This sermon was delivered at the closing worship service at the UCC Executive Council meeting in Cleveland. Based on John 3:14-21, it has been adapted as a reflection for Holy Week.

Perhaps you've heard the phrase, "He had a face only a mother could love." When it comes to appearance, or even behavior, most of us can be profoundly grateful that there are those in our lives who view us with the subjective eyes of love rather than objective eyes of fact. My mother's death six weeks ago at age 94 was timely for her, and a time for her children to celebrate a long life well and generously lived.

The circumstances of her death occasioned far more gratitude than grief, though grief is real and I still find myself storing up events and experiences each day to share with her on my daily phone call. I am also aware that one whose love for me was determined far more by grace than by accomplishment, whose love was not dependent on how lovable or unlovable I might be at any given time, is no longer here to express it in ways that I can hear and hold. Indeed, there are times when all of us present a face only a mother could love.

"God so loved the world." I often think that ours is a world only God can love. Peter Makari, Lydia Veliko and I spent two weeks earlier this month visiting partners in the Middle East and Germany. We encountered many brave and beautiful people. But there is much ugliness as well. In Beirut we met with church leaders trying to respond to the flood of Iraqi refugees – Christian and Muslim – who have poured into Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.

These are people fleeing violence and, in the case of Christians, fleeing threats against their lives and their communities. It is wonderful to see what the church is doing for these refugees, in some cases with our financial support. But how ironic that the crusade we began six years ago this week has resulted in the near destruction of the Christian community in Iraq to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed or damaged beyond repair.

In the West Bank we visited Palestinians in Hebron whose homes have become nearly inaccessible because of the militant Jewish settlers who have illegally moved there, as well as by the soldiers who have come to guard them, families who regularly have garbage from the settlements dumped in their back yards and whose fruit trees have been deliberately cut.

We watched Palestinian grandmothers rudely harassed at the border by soldiers and security police younger than their grandchildren. We spoke with families who had just received notice that their homes would be destroyed within two weeks, homes they had purchased in good faith but which are now in the way of bulldozers representing municipal policies eager to clear Palestinian populations from East Jerusalem.

We walked through the main gate between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the route all Palestinians must take – a series of long narrow metal passageways and gates, operated remotely, like cattle chutes at a stockyard; we experienced, if only for a brief moment, the ugly, dehumanizing daily routine that marks life in this not so holy land. Yes, this does seem like a world only God could love.

Not far from Karlsruhe, our last stop in Germany, a teen age boy shot and killed fifteen people during our visit, while back home here in Cleveland there were at least five fatal shootings in our absence. And this litany only includes my personal experience. There are, of course, many other sad and troubling stories as well.

Colleagues in Sri Lanka have been sharing graphic pictures and stories of the plight of the civilian population caught in what appears to be the grim end game of civil war between the government and the Tamil resistance fighters. Your field of vision no doubt includes its own form of ugliness. God so loved the world. A good thing given how unlovable this world often is.

In the secretive shadows of night Nicodemus comes to Jesus to inquire of this Savior's love. The hymn writer captures the paradox: "Love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be." For once born souls this is an impenetrable contradiction.

Even for the twice born it is a nearly unfathomable grace. Trapped like Nicodemus in the old transactions of reward and punishment – good for good, evil for evil, of destinies shaped by works rather than grace – Jesus' announcement demands either the denial of the world's ugliness or a loosening of the limits we place on God. God so loved the world! Has God chosen to overlook the way we are? Or has God chosen something else, something far more demanding, far more costly?

The Via Dolorosa in the old city of Jerusalem is for many pilgrims, a powerful way to walk in the steps of Jesus, to experience the Passion near to the actual places described in the Gospels.

We watched them on our trip reliving the ancient stations from the Garden to Calvary and the tomb. But for me, the rehearsal of the Passion grows far more compelling outside the ancient walls.

Whether amid the growing apartheid of the West Bank, or in Darfur, or in New Orleans after Katrina, or in Mugabe's Harare, or in the refugee camps of Colombia, or in the "slumdog" hovel communities of Mumbai, or even along Kinsman Boulevard here in Cleveland between my office and my home I have met Jesus, God suffering for loving this world, an ever present Christ enduring Calvary's mournful mountain climb.

This love costs God dearly. The light still comes into the world, and people still love darkness rather than light. But this light also costs us, exposing us for who we are as those who do both what is evil as well as what is true. How often have you wished that the bathroom light illuminating the mirror in the morning wasn't quite so bright? Lent exposes us. This, John says, is the judgment.

John's theology is a bit troubling, seeming to suggest that humanity falls neatly into two categories: Those who believe and those who refuse to believe. Those who love darkness and those who love light. Those who do evil and those who do what is true.

In John's time, the beleaguered, imperiled beloved community may have needed such clarity of place and privilege in the face of a dominant culture prepared to destroy them. Today this neat division will not do, for it leads to the kind of moral arrogance, the theological vanity that claims to distance itself from the world's axis of evil.

Are we really the armies of light poised against the regiments of darkness? In fact, we love darkness and light, we believe and disbelieve, we do what is true and we do what is evil. One of Felix Carrion's predecessors at Euclid Avenue Congregational Church here in Cleveland captured it in the familiar words of the Lenten hymn:

  The hopes that lead us onward, the fears that hold us back,

  Our will to dare great things for God, the courage that we lack.

  The faith we keep in goodness, our love, as low or pure,

  On all the judgment of the cross falls steady, clear, and sure.

Ours is a world only a mother could love.

And yet. And yet, God so loved the world. A love so amazing, so divine that it demands our soul, our life, our all. God so loved the world. Can we? Can we love the world as God loves it? Not the world of our imagination, not the world of our nostalgia, not the world of our longing, but the world that is, the world it seems only God can love. The world with all its beauty and ugliness, its grace and grime, its virtue and its violence. Can we love this world? Not to make it more lovable. That's a project beyond our reach, a redemption only God can achieve. Can we simply love this frequently unlovable world even when it brings us the Cross?

During Lent, the United Church of Christ received its One Great Hour of Sharing Offering. In one sense we think of this as funding a set of improvement projects: refugees sheltered, poor communities uplifted, damaged homes repaired. And it is that.

But it is, or at least ought to be, far more than that, more than a cosmetic effort to dress up the world, improve appearances, creating a face more than just a mother can love. This offering represents a love that will not let the world go, a love that will not retreat to a safe, sectarian refuge, a love that refuses to recoil from the ugliness that is everywhere and that resists the easy counsel of despair. It is a witness that says if God can love this world then we can love it, too! Can we love this world, in this great hour, and in every hour both great and small?

Our text ends without any sense that Nicodemus really got it, really comprehended the good news of God's extravagant love for the world. The text is silent. But later in the Gospel, Nicodemus appears again, this time to care for the brutalized body of Jesus after the Crucifixion. He comes, again, bringing a generous mixture of myrrh and aloes to anoint this pierced body bearing all the ugliness of the Cross.

Nicodemus is no mortician trying to cover up the scars and bruises to give the appearance of peace. He is no magician seeking to turn the dead into the living. He is simply a man who comes to offer an emblem of love for a body that's no longer lovable. Who would want to carry such a gruesome body? Who would want to love this corpse? This "face," which at the end only mother Mary could love. But the confused Nicodemus who once came at night now gets it. God so loved the world – this world – and so must we.