Children's Homily - 4th Sunday in Lent

Today is the last day of the Florida Strawberry Festival. We are so blessed to live less than an hour away from some of the best strawberries in the world. We can go and pick them at the height of their perfection, or we can buy them at a local grocery store when they are only a day or two old. Connor Updike, one of our former members, who grew up in this congregation just like you, makes his living growing strawberries, doing everything he can to make them as fresh and delicious as possible for us.

I love strawberries. I think they are one of God’s best inventions. They are sweet, but not too sweet. They are bite-size, not too big and not too small. They are firm, but not too firm. They are colored a bright and beautiful red. They go great with vanilla ice cream, or dipped in chocolate, or combined with shortcake and whipped cream, or fashioned into preserves to be spread on toast and butter.

There’s only one thing wrong with strawberries. They are perishable. They don’t stay fresh very long. They soon begin to spoil, to rot, to go from good to bad, from delicious to disgusting.

A strawberry’s life isn’t entirely hopeless, however. Human beings have learned how to extend the life of a strawberry. The easiest way is to keep them in the refrigerator or save them in a freezer. You can even freeze-dry strawberries, so you can enjoy them wherever you go.

My brother gave me this jar of strawberry jam for Christmas. I don’t know how long ago the strawberries in this jar were picked, but on the top of the jar I am told that I can wait until the second of May, 2022, which is over a year from now, before they will begin to go bad.

There’s always a trade-off when you extend the life of a strawberry. In my jam, for instance, they add sugar, fructose, pectin and citric acid to help make the strawberries taste like they were when they were first picked. They will last longer, but they will never be quite as juicy or sweet or fresh as they were when you picked them at the height of their perfection, the way God created them to be. And you cannot make a strawberry last forever. They are, after all, perishable.

Jesus explains to Nicodemus this morning, however, that God can do what we cannot do. He can make strawberries imperishable, forever fresh. So there is hope for strawberries and for everything else in this world which is perishable, including you and me. That’s how powerful God’s love is.

Jesus tells Nicodemus that God loves the world so much that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Jesus can make the perishable imperishable. He explains that he will do this by being lifted up on a cross, in the same way that Moses lifted up a bronze snake on a pole for his traveling companions in the desert, who had been bitten by a deadly snake and knew that it was only a matter of time before they perished. But Moses told them they could live again by looking at that bronze snake, raised up on a pole. In the same way, when you or I or anyone else look on Jesus lifted up on the cross, we will be saved, not just from deadly snake poison, but from every poison, including the poison of death itself.

Just as strawberries cannot make a refrigerator, freezer or dehydrator so that they might live longer, neither can we save ourselves from perishing through our own efforts. Only God’s Son can make us imperishable. We can never make ourselves good enough to deserve God’s life-saving love. It is God’s love for us that makes us good, makes us completely fresh and new, even better than we were when we were born, even when, later on in life, we may do things that make us feel rotten. That is what it means to become imperishable, whenever we experience the love of Christ, which we can do any time two or three of us gather together and remember Jesus’ love for us.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll be able to enjoy some fresh strawberries during fellowship hour today, or perhaps another one of God’s delicious inventions. If so, I hope they will remind you that one day, we will be able, by the love of Jesus, to enjoy with our own imperishable bodies what a forever fresh, imperishable strawberry tastes like.

Please join me in this prayer. God, we thank you for strawberries. And we thank you for your love which preserves us and, in the end, makes us imperishable, through Jesus Christ. Amen.