Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Lent 2: February 17, 2008
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
John 3:1-17
There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “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 said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?
“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only 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.”
In his recent book entitled The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, A.J. Jacobs, an agnostic Jew, sets about the task of following the laws and rules of the Bible, Old Testament and New, for one year. “My quest has been this:” he says in the opening chapter, “To live the ultimate Biblical life. Or more precisely, to follow the Bible as literally as possible. To obey the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love my neighbor. To tithe my income. But also to abide by the oft-neglected rules. To stone adulterers. To avoid wearing clothes of mixed fibers. And naturally to leave the edges of my beard unshaven. I am trying to obey the entire Bible without picking or choosing.”
But Jacobs discovers that he cannot avoid picking and choosing, because Scripture isn’t consistent as a whole. And so he enlists the aid of Jewish rabbis, Christians of every stripe, and friends and neighbors who help him sort out the finer points of walking the path of the many rules, guidelines and values found in Scripture. Fascinating.
But what is more fascinating is the worry that all those closest to him have about his enterprise. “Everyone” Jacobs says “family, friends, co-workers—had the same concern: (they were terrified) That I’d go native. That I’d end up as a beekeeper in a monastery or I’d move into my (crazy, religious) ex-uncle Gil’s spare room in his Jerusalem apartment.”
This was part of my question too as I read this funny, engaging, dear and challenging book. Would Jacobs in his adherence to Biblical patterns of behavior—some of which make sense and some of which seem nonsensical—would Jacobs, in following these patterns, find God? And if he did find God, what kind of God would he find and how would it affect him and me as I read about his experience?
In our Gospel for today, Nicodemus, like Jacobs, is all about Biblical patterns of behavior. As a Pharisee and teacher of the people, Nicodemus would have believed in and patterned his life around both the torah, the first five books of Hebrew Scripture, and the ongoing oral traditions about how to apply the torah to everyday life. He would have believed that the continuing discussion about torah and how to live it out would be the primary way that God was revealed to God’s people. He would have believed a kind of continuous study and debate over torah was what went on in heaven and that the promised messiah would be a rabbi, a teacher and interpreter of torah who would bring his people new and definitive insights into the right way to live a holy, torah-centered life.
As our passage opens, Nicodemus has sought Jesus out under the cover of night, not to take him on but seemingly because he’s both intrigued and perplexed by Jesus. Notice that he addresses him as “rabbi.” “Rabbi,” Nicodemus says, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”
Nicodemus wants Jesus to fit his paradigm, to be similar to what he’s known. He expects Jesus to be a teacher, a rabbi who will debate torah and who will be yet another voice about the content of a living tradition, someone who will explain how we should live.
But this is not how his conversation with Jesus turns out. For instead of rabbinical insights or debate on the content and practice of torah, Jesus focuses on the process of the spiritual life. The spiritual life in the light of this Messiah is not primarily about getting everything settled and figured out. It’s about yielding to the process of being born and reborn anew—entering into God’s fecundity, into the darkness and water of first things, shedding our skins, being birthed, pushed out again and again into a world where God’s Spirit like the wind continues to stir, refresh, inspire and buffet us.
And so while it’s important in Christian spiritual life to figure some things out related to content and practice— what we believe and value, which people we want around us, what church we may want to go to, what patterns of work and rest and prayer we want to follow—while all of this is important, what is paramount is that this is a part of a larger process of new birth, a process we do not control but that we can notice, and, where possible, participate in and give ourselves to.
Carl Jung once commented: “People live as though they were walking in shoes too small for them.” This is what Jesus seems to be telling Nicodemus and us—that our God, the Holy One, through the lives we’re living, is constantly birthing us into new life that is more capacious, more stretching, more whole, in which our humanity is being enlarged.
Where is this happening to you? Where are you being birthed into a life that is more capacious, more stretching, more whole, in which your humanity is being enlarged? In my experience it’s a process often isn’t easy in that it’s a process that begins in the dark—the dark of the womb, the dark of the cave, the dark of the tomb for it can feel like dying.
Belden Lane in his book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes weaves together the history of desert and mountain spirituality and the story of accompanying his mother through the last years of her life in a nursing home, losing her bit by bit amidst “hospital gowns, droning television sets and food spilled in the clumsy effort to eat.” The experience challenged Lane and his theology to the core. Where was God, he asked, in the midst of this desert experience where the content and practice of his faith had fallen away as he, helpless, watching his mother die a slow and agonizing death.
Months after her death, he went into the desert in New Mexico, where one day he was caught in a rainstorm. He scrambled into a cave to escape the downpour, the hail and the rockslides that the intense rain had begun. It was there in the darkness of that womb-like cave with the rain and hail and rocks beating down on threatening his life that the loss of his mother gave way to something else—to a new awareness of the gift she had been and the gift of the life lived through the grief and on the other side of the grief. And so when the rain died down and the hail stopped and the rock slides ended, Lane emerged from the cave a new person.
I keep a small three-dimensional wooden puzzle by my bed to remind me of what it’s like to be born again in my life. Some would say it’s a cave; others a womb; others a tomb. The outer portion of it is dark but each successive ring as you get closer to the center is lighter, and at the center is a small, yellow, light-filled core.
And as it turns out, A. J. Jacobs did have a born-again experience of sorts during the year he was writing his book. My sense is that it had something to do with the Biblical rules and guidelines and values he tried on. It also had to do with some of the conversations he had with Jews and Christians of every stripe and some of the friendships he made. But more importantly, I believe it had to do with his wife giving birth to twins and the unexpected and painful death of his closest neighbor in New York, a woman living right across the hall from them.
Jacobs did not become a monastery beekeeper or move to Jerusalem. He began to see and respond to the world in a different way. “I’m still agnostic,” he said, “but I’m now a reverent agnostic. Which isn’t an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there’s a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred.”
Works Cited and Consulted
A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality
