Sunday Sermon: 2 Lent
And Mother’s everywhere are cringing at Nicodemus’ words, imagining their children crawling back into their wombs…
The fact that Nicodemus came to Jesus in the night is significant in the writing of John. It is significant because it symbolizes the theme that runs throughout the Gospel of John, the theme of Light and Darkness. The light is always being challenged by darkness, and of course, the light always wins when it is Jesus, but for those disciples of Jesus and those disciples that follow Jesus long after John has left this world, it is a different story. Disciple’s today struggle as much as anybody has with the challenges and the evil that darkness brings.
Nicodemus’ questioning of Jesus in the dark is significant for another reason. Conversion always preceded Baptism in Jesus’ time, and the early Church. They often did not have infants to baptize as we do today. They often made people go through the intense formation in the weeks leading up to Easter, as we hear on Ash Wednesday, Lent was always a season for those seeking to be baptized and those who were seeking to be restored to the Church. For John the story of Nicodemus is about Baptism, we often hear different stories of Baptism in the different Gospels and Epistles, for Paul it was about death and new life, for Matt, Mark and Luke it was a ritual cleansing, a washing away of our sins. But for John it is about being born again, or, as the phrase can also mean, born from above. Rebirth is the theme of John’s Gospel and we will hear all about it as we journey through this Lent.
I would ask you all to take this Gospel home with you this week, take your bulletins and reflect on the Gospel, read it over and over, because it is a unique Gospel; it is a wonderful tug of war between Jesus, this new upstart, renewal figure and Nicodemus, the old established, traditional teacher. It is a tug of war that we often engage in ourselves, and this dialogue could go a long way in helping us all come to understand how God is calling us.
Nicodemus has no understanding about Jesus’ words, but he remains with Jesus trying hard to work out his meaning. The psalm today sheds some light upon the eternal questions of Nicodemus when it sings, “I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come?” The questions we ask are often as difficult and challenging as the ones Nicodemus is asking. They are questions that we ask out of our history, out of our past. Questions that are about what we know and less about what we are becoming. Nicodemus knew full well how babies are born, so in hearing the idea of being born again he thinks of only the physical re-birth of a human being and its impossibility. Nicodemus is asking only out of his knowledge and experience when Jesus is asking him to suspend his own experience and listen to the seemingly impossible answers of God and God’s love for all of creation.
We are in the midst of this same struggle, the same struggle with a bit of a cultural twist. For years, centuries even Christianity has been at the center of the public and private life of most humans in the world. Religion always held some sort of state or official role in its life time. For the first time since Constantine declared Christianity the state Religion, we are experiencing the disestablishment of Christianity from the public life. For instance, we here at Gethsemane have been asked to revive a Church, and I have come to understand that the revival of the church in the eyes of those who sought to make this happen had certain expectations that perpetuated this model of Christendom, this model of Christianity that still places the Church and the religious experience at the center of civic and cultural life. I have come to see that the commitment to this kind of established Church, to this idea of Christendom as it has always been present in the public life, is the single most important cause of inertia and inhibition of intentional and creative response to this great transition the Church at large is going through. The more we seek to institutionalize and recreate institutions of old, the less creative we become, and the more the Spirit is boxed up and left behind on a shelf somewhere.
However, I say that and understand that not many of us are equipped for the end of this Era of Christendom, for the end of the Church’s life in the civic center. I find myself often falling back into the habits and models of the expectations of a priest and a priest’s traditional roles, roles that perpetuate a kind of religious experience that is not transformative and is not engaging the culture meaningfully and with intention. For the most part, there are few people, if any that are prepared to move us out of Christendom and into the post-Christendom world we are all experiencing. This experience, I have to say, goes hand in hand with the great shifts in our culture as well. No longer are people willing to accept one or two world views, or a particular institutions worldview as their own. More and more people are seeking out meaning for themselves and meaning for their particular situations. One size fits all no longer applies to our culture and the people in our culture. Pluralism has become the concept of the day, in everything we do we have to be sensitive and aware of how our actions affect those around us, and at the same time understand more clearly our own needs, wants and desires and strive to have them met.
For years all Christians saw their role as bringing unity under Christ to the world, Christianity rolled through the centuries beating down all those who would oppose her, and reducing to fantasy those religions that stood with her in various expressions of God. Christian mission for years did not mean necessarily bringing Christ to the world as much as it meant territorial expansion, it was and has been a tool of empires and often used the language and goals of the empire to further its cause in the world.
Today if I were to tell you all to go out and convert the world, most, if not all of us would shudder at the thought. We would point out that the Muslims and Jews’ expressions of God are just as valid in the world as ours. Or, we might say that evangelism is not our particular gift and we would rather stay home and explore some other interest we have. The tectonic shift of our culture and our religion is upon us, this sift has been happening for many decades, and yet we refuse to see it, we refuse to see this shift, which is less about culture and much more about God’s activity in the world, about how God has been freed from the boxes that our ancestors have tried to reduce God with.
I wish I could end this on a hopeful note for you all, but we are very much in a struggle of questioning God and Jesus as Nicodemus struggled with Jesus. We approach these questions and the challenges of our future from the places we know and the experiences we have had. It is not often that we are able to step out of those experiences and even out of what we know and look at the world, at the Church and our own lives in a different way. Abram is called by God, in our Old Testament reading to leave all that he knows and all that he loves and embark on a journey that is a mystery to him. To go to a land that God will eventually show him. I believe to my core that until we can find a way to leave what we know as historic Christianity, until we can find a way to disestablish ourselves from the traditions that hold us to a model that is quickly dissipating, we will be stuck and we will not succeed in our life together here in the Garden. We must heed the call of God and leave what we know and love and explore this new world, this new place that the Church is being led to.
Last weekend I met with 15 young adults and although I heard the same sentiment of sticking it out with Christendom, in the same words and sentiments I heard a desire for the opportunity to engage God and move into a land of unknown promise. They have the will and the energy to lead us all as Abram led his people into a new land, out of old expectations and traditions into a place that transformed him and his people. The problem is they want to do that work as a community, not as individuals, so until we all can make the journey together, we will be stuck, inert, unmoving.
Nicodemus, in John’s Gospel, is one of the individuals who eventually will bury Jesus with Joseph of Arimathea, we can assume then, that Nicodemus eventually came to understand how to reconcile his knowledge and experience, his authority and teaching with the new call and teaching of Jesus, with the new life and experiences Jesus was asking people to live. That is our hope, that in our struggles, which will be mighty, we will eventually come to see the world in a new way, in a way that is disestablished from Christendom and that is authentic Christianity, Christianity rooted in Christ and God, in love and hope and faith.
The fact that Nicodemus came to Jesus in the night is significant in the writing of John. It is significant because it symbolizes the theme that runs throughout the Gospel of John, the theme of Light and Darkness. The light is always being challenged by darkness, and of course, the light always wins when it is Jesus, but for those disciples of Jesus and those disciples that follow Jesus long after John has left this world, it is a different story. Disciple’s today struggle as much as anybody has with the challenges and the evil that darkness brings.
Nicodemus’ questioning of Jesus in the dark is significant for another reason. Conversion always preceded Baptism in Jesus’ time, and the early Church. They often did not have infants to baptize as we do today. They often made people go through the intense formation in the weeks leading up to Easter, as we hear on Ash Wednesday, Lent was always a season for those seeking to be baptized and those who were seeking to be restored to the Church. For John the story of Nicodemus is about Baptism, we often hear different stories of Baptism in the different Gospels and Epistles, for Paul it was about death and new life, for Matt, Mark and Luke it was a ritual cleansing, a washing away of our sins. But for John it is about being born again, or, as the phrase can also mean, born from above. Rebirth is the theme of John’s Gospel and we will hear all about it as we journey through this Lent.
I would ask you all to take this Gospel home with you this week, take your bulletins and reflect on the Gospel, read it over and over, because it is a unique Gospel; it is a wonderful tug of war between Jesus, this new upstart, renewal figure and Nicodemus, the old established, traditional teacher. It is a tug of war that we often engage in ourselves, and this dialogue could go a long way in helping us all come to understand how God is calling us.
Nicodemus has no understanding about Jesus’ words, but he remains with Jesus trying hard to work out his meaning. The psalm today sheds some light upon the eternal questions of Nicodemus when it sings, “I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come?” The questions we ask are often as difficult and challenging as the ones Nicodemus is asking. They are questions that we ask out of our history, out of our past. Questions that are about what we know and less about what we are becoming. Nicodemus knew full well how babies are born, so in hearing the idea of being born again he thinks of only the physical re-birth of a human being and its impossibility. Nicodemus is asking only out of his knowledge and experience when Jesus is asking him to suspend his own experience and listen to the seemingly impossible answers of God and God’s love for all of creation.
We are in the midst of this same struggle, the same struggle with a bit of a cultural twist. For years, centuries even Christianity has been at the center of the public and private life of most humans in the world. Religion always held some sort of state or official role in its life time. For the first time since Constantine declared Christianity the state Religion, we are experiencing the disestablishment of Christianity from the public life. For instance, we here at Gethsemane have been asked to revive a Church, and I have come to understand that the revival of the church in the eyes of those who sought to make this happen had certain expectations that perpetuated this model of Christendom, this model of Christianity that still places the Church and the religious experience at the center of civic and cultural life. I have come to see that the commitment to this kind of established Church, to this idea of Christendom as it has always been present in the public life, is the single most important cause of inertia and inhibition of intentional and creative response to this great transition the Church at large is going through. The more we seek to institutionalize and recreate institutions of old, the less creative we become, and the more the Spirit is boxed up and left behind on a shelf somewhere.
However, I say that and understand that not many of us are equipped for the end of this Era of Christendom, for the end of the Church’s life in the civic center. I find myself often falling back into the habits and models of the expectations of a priest and a priest’s traditional roles, roles that perpetuate a kind of religious experience that is not transformative and is not engaging the culture meaningfully and with intention. For the most part, there are few people, if any that are prepared to move us out of Christendom and into the post-Christendom world we are all experiencing. This experience, I have to say, goes hand in hand with the great shifts in our culture as well. No longer are people willing to accept one or two world views, or a particular institutions worldview as their own. More and more people are seeking out meaning for themselves and meaning for their particular situations. One size fits all no longer applies to our culture and the people in our culture. Pluralism has become the concept of the day, in everything we do we have to be sensitive and aware of how our actions affect those around us, and at the same time understand more clearly our own needs, wants and desires and strive to have them met.
For years all Christians saw their role as bringing unity under Christ to the world, Christianity rolled through the centuries beating down all those who would oppose her, and reducing to fantasy those religions that stood with her in various expressions of God. Christian mission for years did not mean necessarily bringing Christ to the world as much as it meant territorial expansion, it was and has been a tool of empires and often used the language and goals of the empire to further its cause in the world.
Today if I were to tell you all to go out and convert the world, most, if not all of us would shudder at the thought. We would point out that the Muslims and Jews’ expressions of God are just as valid in the world as ours. Or, we might say that evangelism is not our particular gift and we would rather stay home and explore some other interest we have. The tectonic shift of our culture and our religion is upon us, this sift has been happening for many decades, and yet we refuse to see it, we refuse to see this shift, which is less about culture and much more about God’s activity in the world, about how God has been freed from the boxes that our ancestors have tried to reduce God with.
I wish I could end this on a hopeful note for you all, but we are very much in a struggle of questioning God and Jesus as Nicodemus struggled with Jesus. We approach these questions and the challenges of our future from the places we know and the experiences we have had. It is not often that we are able to step out of those experiences and even out of what we know and look at the world, at the Church and our own lives in a different way. Abram is called by God, in our Old Testament reading to leave all that he knows and all that he loves and embark on a journey that is a mystery to him. To go to a land that God will eventually show him. I believe to my core that until we can find a way to leave what we know as historic Christianity, until we can find a way to disestablish ourselves from the traditions that hold us to a model that is quickly dissipating, we will be stuck and we will not succeed in our life together here in the Garden. We must heed the call of God and leave what we know and love and explore this new world, this new place that the Church is being led to.
Last weekend I met with 15 young adults and although I heard the same sentiment of sticking it out with Christendom, in the same words and sentiments I heard a desire for the opportunity to engage God and move into a land of unknown promise. They have the will and the energy to lead us all as Abram led his people into a new land, out of old expectations and traditions into a place that transformed him and his people. The problem is they want to do that work as a community, not as individuals, so until we all can make the journey together, we will be stuck, inert, unmoving.
Nicodemus, in John’s Gospel, is one of the individuals who eventually will bury Jesus with Joseph of Arimathea, we can assume then, that Nicodemus eventually came to understand how to reconcile his knowledge and experience, his authority and teaching with the new call and teaching of Jesus, with the new life and experiences Jesus was asking people to live. That is our hope, that in our struggles, which will be mighty, we will eventually come to see the world in a new way, in a way that is disestablished from Christendom and that is authentic Christianity, Christianity rooted in Christ and God, in love and hope and faith.
Comments
As for cultural images of dark and light, I only point out and reiterate your point, Aron. We must get beyond thinking that ours is the only image from whatever culture we hail. It is interesting to me that in our Wednesday night group, we talked bout the creation of light and can only assume the creation of darkness before that. In GENESIS, it is associated with chaos and does often become associated with evil for us as Christians and heirs of these tribal stories. However, I also have learned from the Rev. Dr. Martin Brokenleg of Vancouver School of Theology of the D/N/Lakota understanding of the power of darkness.
Martin writes: "At some ancient point Ptesanwinyan [White Buffalo Calf Woman] begins her revelations to us Lakota. The first revelation gave us the teachings and the ceremony of Inikagapi, Making Spirit. This ceremony is now vulgarly referred to as 'The Sweat Lodge.' In this ceremony the participants are returned to the time of the creation of the visible world. If one knows the account of the creation of the visible world, there would be easy recognition of the place of the creator, Inyan, Stone who provides the life force to make the heavens and the earth. A Lakota would also recognize the female spirit Hanhepi, Darkness. In her superior form she easily contains the male spirit Stone. The male principle is active and the female principle manifests being as the interaction of Inyan and Hanhepi show. In the Inipi lodge then, one would experience the interplay of Stone, Darkness, Heavens, Earth, and the spirits of Fire and Water. Water is present from the beginning of living things and so is crucial to the creation of making spirit, the heart of this ceremony." [FIRST PEOPLES THEOLOGY JOURNAL, Vol. 3, January 2005, p.28]
In this case, darkness is not associated with evil but is a necessary component of creation. I would note that my interactions with some Lutheran colleagues have been distressing because the imagery of light as good and darkness as bad have not generally been challenged. Obviously, there is a call of transformation, but I am not sure that contemporary Christians are always aware of the depth of change that is being asked.
Thanks, Donald Whipple Fox
The passage makes me think of the 2" hidden" disciples in our world, those not to sure teetering on the brink of this new spiritual birth, but unable to at that moment because of fear or circumstances.