Genesis 12:1-4a
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17
Psalm 121
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Imagine that God comes to you one morning as you are still lying in bed, just about to get up for a day of work or school, and God asks you if you want your whole life to become a source of possibilities for others, if you want your life to radiate God’s love into the world. Sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? So how are you going to do it? Abram knows. In order to become a blessing, you have to leave your home and your country and go somewhere entirely different. God promises to be with you, but you have to go to a place where you have never been, a place that will be shown to you once you get there. Now, how many of you would agree to get up that morning, pack a suitcase, and go?
That was the
question that God asked Abram in our first reading today. Rabbi Marc Gellman
has an imaginative story for the children among us that points out how few of
us would probably agree to such a journey. Gellman suggests that Abram wasn’t
the first or only person whom God invited to come on this special journey. He
says that God first asked a guy named Eber. But Eber wouldn’t go without
knowing who God is. Eber wanted to pin God down to being a concrete thing, like the god
of the sun or the moon, suggesting that since all the good gods were already
taken, that God should check out being the god of the frogs and then come back
and ask him again. So God went away and asked a guy named Peleg, instead. But
Peleg wanted to know where God is located before he would go. He wanted to see
a nice statue of God first. So God moved on to a guy named Serug. And Serug
wanted to know what God would give him if he went.
“I’m not
interested in moving anywhere or doing anything just so that my
great-great-great-grandchildren will be a great nation,” Serug answered. “I
want to know what is in this deal for me right now. Maybe if you showered me
with some of those blessings up front I might be convinced. How about giving me
all the money in the world and the kingship of all the lands?”[1]
So God moved
on to Abram. And all Abram asked for was to bring Sarai and Lot. And they went.
And through travel, through changing their physical, geographical location, and
through changing their names, and through all the hardships involved in leaving
home and identity behind, God fulfilled God’s promise: The story of the
suffering and the joy of their lives’ journey has indeed become for Jews,
Christians, and Muslims a sign of what God’s blessing looks like in our own
lives.
The life of
faith as a journey is a pretty common metaphor, isn’t it? But God doesn’t
always ask us to get up physically and go somewhere in order to be transformed.
What if you are lying in your bed in the dark before dawn, and God invites
you into blessing through inner transformation? That sounds easier, doesn’t it,
on first glance? But is it, really? Would you agree to the kind of transformation or “new birth”
that Jesus offers to Nicodemus? When Jesus tells Nicodemus that he needs to be
“born again,” or “born from above,” Jesus is talking about change from within.
At first, Jesus seems to challenge Nicodemus not to act like Eber and Peleg in our story, wanting to
pin God down to signs that can be seen and understood in our world: “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,” Jesus evokes mysteriously. And don’t be like
Serug, either, Jesus seems to add. I am not a Lord who will bring you riches and glory
if you follow. The Son of Man will be lifted up on a Cross, Jesus hints, to bring salvation like
the serpent in the wilderness, and eternal life is going to look a lot like
dying.
Jesus’
invitation to new birth, then, is just as vague, just as difficult to pin down,
as a trip into the wilderness, destination unknown. Lying all snug in your bed,
snug in your identity, snug in your life, cozy in the dark room where you can
whisper comfortably with Jesus the great teacher …would you agree to be born
again?
Some
Christians like to make a big deal about this term, “born again,” so much so
that it probably makes our flesh crawl as demure Episcopalians. But for me, the
expression instead reminds me of how the French talk about giving birth. In
France, you don’t say, “I gave birth on Friday.” Instead, you say, “I put a baby into the
world on Friday.” When we are born, we enter into a world. Not just “the world” as in “the
earth,” but the “world” as an environment, as a whole horizon of possibilities.[2]
My “world” is made up of my social customs, of all the books that I have read, of
all the songs that I sing and of all the TV shows that I watch. It is made up
of my language and the people that I hang out with. It holds me together as an
individual self and determines the possibilities for my life. Every time my world meets another world—when I open myself to a
challenging book from a new point of view or when I open myself to someone from
another culture—my world changes a little bit to incorporate that new horizon.
What Jesus is proposing in our Gospel lesson, is for Nicodemus to be born into
Jesus’ world. It is for Nicodemus to open himself to a realm of possibilities
in which death leads to life, and suffering leads to joy, and light triumphs
over darkness. It is for Nicodemus to let the world of the good, wealthy Pharisee
meet the world of the Cross of Christ and to enter into the radically new possibilities
that Jesus’ world opens to him, like a baby who comes into the world, full of
new possibilities.
And for us,
lying in our cozy beds … What does Jesus’ invitation mean for us? I believe
that we are indeed reborn into a new set of possibilities through our
participation in Jesus’ world, as we enter into relationship with him in scripture
and as we enter into Christian community in baptism.
Andre and
Esperance and their six children, the refugee family from the Congo whom our
parish is co-sponsoring right now, are making Abraham’s transformational
journey. They have left home, language, tribe, kin, country, profession, and
they have traveled from one world into another. Right now, they are wandering
in the wilderness of American poverty, unsure where their next footsteps will
take them. They know that God is with them, however, and they are sustained by
that faith. As a matter of fact, it is their strong faith that jumped out at me
as an example not just of Abraham’s story, but of what it means for us to be
“born again.”
I was sitting
in the Baskin-Robbins across from St. Thomas with Andre the other day. Our
youth group had just taken the whole family shoe shopping and then into the
Baskin-Robbins for their first ice-cream cone ever. During that whole
afternoon, I had watched as the “world” of each Bankuga family member was
confronted with a new and unfamiliar “world:” the “world” of English; the “world”
of ice and huge snow piles; the “consumer world” of an immense American shoe
store; the “world” of Saturday afternoon ice-cream. Their old worlds were
constantly bombarded by new ways of being. As they picked at their ice cream,
probably wondering why one would eat something so sickly sweet and made of such
unnatural colors on such a freezing afternoon, I pointed through the window to
St. Thomas. In very simple French (they know just a few words of French and practically
none of English) I indicated to Andre and Esperance that St. Thomas is our
church and that I am the pastor. Suddenly, Andre’s face lit up in a radiant
smile so big that it almost split his face in two: “Me deacon!” he proclaimed joyfully in broken French.
“You are a deacon in your church back home!” I repeated, as he nodded vigorously
and Esperance patted him proudly on the shoulder, beaming and remembering the Christian community that they left behind in Africa. Suddenly, we were all
only Christian pilgrims …. We at St. Thomas reaching out because of our faith;
Andre and his family sustained and ready to reach out because of theirs. I
could have sworn that a gust of warm wind swirled around us in the moment,
though I don’t know where it could have come from. In that one short exchange,
the world of Saturday afternoon ice cream in Louisville broke open. The world
of “Anne-the-helper” fell away. The world of “Andre-the-needy-refugee”
disappeared. The worlds of English, French, and Kirwanda merged into the world
of our common Christian story. In that moment of recognition, we saw one
another only as committed followers of Jesus Christ. Andre’s life story and my
life story met in the story of the vibrant, living Body of Christ, spread
across the globe. We recognized one another as “born from above,” our Christian
world the only real world, the only one that matters to our souls, regardless of
what other worlds swirl around us. As the line from a poem says, “I hold
instead of a homeland/ the metamorphoses of the world.”[3]
Go forth into the world with scriptures in one hand, your cross in the other, and
be born into a new creation, rejoicing in the power and possibilities of the Spirit.
Amen.
[1]
Marc Gellman, Does God Have a Big Toe?
(New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 49.
[2]Paul
Ricoeur, “Poetry and Possibility,” The
Manhattan Review 2 (1982): 21.
[3]
Nelly Sachs, “Fleeing” in The Torah: A Women’s
Commentary (New York: Women of Reform Judaism), 83.
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