Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
© Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
March 12, 2017 – Second Sunday of Lent, Annual Meeting
Scripture: John 3:1-17
This is the first of four encounters we will read about during the season of Lent, conversations that Jesus has with four different people: This morning, we listen in on the exchange between Jesus and a Pharisee, a pious Jew, named Nicodemus… Hear the story, told this morning in the voice of Nicodemus…
I didn’t ask to have my life disrupted. I was content with my routine: reading and interpreting the Talmud with the other Pharisees, considering its daily applications to Jewish life. I appreciated the methodical nature of this work, the careful parsing of each Hebrew phrase, to discern what Yahweh intends for Yahweh’s people. I was always a numbers guy: I love the symmetry of the texts, how every Hebrew character has a numerical value that can reveal something about The Holy One’s purpose. For example, the characters that spell the word ‘Chai’ add up to 18. ‘Chai’ means ‘life’ so we know that the number 18 is a life-giving number – good for a blessing on special occasions.
The people seemed to appreciate my ability to reason out the scriptures – which is how I became a leader among the Jews of our community. I am trusted, reliable. Just like the Good Book. In these disrupted times, with the Romans imposing their rule and their pagan ways, I was convinced that it was best to keep to ourselves and live according to generations of tried and true Jewish law.
So when this man Jesus arrived on the scene and started teaching and preaching, I was troubled. Clearly, he wasn’t a Pharisee, and yet he addressed the crowds with authority like he knew of what he spoke. He did seem to know his Torah, although some of his interpretations were a bit…unorthodox. His followers were nothing special – uneducated fishermen, mostly. Nonetheless, or maybe because of his oddball nature, this man Jesus was creating quite a stir. The people seemed to be getting swept up in what he had to say.
Also, there were the signs: If the reports are to be believed, he turned water into wine at a local wedding feast – best wine the head steward had ever tasked, we were told. Just a few days later Jesus stormed into the temple, confronted the money changers and overturned the tables, made a right scene. We were preparing for the Passover, and he seemed angry at the vendors who were profiting from the purchase of animals to sacrifice. He said something that day that caught my ear: “Destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days,” he said. Of course, this made no logical sense. It had taken 46 years to build the temple, and he thought he could rebuild it in three days? But this is my point: Jesus was always saying the most illogical things, often right after doing something that would have been impossible apart from God’s presence. I couldn’t make sense of it…
So I decided to check him out for myself, to sort out the facts from the fiction. Of course, I couldn’t exactly let the people see me speaking with this beatnik rabbi; what would they think? That I endorsed his teachings? Or that I’d gone off the deep end myself? That wouldn’t do. The People need consistency from their leaders. Direction. Predictability. So I went at night, hoping no one would be the wiser.
I have to say: the man was even more baffling in person. I began by offering an olive branch – suggested that he did seem to be a man of God. Instead of accepting the compliment, Jesus looked me in the eye and announced that anyone who wanted to see God’s kingdom needed to be born anew. What kind of talk was that? Not reasonable, that’s for sure – no more reasonable than rebuilding an entire temple in three days. Still, he persisted. “I assure you, [he said]: unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom.”
He went on at some length after that, as we sat together, eating dates and olives. But what I remember was this curious remark about being born anew in order to enter God’s Kingdom. God’s Kingdom. Not Caesar’s Kingdom. Did he plan to start a revolution? That was indeed a troubling prospect. I’d have to mention that to the other Pharisees. In any case, I left his house while it was still dark, no clearer about what to believe but keenly aware of one thing: that when he had looked me in the eye and talked about being born anew, I had felt something stirring inside me.
Over time, this germ of an idea took hold in my mind – it was difficult to pin down, especially at first. It played around the edges of my conscience, as I continued to watch Jesus from afar. I think the idea first took shape after I heard about his conversation with a Samaritan woman – he’d actually spoken with a woman from Samaria, which – I don’t have to tell you – is completely unacceptable behavior for a Jewish man. But afterward, the woman in question was said to have changed, somehow. Observers reported that she stood more erect, some even said that her face shone; she couldn’t stop talking about the love of God and didn’t seem at all concerned about whether others might judge. “It’s like she’s a different person,” they said.
Then there was the blind man, whose sight Jesus restored if you can believe such a thing. There again, witnesses reported that the man was hardly recognizable after his encounter with Jesus – not just that his eyes had changed from cloudy to clear, but that his entire demeanor had shifted, so that he appeared relaxed, more buoyant and somehow expectant, all the time.
The idea that had been playing around edges of my mind was this: that being born anew might have less to do with re-opening the birth canal and more to do with opening one’s life to the utterly unpredictable movement of this Spirit about which Jesus had spoken.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about this prospect. I had a sneaking suspicion that this Spirit was not the orderly sort, not something that could be quantified or controlled. What was it Jesus had said? “God’s Spirit blows wherever it wishes. You hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going.”
I preferred a trusty routine. On the one hand, Jesus seemed like a purveyor of chaos: he disregarded the laws willy-nilly; he healed people on the sabbath; he hung out with the ritually unclean – the blind and lame and the lepers. He made friends with women. He threatened to undermine all the structures we had worked so hard to establish, based on generations of careful reading of God’s Holy Word.
On another hand, I couldn’t help but notice how many people seemed altogether changed after their encounters with Jesus – more alive, more grateful, more joyful, more…faithful. Almost as if they had been given, or somehow discovered, a whole new life.
Is this what Jesus had meant about being born anew? I puzzled and puzzled. I ran mathematical calculations on Jesus’ name and the names of his followers. I listened and prayed and consulted scripture until I had to admit that this man Jesus was operating according to an entirely different logic, had cracked open what I thought I knew about Yahweh’s world, about the organized universe. I’d been certain that I knew what my role was, what God expected of each of us: who was in and who was out. I was sure that the circumstances of our lives were evidence of God’s disapproval or blessing, our being faithful or failing.
What if I had missed something crucial? What if the circumstances of our past didn’t have to determine our future? What if we were not limited by our failures, or the failures of others, or defined according to someone else’s calculous? What if you added mercy and grace to the equation, and this Spirit of God doing who-knows-what? What if that bit about entering the Kingdom of God had less to do with getting it right and more to do with discovering what’s possible when you put your life in God’s hands…?”
Here’s the thing: change – even good change – comes at a cost; you lose some stuff along the way – a certain status, maybe, and familiar routines. So I continued to watch from the sidelines, recognizing the dangerous road that Jesus had chosen to walk. How many times did I wish that he’d be a little less visible, that he’d tone down his rhetoric just enough to keep the authorities mollified. I publicly came to his defense – once. But how much could I do, really?
In the end, not enough. He may as well have signed his own death warrant. I am ashamed to say, that we Pharisees took part in condemning the man to die. But don’t you see: he went too far, disrupting the order that so many had worked so hard to preserve, unsettling the Roman authorities, who feared an insurrection. He just kept stirring up trouble. So they crucified him.
And still, I couldn’t rid myself of him. Still, his probing words about being born anew haunted my nights and dogged my days. So that when Joseph of Aramathea asked to retrieve and bury Jesus’ body, I went and collected as many spices as I could carry, one hundred pounds of aloes and myrrh, and met Joseph at the tomb. Together, we prepared Jesus’ body for burial. I must have used ten times as many spices as was customary.
And I wept. I wept because I’d almost believed all that talk about new life. I wept because I had wanted faith to be clear and simple, and it turns out to be neither. I wept in the face of my own indecisiveness, because life is full of compromises, being human is complicated and God’s ways are difficult to discern. Have you ever felt like that?
I wept because Jesus looked me in the eyes that night, with what I realized now was nothing like condemnation, but more like… love. Unambiguous, unconditional love. I wept and I anointed his body and I wondered: Was he real? Was it true? Could one possibly live one’s whole life governed by a love like that?
For some reason, I thought back to that thing he’d said in the temple, shortly before I met him, about rebuilding the temple in three days. I closed my eyes, and I prayed the most outrageous, the most illogical prayer I had every prayed. I prayed for a day that I could not predict or even imagine; I prayed for a tomorrow unencumbered by today; I asked God to surprise me with new life. I prayed it for Jesus, and for me, for every person struggling to be born; for the whole wide world.
Scripture
John 3:1-17 – Common English Bible Translation
1 There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a Jewish leader. 2 He came to Jesus at night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could do these miraculous signs that you do unless God is with him.”
3 Jesus answered, “I assure you, unless someone is born anew, it’s not possible to see God’s kingdom.”
4 Nicodemus asked, “How is it possible for an adult to be born? It’s impossible to enter the mother’s womb for a second time and be born, isn’t it?”
5 Jesus answered, “I assure you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom. 6 Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Don’t be surprised that I said to you, ‘You must be born anew.’ 8 God’s Spirit blows wherever it wishes. You hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. It’s the same with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
9 Nicodemus said, “How are these things possible?”
10 Jesus answered, “You are a teacher of Israel and you don’t know these things? 11 I assure you that we speak about what we know and testify about what we have seen, but you don’t receive our testimony.12 If I have told you about earthly things and you don’t believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13 No one has gone up to heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Human One. 14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so must the Human One be lifted up 15 so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life. 16 God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.17 God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.