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The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies

St. Martin's Church

February 17, 2008

Lent II A

"Where are you from?”

            I always have a hard time answering that question. It came up last weekend while I was getting ready to do a graveside funeral for a family I’d never met.

            I’m never sure what to answer. I was born in St. Louis, but we moved to the coalfields of West Virginia before my second birthday. Five years later, we moved to the small town in Virginia where my father established his medical practice and where my family lived for the next thirty years. But I never really felt I was from there, either.

            Virginia is important to me, but I’ve spent half of my adult life in New England – first in Boston, then New Hampshire, and finally now here in Providence. But I know I’ll never truly be from Rhode Island. Maybe if my children’s children are born here, I’ll be allowed to claim honorary Rhode Island citizenship.

            Where we’re from isn’t always where we’re from. I can’t ever say I am a native Virginian, because I was born in Missouri – but saying I’m a native Missourian is meaningless. So I’m back to not knowing how to answer that simple conversational questions – Where are you from?

            That’s really the question that Nicodemus has come to ask Jesus. Oh, he may say that everyone knows Jesus comes from God, but Nicodemus doesn’t come under cover of darkness to tell Jesus anything – he comes seeking answers himself – he comes perhaps because he is curious, perhaps because he wants to know more, perhaps because the words he’s heard Jesus say and the things he has seen Jesus do have awakened a longing in his own heart.

            This is the first of three times that Nicodemus appears in the Gospel of John. He is an important man, a member of the ruling council of Jews called the Sanhedrin. He is also a Pharisee, devoted to strict observance of the Torah in order to maintain a high standard of cultural purity. Throughout the Gospels, the Pharisees are portrayed as harsh critics of Jesus, but Nicodemus is different.

            So he wants to know where Jesus is from – he wants to discover the source of Jesus’ power and authority.

            “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above.”

            Now, that’s a pretty odd answer. Nicodemus can be forgiven for his bewildered and befuddled question – “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” and even more ridiculous, “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”

            And Jesus’ answer is even more cryptic than it seems. The Greek word anothen is probably best translated “from above”, but it can also mean “again”, in the same way that “take it from the top” means try it again from the beginning. There’s lots and lots of baggage attached to this verse now, all having to do with whether or not someone’s been “born again”. That phrase has been so misused and abused in Christian history that I hesitate to even touch it.

            But Jesus is saying something important to Nicodemus, something everyone who seeks life in Christ needs to hear, and needs to hear again and again. “Where you’re from doesn’t matter,” Jesus is saying, “If you want to be part of the Kingdom of God, you have to take it from the top. You have to start all over again from the beginning.”

            No wonder Nicodemus is nonplussed! He’s a man of stature, a wealthy and important man. He has spent a lifetime studying the Torah and patterning his life according to God’s law. He’s acquired wisdom, and knowledge, and influence. And now, Jesus is telling him that none of that matters? That’s he’s going to have to start all over again? Of course, Nicodemus thinks he hasn’t heard right. How ridiculous to tell a mature adult that he has to start all over again from the beginning!

            But if Nicodemus had just taken a moment to think back through his own Scriptures – he’d realize that Jesus isn’t saying anything that God hasn’t already said before.

            Look at the little snippet of Genesis that is the Old Testament lesson this morning. “Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” That verse is the beginning of the great patriarchal stories that arc through Genesis, the stories that our Lenten study groups are talking about these next few weeks. The words sound a lot more magnificent and grandiose – but God is really saying to Abram, “You have to start all over again from the beginning.” Leave your country, leave everything that’s familiar, leave everything that makes you feel secure and safe and worthwhile – and I’ll lead you to something better.

            And Abram believes what God is promising him, and his faith – his willingness to pack up his household and strike out into an unknown future – is the beginning of Israel. Story after story in our Scripture repeats this same theme. Every time God wants to work a new thing, the person God calls has to start all over again from the beginning. Joseph, sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, reinvents himself as one of Pharoah’s most trusted advisors. Moses, raised as Egyptian royalty, flees his life of privilege and starts all over when God speaks to him out of the burning bush. Jesus, after his baptism, goes out into the wilderness to confront his demons so that he can return ready to carry out the work God has given him to do. And what does Jesus ask of those who would follow him but that they deny themselves and take up a cross – and start all over again from the beginning.

            “There’s the way the world works,” Jesus says to Nicodemus, “The way the flesh works. And then, there’s the way God works – the way the Spirit works. Flesh is flesh and spirit is spirit. God wants to do a new thing in the world. God wants to heal the world and not condemn the world – and God is going to do that by doing a new thing, by God’s own self becoming part of the world, by God’s own self living and dying as part of that world. That’s a new thing, and in order for people to be part of that new thing, they are going to have to start all over again from the beginning.”

            Where we’re from doesn’t matter. What we’ve done doesn’t matter. Who we are doesn’t matter. We are all invited to be part of this new thing God is doing in the world – to be made new ourselves.

            That’s what baptism means. We splash a little water on the heads of adorable babies, and maybe we don’t quite see that really, that baby is being drowned, plunged into a torrent that sweeps away the old and brings something new to life. It was a lot clearer in the first centuries of the church – when it was too dangerous to baptize babies. Choosing baptism meant choosing rebellion against the Roman government, choosing a loss of status, choosing sometimes persecution, or imprisonment or even death itself. It meant standing naked in the water and being drenched, buried with Christ in his death in order to be reborn in his resurrection.

            There’s no way Nicodemus is ready for that – he’s still tiptoeing around in the dark – wanting to know more about Jesus, but nowhere near ready to start all over again in the new life of the Kingdom. He’s nowhere near ready to respond like Abram, and leave everything behind to go out in search of a new life.

            And the good news is that whether we’re a Nicodemus or an Abram – whether we are hesitant or ready for the plunge – whether we’re skeptical or brimming with faith – God is still ready to do that new thing. With us, or without us, God is at work in the world – creating, healing, reconciling, renewing. And anytime we’re ready, we can join in that divine work, and let something new be born again in us. We can start all over again from the beginning.

            That’s really what happens every time we gather for worship. In Lent, I like to start with that penitential order which puts the confession at the very beginning of our liturgy. So we start out by offering our regret, our repentance, our guilt, even our shame to God – whatever we’ve done, however we’ve fallen short or wandered away – we offer all that to God and receive the absolution that says, “It’s done. It’s put away. It’s all forgiven. You can start all over again from the beginning.”

            We don’t ever use it up. We don’t ever exhaust our chances. We don’t ever run out of opportunities to respond to that invitation. Whenever we’re ready – God is ready for us. And that invitation is renewed, offered again and again, no matter how many times we’ve accepted it before. That’s why confession is a regular part of our spiritual practice – we know that God invites us to begin again, and is just waiting for us to accept the invitation and be incorporated again into the new life of the resurrection.

            This year in the lectionary cycle, we hear four great stories from the Gospel of John about encounters Jesus has with others. Nicodemus, this curious but fearful Pharisee is the first. Next week, it’s a Samaritan woman Jesus meets beside a well, with whom he has a shocking conversation. The week after that, Jesus heals a man born blind and – surprise! Not everyone is thrilled about it. And finally, the last story tells us about Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha who has died, and whom Jesus calls forth out of his grave. They are all new things, new things that God is doing in Christ and each one of them – Nicodemus, the woman at the well, the blind man and Lazarus – are invited to start all over again from the beginning.

            “Where are you from?” Even in our mobile and peripatetic culture, that’s still an important question. We always want to find people who have similar experiences to ours – who are anchored in the same landscape, have smelled the same air and seen the same things. I was thrilled last week to talk to someone who knows what redbud is. It was an even more important question in Jesus’ culture. Pharisees hung out with Pharisees, Samaritans never spoke to Jews, people born blind were bearing God’s curse and should be shunned, and the dead never, ever walked out of the tomb.