Don't Forget About Being Born Again

Whenever the lectionary picks up in the middle of a paragraph, there's a good chance something will be taken out of context. I think that's exactly what happens in this Sunday's gospel lesson (John 3:14-21). You might think that it starts at a logical place since verse 14 has Jesus saying to Nicodemus, "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life." Given that the reading from Numbers is the actual story about lifting up the bronze serpent in the wilderness so that those who had been bitten by snakes as punishment for their impatient faithlessness could be healed, you might think this is the right place to start. I disagree.

If we begin with verse 14, we miss everything Jesus has to say to Nicodemus about being born again. Remember the story? Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, wondering how to make sense of Jesus' miraculous signs and seemingly conflicting radical message (e.g. turning over of tables in the temple). Jesus' response to Nicodemus? "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." They go back and forth about what this means--Nicodemus still struggling to make sense of Jesus' teaching--until finally Jesus says, "If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?"

There is a gap, it seems, between what Jesus is saying and what Nicodemus is understanding. This gap cannot be bridged by human thinking. Only one who is born of water and the spirit--only one who is born again--can see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus wants to know whether he is supposed to crawl back into his mother's womb, and Jesus (insert face-palm here) can't believe that this leader and teacher of Israel can be so obtuse. The implication for me is that I won't be able to make sense of what God is doing in my life and in the world around me until I am born again--until I start all over and claim a birth that is given to me through Christ's death and resurrection.

That is the background to the statement about the bronze serpent being lifted up. That is the prerequisite to understanding what Jesus says about the Son of Man being raised. And, as this week's lesson continues with verse 17, it's also essential to understanding that Jesus came into the world not to condemn the world but that, through him, the world might be saved.

This week, Jesus himself does some exegesis on behalf of the preacher. He takes the story from Numbers and interprets it for us as a story about life and hope and promise. He takes it out of the context of punishment, death, and despair and shows us what it is really about--about being born again. When my instincts run counter to that, I'm failing to see the story through born-again eyes. In other words, I'm stuck in the earthly realm and have failed to see the kingdom of God at work.

As Steve Pankey said in his post today, "There comes a time when you realize that snakes have been biting you for quite some time and you are in desperate need of relief." We are all snake-bit. If we want to be healed, we need to look at the one who was raised in the wilderness. We need to be born again.

Graven Image or Source of Healing?

Does anyone else find Sunday’s Old Testament lesson (Numbers 21:4-9) to be completely strange? In this passage the Lord gets angry at Israel’s grumbling, so he sends poisonous snakes to bite and kill them. Moses prays for the people, and the Lord commands him to make a poisonous serpent out of bronze and set it on a pole. If someone was bit and then looked upon the serpent, she or he was healed.

This story is bizarre, of course, because of the method of the healing. What does it mean to look upon the image of a serpent and be healed? But, at a deeper level, this story is beyond weird because of the strong prohibition of making graven images or idols that was central to Israelite culture. In this story, God essentially asks Moses to make an idol that will have power to save the people. Well, sort of, but, of course, that’s not the whole story.

For starters, let’s jump ahead and see what happens to this bronze serpent. Centuries later, when Hezekiah the great reformer king of Judah came to the throne, “he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it (2 Kings 18:4). Indeed, the strange source of healing—like all graven images—became an object of worship. The message is that if you give human beings long enough we will worship whatever we see. So this temporary answer ended up being a problem for God’s people. Maybe I’ll post later this week on how the cross has become a graven image for some Christians. (Oooh, controversy!)

But my real focus on the Numbers passage is the nature of the image that was made for the people’s healing. God did not command that a butterfly be made. God did not command that Moses make a beautiful flower or a moon or a star or a lion or a calf or anything else…except a serpent. God asked Moses to make an image of the very thing that had been the source of Israel’s punishment. Those who looked upon it—those who stared the consequences of their sin straight in the face—were saved. Presumably, those who turned away and refused to confront their mistakes were not.

There’s a message of repentance here. Those who look upon the consequences of their sin find salvation. Those who turn away and pretend their sin does not exist or does not have consequences in their lives cannot find salvation. If we are going to be saved, we must look at our sin, behold it, and let the act of confronting it become our real healing.

As I work toward Sunday, I’m looking for a way to convey this message of repentance in the context of John 3 and Jesus’ words to Nicodemus.

We Are Helpless

March 8, 2015 – 3^rd Sunday in Lent, Year B

Exodus 20:1-17; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

© 2015 Evan D. Garner

 Audio of this sermon is available here.

Today we proclaim one of the most difficult to grasp truths of the Christian faith. And, at the same time, we also proclaim one of its most liberating aspects. This doctrine is not only difficult to grasp; it’s actually impossible. Yet all our hope depends upon our ability to accept it. It is a belief that runs contrary to every instinct in our being, but, if we want to be the people God created us to be, we must embrace it. And it is simply this: we are helpless.

I don’t know how carefully you listen to the Collect of the Day, but it is written to collect and focus all of our prayers for the day into one clear expression. It reflects where we are in the seasons of the church year, and it often articulates a thread that holds all of the readings together. Our hymns are chosen to tie in with the scripture lessons, so the words of the collect are often echoed in the words we sing. The Collect of the Day is a brief moment in our service, and it’s over before you know it, but, if you let that prayer sink into your heart each week, I believe that you will be drawn deeper into our worship. And, this week, our collect says a most amazing thing: “Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.”

We are helpless. We are powerless. We are impotent. We are beyond weak. We are utterly unable by ourselves to do anything that would benefit us. We are drowning in a sea of our own trouble and unable to save ourselves from sinking. What wonderful news! But it sounds terrible, doesn’t it? No one likes hearing that he is helpless. No one wants to be told that she is powerless. We live in a world where anything is possible—where, with enough hard work and determination, you can do anything, become anything, accomplish anything. We don’t tell our children that they can’t. We pump them up with entitled potential and tell them that they can be anything they want to be. It’s easier to let them figure out for themselves (and sometimes with the help of a therapist) that they won’t become a professional athlete, that they can’t choose to be a Wall Street genius, that they can’t make themselves happy.

I’m not saying that hard work and determination don’t pay off. There are plenty of stories of little kids who worked harder than anyone else and made it to the NFL, and ESPN knows that we’ll sit down and watch those stories. Human beings have remarkable abilities, and exceptional human beings can do the kinds of things that fill the rest of us with awe. But then what? How far will that get you? How many former athletes are now bankrupt? How many billionaires are still searching for happiness? How many couples with perfect jobs and perfect houses and perfect children are hiding their discontent? Sooner or later—whether it’s in this life or standing in front of our maker—we will encounter our own limitations. We will confront the fact that we cannot give ourselves true joy. We will take a long, hard look at ourselves in the mirror and realize that, in the truest sense of the word, we are powerless. And I believe that the sooner we do the sooner we discover true peace.

Jesus revealed that truth in dramatic fashion when he charged into the temple and chased out those who were selling animals or changing money and overturned their tables. In that prophetic act, Jesus confronted the religion of his day, declaring that this temple commerce had made his Father’s house a marketplace. Some commentators and preachers like to explain this disruptive display as an attack on those who would charge exorbitant prices and exchange rates to those who had come to the temple for worship. Indeed, these animals were necessary for those who had come to offer a sacrifice, and it was more than inconvenient to bring a sheep or a goat or a pigeon on a journey that could last for days. Plus, in the temple, monetary offerings could only be made in the Jewish or Tyrian currency. Greek or Roman coins, which were used everywhere else, were not acceptable, but who carried around shekels? These merchants and money changers were essential. And, in all of the historical accounts of what went on at the temple, there is no record of exorbitant prices or exchange rates being charged. By all accounts, they were a much-needed, much-respected part of worship in Jerusalem. Like it or not, therefore, it seems that Jesus’ ire was not directed at an abusive system that preyed on the poor. Jesus was criticizing the system as a whole.

An act like that—a defiant stand that challenged the very nature of religion in that day—required proof. The temple authorities went to Jesus and said, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” And Jesus replied, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Of course, they thought he was talking about the structure which had taken forty-six years to build, but Jesus’ challenge wasn’t levied against the stones and mortar of Judaism. He was criticizing the assumptions that had grown to accompany the religious practice of the day. He wanted them to see that the relationship between God and humanity had never depended upon a transaction between us and God but that it had always been built purely upon God’s gift of grace. In order to make that truth resonate in the hearts and minds of God’s people, God had shifted the temple where he meets humanity away from a place where people instinctively brought their best to God and relocated it onto the person of Jesus Christ. And that had changed everything. The life and death and resurrection of Jesus made it clear that we have nothing to offer in exchange for salvation.

It is hard to believe that we are helpless. It is hard to accept that we are powerless. It is impossible, even, to understand that God sees that we have absolutely nothing to offer him yet gives us salvation anyway. And that is truly good news. God isn’t asking for anything in exchange for his love because he knows that we have nothing to offer him. We are faithless. We are selfish. We are sinful. And God declares that he loves us anyway. That is what Jesus is all about. One cannot stand in the shadow of the cross and think that one has anything to give in exchange for God’s love. How could you pay for that? How could you earn that? How could you merit that?

But our world revolves around exchange. Transactions are as old as humanity itself. We are more comfortable with quid pro quo than no strings attached. When someone gives us a present, we like to have something that we can give them in return. We make sense of things by putting a price on them, including our relationship with God. It is human nature to think that God will bless us if we are good and curse us if we are not. And, even here and now, we invent ways to quantify the economy of salvation. We have simply replaced temple sacrifice with new forms of exchange. Ask yourself why you come to church, why you put money in the plate, and why you volunteer your time. Is it out of pure gratitude for all that God has given you, or are you still trying to give something back in exchange for God’s grace?

Is our faith built upon the principle that we have nothing to offer God, or are we still working as if God’s love depends upon what we bring him? If Jesus walked through that door, what tables would he overturn? What practices would he chase out of our church? How much of our religion is still modeled on exchange? In Christ, there is no back and forth. In grace, there is no transaction. If we believe that God loves us unconditionally, we must also believe that we can do nothing to receive that love. We must proclaim the good news that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves. We must rejoice in our helplessness because only then can God’s love free us from the crushing weight of unmet expectations.

Hear the good news that God expects nothing from you. Hear the good news that you have nothing to offer in exchange for God’s love. In Christ, we are set free from the belief that God’s love depends on us. Don’t return to the shackles of exchange. Accept that God’s love is a free gift and that you are helpless without it.

Damning Collect

What is Lent supposed to teach us? What is repentance all about? Why do we spend this season in a spiritual wilderness? What would happen to us if we journeyed out into the desert all alone for forty days?

We do these things to learn that we are helpless, that we are mortal, that we cannot make it on our own.

This Sunday we will pray words as damning as any we encounter all year long: "Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves." The collect for the Third Sunday in Lent is powerful. It begins with the fullness of our failure. It announces boldly and plainly to God that we are destined to screw it all up. There is no where to hide after those words are said. There is no way to start a prayer with those words and end up anywhere other than begging for help. We cannot simultaneously acknowledge our powerlessness and then claim we have any power. We know, after hearing those words, that the conclusion of that prayer will be a supplication for God's help.

Something powerful happens when we admit that we are powerless. It's the first of the twelve steps. We have no power in ourselves. That's where recovery starts: "We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable." That's where deliverance begins. That's where salvation starts.

I live in a world that hides from weakness. I live in a culture that celebrates strength. I live in a community that doesn't know how to handle failure. When confronted by a terminal illness or a monumental grief or a raging addiction or a debilitating depression, we pat people on the back and say, "Hang in there. Things will get better." We do that because it is threatening to acknowledge our own powerlessness over the circumstance. The truth is, however, that there's nothing we can do about any of it. We are all totally, absolutely, utterly powerless.

And once we say those words--to ourselves, to one another, and to God--we can finish the prayer: "Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul." We are helped. We are loved. We are saved. But all of that comes from a power greater than ourselves. And we can't get there until we admit our powerlessness.

Life Is Full of Excuses

Audio of this sermon can be heard here.

 

My life is full of excuses—some of them mine, most of them belonging to others. My children always have a reason why they haven’t cleaned up the play room, why they aren’t ready on time, or why their sibling is crying. And that reason is never, “It’s my fault. I didn’t do what you told me to do. I’m sorry.” Other people share their excuses with me, too. “I know we haven’t been to church in weeks, but we’ve been busy. Janet had a gymnastics meet over the weekend. John had a stressful week at work and needed some time to relax. We’ve had something on the calendar every single weekend, and this was the first time we could stay home as a family.” No one ever says, “I guess church isn’t really a priority in my life. I always seems to find a reason not to go. I suppose I should just get myself there next Sunday.”

I have my own excuses, too. Sometimes I share them with other people, but more often I use them to soothe my own disappointment. “That sermon would have been better if I hadn’t been so busy last week. I should have been nicer to that person, but I wasn’t really feeling well. I know there’s a lot of work I need to finish, but I also need to give more time to my family.” I say those things to myself as a way of burying my failures—hiding them underneath a rational, logical veneer that allows me to keep my head up…for a while.

But the problem with excuses is that they hide the truth. They mask our real failures. They persuade us that there isn’t something wrong or that we can’t do anything about it. They chain us to our current circumstances, locking us in that place of failure, convincing us that things could be no other way.

How do you feel when you hear others’ excuses? Do you even notice when you make excuses for yourself?

In John 5:1-18, Jesus comes upon a man who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. For thirty-eight years, this man had been more or less lying in the same place. Day in and day out, he was stuck there. And Jesus walks up and says to the man, “Do you want to be made well?” Finally, salvation had come to this man. At last, after four decades of helplessness, the one thing this man had dreamed of was right in front of his face. And what did the man say? Jesus asked, “Do you want to be made well?” and the man said, “I don’t have anyone to put me down into the pool when the water is stirred up.”

Don’t you just want to slap the man and take him by the shoulders and shake some sort of sense into him, yelling, “Don’t you see what Jesus is offering you? He’s asking if you want to be made well! Don’t make excuses. Just say, ‘Yes, please!’”

Of course, Jesus doesn’t wait for the man to get it. He heals him anyway. Perhaps that’s because Jesus sees something that I have a hard time seeing. He sees a man who has been stuck in his circumstance so long that he has forgotten how to recognize a way out of it even when it walks up to him and offers him the very thing he seeks. The truth is that sometimes we have been stuck in our helplessness for so long that we can’t even ask for help. The excuses have become our reality. And what then?

God comes and helps us even when we’ve forgotten how to ask for it. I hear a lot of Christians talk about salvation as if it were this thing God is holding out to us, waiting on us to take it. Those who ask for it receive it. Those who don’t don’t. We use words like “repentance” and “belief” to describe the process of “being saved.” “If you want to go to heaven,” we might say to our children or to someone who asks us about the Christian faith, “you must tell God that you’re sorry for your sins and ask him to forgive you and then believe that Jesus Christ died and rose again to save you from your sins.” And all of that is good and right and godly. But what happens when we’re stuck in a place for so long that we can’t even find the strength to ask for help? What happens when we’ve been making excuses for so long that our life has become one big excuse?

 
Well, God’s love is bigger than our excuses. God’s love is bigger than our inability to see salvation. God isn’t waiting on us to ask for his love before he will love us. Jesus died for us while we were yet sinners. That means he died for us while we were still stuck in our sin—even unable to ask for help. God’s love is where everything begins. God’s mercy meets us right where we are—even if we are unable to see it or ask for it. Thanks be to God that he sees through our excuses—not to demand that we leave them behind before he will redeem us but that he sees just how helpless we are and loves us anyway.

In Jesus' Name

This post first appeared as the cover article in our parish newsletter, The View. To learn more about St. John's and to read the rest of the newsletter, please click here.

Back in 2002, as a part of campaign finance reform, candidates for public office were required to say at some point in their advertisements, “I am So-and-So, and I approve this message”—a line usually placed at the end of the commercial. That reform was supposed to discourage negative campaigning by forcing candidates to link their names and faces more closely with the advertisements they ran, but it had a different effect on me: it changed the way I hear people’s prayers.

After the inundation of political commercials that accompanied that first post-McCain-Feingold campaign cycle, I started hearing the conclusion of individuals’ prayers as if a tagline had been stuck there on the end because it was required by some religious authority. I pray this prayer in Jesus’ name. We ask these things in the name of Jesus. I checked with Jesus, and he approved this message.

Of course, those words were nothing new. Christians have been offering prayers in the name of Jesus Christ from the earliest days of his movement. But the advent of this new political tagline drew my attention to the way we invoke the name of Jesus in our prayers. To my ear, dinner blessings and other spontaneous prayers, when ended with any form of “…in Jesus’ name,” took on an artificial quality. I began questioning the link between that practice and the content of the prayers being offered. What does it really mean to ask for something in Jesus’ name? Are we simply sticking those words on the end of our prayers out of habit? Do we say those words because Jesus told us to? Or do we think that they make a difference in the way God hears our prayers? Could it be that those words change the way we approach God? Might they even be a prayer in themselves?

There is a tradition in Christianity that any request made of God in Jesus’ name will be granted. I suppose that this is based on a selection of verses in which Jesus encourages his disciples to believe in the power of prayer and the faithfulness of God who answers those prayers. In Matthew 18:19, Jesus says, “If two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.” In Mark 11:24, Jesus says, “Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” Then, in John 14:13-14, Jesus says, “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.” As any twelve-year-old boy can attest, however, this does not mean that asking God for a Ferrari in Jesus’ name guarantees the delivery of an Italian luxury sports car. What, then, did Jesus mean? Why does he encourage us to ask for things in his name?

Two weeks ago, I led a bible study on John 15:1-17—the passage in which Jesus identifies himself as “the true vine.” In the course of that discussion, we debated the merits of asking for something in the name of Jesus, and I quickly found myself at odds with most of the class. Using viticultural imagery, Jesus urges his disciples to remain connected with him just as a branch remains attached to a vine. Without the vine, the branches can bear no fruit, but, when they abide in the vine, branches are given everything they need for fruitfulness. In verse seven, Jesus offers his disciples a clarifying promise: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” The “wish” that Jesus invites us to bring before God is not akin to the wishes granted to the holder of Aladdin’s lamp. Instead, they are the heartfelt desires of one who remains indivisibly attached to the source of all life—the vine through which our fruitfulness is possible.

Jesus says, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” But what do the prayers of one who abides in Christ sound like? What are the wishes of one who stays fully connected with Jesus? “This is my commandment,” Jesus says in verse twelve, “that you love one another as I have loved you.” If his words were truly to abide in us, we would love one another with the same sacrificial love that he had for the world. Surely that kind of love manifests itself not in prayers for health and wealth but in heartfelt, heartbroken prayers for the poor, the downtrodden, the mournful, and the outcast. In other words, if you want to be sure that God will answer your prayers, start by praying for the sorts of things for which Jesus himself would ask.

When you say a prayer, do you think about what it means to offer that prayer in the name of Jesus? Do you say the words “in Jesus name we pray” because you think God is more likely to answer your prayer, or do you say those words as a way of asking God to be sure that what you request reflects your identity as one who abides in our Lord? Perhaps we should stop ending our prayers with that familiar tagline and, instead, begin our supplications with those words. Maybe that would make space in our prayers for the holy and powerful name of Jesus shape us and our requests, molding them into the prayers that Jesus would have us pray.

 
Almighty God, to whom our needs are known before we ask: Help us to ask only what accords with your will; and those good things which we dare not, or in our blindness cannot ask, grant us for the sake of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. (BCP p. 394-95)

Religious Nut or Radical Prophet?

Ten years ago, some vandals came into the Roman Catholic church here in Decatur, AL, and turned over the altar right as mass was ending, yelling something about idolatry and false worship. They were self-proclaimed prophets whose actions defiled a sacred space, scared the faithful men, women, and children in the church, and underscored the lingering prejudice against Catholics in our community. In an interview from jail, the leader of the group said that he was “acting on a vision from God.”

 

I didn’t live in this community back then, but I remember well the first time I heard this story. As the details came together in its telling, I felt within me an indignant rage rising up at the thought of some religious nut acting with such disregard for the faith of others. When I heard that there were people in the church—that this vandalism didn’t occur in the middle of the night but right as a service was ending—I was aghast. I could not understand how this could happen—how someone in the name of God could do such an evil thing. I wonder how I would have felt when Jesus stormed into the temple and overturned the tables and chased on the moneychangers, which is the focus of this Sunday’s gospel reading—John 2:13-22.

 

Actually, I know exactly how I would have felt. The same righteous anger would have flooded my mind. I would have been the loudest voice calling for a brutal punishment. I would have denounced Jesus as the same sort of religious nut who did that evil thing here in Decatur a decade ago.

 

I don’t like that about myself, but I need to face it. I’m the kind of person who is hardwired to like rules and regulations. On the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, I am a strong ESTJ. I don’t like people who break the rules. I don’t like individuals who threaten longstanding institutions. When confronted by radical change, I respond with radical intransigence. It’s who I am. It makes it hard for me to recognize when God might be trying to change things.

 

I am in no way equating the justification of the actions of the religious nuts who defiled our local church with the justification of Jesus’ radical temple disruption. Although the two acts are similar in form—no doubt the 21^st-century version was an imitation of the 1^st-century act—the comparison stops there. But I do find myself drawn to the question that was posed to Jesus in response to this behavior: “What sign can you show us for doing this?”

 

I presume the felons who turned over the altar in our local church wouldn’t have an answer for that—at least not one that we would find in the least way convincing. Jesus, of course, said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” In other words, the resurrection of Jesus is the vindication of his message and his actions. The empty tomb says to hard-hearted individuals like me, “Jesus was right; it’s time to listen to him.” I need the resurrection to break through my reluctance. During his lifetime, I know where I would have stood—firmly on the side against this radical prophet. My deepest prayer, therefore, is that the resurrection would be so firmly fixed in my mind that I might learn to follow the one who challenges everything I hold dear.