Two Cathedrals

This is the sermon preached by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregations of Unfinished Community and Ashiya Christian Church on Sunday, March 1, 2026, drawing from John 3:1-17

To be honest, today feels like a good day. The sun is shining, the scaffolding has been removed from the new church building, and despite the many difficulties, struggles, and outright existential horrors of life right now, it feels like…well, a good day.

But while I can’t speak for everyone, there are times for me where these better times, these moments in the sun, feel somehow worse. I think that sometimes the realization that good days are possible makes the bad days feel somehow more…incomprehensible. Because of there are days like this why, in the name of our eternally loving God, do we need all that bad at all? Why can’t it be like this? What’s the point of all this rain when every day could be warm and sunny?

I’ll admit, I struggle with that a lot lately. And it feels somewhat apropos right now, as we sit in our sanctuary and look out the windows into the new one, that my heart keeps being drawn back to a moment in an episode an old American TV drama called "The West Wing," in particular an episode titled “Two Cathedrals.”

Yes, I know, you may commence with the old man jokes now. But fit as old and out of touch as I may be this episode has one of those moments in it. You know what I mean? A moment where the actor, the scene…all of these things come together really express something so fundamentally human, even spiritual, that it just sears itself into the hearts and minds of those who see of.

For those of you not familiar with the minutiae of late 90’s American political television, let me give you the basics. In this moment we’re following famous actor Martin Sheen as he plays the President of the United States - a devout Catholic - who, having just experienced a terrible personal loss, stands alone in the National Cathedral following an incredibly painful funeral. He asks his security to step outside and close the doors, leaving himself alone in that great cathedral space. He begins quietly, to be sure, but before long he really gets going and he just…unloads one of the most epically angry,  multilingual rants directly into the face of God, in God’s own sanctuary, before snuffing out a lit cigarette on the marble floor and walking out full of anger and disgust at a deity who would permit the suffering he is experiencing, the loss of innocent people he loves, to ever happen.

He remembers sunlight as it were, and curses the rains, and the God who sent them.

Fun side note…Martin Sheen, the actor who played the President in this show, actually did that. It was not in the script, and not only did they get in a terrifying amount of trouble for it, but it was - as I recall - the inciting incident that caused the National Cathedral to never again accept requests for filming from TV programs or movies.

So yeah…it’s an intense scene.

But before we get to the really intense end part of that rant - and I will, I promise - there's a quote he casually drops right at in that query beginning which has been running through my head all week.

"You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God,' says Graham Greene"

This right here…this is the crux of where I think a lot of us are today.

Confused.

Uncertain.

Worryingly baffled, by that "appalling strangeness" that we are begrudgingly calling the "mercy" of God.

Confused by the presence of sunny days in cold and rainy times.

We know, intellectually, that God is cosmically incomprehensible, but when we get down to it we still expect things to make sense to us. Love seems simple and easy to understand, being a good person seems so simple and easy to do, following Christ seems like a total “no-brainer” where all we have to do is “not do bad things,” but when it comes down to actually living into those things…nothing works out the way we think it should.

We look at the terrors of the world around us - billionaires and powerful people doing unspeakable things on private islands while burning the planet down around us all for fun, Trump gearing up to cancel elections while pausing briefly to misogyny-dump on the Olympic hockey teams, Kansas canceling all drivers licenses for trans people, and so very much more - and none of it makes sense. And because love is so simple, so easy to our minds, it has to be that God is wrong.

Surely God is at fault for allowing these things to happen. Surely it is God’s fault for trespassing beyond the bounds of the boxes in which we expect God - who is love - to operate.

We try and we try and we try, we fill our heads with logic, with justifications, with all manner of mental gymnastics. We say that God has a plan, that there’s some unknowable reason, that if we just look past all the clouds and the rain the sunny skies are still there only we’re just not looking hard enough to see; so many things we say to justify the fact that we simply don’t understand why this is happening. Eventually though, no matter how hard we try, we run into something so baffling, so confusing, that we realize that who God is just won't fit.

We just…don't get it.

And in that moment we are undone. 

But the hard truth of the matter is that the way in which we wrestle with the nonsensical nature God, the way in which we struggle to grasp and execute the incomprehensible nature of divine love, the way in which we embrace sun while sheltering from the rain, this is the very definition of our faith.

That scene I mentioned, where the President unloads on God…that's something that happens to all of us when the painful, lived-in experience of our lives runs into stark conflict with the love of God. We know that this love is real, but in our lives at that moment it can be impossible for us to see, impossible for us to understand.

We can't reconcile that love with our own hurt, our own expectations, our own knowledge, or our own fears.

So…we break. We become undone.  Which is what happens when the unstoppable force meets the less-than-immovable objects of our own understandings.

In today's scripture we have the unique experience of seeing this exact kind if moment through Jesus’ eyes. It’s presented here as a dialogue rather than monologue, and made somewhat worse I'll admit by the absence of Martin Sheen's fantastic acting, but when you get into it this really is the same kind of unraveling moment; not in the life of Jesus, but in the life of Nicodemus.

Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the dead of night, flirting with the embrace of Jesus' teaching but being such a high "muckety-muck" himself that he’s unwilling to be seen doing so publicly. He has within him the spark of belief, but he needs to come to it on his terms, within the bounds of his own reason, and without sacrificing social standing by embracing something ridiculous or absurd.

He needs answers. And as someone who’s spent his whole adult life as a Pharisee learning, studying, and convincing himself of his own certainty, he comes to this meeting armed with as narrow, rigid a box as possible, and the intention of finding a way to make Jesus fit into that box.

But Jesus' response to him is exactly the opposite of what he came looking for, exactly the opposite of what he wanted and needed from the divine; a laying out of the ridiculous and absurd incomprehensibility of God.

Jesus gives it to Nicodemus straight at first - more or less - and Nicodemus responds not with the true, honest inquiry of someone who’s come to learn, but with the pedantic, argumentative conflict of one who wants to poke holes in human rationale; one who wants to convince, not be convinced.

Jesus then digs deeper into us the whole bit about being "born from above" - not "born again," mind you, as the evangelicals say - but "born from above." This makes sense….kind of, if you think about it. He’s explaining to Nicodemus the fact that connecting with God, understanding God, requires something totally different from his implacable and inflexible worldview, an understanding of the universe which transcends reality and which, like birth - as my loving wife can attest - never happens how, or when, we expect it to. Experiencing it requires a surrender of expectations, not the fulfillment of them. I mean, no logical person would go through that much pain and struggle just to create a tiny, wrinkled ball of screaming that looks like your grandmother, eats all your food and poops on you, only to grow up hating you for not doing enough. But when you experience it…none of that matters.

Because love doesn’t fit into our preconceptions. Like all the many ways we have to try to explain God, it falls to gibberish when we our logic and rational thinking meet the experience of the thing itself.

Nicodemus, being Nicodemus, calls him out on that making no sense, to which Jesus calls him out even more personally, asking if he - a teacher of God - is really thinking like this. “Are you really a teacher? You can't even believe the things you've seen from us, which is why you're coming in the dead of night rather than in the harsh light of day like everyone else. If you can't manage that much, how do you think you'll manage to grasp the impossible, the illogical, and the utter absurdity that is the unrestrained love of God?”

And then Jesus lands with that oft-repeated verse which, when you see it in context, is so utterly, Cthulhu-level meta-horror that it completely defies our modern, hallmark-greeting-card understandings.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may 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."

Seems straightforward, doesn't it?

But then you realize….with a dawning horror….that this line isn't, as would make sense, something put down by the apostles as a testimony to the crucified and later risen Christ, but a past-tense statement by Jesus himself about something that hasn't even happened yet.

This is almost like that time-traveler meme, where a guy uses a time machine to go back and see the sermon on the mount, only for Jesus to turn to them and say in perfect modern English, "Go home, you don't belong here."

Jesus is, in a very real way, turning his face away from Nicodemus and towards each of us today with this line, and using something only he can see then, and we can see now, to teach a lesson that misses Nicodemus completely…and that's the point.

"You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God,' says Graham Greene"

We don't get to understand how God works in the moment. We only ever kinda understand it when it’s in the rear view.

We are given in Christ a gift beyond comprehension, and not only can't we parse that in terms that make sense to us, we're not meant to. In that way, the evangelical predilection to take this verse and paste it on every piece of merch they can find as though it's a self-contained and complete statement of faith is a complete rejection of what Jesus is actually saying with it.

God fundamentally doesn't make sense.

What we suffer through in God's service, honestly doesn't make sense.

What we know of God doesn't make sense.

All our faith, all our resources, all our studies, and all our efforts amount to a hill of beans in the face of God's incomprehensible love and mercy.

There will be times where we stand in that empty hall and scream at God because of how little it makes sense, and how much being bound to the path of love hurts, how much doing the right thing hurts, and how much it hurts to choose love when choosing ourselves would feel so very much better.

Granted, not everyone can rail at the Almighty in Latin like that, but I've found myself in similar places crying out that same rant like it were a Psalm:

"Gratias tibi ago, domine. Haec credam a deo pio? A deo iusto, a deo scito? Cruciatus in crucem. Tuus in terra servus, nuntius fui. Officium perfeci. Cruciatus in crucem. Eas in crucem!"

[TRANSLATION: "I give thanks to you, O Lord. Am I really to believe that these are the acts of a loving God? A just God? A wise God? To hell with your punishments. I was your servant here on Earth. And I spread your word and I did your work. To hell with your punishments. To hell with you!"]

Truth be told, I think I have that one memorized better than any Psalm in English OR Latin, and for good reason.

Standing in front of God and saying, even screaming, "I just don't get it" is part of the process.

But while that is a very necessary part of the process, we need to remember that this process ends with a profound reassurance that while we might not be able to understand these things on the page where we find ourselves, in the fullness of time we can come to realize the truly wonderful gift we have been given:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may 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."

I don't necessarily get it, but I get it nonetheless.

That is…we don't necessarily understand, but by the incomprehensible grace of God we receive it anyways.

So, for this moment, let us enjoy the sunshine, sitting here in between these two little cathedrals, and delight in how little we understand things now, knowing that God’s love - while incomprehensible to us - always gets the last word over our hurt, our anger, and our pain.

Amen.