A Sermon Preached By

Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle

Trinity Sunday, June 11, 2006

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 we want, what we need, what we are feeling are all important things to acknowledge and understand in ourselves, of being in touch with ourselves.  Any psychologist or other mental health professional would tell you that.  It’s important, among other reasons, because if we aren’t in touch with our own needs and wants and feelings, there are lots of people out there who will tell you what you need and want, even what and how to feel.  Mostly they come with price tags, of course, these things, these experiences, we are told we cannot live without – the image we should want to portray to others, products that will make us feel better about ourselves, how to include our effectiveness in every area of our lives, including our spiritual lives.  There always seems to be a ready market for all kinds of needs we never knew we had.

          This “holy trinity” of wants, needs and feelings has become, Peterson contends, the “divine control center” of our lives.  And because of this, so many have become convinced that we are the authority over our own lives.  What I want, what I need, what I feel – these things are easily couched in spiritual language – and the God of the Bible gets put in the service of them.  The texts have been switched, and we are hardly aware of it.  We’ve traded our Bibles in for these other texts, the stories and narratives of our own wants, needs and feelings.

          This was a conference about reclaiming the Bible for preaching.  For preachers the danger of trading in the text of the Bible for the cultural holy trinity of needs, wants and feelings, is that we’ll read the Bible only for sermon ideas, rather than to be formed by the Word that we are to proclaim.  For Christians with other responsibilities and callings scripture can be looked toward as something merely to use – for information, for answers, for guidance or inspiration, even as W.C. Fields allegedly said from his death bed, for “loopholes” – rather than our looking toward the scriptures as the story of the people of God that we are invited to enter and participate in.

          The point that Peterson was making was that our lives are not the text.  Scripture is the text, the scriptures through which we are learning what God reveals.  We must take ourselves seriously, what we need and want and feel.  But we must not take ourselves too “narrowly.”  Our lives are brought into the text of the Bible, made part of it, formed by it, enlarged by our participation in it – all of who we are, including the parts of ourselves we didn’t even know about.  One of the most rewarding and joyful things about being a pastor is the privilege of watching someone grown in their awareness of their life in God, their life in Christ.  There is a reason why in the original languages of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures the same word is translated “spirit,” “breath,” and “wind.”  When the Spirit of God blows through a life it’s as if the breath of God is opening up and expanding the airways and the arteries and the capillaries that have been narrowed and constricted by the illusion that the self is the final arbiter and authority over life.  This isn’t just an individual thing, but for the church as well – God is about opening things up, creating free space in which to move about.

          The story of Nicodemus, the religious official who comes to Jesus under the cover of night, is a story we are invited to enter.  Jesus was talking about these things with him, this life that the Spirit of God opens for us, and he said to Nicodemus that he would have to be “born from above” or “born again” (meaning that he could be) to catch what Jesus was talking about.  That first breath hurts - just ask any new born.  It’s hard to give up on the self enough to risk falling into other arms.  It’s frightening to let go of our certainties, especially our certainties about God.  Nicodemus had them; as a Pharisee he had them in spades.  The first words he said to Jesus were “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God, because no one could do the things you’ve done and not be from God.”  In other words, you have to be from God because of what you do.  Now just before this John the gospel writer says that Jesus would not “entrust himself” to anyone who believed who he was and what he was about “because they saw signs that he was doing.”  Already Nicodemus has believed only because of what he’s seen - and so when Jesus presses one to say that the new thing Nicodemus senses can happen, that it has to happen inside Nicodemus himself, and he likens it to being born all over again, Nicodemus retreats back into what he can only verify with his own experience.  He is the judge of what is and is not possible with God: “How can this be?  Who can enter again into his mother’s womb?”

          You see what we have here?  It is two very different perspectives on life before God.  The one way looks for enough proof, enough evidence that I can verify sufficiently to believe I have arrived at a faith that is safe and solid.  And of course only I can be the judge of that.  The other way insists that life in the kingdom of God is given by God, that it’s not something I bring on by my own powers, that it’s not there to meet my wants or needs at any given moment, but a life that takes up and enfolds and transforms my own wants and needs.  It is life “from above,” meaning life that is uncontrolled and uncalculated.  I don’t conjure it up and I don’t make it go away when I’m not feeling “religious.”  It is like the coming and the going of the wind.  It’s the difference, you might say, between being “successful” in religion and having “eternal life.”  The choice for Nicodemus, and for us as we enter his story, is between claiming this life as a right, and receiving it as a gift.

          Preachers and churches get caught up in the “success” model of religion all too easily, judging ourselves by standards and measurements of effectiveness that come not from scripture and the experience of transformed life, but from other places.  Numbers and money and other objective criteria that we can touch and see and feel can become the ways we validate our own success.  But I truly believe that preachers and congregations, Christians individually and collectively, really want to be free of that.  We really do want to make room for more mystery than the world is willing to allow.  We really do want to be a people who wait on the wind, who wait on the Spirit.  God has more to reveal.

          I remember another speaker at that same conference talked about how we come to a biblical text wanting to know “what it means.”  If we could do that, if we could determine the meaning of a text once and for all, then we wouldn’t have to read it again, because we’d know.  We don’t come to the Holy Scriptures for information, but to be formed by them.  We don’t “figure out God” by reading the Bible, any more than we figure out a person by reading their resume.  It is only by getting to know that person - that person’s wants, needs, feelings - by being in relationship with that person, that we come to know them.

          How could we think it would be any different with God? – the God who has made himself known to us in creation; the God who has come to us through the Son; the God who sustains us in faith and in life from above through the Holy Spirit.  God, who is one, expresses who God is in ways we truly need.

          To love someone is to be changed by that someone.  It is to be more together than you are alone.  Together, though you are still each who you are, you are also one.  This is how the mystery of God includes us.  God, who makes prophets tremble before his awesome throne, who is wholly other, eternally apart from us, whose very presence judges and condemns us in our sinfulness (Isaiah - “Woe is me...”) - is the same God who comes to us in the most intimate ways, sharing his very breath, breathing in us a word of grace and forgiveness, staying with us, abiding with us, releasing us in freedom to live our lives for others.

          Do you have to be “reborn” for this?  Well, I know it’s not something I can conjure up by myself.  So much of the time I don’t want the right things, and too often I buy into needing what I’m told I need.  I can’t trust my own feelings much of the time.  No - I’m not naturally given to holiness.  I can only receive it, and much of the time I’m hanging on too tight to what I know to be able to let go and take hold of what I don’t.  But that’s why we’re here.  We can hold each other up when the night is upon us.  We can love each other, even when we’re not feeling it.  We can lose ourselves in others’ needs when our own needs are out of hand.  We can learn to want what God wants.

          May the true and Holy Trinity bless you this morning: may the most holy and awesome God touch you with forgiveness, may the Son of God give you his peace; may the Holy Spirit enliven you with the breath of new life and the fresh winds of a new awakening of joy.  Amen.           

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