2nd Sunday in Lent, February 17, 2008, “Series A”
Grace be unto you and peace, from God our Father and from our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Let us pray: Dear Heavenly Father, in our baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus, your beloved Son, you have redeemed us from sin and death, and claimed us as your own. Through the power of your Holy Spirit, help us to realize that our new birth in baptism continues to unfold throughout our lives, and that you will never abandon us. This we ask, in Christ’s holy name. Amen.
In his commentary on our Gospel lesson for this morning, Thomas G. Long cites that the famed preacher, Fred Craddock, often described the tendency for us humans to try to shrink the Christian faith to a manageable size, to fit it into the tiny boxes of our impoverished religious imagination.
He says that with sharp wit, Craddock tells of people who have boiled the Christian faith down to slogans, of those who have taken the spacious and infinite promises of God and reduced them to bumper stickers. For example, he says that this shrink-wrapped faith is easy to identify when the back bumper of a car reads “God Is My Co-pilot,” to which Craddock adds, “So, Mr. Driver, that must mean that you are the pilot. I think I’ll take another flight.”
And how often these boiled down slogans truly miss the point of our faith.
For instance, Craddock describes a grinning seminary student who ambles mindlessly up to the theology professor, who had just delivered a passionate, sweat-drenched lecture on the mysterious depths of God’s unmerited grace. And what does he say? “Hey prof, I guess it boils down to ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ right?” [Pulpit Resource, Logos Productions, 1999]
This morning’s gospel is a familiar text. And like all familiar stories from the Bible, we often have this tendency to presume that, since we have heard it before, we already know what it means. And yet, as I have entered the last decade of my active ministry, I have begun to take a new look at these texts, in the hope that they might surprise me with new insight. After all, as I read some of my older sermons in preparation for preaching, I don’t very often find them very helpful.
And perhaps this is where we might enter our Gospel lesson for this morning. I have found over the years that God’s Spirit is continually challenging us to expand our preconceived understanding of Scripture, to help us grow in faith. In other words, God’s Spirit helps us to break open those tiny boxes that Craddock describes, to gain a glimpse of the infinite promises of God.
And to this end, we might do well to consider how we might identify with Nicodemus. Here was a man who was highly versed in the Scriptures. He was a leader of the Jews, perhaps a member of the Sanhedrin, the group that decided issues of faith for the life of Israel. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, and says to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God’ for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”
As Thomas Long puts it, “Nicodemus establishes the conversation on grounds save and comfortable to himself: a conversation between established authorities. He gives Jesus the title “rabbi…teacher.” But he speaks as one who has power and tradition on his side. “We know…” he says, speaking for and from the established group, confident. He brings to the table a fixed understanding of what can and what cannot happen in the world and in human experience.
Thus, the very opening lines of this story present Nicodemus as the spokesperson of a fixed, immutable world, confident of its knowledge and closed to the surprising and the new. The rest of the story, and of the whole Gospel of John, is about that tightly bound world coming unraveled. At each turn in the road, Jesus confronts Nicodemus’ boxed view of reality.” End quote.
And how does Jesus confront those closed boxes of Nicodemus’ fixed understanding of the Scriptures? He tells Nicodemus that “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
Nicodemus responds to Jesus by asking, “How can one be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be reborn? Nicodemus, it seems, is totally confused by Jesus’ statement. But then, we shouldn’t blame him. The Greek word that John records Jesus using here, “anothen,” can have two connotations. One spatial, meaning “from above.” The other temporal, meaning “again.” Thus, Nicodemus could easily have taken our Lord’s statement in earthly terms. Nevertheless, his box of preconceived ideas was shaken.
We mainline Protestant churches do not talk much about the idea of being “born from above.” And we have good reason not to dwell on it, because the New Testament does not dwell on it. The word “anothen” occurs only twice in the entire New Testament, and both of them are in this passage. But you would never know this by some Christians. They have turned this phrase into a box of their own, thinking they captured what it means.
Personally, I believe that the mainline Christian Church is correct in not emphasizing “being born from above” as an event in ones life that needs to occur in order to see the kingdom of God. And I say this, not because of the phrase’s double meaning, but because as it appears in the Greek in which this text was written, the phrase involves a present participle, meaning that it is an ongoing process. It does not describe a one-time event.
As a result, our church stresses the concept that John Ylvisaker captured in the hymn we just sang, “I Was There to Here Your Borning Cry.” The phrase is correctly translated “borning from above, or being born.” It implies an ongoing process of our rebirth by God’s Spirit, throughout our life.
Albert G Butzer, in his book Tears of Sadness, Tears of Gladness, picks up on the ongoing process of being born from above, as he relates it to the explanation Jesus gives of the phrase. Jesus says to Nicodemus, being born from above is a lot like the wind. “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Butzer writes: “The winds on the Chesapeake Bay where I sail, are not very predictable. One day they will blow down from the North, another day from the Southwest. On still another day, a sea breeze off the Atlantic will fill in from the Southeast. As a result, you never know what to expect.
The wind of the Spirit is like the wind on the Chesapeake: subtle, mysterious, always changing, rarely the same two days in a row. It is the wind – the wind of the Spirit – which can blow into your life and mine in ways that are so subtle that you hardly notice until one day you open your eyes and begin to see things differently.” End quote.
And this is what happened to Nicodemus. Even though he thought he had a deep understanding of what it meant to be a person of God, even though he was a theological scholar and a member of the Sanhedrin, the Spirit of God continued to challenge those tiny boxes in which he had put his trust, and at the end of John’s Gospel, Nicodemus again appears, as a disciple of Jesus, who worshipfully cares for his dead body.
As our hymn began, “I was there to hear your borning cry, I’ll be there when you are old…” The Spirit of God is like the wind. It comes and goes, constantly challenging our attempts to confine and minimize our conception of the Gospel. It is the promise of God to walk with us throughout our life, ever opening new doors to understanding his grace at work among us. Thanks be to God.
Amen.
