The Reverend John E. McGinn, Rector
Saint John’s Episcopal Church
Sandwich, Massachusetts 02563
February 17, 2008
2 Lent
The sermon for today is taken
from the Gospel of John, chapter 3, verses 1-17.
Last Sunday we had the 154th
annual meeting of this parish. I think
(I speak for myself for sure) for a rector that is always a time of kind of
nervousness and wonderment, and you begin to question some of the things you
have done, should have done and wanted to do.
And there were other things on my mind as this past week
approached. Then on Monday morning my
daughter, Colleen, went to Jordan Hospital and our fourth grandchild was born -
a girl. Julia Caroline White was born at
8:30 a.m. As I was going through feeling
kind of sorry for myself over all the things I’ve gone through in the past few
weeks, whether they be with my health or with the job,
and so forth, I was - well - a little down.
Then Julia came along, and I held her in my arms for the first time
about 10:30 in the morning, and as I held her she immediately began to
cry.
Have you ever received a word
from God about your life? Nicodemus
did. He received that message from
Jesus. Most of you remember his story. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a member of the
Jewish ruling counsel. He came to Jesus
at night, and this rings true, doesn’t it?
How would it look for the Jewish ruling counsel to seek out an itinerant
preacher from Galilee? But Nicodemus was an apparently earnest man.
So he said to Jesus, “Rabbi,
we know you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one could perform the
miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with you.” Quite an admission for a
man of his stature in the community.
However, it appears to me that Jesus cut Nicodemus off short. In answer to Nicodemus’ praise Jesus
declared, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they
are born again.”
This was not what Nicodemus
expected. What’s this
man talking about, he wondered to himself. What does it mean to be born again? And finally Nicodemus voices bewilderment,
“How could a man be born when he is old?” he asks. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into
his mother’s womb to be born.”
It is interesting that
Nicodemus takes Jesus’ reply so literally.
As a member of the Rabbinical class, Nicodemus
was surely familiar with the scripture passages, like Ezekiel 36, verses
26-27. “I will give you a new heart and
put a new spirit in you. I will rule
from your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh; and I will put my holy
spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my
laws.”
Jesus tried to explain to
Nicodemus, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless
they are born of water and the spirit.
Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying you
must be born again. The wind blows
wherever it pleases, you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes
from or where it is going. So it is with
everyone born of the spirit.”
“And how can this be?”
Nicodemus asked. “You are Israel’s
teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things?” Jesus appears to be quite surprised at
Nicodemus’ confusion. Everything Jesus
taught can be found in the Old Testament, and Jesus did not come to destroy
that Bible, but to fulfill it. But
Nicodemus was confused, and there have been many people ever since who have
also been baffled by Jesus’ words.
“I tell you the truth. No one can see the kingdom of God unless they
are born again.” The confusion is almost
a red state/blue state thing. Each
theological grouping in our land has a different interpretation of the new
birth that Jesus calls born again, and even within those theological groupings
there are differences, some of which are cultural.
I don’t know how many of you
listen to Garrison Keillor on public radio. He’s on every Saturday night - his show
begins at 6:00 p.m. He recently did a
bit which illustrates this theological diversity that is in our land. The show is broadcast from Columbus, Georgia,
and Garrison Keillor described a man who had moved to
Lake Woebegone from Columbus which is in the deep south. The man found work at a bakery and soon
captivated the town with his peach pastries and his southern hospitality. The whole town was becoming friendlier
through his influence. But over time,
this man’s personality changed. He
became obsessed with the end of the world and his need for salvation. One day in desperation he appeared at the
Lutheran Church and inquired of the pastor what to do to be saved. This threw the Lutheran pastor for a
loop. He didn’t normally do alter calls,
and people were supposed to take care of salvation on their own time. Since this was happening in late November,
the church didn’t have time anyway - it just didn’t fit into the busy Advent
schedule. You know how it is in Advent
when we are getting ready for Christmas.
But the story became more
complicated. Over the coming months the
man continued his pursuit of the kind of salvation he had seen happen in the
lives of people in Columbus, Georgia. He
wanted to be baptized by immersion.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a tub in Lake Woebegone big enough for a
submersion, and by this time it was January and the lake was frozen over.
So our desperate man had to
return to Columbus, Georgia, to care for his salvation. Now, Minnesota Lutherans and South Georgia
Baptists simply don’t look at salvation in the same way, and that’s a fact. These words can be confusing, at least to
many of us. “I tell you the truth. No one can see the kingdom of God unless they
are born again.”
Former President Jimmy Carter
faced this confusion when he labeled himself “a born-again Christian,” and many
people are confused by the concept of a new birth.
I want this morning for us to
look at this teaching in a new way and to apply it to our lives. What did Jesus mean when he said, “No one can
see the kingdom of God unless they are born again”? Did he mean that you cannot get into heaven
without some kind of specific conversion experience? Did he mean that? Well, maybe.
For many Christians, this is what being born again is all about. On a certain day, I had a specific experience
with God, and I was saved. That is the
valid interpretation, I think, of this text; however, it is not the only
one.
In my sermons, I talked
before about the kingdom of God and Jesus’ teachings. Jesus came teaching and preaching the
kingdom. This was central to Jesus’
ministry. He was following in the
footsteps of John the Baptist, our patron saint, his cousin. In those days, John the Baptist came
preaching in the wilderness of Judea and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of
heaven is at hand.” And Jesus used
almost the same language when he began his ministry. Jesus’ first sermon began like this: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God
is at hand. Repent and believe in the
Gospel.” And many of Jesus’ parables
were about the kingdom. He described the
kingdom as a mustard seed which is planted in the ground which grows into an
enormous tree. He described it as leaven
which a woman puts into a loaf of bread as a pearl of great price for which a
person will sell everything he owns, a treasure hidden in a field. “The main task of the church,” Jesus said,
“is to tell about the kingdom of God.”
Jesus said to him, “Let the
dead bury their own dead, but you go and preach the kingdom of God.” “And even after his resurrection,” says Luke
in his introduction to the book of Acts, “he appeared to them over a period of
forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.”
And it’s clear that Jesus is
not speaking of an event which is yet to be realized. Of the twenty-seven times that Jesus spoke of
the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven - and remember that those two terms
are interchangeable - seventeen of them referred to a kingdom that is already
here. “The kingdom of God is anywhere
that God reigns,” Jesus said on one occasion.
“The kingdom is within you.”
On another occasion he said,
“You are not far from the kingdom. He
even taught us to pray that “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it
is in heaven.”
The kingdom is here. The kingdom is now.
Now, I want us to consider
Jesus’ words to the Pharisee Nicodemus in this morning’s Gospel of John. “I tell you the truth. No one can see the kingdom of God unless they
are born again.”
Jesus, I think, is saying to
Nicodemus: There is this kingdom, my
kingdom, a
kingdom of the heart, a kingdom of the spirit, and in order to enter that
kingdom, you need to experience some profound changes in the way you think and
in the way you feel. You need to open
yourself to a new level of devotion - a new capacity for love - a new set of
eyes by which to see the world - eyes filled with compassion and acceptance and
forgiveness.
Jesus is saying, I think, to
Nicodemus what God said through Ezechiel. “I will give you a new heart and put a new
spirit in you.”
I see no evidence that Jesus
is prescribing an certain emotional experience or any
timetable for this experience. It may
happen at once, as it happened to St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or it may
happen over three or so years as it did with Simon Peter. Or it may take a lifetime, as it has with
many people over the centuries.
Now here is what I think is the
critical point. Entrance into this
kingdom is very desirable. It is the
pearl of great price - the treasure hidden in a field. And as St. Paul would say later, “For the
kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness,
peace and joy and the Holy Spirit.” That
is that Jesus brought a kingdom into this world. It is an invisible kingdom, a spiritual
kingdom. It is available to all who
would make Jesus Lord of their lives.
And once that kingdom is established in your heart, you stand righteous
before God and you know a peace and a joy that the world cannot knock.
Yes, there is a heaven to
look forward to, but you experience a little foretaste of heaven here and
now. It is the most incredible promise
we can imagine, and it is as astounding how few people understand that this was
really the thrust of Jesus’ ministry here on earth.
Now let me ask the question
again. What does it mean to be born
again? It means to open yourself to Jesus’ spirit.
It means allowing Jesus to make you righteous before God, allowing him
to give you his peace, his joy. This
could happen in an instant, or it could happen over a lifetime journey. But it will be the most important decision,
the most rewarding journey you will ever make.
An external sign of this
internal transition is the application of water and Holy Baptism. Jesus said to Nicodemus, “No one can enter
the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and spirit, and when we are
baptized we become recipients of God’s grace.
And entrance into the kingdom may become concurrent with our baptism or
it may take longer. It may come when we
make our First Communion, it may come when we make our Confirmation, it may
come if we are married in the church, it may come some Sunday when we least expect
it.
The wind blows wherever it
pleases. You hear its sound, but you
cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the spirit. The kingdom is the gift that we all seek, but
one which God alone grants according to God’s timetable.
In the summer of 1969, a
young doctor named Oliver Sachs was working with an experimental drug. He was giving the drug to patients who
suffered from a condition commonly called sleeping sickness. Patients with sleeping sickness existed in a
catatonic state. They weren’t completely
unconscious, they might respond to stimuli, but they were never fully
awake. They were like sleepwalkers if
they walked at all, lost in an inaccessible dream mode.
Dr. Sachs’ use of the drug on
these patients yields such dramatic results that he wrote a book about it. His book was later made into a movie, which
if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.
It is called Awakenings. It
stars Robin Williams as the doctor and Robert DeNiro
as Leonard Lowe, the first patient to be awakened.
After thirty years of
existing in a sleep-like state, Leonard Lowe suddenly regained his ability to
walk and talk. In one scene in this
powerful movie, he is so excited by his new life that he calls the doctor in
the middle of the night and says he has to talk to him. The doctor hurries over and Leonard Lowe
says, “We’ve got to tell everybody, we’ve got to remind them, we’ve got to
remind them how good it is!” “How good
what is, Leonard?” the doctor says.
Leonard picks up a
newspaper. “Read the newspaper. See what they say. It’s all bad!
It’s all bad! People have
forgotten what life is all about.
They’ve forgotten what it is to be alive! They need to be reminded about
what they have and what they can lose! And what I feel is the joy of life, the gift
of life, the freedom of life, the wonderment of life.”
Leonard Lowe wasn’t exactly
experiencing the kingdom of God, but he was awake and aware of how precious
life is. And in the same way, Jesus
wanted Nicodemus to wake up and to be aware that God’s spirit was alive and at
work in the world.
Now, you know we don’t know -
we don’t know - if Nicodemus answered Jesus’ call to a new life. The story ends with him puzzling over Jesus’
instructions. Here is what he
missed: New eyes would see the beauty of
this world, a new appreciation of the joy of being alive. The peace of trusting a loving, heavenly
father, concerned about his every need.
And all of this is available to those who open themselves to God’s spirit.
Now I come back to my
granddaughter, and I think of Julia whose only words were a cry of joy for
being born. You know, she was more
profound than any of us could be. We
think happiness is to be found in a fat bank account, a position of prominence
in a community, a perfect family, a life without problems. These are nice, but they will not meet our
deepest need.
“I tell you the truth. No one can see the kingdom of God unless they
are born again.”
Amen