John 3: 1-17
February 20, 2005
Elizabeth Macaulay
It is no coincidence that Nicodemus seeks answers in the time of night.
Is there a one of us who does not know the honesty and soul stripping that time during the night can bring? Our business has subsided. The costumes we wear during the day are put away. We are able to let down and relax. And we are vulnerable. The props we sometimes use to keep the voice of our souls stilled: work, frantic tending of the too-much that is our lives. Those activities are behind us for another day.
And so, in the night, we are more clearly able to hear, as Kabir speaks in the poem on this morning’s bulletin cover, the sound our souls make.
There was something that would not leave Nicodemus alone in the night. He who was a leader in the Temple. He who had every reason to suspect and demean this Rabbi Jesus who had attracted crowds and who had been in the temple throwing out the money changers. He who knew his place in the world and knew that this Jesus was preaching an unsettling way that threatened the assumed order of things.
He came listened to his questions in the night. And he honored them by seeking answers. Nicodemus sought out Jesus and the life he sense there, I believe, because the song of his soul insisted upon it.
And the first thing Nicodemus hears from the Rabbi Jesus is perplexing and not easy. Jesus tells him that although there have been water to wine sort of miracles witnessed by many, it is not the signs and wonders of his ministry that are proof of his identity. Jesus tells Nicodemus that what makes for true identity as one who walks with God is that he knows himself to be born from above.
Born again in flesh and spirit. Born again.
Now, before we go off on a tangent around those two words – born again – and the ways they have so often been used to divide God’s favorites from the naugties, I want to share with you what an unsettling message this was for Nicodemus to hear.
In the culture of his day, the circumstances around one’s birth meant almost everything. Status was gained by cultural placement. Life has not changed all that much in the thousands of years since, has it? Honor and community standing were vitally important. Birth right made for sureity.
Nicodemus, as a Pharisee, enjoyed power and privilege as an elite leader in the Temple. We can assume that he was born into a position of power. So what he hears from Jesus is unsettling to him. Because what he hears from Jesus is that in order to be fully a part of God’s vision for life, he has to be willing to let go of all of the props the accident of his birth has given him. He has to be willing to be born again with God clearly as author of his life. And this is a radical and compelling notion to this Pharisee, a man who has dedicated his life to managing the affairs of God. Because having God as the author of life means that Nicodemus, as child of God, will, in the understanding of his culture, inherit all that is his father’s – all that is God’s.
This is a powerful and exciting vision for what it means to be born again! Nicodemus and all who are willing to be born into being claimed children of God are inheritors of all that is of God.
But it is gift with a catch. Maybe most especially for those who were born into power and privilege.
If Nicodemus is able to be born again and inherit all that is of God, so too is the temple slave, the peasant, the leper, the tax collector.
…For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16-17)
I have been proud to be among the ranks of religious leaders in the past week. If you have been reading the headlines, you know that the bishops in the Catholic and Lutheran churches have joined together with other religious leaders (they don’t know our bishop yet. It’s only a matter of time until they find in our United Methodist bishop a kindred spirit). They are speaking out to call to us as citizens of this world and as people of faith.
Their message comes straight out of this morning’s teaching. The message is this:
We are family. We claim our birth through the water and the spirit and our oneness in our parent God. And as family, as a people born again and again and again, we are called to tend each other.
What this means is: if the elders in our family have such limited health care that they have to choose between buying medications or food, we all are broken.
What this means is: if the children in our family don’t have access to quality child care while their parents work minimum wage jobs, we all are broken.
What this means is: if our youth live in a state where funding is continually cut for schools we are all broken.
If we are living as born again Christians, we know that the brokenness of any is our brokenness.
We have a visitor here at Richfield church. She stops by every three weeks or so. Her name is Christina. She is 28 years old. She is deaf. She is poor. She is the mother of two; the youngest is 1. She is dying of cancer. It will claim her before the year is out.
Christina comes seeking help. In the scheme of things, she doesn’t ask for much. Twenty dollars for patches for her tires. Money for medicine. She has stayed the last two times she came and shared a meal with the staff or most recently, with the crew who gathered on Wednesday night.
Christina gets monetary help here. But I want for her more than that. What she gets in this place, I pray, every time she walks through the door, that feeds her more than money or food is the reminder that we are – rich, poor, healthy, sick, comfortable church folk and heartbroken mother - human together. She is guest in a place where we know ourselves to be born of the water and the spirit. Distinctions blur between us.
When we see the holy in ourselves and when we see it in the other, we are, truly, born again.
Many authors who are writing and thinking and praying in these days see us in a uniquely power filled time. We who live in these days are aware of a growing sense of night time openness to this jangling in our souls that will not be stilled. Many are allowing themselves in this time the courage and vulnerability it takes to hope for and work toward a better way of living as family. Many who believe there IS a something more are willing to open themselves to the same sort of prompting that led Nicodemus from the comfort of his assumptions to the challenge of learning and living the way of Jesus.
We know ourselves to be a global community wracked by the scourges of AIDS, hunger, ecological devastation, war, and injustice and we know that God speaks forth in this Rabbi Jesus in ways that lead to life.
Religious leaders are speaking up because they know the intimate ways we who are born again are kin to ALL people – Christian, Muslim, Jew, human, ALL people. God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through living in the way of God’s Son.
In the late 18th century, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau had something to say about how important it is to claim our kinship, one for the other. He said,
“We have all sorts of specialties; we have engineers, we have scientists, we have ministers, but we no longer have a citizen among us” – that is to say, somebody who will go beyond his or her professional prison and take part in the battle for social justice. (Howard Zinn, The Sun, July 2004)
We are citizens of this world that God so loves. Each one of us. Given a unique song to sing and a unique place to live the questions and graced with unique wisdom that speaks to us in the vulnerable honesty of our souls.
Let no prison, professional or cultural, keep us from singing the complex and simple song of our connection to all that is: we who are born again.
Let us speak and act and pray and listen. Let us live!
Amen