Lent 2A, 5 March 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
- Genesis 12:1-4a. Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house.
- Romans 4:1-5, 13-17. Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered.
- John 3:1-17. How can these things be?
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.
Some Sundays are harder than others to give thanks and praise to God in response to the scripture readings; don’t you think? Perhaps you have an experience similar to mine of knowing these lessons from a standpoint of in-versus-out, us-versus-them, or ours-and-not-yours. Perhaps you’ve heard these lessons as being about tests of who measures up because of what they think or don’t think. If not, just wait for the end of today’s cantata! All this makes people flee religious practice, and for good reason. As many of you know, rather than skipping over or speeding through scripture that is offensive, off-putting, or terrifying, my Bible teachers taught me that even the worst passages will bear fruit if I slow down and wonder what they have to say to me. 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 they seem to be about the complete opposite to me: about taking leave of your senses and moving into the unknown. Having read these lessons more slowly, more deeply, I now 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, your accomplishments, your identity, your status, your security, your 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 reading is just too short, in my opinion. Just before our reading, Genesis says that Abram’s family was at a crossroads (that’s the literal translation of Haran); and just after our reading, it says that Abram was 75-years old and his wife was barren when he embarked on this transformative journey. He had listened to the voice of God inside him, which said, “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, not a promise. Lech l’cha is what Abram hears. Lech (go, walk away; also an imperative) l’cha (for yourself or better, to yourself) from everything and almost 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.” And the Hebrew says Abram comes out. (I’m not making this up.)
For many centuries, children of Abram (later Abraham) have debated whether he became a vessel of God’s grace through no merit of his own (this is how Christian teachings have leaned) or, like Noah, did Abraham stand out as a righteous and moral man (this is how Jewish teachings have leaned). The best answer is probably both. [1] Like all of us, Abraham certainly had good days and bad days. What seems clear to me is that Abram acted on his sense of the Divine, and the children of Abraham have studied his story and made it their own: the call or the urging to go is from God, and the yes is the human’s choice. What is so poignant in this and other stories of call is that, while Abraham would not live to see the blessing that he would become, his fidelity to the call to be a blessing for all the families of the earth has shaped our world profoundly.
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, which has been oversimplified as faith vs. works. Paul was writing to a community that seems to have been made up of a Gentile Christian majority and a Jewish Christian minority; so 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 God’s will. It 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 this letter. [2] 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 a mandate for people who love each other! [3] 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, so we all need grace. We all receive grace, whether we feel it or not, whether we know it or not; and knowing it requires some trust or faith. If you ever learn one thing from me, I want it to be this: believing in a biblical sense is about fidelity, about trust, not about intellectual assent to an implausible set of ideas. If you don’t trust in grace, you simply can’t and won’t identify it when you experience it.
So, on to the Gospel and the call of Nicodemus. The name Nicodemus means victory for the people. Once upon a time, there was a man named Victory for the People, who was a highly moral, law-abiding Judean authority, most observant, yet he couldn’t see the realm of God to enter it, according to John. 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, the sacred now. It occurs to me that state might be a better translation for us than realm: 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, as mysterious as the wind, breath, the Spirit, which blows where it chooses. 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. The Gospel of John explains that it’s for the whole world, not just for those who are worthy, a vision about saving the world, not condemning it. Jesus spent (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 he showed it by demonstrating the importance of life in a community, in service to others, and being open, coming alive again, to the movement of spirit, wind, breath.
So the most important question for those of us encountering these scripture readings today is not, ” Did any of this really happen?” but, “Is any of this really happening?” How are we like Abram? When have we been called or compelled to go, walk away, become a stranger, become a blessing, realize our dependence on grace, come 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, 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 others, which define what is possible. We imagine limits for God (aka Love), which 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.
Now I don’t know how many other Iris DeMent fans are out there this morning, besides Joy and maybe Ryan Turner: anyone? She’s a singer-songwriter of country music, who leans heavily on the Bible for inspiration. She’s just released a new album called, “Workin’ on a World.” The title track was written in response to the despair she felt after the 2016 presidential elections and the pile-up since then of violence, illness, and climate catastrophes. The song starts: [4]
I got so down and troubled, I nearly lost my head.
I started wakin’ every morning, filled with sadness, fear, and dread.
The world I took for granted was crashing to the ground,
And I realized I might not live long enough to see it turn around.
Sound familiar? Then she sings about thinking of the ones who came before and the sacrifices they had made to open up doors through which she could walk and the streets they had paved on which she could travel, who had worked on a world that they never got to see. As her song turns on the inspiration of those who came before, she sings:
Now I’m workin’ on a world I may never see.
I’m joining forces with the warriors of love who came before and will follow you and me.
I get up in the morning knowing I’m privileged just to be
Workin’ on a world I may never see.
Who will join me? Go be a blessing: humbly acknowledge the need for, and receipt of, grace: be born anew! Work on a world we may never see!
- The Torah: A Modern Commentary, W.G. Plaut, ed. (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981), p. 93.
- Calvin J. Roetzel, The Letters of Paul: Conversations in Context, 3rd ed. (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), pp. 105-111.
- Padraig O’Tuama said something like this in an interview with Krista Tippet, in On Being, March 2017.
- Iris DeMent. “Workin on a World”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOS7OiLE11c.