June
11, 2006
Trinity Sunday
Gospel:
John 3: 1-17
This sermon is also available in audio
When
my children were very small sometimes their questions just about
drove me crazy. Do dogs go to heaven? Where do babies come from?
Why does that man have only one leg? How do you get more grapes
from seedless grapes?
Part
of my irritation derived no doubt from the relentless demand for
my attention that their questions represented. But more to the point
was the discomfort of not being able to provide satisfactory answers.
“That man was probably in an accident,” I might say.
“But why?” would be the next question. And then I was
sunk, because I just didn’t know. One time, in exasperation,
I responded to the umpteenth question of the day, “Curiosity
killed the cat, you know!” But a few minutes later my son
was back. “What did the cat want to know?” he asked.
When
my daughter was six her Sunday school teacher reported to me that
she had asked if Jonah was really swallowed by a whale.
The teacher’s answer? “Well, that’s what the Bible
says.” Her question, of course, had little to do with Jonah.
What she wanted to know was, what’s real and what’s
make believe? Can I trust what grown-ups say? The problem inherent
in those questions goes even deeper.
What
do you do when the grown-ups, i.e. the people in charge, the “authorities,”—what
do you do when what they say doesn’t square with your experience
of the world? At
the tender age of six my daughter knew there was something about
that Jonah story that didn’t sound quite right. What she learned
in Sunday School that day was that church is not a good place to
ask questions.
Maybe
Nicodemus had come to the same conclusion about the religious institution
he called home, and maybe that is why he came to Jesus by night.
A
strange conversation unfolds. Nicodemus begins with what sounds
like a sincere honoring of Jesus’ authority and status: “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.”
But Jesus redirects the conversation, skipping past the social niceties
and going directly to the heart of the matter. It is as if he can
see straight into the soul of the man standing before him in the
dark. “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of
God without being born from above.”
Whatever
meaning Jesus has in mind, Nicodemus misses the point, focusing
instead on the literal meaning of Jesus’ words. “How
can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second
time into the mother’s womb and be born?” It is tempting
to dismiss Nicodemus as dense, resistant, a Pharisee who doesn’t
get it, and it’s true that his questions are about on the
same level as my daughter’s question about Jonah.
But
I wonder about the questions that drove Nicodemus out into the night
in the first place. Had the old answers begun to unravel?
Was he wondering if there was something else, something deeper and
more true than the words he heard and the words he spoke in the
temple?
Perhaps
you yourself have sat in church and thought—silently, of course
and to yourself—do I really believe this? Is there anything
here worth believing? Who is Jesus, and would he bother to come
to this church?
In
her book Called to Question, Benedictine sister Joan Chittister
tells about her conversion from religion to spirituality. The only
child of a Roman Catholic mother and a Presbyterian step-father,
Joan had an unusual religious sensibility for a child. It troubled
her that her good and faithful step-father was judged by some to
be undeserving of heaven because he was a Protestant. “Early
on,” she writes, “(I knew) that life was not really
the way the church said it was.” But she pushed her questions
away, and began to “(haunt) churches the way other children
(haunt) back alleys and open hillsides. . .
I
went from church to church, smelling the cool, damp
air of their high vaulted caverns. I lit candles in every
candlestand along the way. Then I dropped to my knees
at the marble altar rails next to each flickering bank of
flames to draw God’s attention to the petition they
represented. Most of all, I studied my catechism.
Correction: No, I did not “study” it.…I swallowed
it
whole. I memorized every word of it.…I could recount
every feast day. I could recite every gift of the Holy Spirit.
I could list every capital sin.
Given
her religious bent, it was not a surprise when Joan entered the
convent at sixteen. In the years that followed she fulfilled all
the requirements, followed all the rules, took all the vows. She
became active in the Civil Rights and women’s movements, wrote
over two dozen books, traveled widely on the lecture circuit, taught
courses on spirituality, and accumulated honorary degrees by the
handfuls. But a moment came when something shifted.
She
describes the ensuing journey as one “from the certainties
of dogma to that long, slow, personal journey into God. . . . I
began my own wrestling match with God, which no catechism, no creed,
could mediate. From then on . . . I would have to dare to ask the
questions no one had ever wanted me to ask.” She
adopted what she called a “spirituality of search” in
which openness to other ideas is not considered an infidelity, but
rather the beginning of spiritual maturity. She
realized that “Being spiritual means that we become more than
pursuers and purveyors of a system. It requires a total change
of heart.” It requires being born again, if you will.
We
are not told what Nicodemus was thinking or feeling as he walked
away from that first conversation with Jesus. We can gather a few
clues about his journey though from the two more times that he appears
in John’s gospel. In the seventh chapter Nicodemus, alone
among the Pharisees, protests their treatment of Jesus. “Our
law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to
find out what they are doing, does it?” While this may not
sound like much, and it is not be the full-fledged support of Jesus
that we might hope for, Nicodemus has at least begun to question
the powers that be.
And
then in the nineteenth chapter, after Jesus has been killed, after
all the disciples have run away, after the worst that could happen
has happened, Nicodemus appears yet again, this time with Joseph
of Arimethea who has asked for and been given permission to take
Jesus’ body away. The two men have brought with them 100 pounds
of myrrh and aloes. They wrap the body in linen and place it in
a tomb which has never been used before. To provide such an extravagant
burial for an executed criminal was a very dangerous thing to do;
it placed them at great risk. Nicodemus, finally, has come out of
the shadows to show himself a disciple.
Perhaps
his journey to discipleship had begun on that night in the dark,
asking questions. My own spiritual journey began when I started
bringing my questions to speech. I would make an appointment with
the pastor and tromp into his office with my list. How do you
come to faith when you can’t force your mind to believe the
things you are supposed to believe? Why can’t women be deacons?
Why are we spending so much money on a new building when there are
so many poor children in this city?
Those
questions, and a thousand more, eventually drove me to pursue a
seminary degree; they eventually led me to seek ordination; and
finally, my questions delivered me to Calvary Episcopal Church.
Newly ordained, amazed, humbled, grateful.
And
what I have to tell you is this: the God-life is not about believing
all the right things about Jesus. It’s not about being able
to recite the creed without crossing your fingers or believing that
Jonah was swallowed by a big fish or having an instant, now-you’re-saved,
“born again” experience. It is about being willing to
let go of everything you think you know and allowing yourself to
be drawn into the mystery that is God.
“Believing,”
as John uses this word, does not refer to some intellectual process
that happens in your head. To “believe” in something
is to give your heart to it. The
God-life then is about giving your heart to God. Your broken heart.
Your disbelieving heart. Your divided, angry, fearful heart. Your
hard heart. You do not, of course, have the power
to transform your own heart, but you do have the power to offer
it, no matter what condition it is in, to the God who is able to
make all things new.
My
wish, my hope, my most earnest prayer, is that church could be a
place, the very place, the best place, for our children
and our youth to bring their questions. And for us to bring ours.
And then, as we wrestle with the questions of how we are to live
and work and worship, as we grow in trust of God and each other—slowly,
gradually, over our lifetimes—a new spaciousness would emerge
allowing new things to be born in us and in the world.
“Have
patience with everything unresolved in your heart,” wrote
Ranier Maria Rilke,
and
try to love the questions themselves as if they
were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign
language. Don’t search for the answers, which could
not be given to you now, because you would not be able
to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live
the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the
future, you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.
Copyright
©2006 The Rev. Deacon Eyleen Farmer
Preached at Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, TN
Gospel
Reading: John 3: 1-17
Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He
came to Jesus by night and said to him, “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.”
Jesus answered him, “Very
truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being
born from above.”
Nicodemus said to him, “How
can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second
time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
Jesus answered, “Very
truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being
born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and
what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I
said to you, ‘You
must be born from above.’ 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.”
Nicodemus said to him, “How
can these things be?”
Jesus answered him, “Are
you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?
Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what
we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told
you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe
if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven
except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just
as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son
of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal
life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that
everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,
but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) |
