Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor
© 2022, Dr. Tamilio
For God so loved the world.
For God so loved the world that he gave us Jesus, the greatest gift of all.
The greatest gift.
Most (if not all) of us have received gifts throughout our lives: birthday presents, Christmas gifts, Red Sox tickets to celebrate ten years as a certain church’s pastor. Yes, I know, they got slaughtered, but as someone sitting behind us said, “A bad day at Fenway Park is still better than a good day at the office.” I cannot thank you all enough. It was an amazing day is so many ways. Being at Fenway (my Mecca) made it even better.
When we think of other gifts, there are so many more that fill the list. Here are three just for example:
- The gift of life itself. Think for a moment about the fact that you It could have been otherwise. You could have never been, just as you didn’t exist prior to when you were conceived.
- The gift of love. Life is not mechanical. We are more than anatomy and physiology. We are more than biological processes and electrical impulses in our brains. We are more than bones, blood, muscles, and tendons. Life has meaning and purpose, and one of those purposes (or better yet gifts) is that we can love and be loved. We’re not zombies trudging through life — or robots designed to fulfill a handful of functions. There is a reason why we are here, and that is to love one another.
- And then (number three): the gift of eternal life. One of the more modern movements in Western philosophy is Existentialism. Its roots stretch back to the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Dostoevsky, but it is more famous for its expression in the middle of the twentieth century with writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Camus was more of an Absurdist, according to him, whereas Sartre is more of a traditional Existentialist, but their philosophies are quite similar. They maintain that since there is no God, humankind stands before an absurd, silent universe. Atheistic Existentialists begin with the premise “if there is no God and, therefore, no existence beyond death, what is the point of the meaning or purpose of this life?” “But aye, there’s the rub,” as Shakespeare said. We do not need to ponder this question, because we know that the greatest gift of all is that Jesus died on a Roman cross and rose from a borrowed tomb to open up to all of us the gates of everlasting life. That’s Good News!
For God so loved the world.
For God so loved the world that he gave us his Son.
For God so loved the world that he gave us his Son so that we may have everlasting life.
As many of you know, I lost a longtime friend this past week. Dan Paglia and I met on the first day of seventh grade — our first day of junior high school. I never met a funnier person in my life and I doubt I will ever encounter someone of his ilk ever again. I spent a lot of time this past week meeting with his family to mourn together, to laugh together, to cry together, and to begin discussing his wake and celebration of life. His mom’s house is filled with pictures of all four of her children and her five grandchildren. As we took many a jaunt down memory lane, my stomach hurt at a few points over how funny Dan was — and how hysterical the rest of his crazy family is.
Although there was sadness over the fact that this life now seems a bit empty without him in it, I took comfort in the fact that I know I will see him again. I will see all of my loved ones again, and so will you. The greatest gift is that God sent his one and only Son so that we may have the gift of everlasting life. It is hard to comprehend that when we are in the midst of death — our own or that of a loved one. It seems so final. The heart stops. Breathing ceases. The eyes glaze over. Everything is still, inert. The body becomes an empty shell, as animated as a stone.
But death does not have the final word. “Where, O death, is thy sting,” the Apostle Paul asked, with a bit of a smirk in his pen. Death does not have the final word. It is simply a door that we pass through on our way to our eternal home.
T.S. Eliot (I haven’t mentioned him in a while) Eliot wrote these lines to frame part of his final poetic masterpiece: “East Coker” from Four Quartets. Eliot, alluding to Julian of Norwich, wrote:
In my beginning is my end.
In my end is my beginning.
You’ve heard me recite these words before. We are born into a sort of death. Even though a newborn begins maturing the moment it is born, it also begins the process of dying. Life is an 80, 90, 100-year process of dying, the cynic asserts. In other words, our ending (our death) is written into our birth (our beginning): “In my beginning is our end.”
But at the end, when we take our final breath and all signs of life seem to extinguish, our eternal life begins, for “In my end is my beginning.”
There is much wisdom in the old Eastern saying, “What the caterpillar calls the end, the butterfly calls the beginning.” The writer Richard Bach (famous for the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull) has reworded this to better fit Christian doctrine: “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” There is a reason why the butterfly (particularly the monarch butterfly) is a symbol of the resurrection. It is the new life that emerges from a gray cocoon. Think of the symbolism of it all: the caterpillar walks around on numerous pairs of legs. Even though he is diligent and industrious, he makes little headway. He sallies forth, certainly, but he inches along. He is the lowest of the low, dragging his belly along the ground almost like a snake. But then, when he is transformed, he flies through the air so beautifully and gracefully.
And we do the same. We go through life. We trudge along. We grow, we play, we go to school, we graduate, we start working, we get married, we have children, we buy a home, and we spend our life worrying about the bills, our health, and the safety of our children. We are driven by a national media that plays upon our fears by magnifying them so that we will consume them. Then we have to work more to pay those credit card bills for the things we purchased, most of which we don’t need anyway. In many respects, it is a rat race, and we are the rats.
At least for a little while. But after we take our last breath, we become something glorious. We become the monarch flying high, spreading its colorful wings, gracefully dancing through the air.
For God so loved the world.
For God so loved the world that he gave us his Son.
For God so loved the world that he gave us his Son so that we may have everlasting life.
Amen, and Amen.