Life
Sermon by James W. Crawford
Second Sunday in Lent, February 28, 1999
Nicodemus belongs to the religious elite. He is intelligent, thoughtful, eager to sustain the religious and national tenets of his people. But Nicodemus comes to Jesus not really alone. He comes representing his colleagues in the religious establishment. He expresses their concern. They watch Jesus. They wonder about him. They are intrigued and troubled by what they see. They discern a casual attitude toward orthodox religious practice. They witness an acceptance of apparent blasphemous behavior. They blanch as crowds hang on every heresy. They perceive a challenging and dangerous, a bewildering and threatening figure. So, at night, in the darkness—John's description, not so much of a moment in time, but rather of a spiritual condition—at night, in darkness, Nicodemus attends his appointment with Jesus.
I
Nicodemus initiates the conversation. Gentleman and scholar that he is, Nicodemus sends out a complimentary and friendly probe. "Rabbi," he says, "Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God."
We see here in Nicodemus a nocturnal visitor of considerable reputation: a lawyer, a teacher, a political insider. He approaches Jesus with no condescension, no insults, no put-down. Nicodemus seeks to draw Jesus out. Today he might sound something like this: "Say, Reverend: where do you stand on this matter of gay men and women presiding at denominational communion tables?" Or "Good Doctor, can we compartmentalize a leader's moral practices and personal integrity and his political accomplishments and ambitions?" Nicodemus wants to kick off a religious bull session.
And Jesus? Remember his reply? "In very truth"—his words carry the ring and profundity of an oath—"In very truth I tell you no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above."
Hello? Say that again? Nicodemus steps back stunned and confused. "Reverend," he says, "Reverend, what are you talking about? I want a thoughtful opinion about the appropriate presence of gay people in the Christian ministry. I seek your perspective on questions of law and the constitution tangled up with references to personal forgiveness and repentance. Your references to new birth lose me completely. They are beside the point."
The new birth beside the point? Or does Jesus speak directly to the point. I do not know about you, but this encounter between Nicodemus and Jesus always makes me uncomfortable. "Nicodemus," Jesus seems to say, "Nicodemus, you seem to be the ultimate open minded religious type. A mind open to everything, closing on nothing. You want your religion intellectually manageable. You resonate to ideas. You like to wrestle with doctrine, but at arms length. You seek to debate truth claims. Sorry, that's not enough."
Now let me tell you what disturbs me about this encounter taking place at night, in the darkness. A week or two ago I made reference here to our meetings with those of you who consider membership in our congregation, and at that meeting my articulating one style of this church as being a "religious half-way house." I still believe that is true. And in this city where men and women of whatever religious stripe consider themselves seekers, pilgrims, searchers, this image of a religious halfway house seems to touch a responsive chord. And as a result, those of you who come here can dip a toe in the stream, get a feel of the temperature, gauge the flow, slip into a mainstream at your own pace. You can breeze in and breeze out; you can brood; you can wrestle with this approach or that. You can come back next week, next month, next year. You can go to another church; you can say, "I gave it a try, it's all for the birds." That is freedom. That is an open approach to you and your religious inclinations, a free style to your seeking coherence and meaning.
But I think Jesus confronts this open, questing approach with a powerful, world-changing alternative. "Nicodemus," says this Jesus of John's Gospel, or "Jim Crawford!" says this Jesus of John's Gospel, "Jim Crawford, I'm not on your benign open-minded track. You want discussion of religious ideas; I confront you with the very ground of your spiritual existence. You seek friendly discourse about the ambiguities of life; I call into question the very roots of your being and source of your action. You want to speculate about who fits the Christian ministry or public morality; I am compelled to ask, in what, in whom, do you claim your deepest identity? The crucial question facing you, Jim, has little to do with sparring over ecclesiastical legalisms or the personal forgiveness of public servants. These matters are but symptoms of a deeper, more crucial question: Jim, who or what defines your life? If I were to ask you," says Jesus, "if I were to ask you where you were born, what would you say? If I were to ask where you come from, would you give me a geographical answer? Are you really born a child of my healed, reconciled future? Are you a babe from a dimension of life ruled by peace, joy and power, which even now, in face of all that denies it, breaks into the anguish of Boston, the grief of broken hearts, the pain of life betrayed? Are you born into—do you act out of—that transforming, transfiguring realm? Who are you, Jim? Who are you, Nicodemus? Whose realm do you truly live in? From whose womb did you come, in whose hands rests the destiny of your life? It is a question of where you find yourself rooted, grounded, nourished, claimed, identified, Nicodemus—Jim—and in truth that decisive question faces you. Who you are—in mind, in heart, in soul—and as a consequence, how you treat, how you serve, how you succor and sustain, how you love others, answers the crucial question of your identity.
II
So, what do you consider your true identity? What or who identifies you? What or who identifies me? John knows how most of us answer this question. He knows what we consider our birthplace. We are born, if you will, into what John calls the world of the "flesh." And believe me, to John, this world of the flesh does not mean the world of vice, desire, gluttony and all the rest of the seven deadly sins. When John talks about "the flesh" he means life and the world as we know it. When asked where we come from, who we really are, where we were born, most of us begin with little shreds of autobiography from the so-called world of "flesh." "I'm from Rochester, or Bismarck, or Jasper. My father teaches first grade, my mother is a professor of Engineering, my brother is a magician, I was baptized in a Methodist Church." You see, by the world of the "flesh" John means the world in which most of are sunk up to our eyeballs—in finagling with the IRS, paying down our Christmas debts, squeezing onto the Green Line, and wondering if anybody likes us. In the world of the "flesh" we cling to the scraps of self-definition meted out by the garbage dispensers of mass culture. Who are we? What identifies us? Our credit line? Our clothing labels? Our job category? What our friends say? What our enemies believe? Our zip code? The fodder of focus groups, political pollsters, hip-hop nation? As Maureen Dowd suggests, are we defined by a world "obsessed with entertainment, celebrity, buzz, spin, market share, synergy, gestures, decaf skim lattes and cigar bars?" If we believe, if we live by those definitions, if we see ourselves in this way, we are, as John writes, "once born of the flesh."
Is there an alternative? Can we discover another birthplace and source of identity? The good news John offers us to our pleading question is "yes."
The question Jesus asks Nicodemus, the question Jesus asks us, "Does your life, does mine, derive its meaning, its goal, its purpose not so much from the culture of Ally McBeal or the ads promising to pummel us in March Madness coming up, nor our rung on some career ladder, nor the content of this morning's Globe editorial, nor last night's latest Presidential campaign speech by Al Gore or Elizabeth Dole, Bill Bradley or—here he comes again—Pat Buchanan. Does you life or mine gain identity, not because it is male or female, gay or straight, white or black, yellow or red, rich or poor, Protestant, Catholic or Jew. But rather do our lives derive meaning from a realm where service is the order of the day? Does your life and mine gain definition from a reality where those whom the social register deems last are in truth first; where competition for turf, title, or image is given over to self offering and the building up of one another? Do we consider the source of our being, do we come from a reality where the joy of self-surrender, the peace of self investment in a healed and renewed humanity saturates the totality of our human-being and purpose? That kind of selfhood demands from most of us a new beginning, a new start, a fresh grounding. Indeed, it demands, what, for lack of a better analogy, we can only call, "new birth. . . from a new place . . . new birth from above."
III
A new birth; a new birth place. Have we got that? Nicodemus does not get it. He is dissatisfied with our Lord's cryptic, non-sequitur of an answer. So he presses on. "New birth?" he exclaims. "Look, I am an old man. I cannot return to my mother's womb at my age. Your suggestion is absurd."
Jesus plunges again to the very core of the old man's life. "In truth I tell you no one can enter the Realm of Heaven without being born of the water and spirit."
What is this? Another disconnect? What is this pious lingo about "Spirit" from the mouth of Jesus got to do with the realities of this world? what does it have to do with avalanches smothering Austrian towns, Black Raven fighter planes bombing Saddam's "no fly zone", Lamar Alexander traipsing through the snows of New Hampshire? What does John mean when he talks about being born of the Spirit? Is he talking about what we usually call conversion? Is he describing an ecstatic experience, the kind we see coming at the hands of a well-heeled televangelist, to the beat of a rock band, a crescendo of emotion, an experience labeled in popular parlance, "born again?" Perhaps. No doubt these are life-altering moments. But—but—I believe John would be at a loss to understand were he to discover we defined this "new birth" or "life in the spirit" as primarily a passionate, ardent moment, as marvelous as such a moment might be. No, to John the Spirit transmits life, communication, love, all taking the shape we see in the mission and ministry of Jesus. To be reborn in the Spirit, to discover our identity from above, means life lived out of the love which never lets us go—life and love which on this side of heaven may run into dead ends, betrayals, rejection, manipulation—but life and love never giving up. Life in the "realm born of the Spirit" means, right now, life invested to encourage and build up the lives of others. It means life rooted, grounded, claiming as its birthplace the peace and compassion that risks everything, as did our Lord, to save this beautiful world as it muddles and stumbles after justice and true community. It means identifying with a source of life leading to the possibility of a destiny on the Cross. That is life in the realm of the spirit; that is existence in the Dominion—the Kingdom—of God. There lies the true source of our life we might dare call Christian, our real birthplace, our true home.
I suppose you all know of Dorothy Day, a radical in both religion and politics, the founder of The Catholic Worker, who died in 1980, a woman whose early life as she describes it, was "dissolute, wasted, full of sensation and sensuality." Brought up on the Bible in her nominally Protestant Chicago home she later became a devout Catholic whose life was spent in soup kitchens, on picket lines, in prison for pacifism, her own houses of hospitality and among and for people of the street. She called herself "a fool for Christ." Robert Coles, among his many profound forays into culture and religion, interviewed Dorothy Day. He related her discouragement with the failure of the church, its clergy, its parishioners to do the will of Christ for the sake of justice and peace. Yet, as he writes, Dorothy Day continued to "look for hope not in the pagan state, not in the dreary banalities and faddish abstractions of social science, not in the cultivation of self, not in a rampant and crazy consumerism, but in the daily struggle to obey God and live a life that does as much justice as possible to God's constantly demonstrated lovingkindness. 'All the way to heaven is heaven,' she observed. . ." And later, after telling Coles of her devotion to her Christian Community, her ardent seeking after God, her eagerness, "after a few false starts," her eagerness to follow Christ's example, Dorothy Day, during that interview, "pauses to look out the window, after a retreat into silence, she (says) slowly, quoting the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Suhard, 'To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, or even stirring people up, but in being a living mystery; it means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.'"
Of course. ". . . living in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist. . ." Now that is being born from above.
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