THE JOURNEYS OF LENT
NICODEMUS – GIVING UP THE FAMILIAR
Scriptures:
Genesis 12:1-4a
John 3:1-17
Continuing our Lenten journey. We’re doing now what I like to call a “jump-shift” – all the way from the beginning of the Bible and the Adam and Eve narrative to one of the most significant and intriguing characters in the New Testament. Next week we’ll be jump-shifting backwards again to look at one of the real journey-ers in all of the Bible – Moses and his 40 years in the wilderness. But today we have this familiar story of Nicodemus and what Jesus is presenting to him. Jesus offers Nicodemus the opportunity to journey into the wilderness, not by giving up a geographical home as Abram and Sarah do in the Genesis scripture that we read, but by giving up all that he knows about the territory of his soul and spirit, by giving up his familiar inner environment.
As you well know, this story of Nicodemus – like every story in the Bible – is important not so much because of what it tells us about Nicodemus but because of what it tells us about ourselves. As we go along we will want to hold up a mirror in order to reflect our own questions – or to see how we can make Nicodemus’s questions our own.
This story of Nicodemus follows quite naturally after our reflection on Adam and Eve and the giving birth that the expulsion from the Garden of Eden signifies because this is a story about a new birth – a re-birth into something quite different and wonderful. Nicodemus is, of course, initially non-plussed by what Jesus is telling him – as, I would imagine, any of us would be. He raises what would seem to be quite logical questions: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Nicodemus has come to Jesus because he is troubled about some aspects of his religion (the text says he came “by night”, which probably meant that he really didn’t want anyone to know he was doing this). He is an honest seeker. I would suspect that many of us could identify with that. A religion that has grown staid and comfortable and not very challenging needs to be taken out and shaken up every once in awhile
Nicodemus gets an immediate response, but it’s not one that pleases him very much: “I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” (Frankly, here’s a place where the New Revised Standard Version’s translation doesn’t communicate as well as the older RSV; here’s what Jesus says in that version: “I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”) The idea of being born again, born anew, re-born is what makes this such a powerful passage. Nicodemus takes Jesus’ words literally and thus gives his logical response. But Jesus is not talking on a literal level. Being born anew – re-birth – is a metaphor for what happens to a woman or man when they discover this radically new thing that has happened in the world and rush to embrace it. Nicodemus will not find it in the musty religion of which he is a leader. A wondrous new thing has entered the world and our lives, and its sign and symbol is baptism by water and the spirit.
What is this new thing that Jesus is talking about? It is God’s entrance into the world in such a way to shake up everything that we thought we knew. It is offering us something that we never thought we could have – our lives freshly minted by grace with a new spirit. It is something to which we respond with awe.
Back in the 1950’s beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote a poem called “I Am Waiting” that many still consider one of the best poems of the 20th century. His constant refrain in this poem is “and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder”. There’s a lot of cynicism and a sort of smarmy attitude in “I Am Waiting” – especially toward religion – with lines such as:
I am waiting for the second coming
And I am waiting
For a religious revival
To sweep thru the state of Arizona…
And I am waiting
For them to prove
That God is really American
And I am waiting
To see God on television
Piped into church altars
If they can find
The right channel
To tune it in on…..
But then when you get to the end of each stanza the tone shifts to one of almost wistful longing and possibilities:
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
right down to the final line when the language is slightly changed to reflect the grand sweep of this longing:
and I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder
(By the way, when you read this poem on the page there are no periods or any other form of punctuation, demonstrating how the poet’s awaiting just goes on and on and on.)
Ferlinghetti’s poem is searching for something new – for some break in the mediocrity and monotony of our lives – and the anguish in these lines is that he feels he will never find it. Had he been a beat poet, Nicodemus might have written that poem. And Jesus is telling him that he has found that awe-inspiring something new. This is indeed, for him, a re-birth of wonder. And Nicodemus’ question almost echoes Ferlinghetti’s wistfulness: “How can these things be?”
These new things can be for us because of our baptism. Whenever we baptize a child or an infant we symbolically sprinkle water over the whole congregation and say, “Remember your baptism”. This is not just a cute imperative. Remembering your baptism is the key to accepting the new thing that God is bringing into the world. Again, we’re not talking literally here, and like Nicodemus we shouldn’t hear this literally. Most of us who were not baptized as young adults, like Harry and Thomas were last year before their confirmation, would not be able to remember our actual baptism. But baptism is the determinative act for a Christian – it signifies our acceptance of having been accepted by God and Christ. That’s why Jesus gently leads Nicodemus to see that what he is really talking about is a baptism of the Spirit, and that to be all that he can be he must be born of the Spirit.
When we accept our baptism rightly we accept the re-birth of wonder that occurs because we have submitted to a Christian way of life. It means, as the United Church of Christ’s Statement of Faith puts it, “to share in Christ’s baptism”. At its best, baptism takes place within the community – in the presence of the worshipping congregation – so that these people may give the one who is baptized their full support. Besides, your life within the community of the faithful is also a part of the re-birth of wonder.
That same line from the Statement of Faith goes on to say after “to share in Christ’s baptism” “and eat at his table”. Just as baptism is the determinative act which brings an individual into the Christian community, so communion (as we discovered last week) is the definitive act of worship for the community – indicating our shared life together and our individual acceptance of God into our lives. These are the two acts which have been declared sacramental – that is, sacred – by the Protestant Church, since they are the sacraments ordained in the New Testament. These acts are the ones which lead us to renewed life – and a re-birth of wonder.
The Statement of Faith then goes on to say, “to join him in his passion and victory”. I’ve always thought that this word “passion” was particularly appropriate. When we say it we first of all think of romantic love (as most of us did last Thursday on Valentine’s Day) or an upsurge of emotion that causes us to be intensely involved in whatever we are passionate about. To join Christ in his passion, therefore, is to intensify our sense of dedication to his work. And ultimately it is only as we are able to enter this passion that we will enter into the victory of Christ over the world – a victory which has been and will become the ultimate re-birth of wonder.
All of this is behind Jesus’ invitation to Nicodemus to be born again by the Spirit, which begins with our baptism but becomes much more than that. Jesus says to him, “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 it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” The Greek word that is being used here, pneuma, means both wind and spirit, and it also, in this context, means for Jesus the breath of God. God’s spirit blows upon us like the very air that we breathe. Every time that we inhale, we take in God’s breath. We literally “in-spire.”
When Jesus tells Nicodemus that he needs to be born of the Spirit, he is telling Nicodemus (and telling us, of course) that this is not about having water sprinkled on our heads or even poured over us and then never thinking about it again. This is about submitting to something that will take over our whole being, something that will permeate all the cells of our bodies, something that is so much a part of us that its presence makes us someone quite new. Not new once, not even new once again, but new over and over and over, again and again and again, with every breath we take.
We are discovering more and more in our day that it matters what we inhale. Recent years have taught us about the dangers of second-hand smoke. I was watching a Jeopardy episode this past week, and one of the teen-age girls on it talked about a project she had undertaken related to asthma in children, where it was determined that living in an environment with too many cockroaches caused toxins to get in the air that exacerbated the asthma. We’ve known for years that miners have been dying of “miner’s lung” from breathing coal dust day after day. Just over 20 years ago, 6,500 people died and tens of thousands suffered serious health repercussions in Bhopal, India, when a chemical factory leaked poisonous gas into the air. Breathing flu and cold germs leads to illness even in the strong and robust. All of these illustrations indicate that what we breathe in has a very important effect on us.
Jesus tells us that our very lives depend on whether we breathe in the pure breath of the Holy Spirit or live surrounded by an unhealthy and tainted spiritual or emotional atmosphere. It matters whether we “in-spire” the stale, used-up air of dusty ideas or the fresh, invigorating air that whipped open the doors and windows of that upper room where the first disciples were gathered. It matters because we are not in control of God’s breath or what God’s breath might empower us to do and to be. It matters because “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
And so Nicodemus is presented with the possibility of a journey into the uncharted territory of new ideas and renewed life. To enter into this journey means giving up quite a bit – old ways of doing things, staid ways of thinking, comfortable religious concepts. It could mean giving up nearly everything. And it could mean gaining a whole new life.
Last week while working out in the morning I was watching a video of the Gene Kelly/Cyd Charise movie version of “Brigadoon”. At the end of the one day when Brigadoon appears for a century the hero, Tommy Albright, believes that he is in love with Fiona and will stay with her in Brigadoon. But then his cynical friend, Jeff, introduces a note of reality, and Tommy now isn’t sure any more. His doubt forces him to leave with Jeff. The kindly school master, Mr. Lundie, comes to him and says, “Dinna be ashamed of yourself, lad. It’s the hardest thing in the world – to give everything. Though it’s usually the only way to get everything.” These words from Mr. Lundie, of course, echo the words of Jesus that “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:39) And in the end, as you probably remember, Tommy Albright does give up everything of his old life…and gains everything.
Like Nicodemus we are touched every day by the breath of God and feel that wind, that Spirit, blowing us into new life. When we fill ourselves with God’s holy breath, others can see the Spirit in us. The Spirit takes perfectly ordinary women and men and gives them new lives filled with the power of God. Like Nicodemus, we are asked to “breathe out” our stale, old, self-defined selves and allow the Spirit of God to inspire us anew. That’s what Jesus means by “You must be born from above…born of water and the Spirit.” Breathe deeply of that breath of God that you may in-spire and be inspired. Our Lenten journeys now take us into this rarefied air.
Amen
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
February 17, 2008