“No Adoption into the Kingdom of God”

Sermon Preached by

Rev. Dr. Peter W. Shidemantle

 John 3:1-17

Second Sunday in Lent, February 20, 2005

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY  13214 

Phone:  446-0960 FAX:  446-0672

phillchu@twcny.rr.com

           The story of the meeting between Jesus and Nicodemus contains two of the most (theologically) loaded and two of the most often referred to verses in the New Testament: “You must be born again,” and the well known John 3:16, “For God so loved. . .”  Often these verses are pulled from the story and made to stand on their own so that they are set up against their opposite: “You must be born again” - meaning, that if you’re not, you’re in trouble as far as God is concerned; and “God so loved the world...” - meaning, that whoever does not believe in him shall perish and shall not have eternal life.  However these verses are used, however you think they should be used, if we are truly to take the bible seriously, to be people not just informed, but formed by the book, we need to see them in the context of the story from which they come.

          And this is a wonderful story!  We know Nicodemus.  Some of us know him quite intimately.  You know, I have always taken some satisfaction in having learned enough and read enough to be able to point out to people how it is important to understand that the bible was written, and the people who populate its pages lived, in a time long before our own, in a pre-modern, pre-scientific era, when the world was thought to be flat, the universe tiered with heaven above the stars and the watery chaos below.  Beyond that, the biblical writers weren’t writing a science text book, trying to “prove” anything in the way we understand scientific proof today.  God was assumed, not conjectured - and everything written flowed from faith in the living and present God.  Once you understand that, there are some questions you don’t need to get hung up on, which allows us to focus on the questions that really do matter to us today. 

          How “Nicodemean” of me!  I’ve got it figured out!  I’ve got the categories straight.  I know what the bible is talking about, and what it isn’t.  Poor Nicodemus - as smart and well-learned that he was, he just couldn’t understand what Jesus was getting at.  Even Jesus said it - “Is this famous teacher of Israel ignorant of such things?”  Come on, Nicodemus, Jesus wasn’t talking about entering your mother’s womb a second time!  How couldn’t you know that?  Like I would be any less in the dark.

          Faith is something I feel that I have a pretty good handle on.  I mean, we know what’s involved, where we should be headed.  So the question is really one of improving our skills - becoming better at prayer, more faithful in reading scripture, trying to love people more - generally progressing.  There’s always more to learn, of course, always more areas in which to improve, but the path itself is clearly marked, this path of Christian life, faithful life.

          Nicodemus had a pretty good idea, too.  As a pharisee, there wasn’t much that he didn’t know about and practice, as far as religion was concerned.  And he wouldn’t have got to the position he was in if he wasn’t seen as a man of wisdom and compassion.  But what he discovers once he’s confronted by Jesus is a strange world where everything he thought counted toward righteousness was just so much dead weight - that what was required was a whole new way of looking at things, imagining things.  And here’s the kicker - and it kicks us as much as it kicked him - it wouldn’t come through anything that Nicodemus did.  He’d have to be reborn into it.  There’s no adoption into the kingdom of God.  It’s always a first generation experience.

          “How can this be?” Nicodemus asks. 

          How can this be?  Not unlike Nicodemus, we are pretty accustomed to thinking of our relationship to God largely in terms of what we bring to the encounter, are we not?  We think of the Christian life, do we not, as the visible effects of our own action, or inaction?  God knows we need improvement: we don’t believe deeply enough, aren’t as loving as we might be, we could treat others better, we might be involved more in behalf of peace and justice; our prayer life could use some work.  Maybe that’s all true.  But embracing Jesus as the Christ doesn’t mean becoming a better person - but a new person.

          Now that’s not a phrase that is foreign to us - in fact, becoming a “new person” is a near obsession in our society.  There are more ways to do it than you can shake a stick at - plastic surgery, the latest diet or exercise craze, the latest techniques for organizing your time or adjusting your attitude.  These things are all under our control, ways to make over ourselves.  But the fact is that we can’t engineer our own rebirth.  And that’s where the resistance comes.  We push for more information, and there’s plenty out there. We can take it all in, sift it and process it, but when it comes down to it our rebirth is not a matter of what we bring, but what we let go of.

          “How can these things be?”  Jesus never really does answer Nicodemus’ question.  Instead he talks about the wind blowing and the spirit of God moving in a similar fashion.  There are ways in which some folks say being born again has to happen, that there’s a certain formula to it.  You need to be able to point to a certain time and place, and explain it to an audience’s satisfaction.  One author a few years ago told of a young acquaintance of his who was trying to make it in the political bureaucracy of Washington, D.C..  He said that one way to begin was to get into an “influential prayer group,” and the password for entry was “born again.”

          If Jesus is not about to define the experience of rebirth, but likens it to the wind blowing where it will, then it isn’t our prerogative to make it a kind of religious, and certainly not a political, litmus test.  But the wind still blows, and the spirit still surprises, bringing new birth with it, and receiving it is still less a matter of what we bring to it than what we are letting go of.

          One such experience that speaks to me in my journey is told by Eugene Peterson, who at one point was really struggling with his own vocation.  The tension he felt was that of being a “religious professional” versus his calling as a pastor.  He had always assumed these to be largely the same, and he was realizing considerable success in it.  But more and more he was finding emptiness in his success, and he found himself longing for a re-stirring of the passion for God that had captured him originally - and I wonder if this is not much of what was going on for Nicodemus.  One day, in the midst his struggling with this, Peterson went to a lecture by the novelist Chaim Potok, an intensely religious Jew.  He said he wanted to be a writer from an early age, but that when he went to college his mother took him aside and said, “Chaim, I know you want to be a writer, but I have a better idea.  Why don’t you become a brain surgeon.  You’ll keep a lot of people from dying; you’ll make a lot of money.”  Chaim responded, “No, mama, I want to be a writer.”

          When he returned home for vacation, every summer, every meeting she’d say the same thing, and so would he.  Finally the pressure intensified until there was an explosion: “Chaim, you’re wasting your time.  Be a brain surgeon.  You’ll keep a lot of people from dying; you’ll make a lot of money.”  Finally, the explosion detonated a counter-explosion, “Mama, I don’t want to keep people from dying; I want to show them how to live!”

          Peterson tells how these words arrived in his ears with the power of an oracle of the prophet Isaiah.  People all around him were congratulating him about his success, advising him to keep doing the good things he was doing - to help a lot of people with their problems, to be successful.  But he never wanted that, really.  He didn’t want to keep people from dying, to patch them up, to give them interesting things to think about.  He wanted to show them how to live.

          He says that as a conversion experience maybe it doesn’t rank up there with some others we’ve heard of, but it strikes me more like the wind that blows where it will.  The spirit speaks to the heart of things, through the clutter of our lives, the many things that we struggle to maintain control over, speaking of the one thing, the one relationship, the one life, the new life - the life from above, given for us, given to us.

          Jesus’ dialogue with Nicodemus, and his dialogue with us, preserves a place for mystery, a sacred place where our experience, our lives are opened to holiness.  We do not, we cannot create those places.  They open where and when we have gone as far as we can go, taken our lives as far as we can take them - where there is no more wiggle room - our own answers depleted, maybe even our hopes.  It is as we near the end of our own understanding, our own strength, that the stirrings for new life begin to be felt.  It may not, it need not, be a large or dramatic thing.  We may not be all that aware of it.  But something is about to be born in us, a life we have not created for ourselves through careful planning or technique.  We cannot achieve it, we can only receive it.  Strange and wonderful and even frightening things happen there.  They are of God, and they are for us.  They mean our rebirth.              

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