These past weeks, I’ve been articulating what I’ve been calling a “big God theology.” We began with the confession of Peter and talking about all the things that confuse Peter and the other disciples about Jesus’ identity and what it means. I said they are likely blinded by the teachings of those who want God to reflect our own prejudices and fears and they have difficulty seeing Jesus for who he is, as well as understanding what he is here to do. Then I spoke to what our lives, as fellow disciples of Jesus, look like when we step beyond those limited images of God and truly embrace God and Jesus for who they truly are. I called those last two sermons the “rubber hits the road” sermons: our role in the big God’s plan for the world.

If that’s what those two sermons were, then today is more of a “where the axle hits the car” sermon. We’ve come full circle in many ways, back to the beginning, to the very thing that makes God so grand as to seek to save the whole world. And that thing is found, stated simply and yet so profoundly in two verses at the end of today’s Gospel lesson from John.

Our evangelical brothers and sisters often say that John 3:16 is the most important verse in the Bible. While I don’t always agree with them on issues of Biblical interpretation, I’ll grant them this one. They’re right...mostly. And my counter-argument is only that you cannot have verse 16 without verse 17.

But these two verses together, this is it. This is the bottom line. It’s the reason you once couldn’t watch a televised sporting event without at least one yahoo holding up a sign with “John 3:16” printed on it. It’s the entire Gospel in a nutshell.

God loves the world. God sent Jesus to live in this world. Those who have faith in him are given the gift of eternal life. God does not condemn. God saves through Jesus.

All else that we have heard in these past weeks hinges on this simple truth. All else that we have heard in every sermon from every preacher throughout our lives hinges on this simple truth.

This is the heart of who God is. If you want to understand why God is as big as he is, the answer is love. Love unbounded. Love that sought and continues to seek to save all of creation. Love that gives and gives and gives countless graces to us and to others. Love that sent Jesus into this world to live among us. Love that sent Jesus to surrender his comfort and his security to be beaten, tortured, and then hung on a cross to die. Love that brought him forth again from the grave on the third day.

It is a love that embraces us, regardless of who we are or what we’ve done. Made some mistakes? Done a thing or two of which you are ashamed? (Who hasn’t?) God forgives you, because he loves you. Been a part of a group that are looked down upon or cast out because of some quality, race or economic status or gender or education or whatever? God doesn’t care. He made you who you are and loves you for who you are.

And this same love that embraces, forgives, and accepts us also compels us. For there is a world out there that is full of people who just don’t know. They don’t know because, unlike us, there wasn’t someone who told them. Or maybe, there’s been someone who’s told them wrong, someone who’s taught them a small god. Or worst of all, maybe they’re someone who has been told that God doesn’t love them, that God won’t love them because they’re different or they’re guilty of some sin or some such. The victims of small god theologies.

God’s love compels us to tell them the truth: That God so loved the world… The word in Greek that Jesus uses there is cosmos. God so loves the cosmos. That’s everybody. No exceptions. That’s us and everyone else.

We live in a world that thrives on hatred. We marked the 7^th anniversary this week of the terrorist attacks on 9/11. I can’t think of a more potent example of hatred than that. But there are others, too many to count. Portions of Georgia are still under Russian occupations. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, with the latter more fiercely now than at any other point since we arrived there. Tyrannical governments abound in this world. And then here at home, there is economic injustice. Racism, sexism, and homophobia still pervade much of our society.

It’s hard to imagine sometimes considering all the ways we screw things up, both as individuals and as collective communities and societies, that God would bother with us. And yet he does. Perhaps that is the greatest statement of all of just how truly immense God’s love really is. That’s the truth that has been entrusted to us, not to horde but to share. To tell to a world that seems fixed on self-destruction that there is another way. There is God’s way.

The way of a God who loves this world. The way of a God who sent his son into this world to die for it. The way of a God that does not condemn us, no matter how much we deserve it. The way of a God that loves us beyond words.

The world needs us, need us to show them who God truly is, and how far he is willing to go to save us. The world needs us to show them the cross and all that it means: The greatest symbol of love the world has ever known. Amen.