On Living in a Big World

On Living in a Big World--March 13, 2017

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.  Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." [John 3:16-17]

The world is a big place.

That fact either compresses our love inward, downward, and smaller, or it stretches us outward, wider, and bigger. And for people who claim to follow Jesus, the determining factor should be what we believe about God--and about just how wide God's love will reach.

Let's unpack this thought for a bit: the world is a big place.  That is to say, the world is full of all sorts of people--some of them are people like you.  Some of them are not.

There are people who look like you, or have the same chromosomes as you do.  Many of them, to be sure. There are people with the same gender, same ethnic ancestry, same church, same language, same politics, same outlook on the world, and same taste in music as you have.  Yes, there are people who are very much like you--same tax bracket, same tastes, same way of life.  Chances are, many of the people you surround yourself with intentionally in your circles of friends, family, confidants, and information-sources (I'm looking at you, Facebook News Feed and cable news...) are in a lot of ways... like you.  In a country as large as ours, that means for just about any category, there are literally millions of people who are the same as you for any given quality--red hair, love of country music, dislike of the same vegetable, early-morning riser, whatever. 

But even if there are millions who share whatever trait in common with you, and even if we all tend to surround ourselves with voices that say things we already want to believe and faces that already look like ours, it turns out that... the world is a big place.

That means for every person who is like you in some way, there are plenty more who are different.  As Bill Murray's title character put it in the immortal "What About Bob?" all those years ago, "There are two kinds of people in the world--people who like Neil Diamond, and people who don't.  My ex-wife loves him."  Pick a category: skin color, hair texture, language, faith, politics, income, gender, relationship status, the labels we wear and the identities we own, all of it--there are lots of people in this big world who are other than you, and who are other than me.  That is a consequence of living in a big world with the infinite variety that is humanity.

Now, that fact can do one of two things to us.  On the one hand, we can look at all that difference, all the other-ness in the world, and say, "Well, it's all too much and too big. I can't be expected to look out for all of those people!  After all, there are some people I don't like in that hodge-podge! There are people who believe different from me, and people whose view of the world is far different from mine!"  And from there, we decide that we can only afford to look out for the needs or interests of people who are like me.  We decide our resources are too small to attend to everybody's needs, so it only makes sense to us to focus on the people who are like me--people who live in the same place as I do, or who look like me, or who think and believe and vote like me.  It is very easy to decide that, as big as this world is, we just don't have the resources to care for everybody, so we should all only direct our resources to people who are like me. 

That just seems downright logical, then, doesn't it?  Only so much to go around, and the world is an awfully big place, so if I have to make a decision, I will look out for the ones who are like me when I have to choose.  My group first. Those who share my genes first.  My local church denomination first.  My country... my party... my ethnicity... first. There's conventional wisdom at its most conventional for you

On the other hand, it is possible to see how big the world is and come to the opposite conclusion.  It is possible to say, "The world is such a big place--I'll bet that other people matter just as much as I do, even outside my own little circles."  It's the same world, and it is still big, but in this case, instead of seeing the size and thinking we can't possibly care about people outside our own little group, now the size instead helps us to see wider than ourselves. 

How do we decide which way to let the fact that the world is a big place affect us? Well, as I say, for us as Christians, a big piece of it has to do with how we see God.  Is the God we meet in the Bible interested only in people "like me," or is God interested in the whole enchilada?  Does my life matter more to God than someone down the road... or down the river... or on the other side of God's green earth?  And vice versa, does someone else whose ways and language are different than mine matter more to God than me? 

Let's consult the most famous, most-televised verse in the whole Bible: you and I know it as John 3:16.  "For God so loved the world..." the text says.  You probably knew those words by heart, right?  But consider for a moment how radical--and how clarifying--a statement that is.  "The world" is a shorthand in John's gospel for "everything that is turned away from God" or "all the creation, including people dead set against God, or who have no interest at all in hearing about God."    It's a phrase that includes everything--the well-behaved, the people who are "like me," the people who are NOT "like me," the people who are striving to love God, the people who have no use for religion, the people who are not interested in hearing my speeches about God... all of us.  "The world" that God loves includes people who see things like I do, and it includes people who do not see the world as I do.  It includes my like-minded circle of friends or family, and it includes everybody's angry uncle who goes off on nonsensical tirades at family holiday gatherings or on Facebook.  It includes people it is fashionable to like... and it includes people it is no longer trendy to care about.  "The world" includes people who have been sitting in church next to me for decades, and people whose faith is other than mine.  The world that God loves is not bounded by "the limited group of people whose skin, salary, or style match mine".

Now, to be clear, that manifestly does NOT mean that all of us on earth are all "right" about whatever things we each believe or think.  The point is not that all beliefs are equally "right" or "true" or whatever, as long as they are sincerely held--facts and reality matter.  But the beautiful thing about the love of God is that you don't have to be "right" for God to love you.  So, yes, it matters whether the world is only six thousand years or billions of years old--this is not a question we just shrug our shoulders and go, "Eh, potato, poTAHto."  BUT God doesn't only love the people who are correct in guessing that number.  It matters whether the world is or isn't getting hotter--but God doesn't just love the people who are correct in their reading of the facts there.  And yes, there are people who believe that Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" is the epitome of human musical genius, like Bill Murray's character reminds us... and then there are those of us who are convinced that, no, music reached its zenith in 1982 with Dexy's Midnight Runners' release of "Come On, Eileen."  (See how quickly we can get ourselves all worked up in right-ness that we forget even the possibility that we could all be wrong, too?).  God's love is not just for people with good taste in music, either.  The truth matters, and it matters as it guides us to make wise decisions at the micro level and at the big-picture level, too--but love is not bound to people who people who see the world like I do.... or like you do.  God's love reaches out to us when we are dead-set turned away from God, so yeah, it can also include people on different sides of the capital-gains-tax debate.

The point in all of this is that the world's most famous Bible verse gives us a lot more direction than we might have given it credit for at first.  It's more than just a warm-and-fuzzy sentence to recite when you are feeling down--it answers the question we posed at the start: does the big-ness of the world lead me to shrink my area of concern down to only people who are "like" me, or does the size of the world lead me to say that all people are to be recipients of my concern, even if they are NOT like me?  And the Gospel of John comes down solidly on the side of the bigger vision.  The world's most popular Bible verse RULES OUT "Me-and-my-group-first" thinking, because it says, "Whoa, whoa, whoa--hold your horses a minute!  God doesn't just love YOU and people like you.  God's love has determined that people who are very, very different matter, too."  John 3:16 prevents us from looking at any question simply with the attitude of "Hey, we gotta look out for our own, and who cares what it means for anybody else." 

Today, two things are important to take with us through the day: yes, the things we think and believe about the world and life matter.  Facts matter, and we are not all entitled to our own different sets of facts, and so the pursuit of the truth is important and worth pursuing.  But the love that wins at the cross is not limited to people who are right about whatever issue, and the love that wins at the cross is not limited to my group of people.  If we are going to insist that John 3:16 says something important to us who follow Jesus, then we are going to be clear right out the door today that we can no longer in good conscience justify our choices or priorities by saying, "Me-and-my-group-first."  That is too small a love for the God of the universe, whose love for "the world" meant laying down God's own life at the cross.  That is too small for God's beloved world, which, it turns out, is a very big place.

Lord Jesus, help us on this day to love as wide and broad and deeply as you do.