John 3:13-17 and Blessed Are You Who Bear the Light by Jan Richardson
September 14, 2025
By Nicole M. Lamarche
Welcome again! On this beautiful morning. Thank you for showing up for yourself and others to build the world we all want. I invite you to take some deeper breathes with me.
As you are moved join me in a spirit of prayer. God of many names, force of Love between us and among us, grounding of our being, we are grateful for this day and this place, for this community of faith. Help us all to hear whatever we need to. Open us, soften us, change us. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Jesus saved me and continues to save me daily. Yes, you heard me right. I have been saved by Jesus, saved by the Divine that showed up in him and held by a ground of being that is our God of love. I have been saved from a life of grudges and anger with teachings about forgiveness and peace, saved from feeling like I am not sure where I belong, with a lifetime of
rooting myself in the Body of Christ, saved by each of you all daily and weekly and yearly, being made better by sharing life with you. I have been saved from the demon of white supremacy with the words of a brown skinned revolutionary who challenged the Empire, overturned tables, asked us to align our hearts with the good. I am saved from being driven by all
that the ego commands, it’s need to be angry and right, to get more. Jesus saves me again and again from despair because of our coming together for prayer, I am saved from cynicism and hopelessness because of our doing good, our calling and writing, our building and collecting, our showing up for each other, our giving out, our willingness to grow, change, learn and love our way forward together. I am saved by Jesus. And in a time like this I want to do more to draw on our tradition, claiming the power of our language, our story, our tradition.
Someone like me is now being labeled as vicious and horrible from the highest human places, many of us in this room are in that camp. From the highest office in the land, we are told that the trouble is us. And it is also being said that Jesus is on the side of some and not others. That some are good and not others.
We must challenge the idea that some of us are good and some of us are not, that some of us are the right Christians and some of us are not. That some are worthy of mourning and not others. And there is so much noise right now that I find this time together on Sunday mornings even more precious than before. No ads will appear before my face, you won’t be
asked if you would like the AI version of what I am offering, you can hear right from my heart. We can process life together. So after a really hard week, a day of lockdown for all schools and many of us in this neighborhood, another school shooting and in the Denver Metro area, another assassination, words from leaders that escalate, a growing distrust in our institutions, increasing polarization, driven by money soaked algorithms, so in my words today I want to convey with the deepest longing
for this tense moment in which we find ourselves, that Jesus is on all of our side. There is no us and them. For God so loved the world that God wanted to come among us in human form.
Some Christians like to forget how that verse in the Gospel of John begins. It is love. And instead it is used as a weapon, used as a way to advance the theological paradigm that I want to address today: that God needed to let Jesus or have Jesus die as part of a plan to save humans from our sinful nature. The official name for this theological stance is: Penal substitutionary atonement. As many of you know, for the month of September we are doing a series on Healing from Toxic Christianity
and this is on the list.
It aims to explain the meaning and purpose of Jesus’ death and what it means. Penal substitution, also called penal substitutionary atonement theory is a big thread within Protestant Christian theology, arguing that Jesus was punished (penalized) in the place of sinners (substitution), to satisfy the demands of justice and appeasing God to justly forgive sins making us at one with God, which is where we get that word atonement at-one-ment. Those who know Church history know that German Reformation leader Martin Luther wrote about this and John Calvin built upon it. This theological paradigm teaches that the substitutionary nature of Jesus’ death is understood in the sense of a substitutionary fulfilment of legal demands for the offenses of sins. It’s basically a swap.
And part of how I understand the reason for this idea has been around for eons. We humans really love a scapegoat. We love the idea that one person or group can take the blame for the whole group/tribe make it better. It is ancient. In the Bible, we first see the idea in the book of Leviticus where a goat is designated to be cast into the desert to carry away the sins of the community, taking with it every sin and impurities, while the other is sacrificed. Leviticus 16:1-34
Where we read that Aaron is to take the two goats and present them before the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting. 8 He is to cast lots for the two goats—one lot for the Lord and the other for the scapegoat. [b] 9 Aaron shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the Lord and sacrifice it for a sin offering. 10 But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented
alive before the Lord to be used for making atonement by sending it into the wilderness as a scapegoat. The theology of penal substitution relies on three basic ideas. According to theologian Stephen Morrison, “First and foremost, the notion of retributive justice, that God requires the death of a perfect sacrifice to forgive our sins. In short, that on the cross Jesus Christ died to pay back God’s justice. Second, that the wrath of God must be appeased, that God is full of wrath towards us and must have that wrath satisfied, or “propitiated” in Christ’s death. And finally, the third notion is that God turned His back on Jesus Christ in His death, that Jesus was forsaken and abandoned because God cannot look upon our sin.” 1
That’s part of why it feels urgent to address it. It wasn’t originally part of our tradition. And it is grounded in the idea that God is violent or retributive or that God demands some kind of appeasement. Of course, you can read this verse in John mapping this theology on it, but it isn’t there on its own. But I do believe Jesus saves us, offers us salvation, a salve for the wounds of this world. I believe we can be saved by these teachings.
I read it like this, whoever believes in Jesus’ teachings will have a certain kind of life. For God so loved the world that Love manifested in this human of Jesus so that everyone who takes his teachings seriously will not perish on earth, being dragged down by all that humans create and may instead find life and find it abundantly. God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved.
At least for me, I want to pull the theological support for scapegoating out from under all of this, in our tradition and in our politics. Especially since authoritarians need scapegoats. Democracies that exist in diverse societies depend on protecting the rights of minorities of all kinds, and this includes race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity. According to
research at Columbia University, robust social ties reduce the effectiveness of repression, which is why modern-day autocrats use demographic identity as a way to sow and increase division, gaining power from claiming that there is a broad mandate for what is happening. This is what happened in Hungary and Poland “while ascending to power with only plurality support, (they) have demonized immigrants and used claims of representing “the real Poles” or “the real Hungarians” as ways of establishing a more legitimate popular mandate.” 2
No more scapegoats of any kind. In religion or in politics. For me, Jesus died on the cross not because it was needed by God so that we could all feel good about living imperfect lives, but because if you take seriously living like him, it challenges the powers that be, it discomforts all of us, asking us to unsettle our ideas of who belongs. He died because he dared to keep speaking, keep healing, keep bearing light, when they tried to put it out, as we heard from the poet Jan Richardson, keep bearing light, keep burning bright and being a glow on an altar where somehow even in the deepest night it can be seen, it cannot be extinguished, this fire in each of us, shining bright collectively in all of us. This light is needed right now, even in unbearable times. For God so loved the world… It’s about love. There is no us and them. Jesus is for all of us. What a gift. May it be so.Amen.
Communal Reflection
How do you resonate (or not) with the language of being saved by Jesus?
What do you think about the theology of substitutionary atonement?
Beloved of God, for God so love the world. Amen.
1 https://www.sdmorrison.org/the-book-to-end-penal-substitutionary-atonement/
2 https://protectdemocracy.org/work/the-authoritarian-playbook/#marginalizing-communities