Lent 2A, March 16, 2014; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of mercy, 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.

There are two things I want you to know about the famous passage of the call of Avram or Abram from the Book of Genesis that we just heard. The first has to do with translating the pesky verb in the second verse. 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 not so clear in English is that the verb is imperative. Be a blessing. It’s a command, rather than a prediction of the future. Lech l’cha is the song we sometimes sing when Rabbi Berman preaches. Lech l’cha. Go, (also an imperative) go, for your own good, from everything and everyone you know to a land and people you do not know, and be a blessing. The second thing I want you to know is that, although our lectionary ends the reading in the first half of verse four, the second half seems really important to me. In the last part of verse four, the Torah tells us that Avram was 75 years old when he embarked on this 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, for any of you who are under the age of 100, I think this story might apply to you. Be a blessing.

Now, on to the Gospel. If you’ve been to a professional football game or a baseball game, or any other event in a large venue, you’ve probably noticed banners that say, simply, John 3:16. Or maybe you’ve noticed bumper stickers or billboards 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. And if today’s Gospel lesson sounded theologically heavy-handed to you when Susanne read it a moment ago, it’s not the way she read it! It’s probably because John 3:16 has fueled some of the most damaging and unchristian impulses of those who have taken the name Christian, from the Crusades to the destruction of conquered indigenous peoples, to the Holocaust and beyond; and from “matters of individual salvation to the way we [have] conduct[ed] foreign policy as a nation.” [1]

For me, the incredible irony is that this passage, so often taken literally, is in the most symbol-loaded Gospel of the four, a story rich with literary devices – metaphor, rhetoric, hyperbole, prolepsis, figurative language, and on and 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. It’s also incredibly ironic because, in this very passage, Jesus is arguing against literalism with Nicodemus. Retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong recently wrote about how, when the Jesus movement became predominantly a Gentile movement, the Jewish background to the gospel’s Jesus stories got lost. The apostle Paul, a Jew, in his enthusiasm to recruit Gentiles to the Jesus movement, inadvertently assisted “an active and virulent anti-Jewish prejudice that [grew and grew until]. … symbolic Jewish stories were read as if they were literal history.” Spong suggests that, “Biblical literalism is at its heart a Gentile heresy, born in the ignorance of the Jewish background to the Gospels” [2] and, I would add, in the lack of regard for the essential Jewishness of Jesus and his earliest followers.

I think we might understand this story of Nicodemus best as a true story, symbolically, rather than true literally. It appears very early in Jesus’ public ministry, according to John, just after the wedding at Cana, where he told his mother that he really wasn’t ready to go public, and then a few days latter, when Jesus made a whip and drove sheep and cattle out of the temple in Jerusalem and overturned tables and poured out containers of coins that belonged to the currency exchange dealers – quite a scene. This encounter with Nicodemus comes next.

The name Nicodemus means “victory for the people.” So, once upon a time, there was a man named “Victory for the People.” He was a highly moral, law-abiding community leader who was in the dark about his relationship with God. He was most obedient and most observant, but he couldn’t “see” the Kingdom of God to enter it. He came to Jesus in the night – in the dark – and Jesus knew that Nicodemus couldn’t see the Kingdom of God. In John’s Gospel, the Kingdom 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. In fact, it occurs to me that State might be a better translation for us: State of God – or even better, State of Love (capital L). That conveys the space as well as the mode of existence. Nicodemus was obedient and observant, but he wasn’t seeing – wasn’t entering — the State of Love. Jesus is telling him about being born anew or born from above and Nicodemus is taking Jesus literally and asking, “How is that possible?”

It reminds me of the story, perhaps you remember it, of a student who arrives after traveling a long time, to study with a spiritual master. The student says, “I want you to show me where God is.” The master replies, “I cannot show you where God is any more than I can show a fish where the water is.”

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 — 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 for those who are “worthy.” It’s to save the world not to condemn the world that Jesus came, John says. And Jesus spent his life and expended his life showing people who God was, and who and whose they were. And how did he show that? Jesus showed that by demonstrating the importance of life in a community of faith; the importance of life in service to others; and the importance of being open to the movement of the Spirit. [3]

So I’m wondering this: How are we like Nicodemus as individuals, as a Church, so often obedient and so often observant, but in the dark when it comes to “seeing” the State of God in the world? 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 that define what is possible. And 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 God blows through our limits (sooner or later) every time, because, as Bishop Nedi Rivera says, “Self-giving love trumps everything.” “Self-giving love trumps everything.”

I had an experience the other day that felt like I was born again – not born again the way some Christians mean, but born again in the sense of what the French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur called “a second naivete,” The glory of the Lord dawned upon me the other day. Here’s what happened when I was born again. I think Brother Curtis Almquist from the monastery across the river was the midwife. Thursday morning, Curtis led a group I was in, in singing the canticle from Isaiah, “arise, shine, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has dawned upon you.” [4] We sang that as a round over and over. Then Curtis offered a reflection in which he mentioned something I’ve heard him say before – that if there’s someone who’s getting under your skin, she or he probably belongs there. That always makes me grimace. But then he invited us to make a list – a list of the people getting under our skin. I made a list and then, since they were already under my skin, I used my heart to welcome them and I tried not to make my welcome warm — not too begrudging. Later in the day I had a meeting in which Bishop Shaw, who many of you know, is living with an aggressive brain cancer. He’s freer than I’ve ever seen him. And then my day ended with an enthusiastic conversation back at Emmanuel about ways to think about what any of us wants our legacy to be after we die. It was a part of the Lent supper program, Ashes to Ashes.

I woke up on Friday – with the dawn – and it was as if the heavens had opened a little bit and I could see the glory of God so much more clearly than I could see the more familiar landscape of outrage, frustration, resentment, shame, regret, grief, you know the list. Those things were small – way off in the distance, heading out to sea. I’m sure they’re not gone for all time – but what a breath of fresh air while they are at a distance! With that breath of fresh air, that extra room, I felt a deep sense of God’s mercy for the folks who had been on my list – the ones under my skin, and God’s mercy for me. It dawned on me, the glory of the Lord.

And that, it seems to me, is the key to entering the State of God. It is by showing God’s mercy to others that we experience God’s mercy. And we all know that life in community requires showing a lot of mercy. And sometimes life in a community of faith requires showing more mercy than secular communities! It is by serving others in God’s name that we are served. And it is by being open to “the presence of the God in whom Jesus believed, who [as Paul said in our passage from Romans] gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” that we are opened to eternal life. Like Abram, we are blessed so that we might be a blessing. It’s a command. May it be so.

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