Fearlessly Born Anew: Sermon for the 2nd Sunday in Lent A

That verse is just sitting right there, staring at all of us. You know the verse I'm talking about. The one that gets waved on banners in the end zones of football games, that gets written onto the face paint of sports fans and athletes. The one that even people who would admit that they are pretty much Biblically illiterate can probably at least say part of. John 3:16:

 “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.” 

Yep, that one. The one that too often gets used as a battering ram against people. Especially when someone tries to use it to scare someone else into professing faith in Jesus, and everybody knows that Jesus reminded us repeatedly that faith and fear are pretty much antithetical. The one whose meaning gets changed unless you consider the verse that comes after it: 

 “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.” 

Taken together, this is a summary of the gospel: God loved the world so much that God sent God’s precious Son to show us how to live by meeting us where we are. 

The point of these two verses is to remind us of how much God loves us and indeed how much God wants us to love God. And we have to acknowledge that the word believe itself comes with a whole lot of baggage in today's world. I once had a misanthrope tell me that the word “lie” is in the middle of the word “believe.” Yet that claim forgets that the origin of the word belief comes from the German word “belieben,” that means “to love.” It's all about relationship. It's all about faith and love. 

Folks often forget that these verses originated with someone who was considered to be wise coming to Jesus to ask for help in understanding how God was working in his life. John 3:16 and 17 are about always giving thanks and praise that God is determined to meet us where we are. And that's where Nicodemus comes in.

Nicodemus, as a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, the ruling body of Israel, has a lot to lose by allying with Jesus in the light of day. Nicodemus, just like all of us, is hobbled by thinking he knows who Jesus is, as well, which means he could be blinded by his own certainty, as we all can be. Nicodemus occupies a position of power and influence. He is a man whose wisdom and leadership are held up as exemplary. Yet he has been brave enough to come to Jesus, even in the dark of night, because he obviously has questions that are going unmet and unanswered. 

And that possibility is emphasized by the fact that John portrays Nicodemus as coming to Jesus in the night. Some say it’s because he is a member of the Sanhedrin, and he doesn’t want to be caught talking with this disreputable preacher. But nonetheless Nicodemus begins by expressing faith that Jesus has been sent by God. There’s a little glimmer of light in the night there. 

Light and darkness are important themes in John’s gospel. Nicodemus comes in the night also because he lacks true understanding of who Jesus is, but at least he is straining toward the light. Right now, he sees Jesus as a sort of faith-healer. Nicodemus points to certain signs—and signs are very important in the gospel of John. He is willing to admit that Jesus is a healer, a miracle-worker, and a teacher-- but that is as far on the journey of faith as he can go on his own. Will he eventually commit to Jesus and have true faith? You could skip to the other mentions of him to find out, but we have other matters to consider today. 

Jesus talks to Nicodemus about rebirth—“from above” and “of water and Spirit.” In response, Nicodemus gets stuck on the literal image of the metaphor—and let’s be honest, how many of us would go back to being a child again? Howard Nemerov, twice the poet laureate of the US and long a professor at Wash U here in St. Louis, captures Nicodemus’s skepticism toward the concept beautifully in his poem, “Nicodemus”: Nicodemus replies to Jesus: 

Rabbi, all things in the springtime 
Flower again, but a man may not 
Flower again. I regret 
The sweet smell of lilacs and the new grass
And the shoots put forth of the cedar
When we are done with the long winter.

Rabbi, sorrow has mothered me
And humiliation been my father,
But neither the ways of the flesh
Nor the pride of the spirit took me,
And I am exalted in Israel
For all that I know I do not know.(1)

Jesus emphasizes that the life of a Christian is a completely new life—as committing to a life of discipleship always is. Jesus’s call for rebirth is a call to allow a new creation to take place within us through God’s power. As we are reminded in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” Nicodemus is making his way through the night, and is humble enough to admit what he knows may be incomplete. Truly the sign of a wise person.

Nicodemus’s confusion is completely understandable, and that Jesus leaves it that way so that Nicodemus can wrestle for himself with understanding. We also have to remember that we’ve had a chance to read this passage hundreds of times—which sometimes mutes the confusion MOST would feel at these teachings.

Nicodemus is an acknowledged leader who could rightfully claim the title of “son of Abraham.” If Nicodemus or any of us consider what being a descendant of Abraham really means, we will remember that Abraham, back when he was just two syllable Abram, heard the voice of God from within his soul speak so convincingly that even as his molars still rattled from the conversation, he packed up wife and cattle and nephew and headed to an unknown land. In doing so he left behind all he had ever known.

As the apostle Paul reminds us, it was not Abram’s works that made him righteous but his belief in God. It was not the walking to Canaan with Lot and his household that was important. It was having faith in what God was telling him that made Abraham righteous. Abraham’s faith was what enabled him to journey fearlessly toward the new life into which God called him. Abram was willing to set out in a kind of darkness, too, and walk toward the light of a land he had never been seen and only been promised. And that’s a powerful metaphor for the life of faith.

Most of us cannot imagine abandoning everyone we’ve ever known on the say-so of a voice we’ve never heard before, though. Nicodemus, in a bit more understandable way, models for us the person who hears a call and acts upon it. And it is here that Nicodemus becomes our own teacher, all these centuries later.

How often do we let the negative bass trombone voice in our heads tell us failure is inevitable and convince us not to try but instead prepare for the end? How often do we cling to the wounds of our past, maybe because they are familiar, or maybe because they give us an excuse for our own choices, rather than releasing them? How often do we hold a new person in a place accountable for a history that they had no part in making, or assume that just because ONE person in authority hurt us that it will inevitably happen again?

There is a crisis in our communities right now, friends—and it has nothing to do with a virus. It starts with emphasizing our self-interest so much that we forget that we are made for relationship with God and relationship with each other. It starts with using people as objects. But it also comes from a place where we refuse to take that first step in the dark. We cling to what is familiar—even if it doesn’t serve us well.

Many people who have turned away from faith communities have done so because those faith communities have become less about faith and hope and more about influence and power. In too many cases, the institutional church has modelled itself too legalistically, forgetting that that was what Jesus came to reform. Somewhere along the line, society has forgotten about how to care for each other—and that’s why the church itself is being called to be reborn. It was for a moment such as this that we were made.

It comes down to this very basic question, even here in the midst of Lent: Are we a resurrection people or not?

Can we embody faith, hope, and love, even when the world scoffs? Can we be fearlessly reborn, or will we stay mired in the old patterns that also, coincidentally, keep us in the dark and miserable? Can we let go of the parts of our memories that make us fearful, or bitter, or cynical to open our hearts to receive something infinitely better and sweeter?

The life of faith offers us the courage to be reborn: to shed the broken, self-dealing ways of the world where we are miserable because we walk around with blinders on in favor of something better, something that draws our eyes above our own narrow concerns to the hills and above, as our psalm today reminds us.

As a community, as a parish, as a diocese, as a denomination, as disciples, we are all searching for answers in changing times. Yet Jesus’s call to be fearlessly willing to seize the hope of God’s kingdom being possible right now is the essence of the Christian life. We are called to reject those who speak glibly of doom—but we also then have to commit to working for change, for hope, for resurrection for rebirth. To be light in the darkness. To be fearlessly reborn by letting the Spirit loose within our lives.

It just requires taking that first step.

Amen.

Preached at the 505 on March 7, and at the 8:00 and 10:30 Eucharists on March 8, 2020, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.

Readings:
Genesis 12:1-4a
Psalm 121
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17

References:
1) Howard Nemerov, "Nicodemus," in The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov, 1977.

Beyond Belief: Sermon for the 1st Sunday in Advent, Year A

Why is it, we all must wonder, that the start of the liturgical year—Year A, even, in the three -year cycle—begins with talking about the end? And I don’t mean like reading the last page of a book first kind of end, but THE END. We begin with a vision of the final judgment at Jesus’s second coming, the one we proclaim about in the Nicene Creed that will be when Jesus “will come again in great glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.” His kingdom—you know, the thing we celebrated last Sunday.

Eschatology is that branch of theology which deals with “the study of the end of things” (“eschatos” means “last”). The gospel reading for this week is eschatological, as it is traditional for Advent to begin with a gospel reading that deals with this subject. 

It is the end of Year C and the beginning of Year A. It is the end of the Season after Pentecost, also known as “Ordinary Time.” And indeed, Advent reminds us that we do not live in ordinary time during this month of preparation that is at once both joyful and solemn. Thus, in this Advent reading, we have a discussion of the end times, right as we balance upon the edge of the beginning.

This passage we read from Matthew’s gospel today itself was one that was quoted to me often in my childhood churches. Many of them talked often about the “end-times,” and this was one of their favorite images: two people will be working side by side, and one will be taken and the other “left behind” when Jesus makes his “second coming.” 

I didn’t like hearing that back then any more than I imagine you do. It didn’t help when my mother tried to scare the living hell out of me-- yes, I mean it-- by taking me to see some low-budget alleged “documentary”—notice the air quotes I used with my fingers when I said that word— called A Thief in the Night, about what the earth would be like for those who were “left behind.”

Nuclear war, disease, disruption and yes, even mutants—these were all the fates awaiting those who were left after Jesus took the faithful bodily up to heaven and left everyone else down here on earth to suffer—which didn’t square with what I knew about Jesus, either. This one imagined that the United Nations became a tool of Satan during his reign on earth and forced everyone to wear “the Mark” or face execution by guillotine, because why not a guillotine? I remember sitting with my big-haired mama in a darkened movie theatre with a bunch of other families with their big-haired mamas as they, I guess, tried to scare their kids into being “born again.”

It didn’t help that the preacher behind this series of films—yes, he managed to get FOUR of these pieces of cheesy garbage made and actually watched by millions of people—always cast himself in the movies and he looked like Grampa from the Waltons but talked like Oral Roberts when he REALLY got wound up. 

So I sat there in the dark with my arms crossed against my chest, slouched down in my seat eating the margarine-drenched popcorn my mom had brought into the theatre in a grocery sack and waited for it to be all over. I was waiting for, you know, it to end. And then I struggled not to laugh at the absurdity of waiting for a movie about the End Times to end for the last hour, because I was sitting next to a bunch of people who believed that this movie was the best chance to save our souls. 

The problem I had with the strategy behind this movie was that it put all the emphasis on the end. It really didn’t matter HOW you lived your life—so long as you personally accepted Jesus as your savior. You could still be mean to people, and make fun of the poor and hate foreigners and refugees—and I knew people who smugly assured me that they were “saved” who did all those things while also assuring me that the Buddhist family in the newspaper were all doomed to hell even though they cooked Thanksgiving meals for the homeless in their restaurant every year. You could look down your nose at those different from you all day long, only just as long as you believed in Jesus, you would go to heaven, these movies subtly and not so subtly told us. 

But when we look at the message of the gospels in their entirety, we see a Jesus who called us to be disciples during our lives right now—to heal the sick and feed the multitudes and welcome the outcast.

For all of this talk about Jesus coming again like a thief in the night in Matthew 24, there’s the outline of what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus in Matthew 25, where the king judges the nations based on whether they cared for the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the prisoner, and the stranger.

For every place in the scriptures that it talks about Jesus’s second coming, there’s many times as much of an emphasis that Jesus’s birth and life already initiated the coming near of the Kingdom of God.

The judgment spoken of in our gospel passage today reminds us that judgment and justice, both tempered by grace and mercy, are two sides of the reign of Jesus. When Jesus comes to judge us, he will judge us on how well we embodied justice and mercy for those who are forced to the margins in this world we have made and of which we are a part. These people who assured me that they were saved when the rapture came also loved to quote scraps of scripture about terrifying prophecies and about a vengeful God,  one without mercy. But in John 5:39-42, Jesus accuses those who profess their own faithfulness but hollow out their responsibility to others with this observation: ‘You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life. I do not accept glory from human beings. But I know that you do not have the love of God in you.'

That movie may not have taught me anything about God. But today I went with my husband and our daughters to see the new movie about Mr. Rogers called A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I had heard about how this movie made grown adults cry, including my oldest. But Mr. Rogers was one of the spiritual gurus of my childhood, and so we went.

I was fine until we got to a scene where Mr. Rogers and the cynical writer who is interviewing him are riding the subway in New York. The full range of humanity was in that subway car around them. But all of a sudden a teenager called out, “Hey—Mr. Rogers!” in kind of a tough voice. But when they got his attention, these oh-so-cool teens started singing Mr. Rogers’ theme song, “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” By the time they get through the middle of the first verse, the entire car, including cops and tough guys, was singing along, “Won’t you please? Won’t you please? Please won’t you be my neighbor?” And boom—cue the waterworks.

I thought about how Mr. Rogers embodied Jesus for me, long before I knew he was a Presbyterian minister. I thought about how he was a dependable, calming influence in a time of great chaos in my own life. How he talked about how he liked each of us just the way we are. How he embodied a life of faithful witness without ever saying the name of Jesus even once.

Just like Mr. Rogers, Jesus calls us to be faithful, and Christianity as a whole is judged in our world based on how faithfully we embody the love of God within us, how prayerfully we embody the command to love God and love each other, to have love in our hearts or else faith is nothing. The call of Jesus to us is to embody Jesus’s teachings so faithfully that, as one of my favorite hymns of childhood goes, “They will know we are Christians by our love.”

“Belief” in Jesus isn’t just about heaven and the end times. It’s not just about grabbing a magic ticket to save yourself. Belief in Jesus is about having LIFE, and having it more abundantly, right now.  It’s about transforming our lives through joy, and then using those lives transformed by love to do nothing less than transform the world. 

Jesus calls us to go beyond belief to discipleship. Belief in Jesus is most importantly a call to work for the repair of the world. Belief in Jesus is about nothing if it is not directed outwardly toward those around us—that’s why there are so many commands to love one another in scripture.

Belief in Jesus is nothing if it is not transformative, leading to making us not just fans out to save our own necks, but disciples. Discipleship is about transformation of our lives and our relationships with each other, especially the marginalized, the oppressed, and the helpless, right now. It’s about working to bring the kingdom of God into being the kin-dom of God, to recognize each other as beloved children of the One Who Made Us and Loves Us.

Jesus calls us to be ready. To be ready and watchful, for Christ appears in ten thousand places. But he also calls us to transform our hearts so that we can see him here with us now. He appears—right now-- among those we easily overlook. He appears among those the rest of the world seeks to turn away, among those whose outstretched hand is sneered at not as a plea for help but as a con. He appears among those who are carrying burdens we can never see and may not understand. He appears in the vesture of those whom we tell ourselves are not truly needy or deserving of our time or attention. 

Jesus leaves no one behind, but calls the world unto himself and to his life of joyful care for each other. 

The days grow short—quite literally—as we hear these words. Yet the sure and certain promise that carries us through this darkness is that even in the darkest of nights, the light of a single candle can be seen for miles. Even when we talk about Jesus’s second coming, we are reminded that he is risen and with us even right now, calling us into deeper bonds of kinship and companionship with each other.

Amen.

Preached at the 505 on November 30, and at 8:00 and 10:30 am on December 1, 2019, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.


Readings:
Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44