What is REAL?
Reflections on John 3.1-17
RCL Lent 2A
12 March 2017
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Click here to listen to the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 Eucharist on Sunday the 12th.
John 3.1-17
John 3.1-17
3.1 Now there was a
Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling
council. 2 He came to Jesus
at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from
God. For no one could perform the signs
you are doing if God were not with him.”
3 Jesus replied,
“Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born
again.”
4 “How can someone
be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked.
“Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be
born!”
5 Jesus answered,
“Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are
born of water and the Spirit. 6
Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7 You should not be surprised at my
saying, ‘You must be born again.’ 8
The wind blows wherever it pleases. You
hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is
going. So it is with everyone born of
the Spirit.”
9 “How can this
be?” Nicodemus asked.
10 “You are
Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? 11 Very truly I tell you, we speak
of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do
not accept our testimony. 12
I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will
you believe if I speak of heavenly things?
13 No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came
from heaven—the Son of Man. 14
Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be
lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in
him.”
16 For God so loved
the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall
not perish but have eternal life. 17
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save
the world through him.
Prelude: Loving the Questions
In my first
parish I was put in charge of confirmation preparation. I looked at the materials that they had been
using for some time and decided that I would change how we prepared our young
people for this important event in their lives.
So, we used the questions of the baptismal covenant as the outline for
our time together. I encouraged the
young people to go home and discuss these questions with their parents.
After the
first week the rector called me into his office. He had received several telephone calls from
parents who were unhappy at the new programme.
“Why?” I asked. “You’re sending
the kids home with questions their parents don’t know how to answer.” “But my point is,” I said, “ that they learn
to love the questions. We’re going to
spend all our lives trying to understand what they mean for us. There might actually be several ‘answers’.”
What is REAL?
“What is
REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the
nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside
you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t
how you are made,” said the Skin Horse.
“It’s a thing that happens to you.
When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but
REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it
hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,”
said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being
hurt.”
“Does it
happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t
happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse.
“You become. It takes a long
time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often
to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully
kept. Generally, by the time you are
Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose
in the joints and very shabby. But these
things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except
to people who don’t understand.” [1]
Born from Above or Born
Again?
I admit to a
great deal of sympathy for Nicodemus.
He’s come to Jesus at some personal risk to understand the message this
itinerant rabbi from Nazareth is sharing with the people. Instead of a satisfying and informative
theological discussion about the coming of God’s kingdom, Jesus speaks in
riddles and leaves Nicodemus holding a bagful of questions. As if to add to Nicodemus’ confusion, Jesus
even plays on the two meanings of the Greek word anothen --- we need to be born ‘again’ but
we cannot unless we are born ‘from above’.
But I think I understand the play on words.
When I was
growing up in Colorado Springs at the foot of Pikes Peak, my perspective on my
hometown was relatively flat. To be
sure, there were some hills around my house that my friends and I would climb
as part of our adventures, but these did not really change my perspective on
where I lived. Then one day my Scout
troop climbed Mount Manitou, one of the peaks that make up the massif of Pikes
Peak. When I reached the summit, I
turned to the east and life was changed.
From the
summit I could see to the eastern horizon.
Looking from above, my hometown which I thought was immense was really a
small area of trees and buildings and lakes hedged on the west by the massif
and unbounded to the east by the Great Prairies that reach from the Mississippi
River to the Rocky Mountains. I could
the smaller towns that seemed so far from the ‘city’.
I looked
from above and I born again. The change
in perspective gained from the heights caused me to reconsider my entire view
of the world in which I lived. And I was
born again. I began the journey that we
all are called to make, the journey to becoming ‘real’.
Being Born from Above
As some of
you know, I am a fan of detective stories, whether in book form or on
television. One of the key dimensions of
solving the mystery is the accumulation of ‘witnesses’ or, as fits my sermon
today, ‘perspectives’ on the events that are being investigated. My service on a jury almost forty years ago
and my experience of a daughter who is a Crown attorney has taught me to be
reluctant to come to any conclusion on the basis of a single witness, a single
‘perspective’.
To see the
world as God sees it, to be ‘born from above’, requires a commitment on our
part to seek out a variety of perspectives.
The most important perspectives come from the Scriptures where we hear
the voices of Jewish and Christian people describe their experiences of the
living God. Although some folk focus on
the similarities of their experiences, I often find the differences more
intriguing and more illuminating that the similarities. The differences reveal a tiny glimpse into
God’s perspective as it is given expression by human experience and reflection.
But the
perspectives do not stop with the last book of the New Testament. Over the centuries believers in the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Moses and Jesus, have shared their
experience of and reflection on the living God.
Right now I am reading Resident Aliens:
Life in the Christian Colony by Stanley Hauerwas and William
Willimon. First published more than
twenty-five years ago it is enjoying a new popularity as Christians in North
America struggle with how to be ‘a strange people in a strange land’. I hope that you have found a companion to
join you on your Lenten journey who can offer you her or his perspective of how
God looks at our world.
Being Born Again
If the truth
be told, every Christian who is serious about being a disciple of Jesus is born
again --- and again --- and again --- and again. I remember one of my friends who happened to
be the rector of a small parish in a very conservative small town where
Anglicans were a distinct and, I must say, distrusted minority telling the
story of encountering one of the other local pastors in a coffee shop on a
Sunday afternoon.
My friend
had just come from celebrating a baptism.
The pastor approached him and said, ‘Forgive me for asking, but I am
curious: Have you been born again?’ My friend looked his colleague straight in
the eye and said, ‘Yes. About an hour
ago.’ His colleague grasped my friend’s
hand, shook it vigorously and said, ‘God be praised.’ When my friend told me the story, he added,
‘I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I thought that I might be born again
the next day when I celebrated holy communion at a nursing home. It would’ve confused him, I think.’
Every time
we gather as a community to hear the Scriptures proclaimed, to offer our
intercessions, petitions and thanksgiving, to share in the bread broken and the
wine poured, and then to be sent forth as Christ’s agents wherever God has
placed us, we can be born again. To be
born again is to have a renewed sense of our place in God’s world and our role
in bringing God’s promise closer to fulfillment.
Becoming Real
My friends,
I hope that this Lent brings you and I one step closer to becoming ‘real’. We share Nicodemus’ search to become ‘real’
by asking questions of this enigmatic rabbi from Nazareth. May we find companions who help us be born
from above by offering us new perspectives on how God looks at this world. May we find each eucharist an experience of
being born again as Christ’s disciples.
I hope that Easter will find us less easy to break, with fewer sharp
edges and less needy of careful keeping --- but definitely more real.
[1]
Margery Williams Bianco, The
Velveteen Rabbit or, How Toys Become Real (Kennebunkport ME: Applesauce Press, 2012), 9-11.
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