“Saved Through Him” Colchester Federated Church, March 10, 2024, Fourth Sunday in Lent (John 3:14-21)

A few years ago, I heard about the natural phenomenon of “mother trees” in forests.  There’s an ecologist from Canada named Suzanne Simard who shared some of her research on trees as social creatures with NPR.  The scientific theory Simard explained is that trees are social creatures who communicate with one another in cooperative ways.  Trees are linked to one another in forests through an underground network of fungi.  Simard relates that this is similar to the neural networks in our brains.  In one of her studies, she observed a Douglas fir that had been injured by insects.  Apparently, the fir tree sent chemical warnings to a ponderosa pine that was growing nearby, to warn that neighboring tree of a likely attack.  The ponderosa pine then started producing defense enzymes to protect itself against those insects, heeding the warning of the neighboring tree. 

How amazing is this? 

The trees began working together to protect each other (and the rest of the forest) against danger.  This sounds like something out of The Lord of the Rings with Treebeard and the Ents protecting Fangorn Forest.  But this is not a tale from Middle Earth, trees protecting each other and the forests where they live happens in our world.

In some forests the trees are even linked to each other via an older tree that is often called a “hub” tree or “mother” tree.  The mother tree helps the trees share nutrients at critical times to keep one another alive and healthy.  Simard shares, “In connecting with all the trees of different ages, [the mother trees] can actually facilitate the growth of these understory seedlings . . . the seedlings will link into the network of the old trees and benefit from that huge uptake resource capacity.  And the old trees would also pass a little bit of carbon and nutrients and water to the little seedlings, at crucial times in their lives, that actually help them survive.”[1]  We humans have a bad habit of thinking that the world revolves around us and that our wisdom and innovation and technology is far superior to any other living creature.  Though maybe it can humble us (in a good way) to realize that trees are social creatures too, even communicating with one another and helping one another to survive in our sometimes-difficult world.

Turning to the natural world can be inspiring as trees looking out for one another in a forest does have something to say to you and to me.  We can think about the concept of an ecosystem in general.  After all, an ecosystem is a community of living organisms that live in and interact with one another in an environment.  The organisms are linked through the flowing of nutrients and energy.  This gets to the concept of community (with humans too) as we are social creatures who need one another in order to survive.  Perhaps we are not meant to go it alone.  We can turn to our environment and our sacred stories to realize these important lessons inside of us and in the world around us again and again.

Now when we hear our text today from the Gospel according to John, we often hear this story lifted up in an individualistic way.  John 3:16 is often cited as a text to talk about our individual salvation—accepting Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior and Jesus saving me for eternal life.  Though this understanding may miss the point of the corporate nature of our Christian faith and all the plural parts of this passage if we just sit with the text and listen to this interaction between Jesus and Nicodemus (the Pharisee and Jewish leader who came to speak with Jesus at night).  Remember the trees in the forest looking out for one another.  Remember the mother tree sharing nutrients with those little seedlings.  Remember that in any ecosystem there is a flowing of energy and nutrients, and ecosystems are communities of living organisms.

Listen again to Jesus’ words: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so must the Human One be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life.  God so loved the world that he [God] gave his [God’s] only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.  God didn’t send his [God’s] Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”[2]  Thinking about this passage in a more communal way can open up possibilities that we may not have considered before.

Our Tuesday morning Bible Study Class here at Colchester Federated Church is just about to finish reading and discussing Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe.  Richard Rohr challenges the idea that the whole point of Christianity is about our individual salvation.  Rohr writes, “In Jesus Christ, God’s own broad, deep, and all-inclusive world-view is made available to us . . . The point of the Christian life is not to distinguish oneself from the ungodly, but to stand in radical solidarity with everyone and everything else.  This is the full, final, and intended effect of the Incarnation—symbolized by its finality in the cross, which is God’s great act of solidarity instead of judgment.”[3]  This is why Richard Rohr will say that mature Christians see Christ in everything and everyone.  The more we look at Jesus, the more we can look at the world around us with the kind and loving eyes of Jesus.

In our Gospel passage, Jesus relates, “God didn’t send his [God’s] Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”[4]  Just as we humans have sometimes made ourselves the center of the universe when it comes to God’s good creation, we have sometimes done the same thing with our views of salvation in the Christian faith.  Christianity becomes almost exclusively about believing the right things (orthodoxy) in order to be saved.  This way of thinking can further divide the world into the “godly” and “ungodly” or the “saved” and the “unsaved.”  Even the Gospel of John can be interpreted in this way with the duality of “light” and “dark” and those who do wicked things and those who do true (or faithful) things. 

We could go on and on—good versus evil, us versus them.  There is a reason why some folks have these beliefs, and it is not uncommon to divide ourselves from one another based on all sorts of categories of human similarity or difference.  Either/or thinking may in fact be how we are naturally inclined to think given the realities of the world around us.  Both/and thinking is harder.  Though it’s troubling if we start putting ourselves into a box and putting God into a box.  It’s troubling to live as if you’re either with us or against us.  Just look at our hyper partisan politics and the conflicts that seem to be erupting everywhere.  Listen to the way that we speak to one another.  This mindset leads to a whole lot of fear and anger and heartache in the end.  Isn’t there a better way?

If we are honest, we have moments where we want to be unique and special.  What’s the point of going to the party if everyone is invited to the party?  Remember that parable that Jesus told in Luke’s Gospel about the large dinner where many people were invited?  The host of the party invited guests and those guests began making up excuses for not attending—I just bought a farm and need to go and see it, I just bought a bunch of oxen and need to take of them, I just got married, I need to go wash my hair (okay, well maybe that one isn’t in the Bible).  But you get the idea!  Lame excuses are shared as to why these invited guests don’t want to attend the party.  Thanks, but no thanks. 

The master of the house gets mad and sends his servants out with these instructions, “Go quickly to the city’s streets, the busy ones and the side streets, and bring the poor, crippled, blind, and lame.”[5]  The servants go as instructed and let their master know that there is still room for more guests to come to the party.  Then the master says, “Go to the highways and back alleys and urge people to come in so that my house will be filled.”[6]  The invitations keep expanding because the master wants a full house.  So much for putting God into a box.  So much for dividing the world into us versus them.

What if we believed (and lived) as if Jesus didn’t come to the world to judge the world, but to save the world for new life.  To show us a different way of being in the world.  To help us keep looking at him—what he taught and how he lived (not just how he died)—in order to look at the world around us with his kind and loving eyes?  There is so much more to our Christian faith than just believing the right things about Jesus in order to be saved.  Following Jesus may just be what truly saves us and saves the world in the end.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

[1] Dave Davies, “Trees Talk To Each Other. ‘Mother Tree’ Ecologist Hears Lessons For People, Too,” NPR, May 4, 2021, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/04/993430007/trees-talk-to-each-other-mother-tree-ecologist-hears-lessons-for-people-too
[2] John 3:14-17, CEB.
[3] Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe, pgs. 32-33.
[4] John 3:17, CEB.
[5] Luke 14:21, CEB.
[6] Luke 14:32, CEB.

Photo by Ed van duijn on Unsplash