August 3, 2014

St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Bovina, MS

Year A, Season after Pentecost, Proper 13, Matthew 14:13-21

            A couple of nights ago my four- and three-year-old nephews got into a bit of a struggle over some toy trains. Harris, the three-year-old, was not really interested in sharing any of his many, many trains with his older cousin, Brooks. My sister asked Harris, “Does sharing make you scared? It’s okay. There’s plenty for both y’all. You don’t have to be scared.”

            In some ways that’s a really good crystallization of our gospel lesson this morning. You don’t have to worry. There’s enough for everyone. The you there being the disciples, as well as all of us here. You don’t have to be scared. There is plenty to share, and we don’t have to fear doing so. There is more than enough. There is always more than enough.

            It’s a good message and one we need to be reminded of again and again. And maybe that’s why this weird story of the multiplication of five loaves of bread and two fish that fill everyone—that fill five thousand men, plus all the uncounted women and children—this strange math that fills five thousand plus and leaves twelve baskets full of leftovers—maybe that’s why this is the only miracle story included in all four gospels.

            This message of sharing and plenty is one we need to be reminded of over and over, but of course it’s not a message that’s easy to hear. It is, after all, a message that runs counter to everything the world teaches us, especially since it just doesn’t make sense, this story. How could anyone possible satisfy thousands with such meager resources? And really, if I’m honest with myself, it’s not a message I much want to hear. At my core, like my nephew, I just don’t want to share. It’s far easier not to. It’s far easier to follow the lead of the disciples, who, rather than offer what they have, urge Jesus to send the crowd home.

            Dismissing the crowd makes really good sense, after all. Jesus had to be tired and not only that but he was grieving and probably a little scared himself. He had just heard about the beheading of John the Baptist, his cousin, who had announced Jesus’ coming and baptized Jesus in the Jordan. John had been beheaded by Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, on a whim, and Jesus, hearing the news, had drifted off in a boat to pray alone at some deserted place. But having begun a ministry of healing across Galilee, Jesus was highly sought after by a hurting crowd, who yearned for the healing that only he could offer. And so, five thousand men and likely thousands more women and children, followed after him on foot. And Jesus, mourning for John and perhaps fearing for his own life, nevertheless hurt for the crowd, his heart broke for them, and he healed the sick among them.

            Hadn’t he done enough? Weren’t the disciples right? Doesn’t dismissing the crowd make really good sense? Night was falling and Jesus had been with the crowd for a while. Why not send them on their way, back to their villages to find food for themselves?

            But here is the thing. We need reminding of this story again and again, I think, because it is a reminder not only that there is plenty to share, but that all that we have is of God, and that we worship a God abounding in compassion for us. God cares for us deeply and Jesus shows us that here in his desire to physically feed those who follow him. And not only that, but God’s compassion transforms us to be able to share with a hurting and needy world—a world hungry for the good news of God’s love.

            There are no doubt a number of theories about the nature of the miracle of the “Feeding of the 5,000.” Perhaps Jesus literally did multiply the loaves and fish, or perhaps Jesus fed a few in the wilderness, and over the few centuries between Jesus’ life and the time the gospels were written the story grew, or maybe the story is simply meant to symbolize the spiritual way in which God feeds us. One popular modern interpretation, that you perhaps have heard, is that everyone in the crowd had a little to offer in his or her pocket and so when everyone shared freely, there was more than enough to go around. Maybe that was the case, but the logistics of the multiplication of food don’t seem to be nearly as important as the transformation of hearts. As one Lutheran pastor puts it, “It’s not that one should doubt Jeusus’ ability to multiply food supplies out of thin air, it’s that curing  thankless, stingy hearts might be the more significant miracle, in the first place.”[1]

            My sister’s words to my nephew about the trains stuck with me, I think, because sharing really is scary. My heart can be pretty thankless and stingy. I don’t, on my own, want to share—my time, my talents, my money. I’m afraid there perhaps won’t be enough left for me. Perhaps, for example, if I volunteer at the jail, I won’t have enough time to both read what I need to read for school and hang out with my friends, or if I give more to Episcopal Relief and Development, I won’t have enough to buy those snow boots I was hoping to get to make it through one more winter at Virginia Seminary.  My heart, left to its own devices, is thankless and stingy, and like the disciples, I can think of really good reasons to dismiss the hungry crowd.  

            Jesus tells them, when they urge them to send the crowd home so that the people can eat, Jesus tells the disciples, “You give them something to eat.” How utterly frightening. No wonder they questioned him. “We only have so much,
 they said. “Not enough,” they said.

            Jesus, however, shows them that there is plenty. In language foreshadowing the Eucharist, he takes what the disciples have, blesses it, breaks it open, and gives it back to them to share with the crowd gathered round them.   

            A few months ago, at our Virginia Seminary middler class retreat, Bishop Ted Gulick, who was a classmate of Bishop Gray’s at Virginia Seminary, told my class that as Christians, we are to be the Eucharist for the world, our hearts broken open and shared with a hurting world. We are enough, he said. We are the Eucharist, the bread of life, and broken open and given to a hurting world. Blessed by God to do so. As if the thought of sharing resources wasn’t scary enough, the thought of sharing myself with a hurting world is that much more so. It can be, of course, overwhelming. It can be paralyzing.

            But as Roman Catholic Bishop Ken Untener wrote in his “Prayer for Oscar Romero,” “We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.”[2]

            But I pray for the ability for all of us this morning to allow the Lord’s grace to enter in. I pray for the ability to give all that we have and all that we are over to God so that God may take it, bless, break it open and give it back through us to a hurting world. I pray for this since what our gospel lesson teaches us, what the entirety of Scripture teaches us, is that when we give all that we have and all that we are over to God, we are transformed by the overwhelming love of God. We are, like the disciples, made able to work miracles.

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[1] Gil Bailey, http://girardianlectionary.net/year_a/proper13a.htm

[2] http://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/prayers-and-devotions/prayers/archbishop_romero_prayer.cfm

July 13, 2014

St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Jackson, MS

Year A,  Season After Pentecost, Proper 10, Matthew 13:1-9, 18-24

            Why does Jesus so confound us? I realize, of course, that maybe it’s just me. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really get the parable we just heard, and Jesus’ explanation doesn’t really help me much, either. I spent a lot time thinking about this parable and Jesus’ explanation of it, a lot of time rereading this parable, a lot of time consulting Biblical scholars on this parable, and even took a class on preaching the parables last spring, and still am not really sure what Jesus is talking about. There’s so much he doesn’t say, so much he doesn’t explain.

            And while it’s a minor consolation, I do find some comfort in the fact that I am not alone on this. The crowd gathered on the shore of the Sea of Galilee to listen to Jesus as he teaches from a boat and goes on about sowing and terrain—that crowd does not really understand what Jesus is talking about, either. And we don’t hear that as part of our lectionary text this morning, but it’s there in the verses that we skip over. The crowd is confused and the disciples are confused about why Jesus is confusing the crowd with parables of all things. And then Jesus quotes Isaiah to say that some people just won’t understand, and we’re not clear if that is merely a description of how things are going for Jesus and will continue to go in Matthew’s gospel or if this is how God has made the world to be. Again, it’s all very confusing.

            This is a difficult text, and even really learned modern-day scholars concede as much. Why is it so difficult? I want an answer.

            Of course Jesus tells us that the seeds are like people who hear the “word of the kingdom” and that makes sense, in and of itself. There are those who are like the seed that falls on the hard path, the ones who hear but do not understand. There are those who are like the seed on the rocky ground, the ones who hear and are on fire for Jesus for a time but then fall away. There are those who are like the seed that fall among the thorns, who hear and but would rather just not bother. And, last of course, there are those who hear and understand, and so bear fruit. All of this in and of itself makes sense.

            But I want to know why so many seeds are lost to places where there is no chance of their coming to fruition. Why are so many seeds devoured or scorched or choked and so bear no fruit?

            Of course parables aren’t riddles—I did learn that in my class—and they don’t have answers. They don’t have easy solutions. Instead, the parables of Jesus often challenge and confound us. The parables, like Jesus, challenge and confound us.

            And probably that’s not a bad thing. In fact, I’m certain it’s a good thing.

            There’s one other really big thing that happens in the verses that we skip over in the lectionary. Jesus blesses the disciples. Just before he gives his explanation of the parable, he tells the disciples that they are blessed because they see and hear (13:16). They are blessed because they get it. They get it—they understand—and they follow him. Or maybe they follow him and so they understand.

            Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian and ethicist up at Duke, writes that the “disciples are the good soil upon which the seeds of the kingdom have been spread,” and “we know that they are good soil, because if they were not, we would not be the church of Jesus Christ.”[1] And he goes on to say something really important, I think. He says that the “soil that the disciples are is fertile because the disciples are not afraid to ask Jesus to explain why he teaches in parables.”[2] The disciples are fertile fruit-bearing soil because they engage Jesus. They engage Jesus.

            This is not an easy thing and perhaps that’s why I have such trouble with this parable. It calls me to an engagement with Jesus, who later in Matthew’s gospel will of course say that the greatest commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and that the second greatest commandment is to “love your neighbor as yourself” (22:37).  This parable calls me to an engagement with the one that challenges us to do the seemingly impossible. Jesus challenges us to love this invisible God that he calls Father and to love our neighbors as ourselves, that is, for Matthew, to care for the least of those among us, to make sure they have basic needs like clothing and food and clean water and shelter and that they do not feel alone.

            This is a huge and difficult and seemingly impossible task. But here is the thing. Discipleship is hard. It just is. And there is no really good answer on this side of the grave for why that is so. The cares and distractions of the world, the insidious urge to have more than we actually need and to give less than we actually are able to give will always win out unless we engage Jesus. All the things we think we should have and think we should be will win out unless we truly engage Jesus. Unless we come face to face with the one who comes to show us God, the one who is God come down to show us how very much we are loved, we will never understand the “word of the kingdom”—unless we truly encounter Jesus, we are bound to live empty, fruitless lives. I’m not talking about hell or damnation, but emptiness, fruitlessness, lifelessness, in the here and now, which may as well be hell.

            We are, you and I are, the very fruit of the love of God in this world, and as such we are called to bear yet more fruit in the world. Understanding this leads to blessing, and not you-will-have-more-and-life-will-be-easy-type blessing, but the blessing of knowing who you truly are, of knowing that you are God’s beloved and that is way more than enough. That is way more than enough to allow each of us to sow a ton of seed and to see yields of even a hundred fold.

            That is great good news. And yet.

            I think this parable is nevertheless difficult, difficult for me at least, because it calls us to seriously think about the fruit that we bear—and more to the point, the fruit that we, I, don’t bear—in the world. I can spend a lot of time asking red-herring questions like, Why does so much seed fall in these weird places that don’t bear fruit? I can spend a lot of time trying to figure out some easy answer for this parable, some easy interpretation that will leave me contented and allow me to continue to go about my day, business as usual. But the real question, I think, for me and for all of us today is, What are the things that keep me from bearing fruit? What are the things that keep me from encountering Jesus and cause me to be stingy, to be unkind to be dismissive? Where is the fruitlessness in my life? Where am I keeping Jesus out and so ensuring zero growth? Where are the hard paths, the rocky terrain, the weeds in my life? Where are the dead zones?    

            When we engage Jesus, when we walk with Jesus, in prayer, in worship, in Scripture, when we walk with Jesus and trust in his promise. When we trust in the love that God shows us through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, when we understand this overwhelming love, this love that will not be taken away from us no matter what we do or don’t do in this world, the dead zones become fewer and fewer. When we truly engage Jesus, there is good soil, soil that can do nothing else but bring forth an abundance of fruit.   

           

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[1] Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 129.

[2] Ibid.

June 29, 2014

Grace Episcopal Church, Canton, MS

Year A, Proper 8, Romans 6:12-23

            It’s easy, especially for Episcopalians, I think, to dismiss the Apostle Paul. Perhaps, I’m speaking only for myself, but I don’t think so. I think a lot of people have a hard time with Paul. For me what’s troublesome about the apostle is not so much such qualities as his seeming acceptance of slavery as a fact of life, as we have in the reading from Romans this morning, since the slavery he knew was in no way as cruel or inhuman as the slavery here in Mississippi. My difficulty with Paul has to do more with my temptation to read his letters as if he were a sort of moralizing grouch. If I’m not careful, it’s easy for me to see Paul as some holier-than-thou curmudgeon chiding not only the earliest followers of Christ but also you and me.

            Of course, I’ve learned that this is a pretty unfair view of Paul, a point I’ll come back to. And not only that but we—I—do well to remember to take all of scripture seriously, most especially those parts we’d just as soon dismiss, those parts that trouble us. And in full disclosure, I should say that all that talk about sin in the section of Romans we just heard is a little bit hard for me. I don’t really want to be told not to let sin exercise dominion within me. I don’t really want to hear that the wages of sin is death. In fact I’d rather just not think about sin at all.

            But if I’m honest with myself, I know that Paul knows what he’s talking about. Paul knew a before and after. Few of us have had the type of road-to-Damascus experience that transformed Paul’s life, that encounter with the risen Christ that separated his life into a time of knowing the love of God and that toxic empty time before of hating and persecuting those who worshipped Jesus as the Christ. But I think many of us understand from our own experience, if not such a delineated before and after, and if not such heinous actions as Paul’s, at least periods of time when we have had God at the center of our lives versus those times when we are living for something else, when we are living for ourselves, for success or material comforts or power or pleasure. We know the emptiness, the pain, I think, of living for something other than God, and of allowing sin to exercise dominion.

            And that’s really what this section of Romans comes down to. Although the letter to the Romans is a highly complex and tightly woven theological argument, Paul makes a really simple point in the verses we just heard. Essentially, we can choose God and life or we can choose sin and death. As the great Bob Dylan says, “you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” As Dylan sings,

                        

                        You may be an ambassador to England or France
                        You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
                        You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
                        You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls. . . .

                        Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
                        But you’re gonna have to serve somebody[1]

            Dylan may well have been channeling Paul, who like the great songwriter, keenly understood the human condition. Paul understood that whether we realize it or not—whether we choose to acknowledge it or not—it is a fact that we all serve someone or some thing. Paul, in this letter to the baptized followers of Jesus in Rome, to these house churches he did not found but cared deeply about, makes the point that we are all slaves to something. We are slaves either to God or to something other than God. We are slaves either to God or to sin and death. As one New Testament scholar writes, “As human creatures, Christians are free only within the framework of some lordship, either of God or of sin. . . . The choice is . . . slavery to which lord, to which ruling power?”[2]

            On its surface it’s perhaps not the easiest of messages to hear. God or death. It’s pretty black and white, a pretty hard line, so perhaps you can understand my struggle with Paul. But here is the thing about the Apostle Paul. He had a story to tell—has a story to tell—a story so good and so transformative that he gladly suffered so very much—shipwreck, flogging, stoning, imprisonment (2 Cor 11:23-25)—in order to tell it.[3]  And it’s a story so very simple that it’s sometimes extremely difficult to believe. It’s a story that is unfortunately often complicated by our own desire to control the outcomes of this life, our own desire to control who is in and who is out, our own desire to remake God in our own image.

            This is too bad because the underlying and ultimate point of all that Paul wrote to all the many churches to whom he wrote was simply that in Jesus Christ he had discovered a love so great and so sure and so completely beyond anything that he could ever have imagined.[4] He, Paul, was loved. Loved despite all he had done, thought, believed. Despite all he might ever do, think, believe. Just as you are loved. Just as I am loved. Paul had, in Jesus Christ, discovered a love that had transformed him completely, transformed him from a persecutor of those who did not believe the way he thought they should into a man longing for all whom he encountered to experience his deep, deep joy and peace.

            In this section of Romans, Paul tells us that we can serve God and life or we can serve sin and death. But thanks be to God that he also tells us that we, through the free gift of God’s love, this love without limit, without qualification, through the grace of God, through the sacrament of baptism—the outward sign of that grace in which we have died and been raised with Christ—through all this, Paul tells us, we have already been freed from sin and death to God and life. And being enslaved to God is of course perfect freedom.

            If you are like me, you have experienced the terrible bondage of living for yourself, of serving everything around you but God. Perhaps you know the bondage of clasping to a grudge in an effort to serve the desire to be right. Or the bondage of collecting and disseminating gossip to help ourselves feel better for a fleeting moment. And on and on. Our culture constantly tells us that serving ourselves is best, so it’s easy to forget that serving God is true freedom.

            But I pray that we may all go forth this morning remembering that through the love of God, through the immeasurable love shown to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have been freed from enslavement to sin. I pray that we remember that through his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ has taken on and defeated the shame of sin and death. I pray that we remember that we have been freed to serve God in all whom we encounter. We have been freed to accept and show forth the love of God in all whom we meet. And I pray that we may remember that this freedom is in fact life worth living in the here and now. It is life with meaning and purpose and it is the path to true peace and joy on this side of the grave. This freedom is in fact eternal life, and we only have to open our hearts and surrender to it. 

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[1] Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody” http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/gotta-serve-somebody.

[2] Paul J. Achtemeier, Romans (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 109.

[3] The idea of Paul having a compelling story is from A. Katherine Grieb, The Story of Romans: A Narrative Defense of God’s Righteousness (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), xvii-xxiv.

[4] Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 449.

April 27, 2014
St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church, Springfield, VA
Year A, Easter 2, John 20:19-31

            As I read and reread our gospel lesson for today, I was drawn back to the summer, and my time at the hospital at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where I completed my clinical pastoral education, or CPE, requirement. As many of you know, most dioceses of the Episcopal Church and in fact most denominations require that those seeking ordination complete a unit of CPE, which is most often done as a hospital chaplain.

            So I found myself back South this summer, in Birmingham, spending my weekdays and a good chunk of my weekend at UAB Hospital, which takes up several city blocks and is the third-largest public hospital in the country. As such, we chaplain interns were required to complete a sort of scavenger hunt wherein we were to go to each unit of the hospital and have a staff member there sign that we had indeed found the particular unit. As I was learning my way around the hospital, completing my scavenger hunt during that very first week, I happened upon a code blue in a unit where very few people ever died. One of the nurses on the unit had just in fact paged for a chaplain, and as all the staff chaplains were in a meeting in the main hospital building and as that building was a 15-minute shuttle ride away, I was it for chaplain support for a while.”

            “Can you sit with the patient’s wife?” The nurse asked, gesturing into the room where the code was taking place.

            “Sure. Yes,” I said, praying for God to please help me.

            Codes are violent—the chest compressions often involve breaking ribs—and can be pretty traumatic for family members to watch, and so I entered this small hospital room to find an elderly woman cowering in the corner, her head bowed and crying. I asked her if she would like to leave and let the doctors and nurses work.

            She wanted out of the room, so I led her to a waiting room and prayed silently for the staff chaplain to hurry. As I sat with her, I learned that she was very poor, had some intellectual disability, could barely see, and was utterly terrified of being left alone by the death of her husband, who was all she had in the world and who had come into the hospital for surgery on his hand.

            His death was completely unexpected and she had no idea how she might take care of herself without her husband. The staff chaplain finally showed just after the woman’s husband died, and I said my goodbyes but thoughts of this woman troubled me for days. Where was God in this?

             Again and again, I found myself with people like this woman, poor and alone and scared, people with no support systems to speak of, and so again and again, I found myself asking where God was in all the suffering that I witnessed.

            I realized it was one thing for me to affirm the love and presence of God from the campus of VTS, where I have pretty nice digs—a warm bed, and breakfast, lunch and dinner provided for me—and also have family and friends back in Mississippi who love me. But it was much harder for me be able to affirm the love of God and the presence of God in the face of so very much suffering. Where was God in all this suffering?

            I think it was the image of the terrified disciples feeling abandoned by Jesus that made me think of this woman from CPE. They must also have wondered where God was after Jesus’ death. They had left everything to follow the one they believed to be the Messiah and that one had been shamefully executed. Now they feared for their own lives and so were hiding out in a locked room. (And while our gospel writer tells us the disciples were afraid of “the Jews,” it is good for us not read this anti-Semitically, but to remember that the disciples were themselves Jews, as very likely was the gospel writer and many within the community to whom his gospel account is addressed.)

            And I’m sure you, like I, have heard lots of sermons on this second Sunday of Easter about Thomas and faith and doubt. And let me say quickly about that, that questioning and doubt are not bad, and it is in fact the one who questions—Thomas himself—who ultimately sees most clearly who Jesus is. Jesus is God, Thomas says, “My Lord and my God!” Thomas proclaims as he comes to recognize the risen Jesus, and this is the most clear and straightforward confession of Jesus’s divine identity in all the gospels.

            “My Lord and my God!” says Thomas to the one who bears the wounds of crucifixion. Way back, just after Christmas, we heard the prologue to John’s gospel. You know it: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1), and that Word of course referred to the second person of the Trinity, Christ. And now, here in Easter, as we come to the end of John’s gospel, we have this affirmation from Thomas, that the one he followed around Galilee and into Jerusalem is in fact God.

            Now it’s hard for our post-Enlightenment brains to comprehend how this human born of a woman and raised in some remote backwater of the world, this human who died a criminal’s death, is also fully God. That this human being died and was not just resuscitated but was resurrected, and in a way that he was unrecognizable by those who knew him best and loved him most and able in John’s gospel to walk through walls, is completely beyond comprehension. But something no doubt happened after Jesus’ crucifixion that caused a lot of monotheistic Jews to worship him. For these Jewish men and women to worship Jesus as God was idolatry, unless of course Jesus was God. And so at the risk of being kicked out of the synagogue, at the risk of putting their very lives in danger, they came to worship Jesus, because of these resurrection appearances that the gospel writers and Paul report. And we are here today worshiping God the Son, Jesus Christ, because of the resurrection.

            And while it is completely seemingly unbelievable, trusting in the resurrection, letting ourselves rest in the conviction that Jesus was not just a man, a great teacher or prophet, but is God come down to us allows us to live fully—to live joyfully, to live without fear, and with the peace that passes all understanding. Because if Jesus is God, then God is no longer some distant transcendent being that looks down on us from afar. If Jesus is God, then we worship a God who not only understands but also bears the deep woundedness of the world, who understands and bears our deep woundedness, our deepest fears and anxieties, who understands and bears with us whatever emotional and physical torment each of us goes through on this side of the grave. Whatever it is, from addiction, to cancer, to depression. And for whatever reason, all of us will experience some pain in this life. But we worship a God who knows our deepest pain and whose Holy Spirit is with us.

            This knowledge is the answer to all prayer, I think. This summer as I walked the halls of the hospital and sat with and prayed with people desperate for their loved ones to get better or for their own situations to improve, I came upon a quote by Richard Rohr, the Franciscan friar and priest. In a video interview he did for theworkofthepeople.com, he says the answer to all prayer is the influx of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit that Jesus breathes onto the disciples in our gospel lesson, that he gives in fulfillment of a promise he makes to them earlier in John’s gospel. The answer to all prayer is the knowledge that God is with us. Because indeed God is.

            It’s often very, very hard to see this, especially in light of so much suffering in the world. But Jesus says that those who have not seen him, as Thomas has, but believe nonetheless, those who have not seen him but trust that he is God, that he has overcome the grave and is risen, will be blessed.

            I think just this trusting in and of itself is the great blessing of this life. If we can rest in the knowledge that Jesus is God, that we worship a God who comes to us as we are, who comes to us as helpless infant, who grows into a man that loves so radically that it gets him killed, but whose love is so radical and so powerful that it cannot be kept down by death, if we can trust just a little bit in that love, then we will be blessed by the peace that Jesus gives and the joy the disciples feel upon seeing him. And we will be blessed by the power to share this love fearlessly with a hurting world. I pray that we all may have that blessing. I pray that we all may live fully in the knowledge that Christ has died but Christ is risen and the Holy Spirit resides with us, empowering us to live and love as Jesus Christ did, until his coming again.
    Amen.

March 16, 2014
St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church, Springfield, VA

Year A, 2^nd Sunday in Lent, John 3:1-17

            I was recently distressed to see in my Facebook feed a meme, which is just a fancy tech word for a type of cartoon, of a Jesus knock-knock joke. The creator of the meme has this very stereotypical-looking Jesus standing in the dark knocking on a big wooden door, much like he is portrayed in the copy of the famous painting that hung in my great-grandparents’ living room. In this online version, Jesus is saying, “Knock, knock,” and while we can’t see the person on the other side, we have his or her words. “Who’s there?” the person asks.

            “It’s Jesus, let me in.”

            “Why?” the person responds.

            “I’ve come to save you,” Jesus says.

            “From what?”

            “From what I’m gonna do if you don’t let me in.”

            Now, I found this very distressing, of course, because this is not the Christ that I believe in. And, yet, our Gospel text today has been used and reused—by both atheists and believers alike—to convey this very false message of the faith: You must be born again (which is part of the double meaning of the word our New Revised Standard Version renders “born from above). You must be born again, and if not, God will condemn you for making the wrong choice.

            This is unfortunate since our gospel lesson today is much more rich and complex than all that. And yet also much more simple, in a way.

            We are all, I think, a lot like Nicodemus, who despite his intelligence and high status within the Jewish leadership, is searching in the dark for what is true, what is real, what he can hold on to, what he can put his trust in. And it’s worth mentioning that the Greek for “believe” in the passage does not just mean intellectual assent to something or being convinced of something, but more so, here, it means to trust in.

            I think I can safely say we are all here today to some extent because we are searching for what we can put our trust in. Jesus of course tells Nicodemus, tells all of us, we can put our trust in him, as the Son of God come down to save the world, come down from Heaven to show us who and what God is, that God is indeed love (as 1 John 4 tells us), that God loves the world, that God loves each of us immeasurably and without qualification.

[Pause]

            This all makes me think of a story. Several years ago, my niece, who was just shy of her 8^th birthday, and I took the train from Jackson, Mississippi, up to Chicago, for a short vacation. I had big plans that we would spend a lot of time at the Art Institute and the Natural History Museum, but my niece wanted only to spend a lot of time at the American Girl Store, ride around on a double decker bus, and hang out at the Navy Pier, where there are carnival rides and games. At the Navy Pier, on our last day, she begged me to take her into the funhouse. She barely met the height requirement but I was worried this wasn’t a good idea. I was no match for my niece’s sad brown eyes, though and relented, as I had with the American Girl Store all week. So in we went, riding up in an elevator and exiting into the pitch-black darkness. The elevator closed behind us and we were left in a room whose floor shifted beneath us and that was filled with loud and unfamiliar noises, and with only a glow-in-the-dark arrow to point our way.

            Of course, my seven-year-old niece freaked out. She clutched my hand tightly and begged me to get her out of there. I assured her that everything was okay, that we were fine, but she couldn’t see and it was loud, and very appropriately she was afraid. Just as she began crying, I spied an exit sign and opened a door to the daylight of a parking garage, and we were soon back on the Navy Pier, sunlight streaming brilliantly all around us.

            I didn’t really think much about this incident till several months later. I had actually started the discernment process for ordination to the priesthood but some family events had called all that into question and, afraid and feeling alone, I think I must have felt a lot like my niece did in that funhouse.

[Pause]

            In today’s gospel, Jesus offers Nicodemus the opportunity to see the Kingdom of God, to have eternal life, just as he invites each of us to do the same. But here is the thing. Eternal life is not some far off event that happens after a one-time born again experience. Eternal life means, as New Testament scholar Gail O’Day says, “to live life no longer defined by blood or by the will of the flesh or by human will, but by God. . . . ‘Eternal’ does not mean mere endless duration of human existence, but is a way of describing life as lived in the unending presence of God.” Day goes on, “To have eternal life is to be given life as a child of God. . . . Eternal life is not something held in abeyance until the believer’s future, but begins in the believer’s present.”[1]

            The unending presence of God. Life as a child of God. Right here, right now. This is what Jesus offers us. And miraculously, we don’t have to do anything to earn it. We only have to accept it. We only have to accept how much we are loved. It is so simple and yet so very difficult, as it is for Nicodemus, who just cannot seem to wrap his mind around what Jesus is saying. Jesus simply asks that we accept that we are loved. Jesus asks that we place our trust in a God so loving, so loving beyond what we can fathom, that God would come down to us, is born in the flesh like us, so that we might experience the eternal joy of being born from above, born by Spirit and water, as Jesus says, so that we might see the kingdom of God, right here, right now and always.  

            There is so much happening in our gospel message today—there are all these double meanings and it’s a difficult passage to translate. But perhaps most importantly it contains a very clear radical and life-changing invitation that we have sadly been dulled to because of the overuse and misuse of the phrase “born again,” and because of the words of John 3:16 appearing on posters and placards everywhere. But it is no less true that God does loves us, loves God’s world, so much that he gave his Son for each of us to have eternal life. As Gail O’Day says, “the God revealed in Jesus is a God whose love knows no bounds and who asks only that one receive the gift. If one receives the gift, one receives eternal life, because one’s life is reshaped and redefined by the love of God in Jesus.”[2] And very thankfully, I would add, it is a gift that is offered again and again and again, as I think, we are born anew again and again and again.

            Sadly, in not receiving the gift, in placing our trust in worldly things, in our own status, or intelligence, or wealth, or ability, we are already perishing. We are already condemned. Because in not receiving the gift of the love of God through Christ, we blind ourselves to the God that is with us always, the God that loves us always.

            When we don’t receive the gift of God’s love, we often end up much like my niece in the funhouse at the Navy Pier, terrified and angry and feeling alone, even though we are ultimately okay, even though we are held in the embrace of a God who will not let us go. This is what occurred to me months after my trip to Chicago, thanks to a very wise friend, as I struggled, like Nicodemus, for understanding.

            Now, be very clear that I am not comparing myself to God, but just as I was with my niece in the funhouse and I was not going to let her go and I was going to make sure that she got out of there okay, because I love her more than life itself, God is with me, with each of us in this life, and loves us so much more than you or I can ever understand. This the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. God is with us, God is for us, and understanding that is salvation.

            My friends, Jesus Christ comes to save the entire world, comes to save you and me and to bear us into the love of God. Jesus Christ comes to save you and me, not from what God will do to us if we don’t believe, as that terrible meme put it. Don’t think that for a second. But Jesus comes with a radical and life-changing invitation to save us from the midst of whatever darkness you or I may believe ourselves to be immersed in, to save us from reacting to the darkness in fear. We don’t have to that, he says.

            He comes with a radical invitation to let go of what we know or think we know and allow God’s Spirit to work in us so that we may see God’s kingdom here and now, so that we may know God’s presence with us right now, so that we may know just how much we are loved in the here and now, and bear that love forth into the world, right here, right now. Jesus comes to us so that we may indeed have eternal life. I pray that during this Lenten journey, each of us may open ourselves to God’s Spirit and accept the life-giving invitation of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

           

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[1] Gail R. “O’Day, “John” in New Interpreter’s Bible, 552.

[2] Ibid. (555).