light
Wake up now, child”

I first “awoke” on April 15, 1951. I have reawakened at various times in my life to the spiritual world as I “reach out beyond this flesh,” and I am assured that I will awaken again, bound to recall (remember) that I, like all of us, are born of one breath, one word.

Lord, I journey to you, my starting and ending point, with one foot nailed down in this material world. I thank you for surrounding me with the sound of the spirit and, in hearing it through my life, with the assurance that I will be born anew.
-Michael Boss