May it be given to me to speak in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please do be seated.

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. This verse is very precious in our house. Jen and I pray it with Esther every night before she goes to sleep.

In fact, we have been praying it with her long before she was born, from the moment that we knew she could hear us in the womb. Long before she could walk or talk or think. Long before she could understand these words were spoken over her as a promise and a prayer.

Many of you probably learned this verse, John 3, 16, as a memory verse in Sunday school. It is one of those sentences that settles into our bones as Christians. But we also pray the next verse, verse 17 with Esther, and one that's often forgotten by the Sunday schools.

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. We pray both verses 16 and 17 because we want Esther to grow up knowing that Jesus's coming was not about condemning her for her mistakes, even if what follows afterwards is forgiveness. Jesus did not come because God was searching for someone to blame, because he was angry at us but he blamed Jesus.

Jesus came because he is God and God loves us. Simple as that. After our prayers, Esther usually falls asleep on one of us, her head resting against our chests until she's deeply enough asleep to go into her cot.

This can take anything from 20 minutes to three hours. This began when she was very little, when skin-to-skin contact was especially important for her development and we haven't quite let it go. I might let it go when she's 19 or 20.

Skin-to-skin contact is amazing. Medically, the contact steadies a baby's breathing. It regulates their temperature.

It even brings their heartbeat into rhythm with the parent's heartbeat. The two heartbeats can quite literally begin to synchronise, to become one, and this is profoundly good for the child, not just in terms of their physical health but also their mental and emotional health. It's not only babies who are made this way though.

Human beings are built for relationship. A human being might survive alone for a while but no human being flourishes alone. Relationship isn't an optional addition to human life.

It belongs to what we are. At the end of the prologue to John's Gospel, that extraordinary poem with which he begins his account of who Jesus is and why he came, we read, No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.

The English translation of this sadly loses something of the poetry of the Greek. The Greek is better rendered, It is the only Son, who is at the Father's breast, who has made him known. This is a profoundly poetic, intimate image.

A child resting against the chest of a parent, heart to heart, skin to skin. And it tells us something about who God is. Before anything was made, before light or life or the world, before space or time, there has eternally been the Father and the Son, a perfect, intimate relationship.

Their love has been eternally so perfect that it is in fact its own person, the Holy Spirit. That love has been from before anything. It is the very essence of being.

That Son who was speaking to Nicodemus in John chapter 3, the one who, he says, was given to the world by the Father, wasn't some remote emissary, not some nameless prophet. He is the one who rests at the Father's breast. The eternally beloved.

The one whose life is one with the Father's life, whose heartbeat is one with the Father's heartbeat. When I look at Esther, I can't imagine loving more than I love her. Many of you will know that feeling.

For a child or a grandchild, someone whose life feels like it's bound up with your own. It's difficult to conceive of any more love existing in the world than we have for them. What we're told in John's prologue is that the Father loves the Son in this way, and more perfectly, in fact, than we can love, at the very pinnacle of our love, because God has more capacity for love than we do.

God's capacity for love entirely exceeds mine, and so he does love the Son more than I love Esther. If the love between the Father and the Son is of that depth, if that is the love which has existed before even time began, if that love is the purpose for which the world was made, if that love is the truest thing in all existence, and yet the Father gives the Son out of love for the world, how much must he love the world? More than we can imagine. God didn't create us because he needed us.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have eternally been in perfect communion. God created us because he wanted us, and then he gave us a purpose. From the beginning of Scripture, we see God walking with humanity, speaking, calling, blessing.

Again and again, the Bible makes the same claim. Human beings are made for relationship with God. That conviction lies at the heart of why I'm a Christian, of why I'm a priest.

When I was trying to decide what I was supposed to be doing with my life, I only knew one thing, but I wanted to give my life to something true. I didn't want to give my life to money, or to companies, or to power, or even to society. All things which exist for their own sake, which pass away.

I wanted my life to mean something, to be given to something real. And what John's prologue is saying is that there is nothing more real than God's love for us. But of course, love cannot be coerced.

A relationship in which one party has no alternative but to love is not a relationship. For love to be real, it must be freely chosen. And to be freely chosen, there must be an alternative.

If we were created for relationship, we were also created to be free. And the Scriptures tell us that we have used our freedom poorly. We have chosen pride rather than trust.

Resentment rather than forgiveness. Self-protection rather than vulnerability. We have acted as though we do not need the one for whom we are made.

The result is the brokenness that we see in our world. Especially this morning in the news. The brokenness that we see in ourselves.

Our faith is the way Jesus leads us back to what we were made for. Faith is not understanding. To understand something is, in a sense, to hold it within your grasp.

If we could fully comprehend God, we would not be comprehending God, but a version of him, small enough that we could manage him. But the letter to the Hebrews tells us that faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. In that reading we heard from Romans, we're reminded of Abraham's faith.

Abraham didn't know how God's promises would be fulfilled when the promises were first made. Instead, he followed, trusting that the promises would be fulfilled and that trust, that faith was reckoned to him as righteousness. The faith came before anything else.

And the faith was hope. And the hope was trust. Not in something, but in someone.

Abraham reckoned that the one who made the promise was faithful to fulfil it, even if it seemed impossible. And this brings us back to those words that Jen and I pray every night over Esther. For God so loved the world.

Not some ideal, perfect world. This world. 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.

Humanity may have fractured the relationship for which we were made. But salvation comes not through a thing, but through a person. It comes not merely to cancel a penalty, but to restore a relationship.

In Jesus, what we're told is that God does not remain at a distance, but rather the word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. Or as the Greek literally has it, pitched his tent amongst ours. The one who has from before time rested on the Father's breast, enters not at a distance, but into the heart of our reality.

And he takes on our distance, the distance that we have created between us and God. He bears it. He overcomes it.

That is the work of the cross. Taking the distance that we put between ourselves and God and cancelling it out. This week, this Wednesday, as I celebrated our weekly midweek communion, I knelt before the sacrament and prayed the confession as I always do every week.

And I was reminded of the depth of that loving relationship. When we pray the confession, we confess because we know that we have not loved as we were created to love. We have not loved you with our whole heart.

We have not loved our neighbours as ourselves. But we are able to confess because we know that the absolution is coming in just a minute. The one before whom we kneel is the one who loved the world so much that he gave his son.

The eternally beloved loved the world so much that he came, left his father, took on the distance between us and God and undid our brokenness. I don't understand everything about God. I really hope that you don't either.

Anyone who understands God is not understanding I am. But something smaller, someone of their making. But I do pray that you're able to trust.

Trust the one who is love. Because you were made for relationship. Relationship with him.

Relationship with them. That relationship may have been broken but it is restored in Christ. To trust him is to align your life with the deepest truth of all reality.

That you exist to be loved. May we all share in faith which is this. Trust.

Not because we understand. But because we love the one who has loved us. Amen.

Amen.