Lent 2A, March 12, 2017; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of grace, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

This is one of those Sundays when I have a harder time giving thanks and praise to God in response to the scripture readings when I first hear them, because it’s hard for me to hear them read without thinking about the damage humans do to one another using these passages as weapons.  The recent and dramatic rise of hateful words and actions against Jews and Muslims (or people mistaken for Muslims) is fueled by arrogance and ignorance of “Christian” teachings. The fighting happens within Christianity as well, between Catholics and protestants, between different kinds of protestants, and within our own Anglican traditions. Perhaps you have a similar experience of knowing these lessons from a standpoint of in and out, us and them, ours and not yours.  Perhaps you’ve heard these lessons as being about tests about who measures up because of what they think or don’t think.  If not, just wait for today’s cantata! All this makes many flee religious practice, and for good reason.

My Bible teachers have taught me that when I hear scripture that is offensive or off-putting or even terrifying, rather than skipping over it or speeding through it, the exercise of slowing down and wondering what it has to teach me will bear fruit. It takes some practice (and some nerve) to learn to go from “fight or flight” to “rest and digest.” Slowing down and wondering about these lessons has led me to see the irony that so many people “of faith” latch onto these readings as prooftexts for theological certainties when these lessons seem to be about taking leave of your senses and moving into the unknown.

When I read these lessons more slowly, more deeply, I see that they are all about a kind of leave-taking of whatever it is you think you know, whether that is your country, your kindred, your home, your rules and your accomplishments, your identity, your status, your security, your definitions and understandings of how life is. These readings are all saying a form of “Go! Depart from the familiar and head into the unknown, the mystery.”

In the famous passage of the call of Abram, our short Torah portion ends in the first half of verse four, but the second half of the verse seems really important to me.  It says that Avram was 75 years old when he embarked on this transformative journey. And I daresay that 75 was a lot older 3,000 years ago, when this story is set, than it is now. So in our time, this story can apply to anyone who is under the age of 110 (and I think that’s all of us in this room). The Hebrew says, “I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and I will cause your name to grow, and be a blessing.” What’s obscured in our English translation is that this last part is a command rather than a prediction of the future.  You will be a blessing is an imperative, rather than a prediction of the future. Lech l’cha is what Abram hears – you might recognize the words from the song we sometimes sing when Rabbi Berman preaches. Lech — Go, walk away (also an imperative) l’cha — for yourself or to yourself, from everything and everyone you know (from everything and everyone who knows you) to a land and people you do not know, and be a blessing. The instruction is not, “go get a blessing.”   It’s “go be a blessing.”

Our lesson from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome is chosen, no doubt, because he cites Abraham’s faith as part of his argument that gets over-simplified as faith vs. works.  Paul was writing to a community that was made up of a Gentile Christian majority and a Jewish Christian minority, and he was hoping to get them to reconcile their internal differences.  Paul had first-hand experience of being both a Roman citizen and a well-educated Jew, who became a follower of Jesus – in other words, the struggle was not just theoretical for him. It was inside him! The community of Jesus followers in Rome seems to have been having disagreements about morality, right-relationship, about how to understand and do the will of God.

It always seems worth remembering that this was personal correspondence, one side of a conversation, and not systematic theology that Paul was writing.  Furthermore, we know that Paul regarded this community, even with its disagreements, to be “full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another.” We know this because he wrote it toward the end of his letter. [1] Paul regarded them as full of goodness and knowledge, I think, not just in spite of their differences, but because of their differences.  Agreement is not the mandate for people who love each other! [2] To take Paul’s attempt to help people love each other more deeply, and use it to judge and divide, seems like a gross misuse of his work. Does morality matter?  “Yes, of course,” Paul says, yet, everyone falls short of the glory of God and we all need grace. We all receive grace, whether we feel it or not, whether we know it or not.  Appreciating it requires believing in it.  Believing in a biblical sense is about faith and about trust, not about intellectual assent to an implausible set of ideas. If you don’t believe in grace, you simply can’t identify it when you experience it.

So, on to the Gospel.  You’ve probably seen bumper stickers or signs that say John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he [sic] gave his [sic] only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” It is, in my opinion, one of the most misappropriated and misunderstood passages of scripture in the whole Bible. John 3:16 has fueled some of the most damaging and unchristian impulses of those who have taken the name Christian, from Constantine to the Crusades, to the destruction of conquered indigenous peoples, to the Holocaust and the present day and our current context in the United States.

This passage, so often taken literally, is in the most symbol-loaded Gospel of the four, a story rich with literary devices for figurative language: metaphor, rhetoric, hyperbole, prolepsis,  and so on. And that’s how it should be because the Gospel of John is a love story. John was writing about relationship with God – about a way of relating with God illuminated by Jesus – the Light and Love of the World. In this very passage, Jesus is arguing against literalism with Nicodemus. Retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong once wrote that, “Biblical literalism is at its heart a Gentile heresy, born in the ignorance of the Jewish background to the Gospels” [3] and, I would add, in the lack of regard for the essential Jewishness of Jesus and his earliest followers, including Paul.
I think we might understand this story of Nicodemus best as a true story, deeply true   rather than just literally true. It appears very early in Jesus’ public ministry, only in the Gospel of John.  The name Nicodemus means “victory for the people.” Once upon a time, there was a man named “Victory for the People.” He was a highly moral, law-abiding Judean authority who was most observant, yet he couldn’t “see” the realm of God to enter it, according to John. In the dark, by night, Nicodemus came to Jesus, who could see even in the dark that Nicodemus wasn’t seeing the realm of God. In John’s Gospel, the realm of God is not a far away Neverland kind of place, it’s a way of being; and it’s not only in the future, it’s also now. It occurs to me that state might be a better translation for us: State of God – or even better, State of Love (capital L). State conveys a space as well as a mode of existence. Nicodemus was observant, but he wasn’t seeing the entrance to the space and the mode of Love. Nicodemus asked Jesus, “how do you see it?” Jesus answered, one has to be reborn in order to see it. This is not a command at all, just a description of what has to happen. Nicodemus takes Jesus literally and asks, “how is that possible?”

Nicodemus is searching (in the dark) for a deeper connection with God. Jesus has said, okay let’s take it from the top. (That’s another way to translate ‘born from above!’) It’s mysterious, Jesus says. It’s as mysterious as the water that gives life and washes us clean. It’s as mysterious as the wind – breath — the Spirit — which blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  It’s indiscriminate. You don’t control it. You can’t contain it. You don’t even know where it comes from or where it ends up. But you know it when you feel it and you can see its effects. It’s for the whole world, not just for those who are “worthy.” It’s a vision about saving the world, not condemning the world, the Gospel of John explains. And Jesus spent his life and expended his life trying to show people the realm of God within them and around them. It was as difficult as showing fish where the water is, but Jesus showed it by demonstrating the importance of life in a community; the importance of life in service to others; and the importance of being open to, coming alive again to the movement of spirit, of wind, of breath. [4]

So for we, who are younger than 110 years, how and when has this been true? How are we like Abram? When have we been called or pushed to go, to walk away, to become a stranger, to become a blessing, realizing our dependence on grace, coming alive as if we were being born anew? For some of us, these experiences are large in our life stories, for others they are true in our interior landscapes, carried in our hearts, carried in our DNA from our forebearers.  How are we like Paul, embodying what seem like irreconcilable differences with the grace of Love? How are we like Nicodemus as individuals, as a Church, so often observant, but in the dark when it comes to “seeing” and entering the State of Love? How can we get beyond how literal we are? Because even if we are sophisticated enough to not take every word of the Bible literally, we are literal people. We create definitions and limits for ourselves and for others that define what is possible. We imagine limits for God, for Love that define what is possible. Those limits are especially clear when it comes to who’s in and who’s out – who deserves mercy and who doesn’t – who deserves to be served and who doesn’t. We do it. I do it. You do it. The Episcopal Church does it. But the spirit blows by and through our limits (sooner or later) every time. Listen to this poem of advice from the 13^th c Muslim poet Rumi, called “A Community of the Spirit.”

There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street,
and being the noise.

Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,
if you want to be held.

Sit down in this circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd’s love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.
Don’t accept consolations.

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