The Gift - Sermon for the 2nd Sunday in Lent

2^nd Sunday in Lent
March 5th, Year of Our + Lord 2023
Our Redeemer and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches
Custer and Hill City, South Dakota
The Gift                          John 3:1 - 17

   Nicodemus is struggling with the gift that Jesus is giving.  Not surprising.  I think most of us struggle with gifts.  I know of a small town man who once sheepishly suggested to his wife a couple of days before Valentines that they consider an already planned trip to the city as a mutual Valentine's Day gift.  His struggle wasn't just because he's lazy and hates shopping.  It also stems from the burden of human gift giving.  If he and his beloved exchange gifts, there is always the risk that he will underspend.  Or overspend.  Or he could lose his mind and buy her something with a cord.  Anyway you look at it, not very romantic. 

   Do you give gifts well?  By that I mean, do you give with no strings attached?  If so, you are a rare specimen.  We tend to give with strings firmly attached, sewn into the fiber of the gift.  Why else would we say:  "My kids had better appreciate all that I do for them"?   Or why are you not happy when the handmade gift you give ends up in the Church yard sale next fall?  We expect the recipients of our gifts to respond in a certain way: they should love your gift, feel indebted to you, and keep it as a prized possession.  At the very least you want them to thank you for it, sincerely.  This is very human.  But it also means that our gifts often aren't really gifts; they are exchanges, transactions.  We give to get.  In return for our generosity, we all too often want to receive something:  satisfaction, or friendship, indebtedness, or thankfulness.  Not that thankfulness isn’t good.  But if it is forced or demanded, thankfulness dies.     

   We sometimes give to the Lord the same way, don't we?  Unfortunately, we don’t have the Lord’s bank account number to make a transfer directly to Him.  So we must give to the Lord by giving to people and organizations down here.  Churches, or charities, or even individuals we think are doing Godly work.  But do we give without strings, as to the Lord?  Or do we give, and then watch, to insure that our money is spent wisely?

    If we see it being wasted, or just used in a way we don't understand or like, we might get angry, and think about withholding our money in the future.  But if we really intend to give to the Lord, and yet still think of it as our money, if we continually condition our future giving on the use of our prior gifts, then the reality is that we aren't really giving to God.  No, we are bargaining.  "I'll give this much God, then You show me something.  Then I'll give a little more." 

    Satan has a field day when we think about giving like this.  You see, and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but no church, no charity, no person doing God’s work will use your gift perfectly.  Sometimes they will not use it well at all.  Because every person involved is a sinner, prone to error.  When you feel your gift has been misused, you could volunteer to get involved and try to make things better.  You could at least pray the Holy Spirit would help the situation. 

   Or, you can get angry and feel offended.  Then Satan pounces, attacking your faith and love, and your relationship to the recipient, over what was supposedly a gift.  I’m not suggesting that there should be no accountability for the use of gifts in the Church or charities.  Certainly there should be.  What I’m saying is that when we put strings on gifts, to anyone, it’s bad for us, the giver.  Because we are bargaining, not giving.  And we are setting ourselves up to get angry, or hurt, or to have a relationship damaged, or destroyed.         

   This is not the way God gives. He gives without strings or demands. He gives rain and sunshine and every good gift - to the good and the bad, the religious and the pagan. When God gave His only-begotten Son to the world, he did it without any strings, without any guarantee we would receive the gift well. He simply made His Son the sacrificial Lamb who takes away the sin of the whole world.

   In our sinful rebellion, we human beings told the Lord that we wished He were dead. 
So, on a very good Friday, God dropped dead.  God’s Son willingly died for our sin, and so won the salvation of the world.  Jesus didn’t ask the world if it wanted to be saved, or if it was really sorry, or if it promised to try real hard to do better. The Son simply said, “It is finished.” And the Father gave an “Amen” loud enough to raise Him from the dead. God gave a death and resurrection to the world with no strings or expectations attached.

   Consider this truth again:  While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. While we were enemies of God, the Father reconciled us to Himself in Jesus.  God loved the world in this way: He gave His only-begotten Son, into death on a Cross, indeed, death under God’s wrath, against our sin.  Whether you believe it or deny it, whether you understand that God's gift is the most important thing you could possibly receive, or whether you scoff at the claims of Christianity, the gift remains the same:  Jesus, crucified and resurrected, for you, and for the whole world. 

    Many of us, like Nicodemus, also have trouble receiving gifts.  When someone gives
you an unexpected gift, how often do you feel uncomfortable, or guilty?  Do you ever feel the gift obligates you to do something, maybe even you get a little angry, sometimes?  We say, “You shouldn’t have.” “Oh, I feel bad, I didn’t get you anything.” “You’re so sweet, now I’ll have to get you something.” It's hard for us to simply say “thank you” and enjoy being on the receiving end of the giving. It makes us uncomfortable. It makes us feel like a “charity case.” 

    This helps explain why the poor are held up as models of faith in the Bible. Living a hard life, knowing great need, this can teach the poor to receive gifts with joy.  And, in my limited experience with them, poor people are often quite generous with the scarce resources they do have.  Generous poor people.  There’s something to learn in this. 

    But most of us are relatively wealthy, and receiving gifts takes our pride down a notch or two. Maybe receiving gifts destroys the notion that we are “self-made,” men and women who can make it on our own.  We prefer to imagine we don’t need anyone’s help, thank you very much.  We’d much rather bargain, cut deals, and negotiate, rather than simply give and receive gifts.  

   When a culturally endorsed gift receiving event approaches, we often specify the presents we want to receive by make, model, and catalog number. Christmas, along with birthdays, weddings, and baby showers, often become organized exercises in merchandising. It’s not just letters to Santa and china patterns and silverware registrations.  You can make and share a registered list at whatever store you prefer, from Amazon.com to Home Depot.  It’s no longer gift-giving and gift-receiving; it’s surrogate shopping.

   Worse yet, we transact with God, too. Or at least we try to. Transaction is the stuff that all human religion is made from. When something goes wrong, maybe we start to pray more fervently, read the Bible more faithfully, attend church more often. Why? Are we trying to cut a deal?   “I’ll be good to You, God,  and then you’ll be good to me, right?”  We have a baby and realize that God has something to do with this miraculous gift.  So maybe we want the child baptized, to make things even.  No matter that baptism is really a dying and rising, an exchange of our sinful demise for Jesus’ Holy victory.  Life for death, a transfer from the kingdom of Satan to the Kingdom of God.  Baptism is an amazing gift from the Lord.  But we all too often treat it like a vaccination against measles, or an investment in a college fund:  just a smart, nice thing to do. 

   Nicodemus was a religious bargainer, a teacher of Israel, a respected Pharisee.  Organized, logical and fair-minded, the religious leaders of Jerusalem had worked out a system.  Like the religious leaders of Rome, or Salt Lake, or Mecca, they had worked out an intricate system of work-reward programs.  You, the religious bargain hunter, select the from the list of pious acts, and supposedly God, the religious merchandiser, will respond.  Maybe He'll even cut you a special deal.  Neat and tidy, a dignified relationship with God. 

    Jesus makes it messy.  Be born again?  Have you ever seen a birth, Jesus?  Nicodemus is not interested in soiling himself; his whole concept of religion was all about purity, about making himself clean.  But Jesus says no.  It is all your bargaining that has left you soiled, filthy with sin, worse than you can know.  Your works are all dirty, unacceptable to God.  You must be born again, from above, by the Spirit. 

   Along with Nicodemus we protest: How can a man be born again?  Can we crawl back into our mother's womb?  How can we accomplish such a feat?

   You can't.  But God can.  If saving you required transforming you physically back into an infant to start over, God would do it.  But the new birth Jesus speaks of is different.  It’s actually more radical.  It could only be done by God.  And so the Father did it.  He sent His only begotten Son, to give your new birth.  It's a gift.  Free.  For you. 

   

Such a gift does make us out to be beggars.  It shows our debt to God to be even more than we thought.  How can it be free?  Certainly we must do something to earn salvation.  What pride can we take in our religion if God just gives salvation away?   

   Jesus has Paul respond to that one.  In Romans Paul speaks to pride in our works, saying: … Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due, but to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. (Romans 4:4-5) 

   If you insist on working your way into God's favor, God will consider your works, and give you what you deserve.  Before you decide to go that route, consider your works before God.  What do you really deserve from the Holy, Holy, Holy Lord?  You don't want those wages, do you? 

    But to the one who confesses: “I can’t work my way into God's favor, because I can’t stop sinning,” to this helpless soul God gives Jesus, and His righteousness. Christ’s goodness and holiness, credited to the sinner, through faith.  And, oh-by-the-way, that faith in Jesus is also a gift from God, His work in our heart.  (Eph 2:8-10) Scripture doesn't leave room for pride in ourselves.  As in Galatians, when Paul speaks about Christian pride and boasting:  But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.(Gal 6:14)

    Jesus ties it all together in the crucifixion.  Re-birth, righteousness before God, death and life, forgiveness, God's gift, all found in Jesus' death.  Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? (Romans 6:3)   This is why we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness,  but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.(1 Corinthians 1:25) 

    Have you ever wondered why crosses became the principal symbol of Christianity?  It’s not great marketing to a world that hates suffering.  Many churches today have removed crosses from their sight.  But we lift high the the Cross because it is the center of everything.  Even though Christ is risen and reigns in heaven, the Church’s primary symbol is the instrument of His death.  Jesus even bears the scars of the Cross in His glorified body, like trophies of His victory, won for us. 

    So, we use crosses, and crucifixes, crosses that show Jesus hanging on the tree.  For this is God's gift to the world: the Son of Man lifted up.  Jesus on the Cross is how God loved the world.  That's where Baptism gets its power.  That's where your death was exchanged for Jesus' life. That's where heaven was purchased for you.  God has given Himself to you, for free.  Believe in God's gift.  Rejoice in God's gift.  Live free in God's gift.  Amen.