A Sermon Preached By

The Rev. Dr. Peter W. Shidemantle

Second Sunday of Lent, February 17, 2008

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., DeWitt, NY  13214

Phone:  315-446-0960     FAX:  446-0672

phillchu@twcny.rr.com     http://pebblehill.presbychurch.org

                What if you could start life over again?  If not the whole thing, maybe just erase and rework some chapter of your life - or erase the events of a particularly fateful day in your life that might have played out differently.  Who hasn’t held a baby or seen a young child and thought wistfully of one’s own youth, its innocence, before age and years added all the baggage?  Don’t you think, when Jesus said to Nicodemus that he had to be born again, born from above (same word), that some of that wistfulness, some of that longing, might have been there for him?  It wouldn’t have been such a loaded phrase then, or at least not loaded in the same way as it is today - “born again.”  Today it’s become a password into a certain kind of Christian understanding, been applied to a certain kind of Christian - for the most part, not the kind of Christian you’d find in most Presbyterian churches.  But I want to invite us to try to set aside the weight of that particular understanding just now - if only for the duration of the sermon - just pick it up and set it off to the side for a little while.  You can retrieve it later if you want to.

            I’d like to invite us instead to enter into some unfamiliar territory, and I know that’s not always an easy or comfortable thing to do, especially when it comes to religion.  Many people tend to look to religion to provide something that is comfortable, safe and reassuring.  To hear those old words, sing those familiar tunes, pray those comforting words.  There are times when that is just what we need.  When my father died I wanted to hear the 23^rd Psalm and I wanted to sing “Amazing Grace.”  But when we are faced with life and how to live it, when we have a sense that we want God in it, even if that sense is not clearly defined, I think we’re looking for more than the old and familiar.  I think Nicodemus was.

            We don’t know much about Nicodemus, except that he was ruler of the synagogue, a member of the Sanhedrin, the religious and secular court for the Jews in Israel.  As such he would have been a scholar, a respected elder in the community, an expert in the religious law.  He represents the religious establishment of his day.  As with all “established” religion, Nicodemus brought certain assumptions, the traditions of the faith, its worship and its practices.  Though part of scholarship was to debate and argue over the religious law and its interpretation, it was within certain parameters, long established ways of doing their work.  Study of the Torah, the law of God, was prayer, and devotion to the Torah was devotion to God.  Nicodemus’ job was to preserve the traditions of the faith and to promote it among the people - to raise the children and instruct the faithful in the ways of the God of Israel.  It was a high and holy calling.

            Within the Christian tradition, we in the Protestant stream of the faith carry centuries of tradition centered on the sovereignty of God - preaching and the sacraments, in the Presbyterian church the offices of elder and deacon, the priesthood of all believers, the advancement of the kingdom of God through works of justice and compassion.  It is a rich and vital tradition, and around it has been built houses of worship, hospitals, school and colleges, foreign missions and all the rest.  It would not be too much of a stretch to say that we in the Protestant mainstream of the Christian church in America have been the Nicodemus’s of our time and place.  Nicodemus is pretty cerebral like most of us mainstreamers - living a bit too much in our head, a little short, maybe, on feeling.  He is financially secure, like most in our churches in North America.  Many in our churches are leaders in our communities, as he was.  His grasp of religion includes doing, the link is from believing to doing, often bypassing the heart.  He is intellectually curious, not one to blindly accept, just like us mainstreamers.  In short, Nicodemus was admirable in most every way. Yet something was lacking in his life, which is why he requests a meeting with Jesus in the middle of the night.

            What happens when he gets there is disorienting for Nicodemus.  After acknowledging Jesus as a teacher, who indeed is from God - quite an acknowledgment in itself - Nicodemus is thrown off his game when Jesus changes the agreed-upon rules of all respectable theological debate and goes off into some netherland of illogical doubletalk about becoming a baby again, being born of water and spirit, and the wind blowing out of nowhere, and Nicodemus is taken back to third or fourth grade - “Huh?”

            But I guess you could say that his disorientation brings Nicodemus part way there, part way back to where he needs to be. 

            We live in disorienting times, when the old rules don’t seem to apply anymore, when what was up is down, when the things that used to hold together of their own accord seem to be falling apart at the seams.  We were talking about some of these things at our leadership day a couple of weeks ago here at Pebble Hill, and how they apply and have affected the mainstream churches.  There are a number of related factors involved in our changing American culture that are at play in the challenges we face in the church, as Anthony Robinson lines out in the book we’ve been studying, “Transforming Congregational Culture.” 

            First, people by and large no longer feel obligated to be involved in the ongoing life of congregations as they once did.  It is hardly the expected thing to do.  Instead folks today need to feel motivated to do so (“seekers”).  There’s got to be a reason - not just the thing you do, but the thing you want to do, something you’re looking for.  Secondly, there has been, over the course of the last generation, an erosion of trust and reliable authority - social trust has broken down, and authority, including religious authority is not automatically granted - in many cases for obvious reasons, when authority has been abused.  Also, our society is also so much more diverse, culturally and religiously.  There are now more Muslims in the U.S. than there are Presbyterians.  Fourth, there is no longer the sense of optimism and inevitable progress that once fueled the American dream.  The mainline church had bought into that project, largely providing the moral compass to keep the project on track.  But through it all, Robinson suggests, we didn’t maintain our Christian distinctiveness to challenge dominant cultural values.  As another observer has written, the church leaned over so far to be relevant to the world that it fell in.  We’ve been unable to give a credible account of our own faith, aside from moralistic sentiments that one ought to be a good person.  And lastly, the established church became complacent through all of this, and was slow to recognize it, and therefore has not well placed to lead through all of these shifts and changes.

            Now, anytime you do this sort of analysis or review, you are speaking in broad strokes and general movements, to which there are always exceptions, and within which there have continued to be prophetic voices of faithfulness, communities of great caring and witness.  God has always tended to measure success differently than we do.  But as a whole I think these things ring true - this is what I’ve seen and experienced across the thirty years of my ministry.

            But what I believe with my whole heart, and in this I concur with Robinson because I am seeing it here, is that these are not the death throes of the church, but the birth pangs of something new. 

            In the very brief reading that Robin shared from the 12^th chapter of Genesis, we see that God’s first move in forming and shaping a people that would bear his promises for the world was to call Abram to leave behind his land, his birthplace, the house of his father – all the things that make it difficult to do something new – because otherwise he can too easily say, “But this is the way we have always done it.”  It’s as if the new thing that God is doing can only emerge as Abram is exposed to a new environment in which old patterns no longer work.  As his story progresses we see how disorienting it is for him and Sarah.  Childless throughout their many years together, God promises that they will bear a child in their old age, and their reaction is largely the same as Nicodemus’ when Jesus told him he had to be born again – “Huh?” – and she laughed. 

            It is not too much to say that our faith was born in a joyfully disorienting way – and that our rebirth in faith involves us in that same topsy-turvy process because even if we thought we knew what it meant to follow Jesus, we are called to move, to offer ourselves forward in a leap of faith where Jesus will teach us all of that anew.  Many of us live off the faith someone once told us that we ought to have.  If we want more than that, and God knows we need more – a new beginning is due.

            Nicodemus stole away to Jesus under the cover of night.  He hardly expected to meet the light of the world.  It threw him off, set him back on his heels, turned his world upside down.  Jesus had the effect on people.  He still does.  We can’t meet him on our own terms.  It’s got to be on his terms.  And just like the first time we were born, we come out kicking and screaming.  No matter where we are along the path of this life, new life is close at hand.  We can almost taste it.  How can this be?  Well, it could happen in a million ways – to try to pin it down would be like trying to capture the wind in your hands.  But it can be as simple as praying, “Lord Jesus, I know I am not what I ought to be, and I hardly imagine what I can be.  But I want to begin…” 

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