For God So Loved
- Community UCC
- Sep 17
- 7 min read
John 3:13-17 and Blessed Are You Who Bear the Light by Jan Richardson
September 14, 2025
By Nicole M. Lamarche
Welcome again! On this beautiful morning. Thank you for showing up for
yourself and others to build the world we all want. I invite you to take some
deeper breathes with me.
As you are moved join me in a spirit of prayer. God of many names, force
of Love between us and among us, grounding of our being, we are grateful
for this day and this place, for this community of faith. Help us all to hear
whatever we need to. Open us, soften us, change us. May the words of my
mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our
Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Jesus saved me and continues to save me daily. Yes, you heard me right. I
have been saved by Jesus, saved by the Divine that showed up in him and
held by a ground of being that is our God of love. I have been saved from a
life of grudges and anger with teachings about forgiveness and peace,
saved from feeling like I am not sure where I belong, with a lifetime of
rooting myself in the Body of Christ, saved by each of you all daily and
weekly and yearly, being made better by sharing life with you. I have been
saved from the demon of white supremacy with the words of a brown
skinned revolutionary who challenged the Empire, overturned tables, asked
us to align our hearts with the good. I am saved from being driven by all
that the ego commands, it’s need to be angry and right, to get more. Jesus
saves me again and again from despair because of our coming together for
prayer, I am saved from cynicism and hopelessness because of our doing
good, our calling and writing, our building and collecting, our showing up for
each other, our giving out, our willingness to grow, change, learn and love
our way forward together. I am saved by Jesus. And in a time like this I
want to do more to draw on our tradition, claiming the power of our
language, our story, our tradition.
Someone like me is now being labeled as vicious and horrible from the
highest human places, many of us in this room are in that camp. From the
highest office in the land, we are told that the trouble is us. And it is also
being said that Jesus is on the side of some and not others. That some are
good and not others.
We must challenge the idea that some of us are good and some of us are
not, that some of us are the right Christians and some of us are not. That
some are worthy of mourning and not others. And there is so much noise
right now that I find this time together on Sunday mornings even more
precious than before. No ads will appear before my face, you won’t be
asked if you would like the AI version of what I am offering, you can hear
right from my heart. We can process life together. So after a really hard
week, a day of lockdown for all schools and many of us in this
neighborhood, another school shooting and in the Denver Metro area,
another assassination, words from leaders that escalate, a growing distrust
in our institutions, increasing polarization, driven by money soaked
algorithms, so in my words today I want to convey with the deepest longing
for this tense moment in which we find ourselves, that Jesus is on all of our
side. There is no us and them. For God so loved the world that God wanted
to come among us in human form.
Some Christians like to forget how that verse in the Gospel of John begins.
It is love. And instead it is used as a weapon, used as a way to advance
the theological paradigm that I want to address today: that God needed to
let Jesus or have Jesus die as part of a plan to save humans from our
sinful nature. The official name for this theological stance is: Penal
substitutionary atonement. As many of you know, for the month of
September we are doing a series on Healing from Toxic Christianity
and this is on the list.
It aims to explain the meaning and purpose of Jesus’ death and
what it means. Penal substitution, also called penal substitutionary
atonement theory is a big thread within Protestant Christian theology,
arguing that Jesus was punished (penalized) in the place of sinners
(substitution), to satisfy the demands of justice and appeasing God to
justly forgive sins making us at one with God, which is where we get that
word atonement at-one-ment. Those who know Church history know that
German Reformation leader Martin Luther wrote about this and John Calvin
built upon it. This theological paradigm teaches that the substitutionary
nature of Jesus' death is understood in the sense of a substitutionary
fulfilment of legal demands for the offenses of sins. It’s basically a swap.
And part of how I understand the reason for this idea has been
around for eons. We humans really love a scapegoat. We love the
idea that one person or group can take the blame for the whole
group/tribe make it better. It is ancient. In the Bible, we first see the
idea in the book of Leviticus where a goat is designated to be cast into the
desert to carry away the sins of the community, taking with it every sin and
impurities, while the other is sacrificed. Leviticus 16:1-34
Where we read that Aaron is to take the two goats and present them before
the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting. 8 He is to cast lots for the two
goats—one lot for the Lord and the other for the scapegoat. [b] 9 Aaron shall
bring the goat whose lot falls to the Lord and sacrifice it for a sin
offering. 10 But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented
alive before the Lord to be used for making atonement by sending it into
the wilderness as a scapegoat. The theology of penal substitution
relies on three basic ideas. According to theologian Stephen
Morrison, “First and foremost, the notion of retributive justice, that
God requires the death of a perfect sacrifice to forgive our sins. In
short, that on the cross Jesus Christ died to pay back God’s
justice. Second, that the wrath of God must be appeased, that God
is full of wrath towards us and must have that wrath satisfied, or
“propitiated” in Christ’s death. And finally, the third notion is that
God turned His back on Jesus Christ in His death, that Jesus was
forsaken and abandoned because God cannot look upon our sin.” 1
That’s part of why it feels urgent to address it. It wasn’t originally part of our
tradition. And it is grounded in the idea that God is violent or retributive or
that God demands some kind of appeasement. Of course, you can read
this verse in John mapping this theology on it, but it isn’t there on its own.
But I do believe Jesus saves us, offers us salvation, a salve for the wounds
of this world. I believe we can be saved by these teachings.
I read it like this, whoever believes in Jesus’ teachings will have a certain
kind of life. For God so loved the world that Love manifested in this human
of Jesus so that everyone who takes his teachings seriously will not perish
on earth, being dragged down by all that humans create and may instead
find life and find it abundantly. God did not send Jesus into the world to
condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved.
At least for me, I want to pull the theological support for scapegoating out
from under all of this, in our tradition and in our politics. Especially since
authoritarians need scapegoats. Democracies that exist in diverse societies
depend on protecting the rights of minorities of all kinds, and this includes
race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity. According to
research at Columbia University, robust social ties reduce the effectiveness
of repression, which is why modern-day autocrats use demographic identity
as a way to sow and increase division, gaining power from claiming that
there is a broad mandate for what is happening. This is what happened in
Hungary and Poland “while ascending to power with only plurality support,
(they) have demonized immigrants and used claims of representing “the
real Poles” or “the real Hungarians” as ways of establishing a more
legitimate popular mandate.” 2
No more scapegoats of any kind. In religion or in politics. For me, Jesus
died on the cross not because it was needed by God so that we could all
feel good about living imperfect lives, but because if you take seriously
living like him, it challenges the powers that be, it discomforts all of us,
asking us to unsettle our ideas of who belongs. He died because he dared
to keep speaking, keep healing, keep bearing light, when they tried to put it
out, as we heard from the poet Jan Richardson, keep bearing light, keep
burning bright and being a glow on an altar where somehow even in the
deepest night it can be seen, it cannot be extinguished, this fire in each of
us, shining bright collectively in all of us. This light is needed right now,
even in unbearable times. For God so loved the world… It’s about love.
There is no us and them. Jesus is for all of us. What a gift. May it be so.
Amen.
Communal Reflection
How do you resonate (or not) with the language of being saved by Jesus?
What do you think about the theology of substitutionary atonement?
Beloved of God, for God so love the world. Amen.
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