March 16, 2014
Scripture:
Genesis 12:1-4a
John 3:1-17
This is the second Sunday in Lent, a time in the church year when we move through the story of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem and his eventual death. This morning we start a series of Lenten teachings using the theme of the passion and promise of Jesus as it plays out in our lectionary scriptures. In coming weeks, we will hear from Jay Forth, Christian Peale, Fred Taylor, Patty Wudel on Palm Sunday and Joseph Deck on Easter.
When we think of the part of Jesus’ story that is called the Passion, what comes to your mind? The biblical Passion Narrative is often used today to cover the whole account of Jesus’ arrest, trial and crucifixion in the four gospels. There is much suffering, but “suffering is not the point of Christ’s passion. Unconditional and emphatic love is the point of Christ’s passion. But, an inevitable by-product of confronting the powers and principalities of this world is suffering.” (Andrews, p. 53) The normal meaning of passion is “aroused, enthused or inflamed emotions” so, I want us to focus on what was Jesus’ passion. There is a passion burning in Jesus’ soul, a “liberating spirituality (Harding), a call, a vocation that defines the very heart of who he is. Nothing seemingly can dissuade him. His passionate commitment, his “holy must” (Andrews, p. 25) fed the promise that he offered to his early followers and future generations.
Both passion and promise figure in today’s reading from Genesis. God first gives Abram travel directions, commanding him to go to a new land. Then, God promises him a blessing. If Abram had no passion or feelings stirring within him, do you think he would have left, moved out and on? I think not. His passions might have been restlessness, a feeling of imbalance, yearning for a deeper, fuller life and a willingness to risk.
In December of 1971 at the end of the morning service at the C of S, a young woman named Katie Bull got up and issued a call. She talked with passion about the tens of thousands of adults in DC who could not read or were struggling readers. She issued a call for a new mission group, to “teach and to heal at the point of literacy”. I listened, stunned and outraged. How could this be? It felt like I was blown over by a wind. I was a public school teacher, and it had never occurred to me that some of the parents of the young people I taught perhaps could barely read. Maybe, it took Abram time to pull up stakes and leave for the new land when God called him to leave. It took me 18 months before I had a vision that made it clear to me that I had to join that mission; that this was a “holy MUST” I had to act on. I did and that response set me on a path that opened me to learning on a very steep and long curve.
I had to learn how to work with a community in which I was a minority white person. I had to learn how to listen to people whose backs were "up against the wall" as Howard Thurman put it. I had to learn how to teach and encourage people who really wanted to learn to read, who had almost given up and lacked confidence and support systems. I had to learn how to teach in a different way and to figure out how and why what I was doing wasn't working. And, then I had to learn what to do when my adult students and others in the community asked me to help them help their kids because these parents knew their kids were failing and that the school system was failing them.
I also began to realize that I feared failing and was always close to it, feeling it much of the time. I needed to learn how to learn from failure. On top of this, I had to learn how to run a non-profit organization when there was a leadership vacuum. Ongoing anxiety, the desire to quit, tears and doubts, situational unemployment, and wondering why this mission of not just teaching but healing was such a Holy MUST. This was a Passion, that challenged and sometimes assaulted, me. It would not let me go. It still hasn’t. Yet, there always remained the promise. The promise of my passion has been born out over many years in small, but sometimes dramatic, ways:
- Adult learners who finally reach their goals because I taught them. or directed them to places where they could get help.
- People who come back to thank me for being an important catalyst in their lives.
- Helping the DC Public Library build a sustaining and vibrant service to those in our city who have literacy needs.
- Engaging with impassioned and committed adult literacy colleagues, teachers and advocates who energize me and have recently challenged the city and the City Council to seriously the reality of adult literacy and educational equity in our city. And, there are about 90,000 adults in our city with serious literacy needs.
Passion and promise also figure in Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus in today’s reading from the gospel of John. So, I want to read a portion of this story as Eugene Peterson tells it in The Message. I think this story should be titled "I want life. Show me how to die." We voice that imperative every week in our worship liturgy.
1 There was a man of the Pharisee sect, Nicodemus, a prominent leader among the Jews. 2 Late one night he visited Jesus and said, "Rabbi, we all know you're a teacher straight from God. No one could do all the God-pointing, God-revealing acts you do if God weren't in on it." 3 Jesus said, "You're absolutely right. Take it from me. Unless a person is born from above, it's not possible to see what I'm pointing to- to God's kingdom." 4 "How can anyone," said Nicodemus, "be born who has already been born and grown up? You can’t enter your mother’s womb and be born again. What are you saying with this 'born-from-above' talk?" 5 Jesus said, "You're not listening. Let me say it again. Unless a person submits to this original creation -the 'wind hovering over the water' creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into a new life - it's not possible to enter God's kingdom. 6 When you look at a baby, it's just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can't see and touch - the Spirit - and becomes a living spirit. 7 "So don't be so surprised when I tell you that you have to be 'born from above' - out of this world, so to speak. 8 You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it's headed next. That's the way it is with everyone 'born from above' by the wind of God, the Spirit of God." 9 Nicodemus asked, "What do you mean by this? How does this happen?" 10 Jesus said, "You're a respected teacher of Israel and you don't know these basics? 11 Listen carefully. I'm speaking sober truth to you. I speak only of what I know by experience; I give witness only to what I have seen with my own eyes. There is nothing secondhand here, no hearsay. Yet instead of facing the evidence and accepting it, you procrastinate with questions. 12 If I tell you things that are plain as the hand before your face and you don't believe me, what use is there in telling you of things you can't see, the things of God?
Nicodemus, a Pharisee is a leader of the Jews, sits on the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Council. In this story he represents not just himself but those others who need signs to bolster their faith or those who are fearful of being put out the synagogue or of confessing Jesus as the Messiah. If we put ourselves in this story, and we should, Nicodemus may carry our fears, timidity, hypocrisy and doubts. Can we like Nicodemus entertain the challenge of giving up our ideas “about God and the authority that arises . . . from previous commitments and cultural status.” (H-B, 1993b, 25) Can we act on a passion stirring within us? Though Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, for reasons of safety, I assume, he does take a first step; he’s very curious about Jesus and his message. He’s likely wondering what is Jesus’ passion; what promise is Jesus pointing toward.
Jesus seems gracious and patient but doesn’t respond to Nicodemus’ desire to discuss signs of divinity. Signs are not what John's community is about. Jesus tells Nicodemus that this call to a different life or kingdom that he is sensing will become real through a process of rebirth. Nicodemus hears the words but doesn’t comprehend; he doesn’t get the metaphor of being born again.
This is the only passage in John in which the term “kingdom of God” is used. Jesus says to Nicodemus: “I tell you no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above [born anew]” (3:3) I think that Jesus/John’s community was saying that you/we must live with passion in this kingdom to see it, and you can’t do that unless you take action to let God’s spirit be reborn in you and then risk responding, risk doing something and living into this kingdom of unconditional and emphatic love. Like Abraham who left his “home” to go to a land that God would show him, Nicodemus could also be a “word made flesh.” Jesus is trying to paint an image or promise of a different, but also an obvious kingdom that he knows already exists. Jesus’ passion in part is: that God has shown up and that the Kingdom has come, and this is a reality that John’s community passionately believes in and practices.
Before we encounter Nicodemus’s meeting with Jesus, the writer of John’s gospel has shared an amazing opening to his larger story. God’s son, embodied in Jesus, has existed with God from the beginning. The poem in John says that the “word became flesh and lived among us.” (1:14) The opening words in this gospel are majestic and poetic. However, as John continues to weave his story, he will invite us into a living kingdom, a community animated by Jesus who “befriends others and commands them to be friends to one another.” (Ringe, 2) The poem is followed by the testimony of John, the Baptist who names Jesus as the “Lamb of God” and states to the Pharisaic inquisitors that he, John, has “seen and testified that this [Jesus] is the Son of God.” (1:34) Next, two of John’s disciples quickly leave to follow Jesus; one of these disciples, Andrew, recruits his brother Simon Peter, saying to him, “We have found the Messiah.” (1:41) Two other disciples, Philip and Nathanael, immediately join up, acknowledging Jesus as the “son of God, the King of Israel.” (1:49) The Wedding at Cana and the cleansing of the Temple during Passover occur next. Chapter 2 ends with these words that serve as a transition to the story of Nicodemus:
When he [Jesus] was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing, but Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone. (2:23-25)
Jesus and John’s community invite/urge Nicodemus to join the community where the spirit says you must publicly and with passion witness to an embodied life of love and action and witness. You can’t keep skulking about in the dark. Does Nicodemus become a disciple, a child of a God?” Does he align himself with this community that has been born “anew’? We never know for sure. The story does tell us that he later cautions the Pharisees against judging Jesus without a hearing (7:50). And, after Jesus’s death, Nicodemus finally appears with Joseph of Arimathea, a “secret disciple” [of Jesus] to prepare Jesus’s body for burial (19 ). Perhaps, Nicodemus spends the rest of his life trying to figure out the meaning of being born “anew” or “again.” Perhaps, the wind of the Spirit blows his fears away and he makes a choice to risk going public. Perhaps, “when after Jesus death, he heard the next day that some of the disciples had seen Jesus alive again, he wept like a newborn baby”. (Buechner, Peculiar Treasures, 137-8)
For John’s community, new birth would have meant being born into a community committed to following Jesus as the incarnation of God’s love, power and presence on earth. Joining this community, entering the kingdom, meant a journey of risk-taking discipleship, not as hero’s quest, but as the community’s commitment together in a world, an empire, where things often seemed to be getting worse.
We need passion and commitment to stand against the suffering and tragedies of the world. But as our passion becomes and sustains action, we live into promise. It’s the promise of moving to a new land, of building and shaping communities and institutions and services that strive to embody the unconditional and emphatic love that was the point of Christ’s passion.
Whether you think of passion as divine fire which draws you to a new land or place, or as suffering that breaks open your heart, or as a gale-force wind clearing a path forward into a new land, I hope we keep both passion, aroused, enthused, inflamed emotion, and promise, Jesus' liberating message of unconditional and emphatic love in our hearts and minds.
And, ask yourself, in this time of Lent, how does Jesus' passion come alive for you and us as a community? And, how are you/we living into the promise of blessing that comes from moving into a new land? I think that was the challenge that Jesus' earliest followers faced. That is also the challenge that we face today.
8 You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it's headed next. That's the way it is with everyone 'born from above' by the wind of God, the Spirit of God."
Amen
Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman
Peculiar Treasures by Frederick Buechner
The Tears of God, Jesus as Passion and Promise by Susan Andrews