Rabbi Marc Gellman tells an imaginative version of Abram’s story for children. His retelling 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 go. Gellman says that God first asked a guy named Eber. But Eber wouldn’t go without knowing who exactly God is. Eber wanted to pin God down to being a concrete thing, like the god of the sun or the moon. So God went away and asked a guy named Peleg, instead. But Peleg wanted to see a nice statue of God before setting out. So God moved on to a guy named Serug. And Serug wanted to know what God would give him if he went. Serug answered God, “I’m not interested in moving anywhere or doing anything just so that my great-great-great-grandchildren will be a great nation. 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.”[1]
That’s when God moved on to Abram. And all Abram asked for was to bring Sarai and Lot. And through travel, through changing their physical, geographical location, and through changing their names and identities, and through all the hardships and failures involved in leaving home, God fulfilled God’s promise: The story of the suffering and the joy of their lives’ journey has become the foundation of three major world religions. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Abram’s journey is 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. But God doesn’t always ask us to get up physically and go somewhere in order to be transformed. What if God were to invite you into blessing through inner transformation? That sounds easier, doesn’t it, on first glance? But is it, really? We’ll be talking more about this kind of inner journey in our class right after church today! This journey is what Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward is all about.
For now, though, we have the story of Jesus offering inner transformation to Nicodemus. When Jesus tells Nicodemus that he needs to be “born again,” or “born from above,” Jesus is talking about change from within. I read something this week about this text that knocked my socks off, so I have to share. We all know and love the famous words of John 3:16, “For God so loved the world....” I always thought that John was saying, “For God loved the world SO MUCH.” That’s not what this sentence means, though! Although God does love us beyond all measure, in this sentence the word “so” means “in this way.” God loved the world “in this way.” In what way? Well, when the people of Israel were griping in the desert, God sent a bunch of poisonous snakes. As they were dying of snakebite in the desert, God forgave them and instructed Moses to make a serpent of bronze, put it on a pole, and lift it above the people. All those who looked at the serpent were healed. Through Moses, God took something that brought death and used it, paradoxically, to bring healing and forgiveness.
In the same way, the Cross is an instrument of shameful death and extreme suffering. It is an instrument of punishment. And God placed Godself on this Cross, lifting it high, to make it instead an instrument of Life. Jesus is saying to the Serug inside all of us: “I’m 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 healing like the serpent in the wilderness. Eternal life is going to look a lot like dying.”
Like Moses in the wilderness, God changes a death-dealing symbol into a life-giving symbol, all out of love for the world—the WHOLE world.[2] That’s what John 3:16 is saying: “For God loved the world in this way: by taking us through death into life, so that we, too, may be transformed. You might even say that John 3:16 is talking about “falling upward!”
Now, some Christians like to make a big deal about the term, “born again,” so much so that just hearing it might just make your flesh crawl. Christians have used this verse to judge and exclude at least as much as we’ve used it to share Good News. I find it helpful to think of the expression in the way that the French talk about giving birth. In France, you don’t say, “I gave birth to my son in 1990.” Instead, you say, “I put my son into the world in 1990.” When we’re 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.[3] My “world” is made up of my social customs, of all the books that I’ve read, all the songs that I sing, and all the films that I watch. It’s made up of the language that I share with others. It holds me together as an individual self and determines the possibilities for my life. Rohr would call it, “our container.”
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’s 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’s 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.
My favorite example of being born again into Jesus’ world happened about ten years ago. My parish had sponsored a refugee family from Rwanda. Early on, a group of us had taken the family shoe shopping one Saturday morning. We stopped afterwards for some ice-cream across the street from our church. During that whole afternoon, I had watched as the “world” of each family member was confronted with a new and unfamiliar “world:” the “world” of English; the “world” of ice and snow; 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 at the church building across the street. I tried to explain that it was our church, and that I was the priest. Suddenly, the dad’s face lit up for the first time in a radiant smile. “Me deacon!” he proclaimed joyfully. You could see his joy at remembering the Christian community that they had left behind in Africa.
Suddenly, we were all only Christian pilgrims …. We Americans reaching out because of our faith; this African 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 ice cream broke open. The world of “Anne-the-helper” fell away. The world of “Andre-the-needy-refugee” disappeared. In that moment of recognition, we saw one another only as followers of Jesus Christ. The family’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 truly real world, regardless of what other worlds swirled around us. As the line from a poem says, “I hold instead of a homeland/ the metamorphoses of the world.”[4]
This Lent, I hope that we all will read Rohr’s book Falling Upward together. Its questions are important ones: Are we willing to be “born again?” To risk “falling upward?” To go forth into the world with our story in our hands and our Cross upon our backs? To be born into a new creation, rejoicing in the power and possibilities of the Spirit?[1] Marc Gellman, Does God Have a Big Toe? (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 49.
[2] https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/3/2/gospel-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-lent-2
[3]Paul Ricoeur, “Poetry and Possibility,” The Manhattan Review 2 (1982): 21.
[4] Nelly Sachs, “Fleeing” in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary (New York: Women of Reform Judaism), 83.
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