Lent 2 - Being Born Anew

Have you ever noticed that it’s far easier to say something, than it is to actually do it?  It’s very easy to state our intentions of something.  It’s something else to actually go ahead, and carry out what we want.  Best example: New Years’ resolutions.  I have a friend who works as a personal trainer; every January 02 he gets a flurry of calls and emails to book his services, people who’ve stated that the new year is their time to ‘get healthy’.  He said that half the people quit in the first two weeks; another half of those remaining in the first month; and by six weeks’ time he’s down to about 12% of those who made the original commitment.

It is, in fact, remarkably easy to say “I am a child of God” or “I am a Christian,” or even something as simple as “I believe in God,” but it’s something else entirely to live into that statement.   When I people new people and they find out what I do, it often becomes a a bit of a two-edged sword: either I get a theological lecture as to my own tradition’ or I have what I call the “I’m-a-good-person-I-haven’t-murdered-anyone" chat.  Truth is, I don’t care. 

But, when we sit back, look at our lives, and say “I’m a good Christian person, look at all the good works I do…God must really be pleased with me”….I call that the snakes-and-ladders approach to Lutheran theology. You are justified – made right with God – entirely by God’s grace and mercy, through Jesus Christ.  It’s not about you, at all.  If say it just comes down to being a good person, or doing good things, then what we’re really saying is that we don’t think God is part of the equation, at all.

If we start applauding ourselves for living our good lives and making God happy by doing good things – then we’re not really trusting God, are we?  We’re putting our trust in our own actions to make us righteous – holy – before God.  And if that is where your faith is – then you’re choosing to raise yourself above the rest of creation.  Then salvation becomes a competition, judged by legal standards to assess your worth.  But there’s some hard news about Christianity, beloved of God: it’s not the Olympics.  It’s not a competition; there are neither winners, nor losers.

You are worth as much to God when you are born – no matter how you are when you are born – as you are on the day you die.  Whether you have ten fingers and ten toes, or twelve, or fourteen, or even none at all, to God, you’re priceless.  Not because of what you’ve done, but solely because God loves you.  In fact, we heard today that God loves the world so much that God was willing to take on human flesh and die for it…

So…here’s Nicodemus.

I mean, he’s not just Nicodemus.  He’s the catalyst, the reason behind what is probably the most memorable line of Scripture in our society.  And in most languages, I suspect.  That’s John 3:16 – for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believed in him would not perish but have eternal life.  

You can’t escape it.  If you go to a hockey game – or in particular, see one televised from the States – you’ll see someone holding up a placard with John 3:16 on it.  At football games, there’s always the unfortunate individual with a belly like a water buffalo, only a few litres of body paint away from an indecent exposure charge.  What’s written on his chest?  John 3:16.

But this man comes to see Jesus, at night.  Again, ‘by night’ is one of those details that John includes for a number of reasons – for John, ‘night’ is a metaphor for spiritual darkness (the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it), but it’s also the time when the Rabbis said it was best to study the Torah, away from the distractions and heat of the day.  And indeed, Nicodemus does come to see Jesus.

That first exchange is interesting, though – Nicodemus doesn’t begin with a question, but instead flatters Jesus – “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  We’ll never know what Nicodemus actually wanted from Jesus, because Jesus cuts him off with one of the most ambiguous lines of Scripture in the entire Bible.

“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”  But that’s only one way of translating it.  You may be more familiar with “born again”, some translations have “born anew” and still others have “reborn” – and all are perfectly fine, and correct, translations of the Greek word.  And it stops poor Nicodemus dead.

And Jesus continues with his teaching, spirit of spirit, and flesh of flesh.  The heart of Jesus teaching is that, like the camel going through the eye of the needle, being born anew or again is not something we can do, but it is something that God can do for us.

But you do realize that Nicodemus still doesn’t get it, don’t you?  “How can these things be?”

For the conquerer of people, it seems, is only interesting in the things that he can do to be righteous before God.  It’s a foreign idea to Nicodemus that God would act out of mercy to reach out to people.  Yet Jesus says that is exactly what will happen – just like the bronze serpent in the wilderness, that when the Israelites looked at it and were healed – so in Jesus’ own death he will draw all people to himself.

Nicodemus knows he’s been born.  He’s a respected elder in his community.  But also realise that in Nicodemus’ culture children were prized possessions, not valued or even necessarily ‘loved’ as we would imagine it.  And Jesus is telling him that must become worthless again, to his society.

But to be worthless to others is to be priceless to God.

And maybe, it’s when we find ourselves worthless that we can understand what it means to be baptized, to be loved by God for the sheer life of it.

Martin Luther said of the Christian life, that it was “nothing less than a daily baptism, begun once and continuing every day after.” [Large Catechism].

Maybe that’s worth considering, beloved.  Baptism is – generally – a one-time event.  Some people are baptized more than once, for various reasons that are between them and God.  But the struggle with sin is so great that there is a need to return to the waters of baptism every day – just so that you remember that you are God’s own.  That it’s not about us, or what we do, that makes us loved.

Baptism signifies that the old person in us – with all its sin and evil desires, is to be drowned and die.  The old person will die through sorrow for sin and through repentance, and then you will discover what it means to be born anew, each and every day: that every day, a new person rises up before God.

We don’t much about what happens to Nicodemus; but he did certainly go and think on those things that Jesus said.  He’s one of the group who asks for Jesus’ body after his crucifixion.  I like to think that Nicodemus found what it was to be born again: to leave sin, and the fear of death, and the fear that he was not ‘doing’ enough, behind; and find what it was like to live in the freedom of the Messiah, when every night all the sins of failures of the day before die, and in the morning you rise again, born again, born anew, born from above, and loved all the more. 

And beloved of God, it’s my prayer that you will find that freedom, and be born again.

Amen.

Humanity, and Human-ness (Lent 1)

What does it mean to you, that you are human? 

It means a few things, at least.  You’re male, or female.  You’re Aboriginal, Caucasian, European, African, or Asian.  It means that you were created. 

But what’s after that?   The Genesis account puts humans into the garden, dependent upon the grace and goodness of God to provide.  Remember Luther’s explanation of the first commandment in the Small Catechism – “we are to fear, love, and trust God above all things.”  The people are to ‘keep’ the garden, and God will ‘keep’ them.  The relationship seems simpler.  God withholds information about the Tree in the garden from the humans; in the military, we may call this need-to-know information.  It’s the mistrust that follows that is the root of the first sin.

It turns out that the serpent doesn’t actually force them to do anything – all it does is put the merest shadow of a question in their minds – do we really trust God? 

It is the temptation to be self-sufficient and self-determining that seduces the first humans, nothing else. Somehow, though they are part of God’s good creation, that willingness to turn from God is a part of who they are.  Instead of doing what they were created to do – to fear, love, and trust God above all else – they change their focus instead to wanting to be like God.

They turn inwards, caring more about who they are than about whose they are.  And that first, innermost sin spreads like a virus throughout history and all of humanity.  It comes to us in the pre-eminence of human agency in our society.

‘Human agency’ is probably the single most overemphasized concept in our society.  Because of it, we are led to believe that we can choose everything we want, and that lack of choice infringes on our ‘rights’ as human beings.  We can choose grocery stores, sales, music, lifestyles; choice is always presented as a guaranteed fact.

But really, we don’t want that agency to extend to the consequences of our choice.  We just want that agency to be total freedom of the consequences of our choices – really, we want to be how we so popularly conceive of God: absolute power; no responsibility.

And that is endemic through our society.  People smoke, and blame and seek monetary damages when they get lung cancer.  Alcohol is a bane in our society, yet is still used to excuse stupid behaviour.  Every day, people die in silly ways as a direct result of their own choices…yet the blame is spread around…and usually, it gets laid on God.

We don’t often realize that the agency we demand is the agency that God gives us – the freedom, not just to make choices, but the total freedom which includes the consequences of those choices.

Remember: the serpent simply asks Eve and Adam if they really, really trust God.  Everything else is their actions.  They don’t anticipate that their choice is going to result in putting themselves in direct opposition to God; they just want to be in control, to be “all that they can be.”

In the same way, St. Paul wrote to the church at Rome so many years later.  In the excerpt from the epistle lesson for today, he really just tells them: you want your agency?  You have it.  But here’s the bad news. That means everything is up to you.  And if your salvation is up to you, then you have no way out.  Even if you’ve never heard of Christ.  But, Paul points out, if sin spread through one person’s choice, then shouldn’t God’s choice remove it?

When we think about our ‘humanness’, isn’t it curious that we automatically start by trying to explain what makes us, in and of ourselves, human?  We try to define ‘who’ we are, and forget all about whose we are.

A crucial part of the Christian journey is honesty, both with ourselves and with God.  If we are not willing to be honest, to be vulnerable, then we will never find a relationship deeper than the most casual acquaintance.  St. Paul knew that – throughout most of his letter to the Romans he keeps asking questions of himself:

                   Why do I sin?

                   Why do I fall short?

And you know, those are the same questions we ask ourselves.  Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, “today, I’m going to make my friend feel miserable by gossiping about her.  I’m going to sin, and I’m going to enjoy it.”

Even like we do now, Paul found that there was nothing he could do to avoid sin.  And then, he realized that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we are pardoned and forgiven.  If that is true – if, in fact, God acted in Jesus to pardon us without our permission – then our salvation rests not in who we are or what we do, but in whose we are.  We are to fear, love, and trust God above all things.

So our spiritual journey then, does not become one of moving towards a goal that God has set for us in the future – as we often think – but rather in becoming more truly human, fully dependent upon God for all things.  That is the example that Jesus shows in the wilderness, that strength is found in relationship with God.

The story of Jesus in the wilderness is a familiar one.  Again, he’s in the desert for 40 days.  The Holy Spirit leads him there after his baptism.  And there, he meets the devil.

Beloved, the devil tempts himself with Jesus’ power.  The devil wants to see Jesus be independent – do it on his own, thereby committing the same mistake made in the Garden.

But Jesus refuses to establish his own worth and identity on his own terms, and remains in relationship with God.  In short, he knows who he is by first remembering whose he is.  He fulfills the first commandment, remembering to fear, love, and trust God above all things.

And that’s an interesting lesson.  Because then the gospel lesson – and Lent itself – becomes less about resisting temptation, defying the devil, and growing spiritually, and becomes more about becoming aware of how insufficient our agency really is.  That it is our belief that we can do things on our own that kills us – kills our relationships with others, and with God.

And now we think: C’mon…it’s not that bad.  I don’t pretend to be God.  But I can run my life without God.  God is for Sunday…for funerals…for weddings…

But aren’t you just pretending you can dictate to God when God is allowed in your life?  That, in fact, you are still trying to be God in God’s place?

The season of Lent reveals to us that Jesus did not come to show us how to be divine.  He didn’t come to show that we could defeat the devil by proof-texting him into oblivion.  Instead, Jesus came in weakness to show us what it means to be truly human; to accept that we are created to be in relationship with God and with each other. 

Through our baptism into Christ, God names and claims us as God’s own children, a gift that is given to us because God wants to give it – and we become the beloved of God.

Our human-ness may come from a realization that the Holy Spirit is always with us, and leads us to places that we may not like – that our agency is really only in our minds. 

In Mark’s version of this wilderness story, Mark writes that the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness, in the same way a swarm of bees can drive a herd of cattle into a thicket of brambles.  These forty days of Lent, then, teach us not that God can be found through fasting or prayer – but that we might find ourselves in those disciplines, and the courage to live out our own baptismal covenant that calls us to return from our high and lofty places, and be led by the Spirit into our own wildernesses.

Beloved, our human-ness and our connection to community comes with trusting the Spirit of God that leads us out of this place and into those wild places, bearing nothing but the promise of the gospel and the presence of Christ.  The same Spirit leads us to be witnesses for our faith in word and deed even when that witnessing exposes us to the shame and ridicule of Christ on the cross. 

It is in our realization of our dependence upon God – God on the cross, God in the tomb, God raised eternally -- that we become, truly, human: created, chosen, baptized, and redeemed.

Let the people of God say amen.

March 2 - Transfiguration Sunday

“It is good, Lord, for us to be here,” Peter says to Jesus.

My wife, it seems to me occasionally, comes from a family of dawdlers.  Trying to keep a deadline with them has in the past nearly driven me to decidedly un-Lutheran language.  And, it’s inherited: I'll find our eldest son, in the midst of our flurry of activity to get out the door and to church on time, is re-tying his shoes, or trying to create some kind of folk art at the kitchen table, sans coat, shoes, or hat. 

There really are times, though, that I would love for the world to just have a ‘pause’ button, that we could use for a moment.  Our eldest daughter, nestled in the crook of my arm and smelling of strawberries and prettiness; or our younger son, sitting beside me and reading to me from the latest masterpiece his five-year-old imagination created.  Sitting in church, surrounded by my friends, looking at the pulpit that I have stepped into every week, but won’t again.  It is good, Lord, for us to be here.  Indeed.

It may truly be good to be where we are, at any given moment.  But there is also a need to be always prepared for what is to come.  When I joined the Canadian Forces, the least amount of adaptation I had to do came with adjusting to the ‘sense of urgency’ that our instructors at basic training worked to instil in us.  The idea that we would move quickly, without rushing, but with a sense of purpose to the task at hand – whatever that may be, from digging a hole, creating a shelter, to mending the sick, or tending the dying. 

That ‘sense of urgency’, though, is all through the gospel text this week, beloved of God.  Some disciples climb the mountain with Jesus.  I don’t see them dawdling.  They see Jesus transfigured before them, becoming as pure as light – and Peter asks that they stay there.   But that’s not all.  There’s clouds, and a voice from heaven repeating what had be spoken at Jesus’ baptism.  Peter stands, and offers to build three houses.  He’s probably sketched out a brief plan on the ground in front of him.  When you’re up to pleasing the Almighty, you don’t dillydally.

Peter’s sense of urgency is to keep that moment going.  It is good for them to be there – just them, Jesus, the mountain, and the memory of that tremendous experience of God.  They know they’ve just seen the stuff that writes pages of Scripture.  They’re into their own retelling of Exodus, when God appears on the mountain.  Peter wants to stay there – urgently.  The faster stuff can get written down and commemorated, the faster that they can get to writing these things down.

Jesus has his own sense of urgency, as well.  Jesus has lived in that moment – it’s occasionally maddening to me that Jesus, who knew full well how to read and write, just didn’t. – and we’ll never know how he felt.  But we do know that literally, from the top of that mountain, that it was all (metaphorically speaking) downhill from there.  To Jerusalem.  To the garden.  The betrayal.  The cross.  The tomb.  Maybe some small, quiet part of the Saviour wanted to stay there, too.  But instead, he offers different words to Peter: Be  not afraid.

Whether Jesus tells Peter simply not to be afraid of him, or of the Heavenly Father, or of what the people had just seen – he’s also telling Peter not to be afraid of what’s ahead of them.  Don’t be afraid of the road to the cross.  Don’t be afraid of the cross.  Don’t be afraid of suffering, of dying, of death.

You know those times in your lives, beloved of God, when you’ve wanted to stay there, on top of the mountain, on top of the world.  Maybe it was the moment you knew you loved your spouse.  I hope it was the moment you first realized you loved your Saviour, or that your Saviour loves you.  I’ve been there.  You don’t want to leave.  You feel like you shouldn’t have to.  Better to build a tent up there, and close up shop, rather than risk contaminating the purity of your experience with the harsh and dirty world.

You do have to come down.  But when you’re down from that mountain, you do travel with your Saviour.  You travel with the one at the centre of the story, who simply says, “be not afraid.”  And you needn’t be afraid.

Beloved, your world will change.  Your understanding of Scripture, of the Bible, of the Church will change – hopefully, it will deepen and strengthen, as you travel down from that mountaintop experience.  But it will change, deepen, strengthen, because the One and only source of that experience walks with you.  You walk with Jesus.  Jesus walks, with you.

And about that journey, beloved of God – it is good for you to be there, too.  It’s in the journey down from the mountain that faith is found, and nurtured, and grown.  Walk together.  Pray and praise together.  Build each other up.  Listen to the Holy Spirit speaking among you.  Feel the Saviour, walking with you.  Move with a sense of urgency – knowing that each moment you spend together is only a brief glimpse of God’s kingdom of earth.  Thy kingdom come, you should pray, so that it would be on earth, as it is heaven.

And there, beloved of God, is definitely a good place to be.