Beginnings

Scripture:        Genesis 12:1-4a,   Psalm 121,      Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, John 3:1-17

Today, our church’s second-newest member, Abigail, will be baptized.  Today, at just a bit over two weeks old, Abigail begins her journey with the people of God, and especially the people gathered here at Emanuel Church.  Abigail will be baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, so that the new life of Christ will be new life for Abigail as well.

In our Gospel reading, a well-respected religious leader, Nicodemus, makes a tentative start toward this new life.  Nicodemus, not wanting to jeopardize his standing in the community by being seen with the controversial Jesus, approached Jesus at night, under cover of darkness.   One way I remember this part of the story, and maybe it’ll be a memory aid for you as well, is the tagline for the Nickelodeon channel’s evening programming, “Nick at Night”.  Nicodemus is truly Nic at night – not only does he come to Jesus under cover of darkness, but he comes to Jesus from a place of darkened understanding, seeking more light.   Nicodemus gropes his way to Jesus through both the darkness of the evening and the darkness of his mind and spirit.

When Nicodemus approaches Jesus, he projects authority and certainty:  “We know that you are a teacher sent by God, because no one can do the things you do apart from God.”  Remember those opening words:  “we know”.   Jesus responds in a way that don’t seem to connect to the words of Nicodemus:  “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”  The Greek word used here is gennao anothen; the Greek word gennao comes from the same root as our words genesis and geneology, speaking of beginnings and birth; the word anothen can mean “from above” or it can mean “again” – so the Greek phrase can be translated “born from above” or “born again.”  I think the words “born again” in our culture come with a lot of unhelpful baggage, sometimes involving images of a tent, and sawdust, and an altar call and being prayed over, asking Jesus to come into one’s life that very moment…and, often enough, the next morning waking up wondering what hit ‘em the night before.   Much of the unhelpful baggage around the phrase “born again” comes from our society’s stereotypes – if someone says that he or she is a “born again Christian”, these words raise assumptions in our society about the person’s family life, how they dress, what language they will or will not use, what establishments they will or will not frequent, how they vote…and, often enough, about who they hate…sad that some who claim the name of Christian are known more for who they hate than who for they love.  Many have come to Christ on the sawdust trail, but I don’t want to limit the discussion of salvation to that image and those stereotypes – and besides, sawdust makes me sneeze - so I’m purposely using the translation “born from above.”  “No one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above.”

Just that one sentence, and Nicodemus’ confidence evaporates as he hears Jesus’ words in a very literal way:  “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”   And Jesus doesn’t try to simplify his message: after all, Jesus is one religious leader talking to another religious leader, and one would expect a religious leader to be able to understand figurative speech:  “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 by now is totally stumped, and says, “How can these things be?”

Now, fortunately for us as we read this passage, two of our congregation’s families have newborn babies – as I said, Abigail is a bit over two weeks old, and our other newborn is four days old – and so this image of childbirth is fresher for us than it would have been at other times.   As a congregation we followed both of these pregnancies closely – as a congregation we’re small enough that births and baptisms are not routine events, and so when a new baby comes, we really celebrate.  Believe me, these two babies were prayed over, bathed in prayer and covered in prayer the entire course of their respective pregnancies.  It may be hard to imagine – it certainly is for me – but what would the birthing process have been like for those babies.  They’ve been inside their mother’s womb for 9 months.  The womb is the developing baby’s world; it’s warm and safe, and everything they need comes to them without their having to ask; it just comes to them automatically.  For the baby, there may have been slight indications that there was something outside the womb, as mom put her hand on her belly and felt the baby kicking, and perhaps in some way the baby felt the press of the mother’s hand, and some moms may talk or sing to the baby inside them.  But everything these babies need is right with them.  Then, all of a sudden there are contractions, and everything in the baby’s world is shaking and convulsing and tensing up and releasing and contracting and letting go and contracting again, and the baby moves down the birth canal, into the light of the delivery room, and it cries for the first time.  And the baby finds itself in a new world, a different, larger world, with nothing but its own feeble instincts and its parents’ love to help it make its way, where it is utterly dependent, and has to learn how to make its most basic needs known to its parents.  But the baby has no lifegiving alternative.  It can’t stay in the womb forever; cannot stay connected to its mother by its umbilical cord forever; one way or the other, it needs to leave the world of the womb and enter the new, larger world of its mother.  For the baby, the only alternative to birth is death.

And this is the figure of speech Jesus uses to describe the radical spiritual transformation needed even to see, let alone enter, the Kingdom of God.  This isn’t about incremental change, about making New Year’s resolutions or joining Weight Watchers or going to a Dale Carnegie class so we can learn how to win friends and influence people.  Instead, it’s being prepared to give up everything we have and everything we know, so that we can encounter Jesus.  For the learned, respectable Nicodemus, all his education and all his stature in the community meant exactly nothing – in fact, if anything, it all got in the way.  Next week we’ll be reading about the woman at the well (John 4), whom Jesus met at high noon and asked for a drink of water, and she – a foreigner, uneducated, with a complicated past – was much more receptive to Jesus than Nicodemus was.  The woman at the well heard gladly what Jesus had to say, and afterward told everyone she knew about Jesus.  “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done!” (John 4:29) Nicodemus had to be willing to lay all he had known aside and begin again, as a spiritual newborn, and for him it was a glacially slow process; it was only near the end of John’s gospel that Nicodemus was willing, near the end of Good Friday, the day of crucifixion, to come into the waning daylight, along with Joseph of Arimathea, to claim the crucified body of Christ.

“You must be born from above,” Jesus said.  That phrase, “from above” tells us who starts the birthing process; hint: it’s not us.  Whether we grow up in the church, or come to Jesus in a moment of crisis, we only draw near to God because God has first drawn near to us.   “The wind blows where it will, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”  Truly, the initiative is with God, not us.

And so, Baby Abigail has much to teach us today.  Do you want to see the Kingdom of God?   Become like Abigail.  Do you want to experience the new life in Christ?  Become like Abigail.  Be prepared to unlearn everything you think you know – be prepared to be fools for Christ – because the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom.  Be prepared to lay aside your pride and self-sufficiency, your precious individualism, your rugged self-reliance – in order to become utterly dependent on God and on those whom God has gathered in Christ’s name – for the weakness of God is stronger than human strength (I Corinthians 1:25)  Anyone who will not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child will not receive it at all (Mark 10:15).  The doorway into the Kingdom of God has a very low passage – adults have to stoop or get down on their knees in order to enter - but there’s enough room for a little child, enough room for Abigail – and enough room for us if we’re willing to follow. Amen. 

"Do You Want To Be Healed" - Lenten service Mar 8 2017

Scriptures                               John 5:1-18

“Do You Want to Be Healed?”

A number of years ago, on a vacation trip to Quebec, I visited the Cathedral of St. Anne de Beaupre.  St Anne is a beautiful, large Cathedral, located just outside the city of Quebec, which in years past had a reputation as a site for miraculous healings, especially of people whose legs were crippled.  To this day, on walking into the Cathedral, just inside the entrance, one will see stacks of crutches and canes left behind by those who were cured.

Our Scripture reading for tonight takes place at a place known for healing in the time of Jesus.  The location is the Sheep Gate – in Aramaic, Beth-zatha, one of the gates in the ancient temple.  We’re told that this gate had five porticoes or porches, in which lay many invalids.  At Beth-zatha was a pool, and we’re told that an angel of the Lord used to come down from time to time and stir up the water, and whoever made it into the water first – but only that person - would be healed.  While one would be grateful for the healings, our Gospel paints an almost pathetic picture of frail, desperately ill people scrambling and tripping over one another to be the first to get to the water in a frantic competition for healing.  It seems a bit unfair – one would expect that those who were the least infirm, the least in need of healing, would get into the water faster than those most in need.  Hadn’t someone thought to set up a line so that people could enter the water in order of arrival?  Maybe set up a system like at the deli counter:  “Now healing number 1,328. New arrivals please take a number for better service.”  Didn’t any of those who had been cured ever come back to help others get to the healing waters? The Gospel reading does raise some odd questions.

Our Gospel says that Jesus had gone up to Jerusalem for one of the festivals – we’re not told which one – and that he walked by this particular gate of the Temple, seeing the many infirm persons there.  He speaks to one particular person, who we are told had lain there for thirty-eight years.  Jesus asks the man, “Do you want to be made well?”  The sick man tells Jesus that he had nobody to help him, and that when the water was stirred, someone else always got there first.  Jesus said, “take up your mat and walk.”  At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. 

The little we’re told of the man makes for a fascinating character study.  We might remember another healing story, the one in the 2^nd chapter of Mark’s gospel, in which a paralyzed man was physically carried by four of his friends to Jesus.  When they couldn’t get into the house where he taught, the friends tore open the roof of the house and lowered the man right in front of Jesus, put the guy right in front of Jesus’ nose.  By contrast, no friends were tearing open roofs or even doing so much as lifting a finger for the man Jesus healed at Beth-zatha.  And you would think that, after 38 years, the man might have moved himself – or enlisted the cooperation of others to take pity on him and move him - close enough to the edge of the pool that, even with his limitations, he could manage to lurch himself into the water first – but, no, that hadn’t happened either.  At the very least, the man’s personality hadn’t endeared him enough to those around him to enlist any aid for his cause, and he wasn’t exactly overflowing with imagination or initiative.  At worst, he could be seen as a malingerer, one who was perhaps more interested in being pitied than in being healed.  On first reading, Jesus seems to be Captain Obvious in asking his question “Do you want to be made well?” – the obvious answer would be, “yes, no kidding, that’s why I’ve been laying here for almost 40 years.”  But on further consideration, the question may reflect more insight into the man’s character than we first suppose.  “Do you want to be made well?”  If you’re made well, you’ll no longer be entitled to the pity of passers by; you’ll have to take up your mat and walk, to return to the duties and responsibilities of society.  Your life will change.  Are you ready for all that?  Are you ready to take all that on?  Do you want to be made well? It’s telling that the man doesn’t respond to Jesus’ question with “yes” but rather launches into an explanation of why he hadn’t been made well in the past, wasn’t well now, and likely wouldn’t be made well in the future – you can almost hear the whining tone in the man’s voice coming through the text.  Almost certainly Jesus wasn’t the first person to hear the man complaining about his predicament.  One could say that the man was as crippled in spirit as in body.  Despite all this, Jesus takes the initiative and heals the man.

We’re told that the healing took place on the Sabbath.  The religious authorities see the man carrying his mat.  You’d think they’d rejoice over the man’s miraculous healing.  And you’d be wrong.  Instead, they chastise the man for carrying his mat on the Sabbath.  The man says, “well, the man who healed me told me it was ok.”  True to the man’s character, he hadn’t actually bothered to find out who had healed him, let alone thanked Jesus, and Jesus had slipped away out of sight.  Later Jesus met the man in the Temple, and told him, “don’t sin again, or something worse will happen to you.”  So the man turns around and dimes Jesus out to the religious authorities, throws Jesus under the bus, so that they start to persecute Jesus for healing on the Sabbath.  What a nice guy!  (You might be getting some idea why people hadn’t been falling all over themselves to help this guy during his 38 years of illness.)  Jesus’ response to the religious authorities bears close reading.  Remember that the law about Sabbath rest had been instituted in remembrance of God resting on the seventh day after creating the universe.  And yet Jesus is saying, “yes, today is the Sabbath, but God my Father is working on the Sabbath, is at work today, right here, right now – because if God weren’t at work right now, the universe would fall into chaos, would cease to exist – and do you know what, I’m working too.”  We can see perhaps more clearly why the religious authorities were infuriated by Jesus, as he seemed to interpret his act of healing as a part of God’s ongoing work of preserving and renewing the universe God created.

Aside from Jesus, nobody comes out of this story looking especially good.  The man who had been healed repaid Jesus’ kindness by snitching on him, and the religious authorities condemned a miracle of God because it didn’t come according to their exact specifications.  I’m glad I wasn’t there, and likely so are you. And yet we may be able to find ourselves in this story.

The basic problem of the man at the pool was that he was stuck, physically stuck in one place.  He couldn’t move.  And I think that’s one place where we can find ourselves in the story.  In various ways, we all get stuck from time to time – physically stuck, perhaps, but also mentally stuck, or emotionally stuck, or spiritually stuck.    Sin, separation from God, makes us stuck.    Addiction or dependency on alcohol or drugs or other ways to numb ourselves out can leave us stuck.  We know in our heart of hearts that what we’re doing is tripping us up, perhaps slowly destroying us, and yet there we are, drink in hand again.  Or it may be a form of sin that’s socially acceptable, but destructive just the same – envy, gossip, lust, anger, the pride that brings contempt for those around us – thank God that I am not like those other people.  Or it may be some other self-destructive pattern, but we all struggle against the darkness in our own lives.  In our heart of hearts we know that these sins are destructive of our relations with God and neighbor and of our own peace of mind….and yet, in the words of the Brittany Spears song from a few years back….”Oops, I did it again….”  Or as Paul put it, “I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law that dwells in my members.  Wretched man that I am.  Who will rescue me from this body of death?”  Probably the very question that the invalid at the pool asked himself as he lay there day after day, decade after decade.  We may truly want to change our destructive behavior, but we fear the changes in our lives that may come as a result.  For example, if I stop drinking, I’ll have to deal with spouse and job and life sober…and who wants to do that?  If I learn to control my anger, those around me may take my apparent serenity as a license to walk all over me, and I’ll need to find new ways to negotiate disagreements with others that don’t involve blowing my stack.  But Jesus Christ who rescued the man at the pool is ready to rescue us.  We may have to hit bottom in some way and admit to ourselves that our sins has taken us too far out into deep waters for them to be able to swim to shore on their own strength.  We become ready to take the first step of admitting that we are powerless over our sinfulness  and our  lives have become unmanageable.  We come to believe that a higher power – God - can help us.  And we become willing to let God take over.  And through Jesus, the healing process begins – not because of our winning personalities, not because of who we are, but because of who God is.

Another place that we in the church can find ourselves in the story is among the religious leaders who criticized the man for carrying his mat on the Sabbath, and more importantly criticized Jesus for healing on the Sabbath.  You see, the religious leaders are stuck, too, but in a different way.  They’re not stuck physically, but they are spiritually stuck, stuck in expecting God and God’s people to behave according to their expectations – to quote a song from U2 from a few years back, they’re “stuck in a moment, and they can’t get out of it.”  We can make the same mistake that the religious leaders in Jesus’ day did, missing miracles from God in our midst because they doesn’t fit into the familiar boxes of expectations that we’re prone to build.  We’ve grown up in the church, lived with the church all our lives.  Jesus has been a part of our lives for as long as we can remember – he’s walked with us and he’s talked with us, and he’s told us we are his own.  We know how the church has worked for most of our lives, we’re used to doing church in a certain way, and because of this we think we know how God works.  Except when God starts coloring outside the lines we’ve drawn, when God starts working in the lives of folks that are way outside our comfort zone, when God gets busy in the lives of folks that just plain creep us out, or when God sends us magnificent blessings in really strange packages.   We look at people being blessed that we always though were beyond God’s love; or we see ourselves being blessed through people that we thought were too whatever to be used by God, and we ask, “Can God possibly be behind this?  Can God do a new thing?”  Will we allow God to do God’s new thing?  Or do our fears prompt us to shut down and block out the signs of God’s grace, to close our eyes to a miracle in our midst

“Do you want to be healed?”  The question Jesus asked the invalid at the pool is the question he asks us today, and asks those around us.  May our answer be “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory in Christ Jesus.”