John 3:1-17
The anti-Fascists breached the defenses at several points, and stormed through.
I am, of course, speaking about D-Day, not January 6, 2021, for despite the misinformation and propaganda of Fox News and other corporate and white supremacist media outlets, anti-Fascists, known today as “Antifa,” were not present during the attempt to overthrow our democracy a little over two years ago. The accusation, as sinful and evil as it is, is that “woke” folk staged a “false flag” operation on that day. Though, as I’ve said, “Antifa” was certainly present on the beaches of Normandy.
The term false flag originates in the 16th century, in the age of unsanctioned criminal piracy and the state-sanctioned piracy of privateers, an age when the false flag involved was the literal flag identifying a ship as being from another nation. Today, “false flag” refers to any covert operation where people misidentify themselves in order to provoke conflict, especially meant to provoke a backlash against the alleged, but false, perpetrators of an attack.
False flag operations have been used throughout history as a way to start wars or, and this is especially heinous, to set up pogroms and riots targeting oppressed minorities. Think here of the slaughter of Jews in Europe or the destruction of Black communities here in the United States. Russian agents have been repeatedly accused of false flag operations in neighboring countries in recent years as Vladimir Putin attempts to re-create a Soviet-sized sphere of influence.
Many of us first heard the term “false flag” in relation to the most noxious cases here in the United States, a sort-of double negative when those who manufacture lies claim that mass casualty shootings are false flag operations designed to justify government seizure of redneck rifles.
This is where you get the horror stacked upon horror of parents first losing their children in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, then finding themselves harassed and threatened by idiots who have been convinced that the shooting was a charade and that the parents are “crisis actors” working for the left. Recent civil judgments against the diabolic Alex Jones, while satisfying, cannot remove the embodied trauma, first of losing a child, and second of being hounded and harassed and threatened. “Oops, sorry” or “I didn’t really mean it” just doesn’t cut it.
I think there is a sort of “false flag” operation going on in some forms of Christianity too. They go on and on about being “saved,” saved by Jesus who is one person in the Trinitarian godhead, person here a technical theological terms that has no connection with reality. But who is Jesus saving them from when they are born again, to use the language Nicodemus misunderstands in today’s reading? It turns out, God in Jesus is saving the born-again crowd from God in the Father, the traditional masculine preserved here intentionally.
So let’s lay that out again, here in the second week of Lent, as we prepare our hearts and minds for Holy Week and Easter. God created, then set a booby trap in creation which ensnared humans. God was insulted that humans fell for the booby trap God created, was offended that these puny and finite creatures were not stroking God’s ego quite enough, and so damned them. But then God decided to offer humankind a way out by taking human form and arranging to be killed, which is either divine suicide or at best filicide. And “all better.”
Hey, if it works for you…
Maybe it isn’t God we need to be saved from. Maybe, as the comic famously put it, we have seen the enemy, and it is us. Maybe what the Holy Week story is meant to save us from is ourselves, from our willingness to create scapegoats, from our hubris and our certainty, from… Jesus help us… most religion, from violence and fear and greed.
Look at this verse, on tattoos and stationary and cheap bracelets made in Communist China… for God so loved the world that God gave their only begotten child… Not to condemn, but to save…
Let’s step back from the ways Paul mapped the rituals of Temple blood sacrifice onto the crucifixion and just focus on that depiction of God.
One of our theological ancestors was the Rev. Jonathan Edwards, now most famous as the grandfather of Aaron Burr, but before all things Hamilton became hip, he was best known as a Puritan preacher and particularly for that sermon so many of us read in American Literature courses, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
This isn’t that. John 3:16 isn’t that.
Here, God looks more like a lover, the way God is frequently depicted by the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, or a parent, the way Jesus depicts God, not as the harsh judge that is hell-bent of sending us to eternal damnation.
You can certainly find that hateful and hurtful version of God in scripture if you want to find that version of God, but I would argue that you can not have it both ways, for the God who orders the brutality of the Cross, who orders ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Hebrew Testament, cannot be understood as “good,” and therefore is not worthy of our worship, at least not of mine.
Like a “pick your own adventure,” you must pick your God from the incompatible versions of God offered in our tradition, must decide whether we are being saved from Jonathan Edward’s “angry God” or from our own sin and sometimes our own stupidity.
God so loved the world that God took action, traditionally understood as Incarnation, becoming one with us in the form of Jesus, a fleshy body that wept and laughed, that knew fear and knew friendship.
During Lent, we re-engage with the climactic end of that earthly ministry of healing and teaching, of that revolutionary challenge to the powers and principalities of the earth, to the corruption that permeated both empire and religion, and are uncomfortably reminded of our own sin, for we are part of sinful systems. We are penitential not because we gain merit through suffering, but because the gospel is a challenge, and being mindful can be raw and difficult at times. We read these stories of people not understanding one another, of systems designed with the best of intentions that slowly spiraled into corruption, and we are promised renewal, promised that life is resilient, that love is more powerful than fear, that the divine mystery we name as God is bigger than our sin, is love which is to say the unspooling of creativity and thriving, cosmic symphonies and an art installation called now.
“For God so loved the world” because human words are the words we have, the knowing/unknowing of how we are in this fleeting finite time that we inhabit these bodies, as we approach the final mystery reminded that the ancients watched a man be executed in a gruesome way and yet still experienced him as real and alive in their lives.
It is not God who would do us violence, despite the violence done in God’s name. God sent Jesus, in whatever way you choose to understand the Christ event, not to condemn, but to save. We reject the false flag of human hatred given a divine face, for we remove the mask and there we are.
You are part of a story, a holy love affair between creative mystery and creation, spinning galaxies and marching ants and all that is life and newness and yes.
Amen.