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,[a] 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[b] 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? (Common English Bible)
“The Screwtape Sermons: Exploring
Scripture With C.S. Lewis,” Week Five
I
was raised an hour’s drive east of the den of horrors that is Westboro Baptist
Church. For those of you who do not know—that’s
the church that pickets the funerals of dead soldiers and gay men with signs
saying “God Hates F*gs.” Kansas was—and is—known
for them, just like we are known for other forms of Christian extremism, like
anti-abortion vigilantism. We suffer by
association, when really none of us want anything to do with Fred Phelps and
his devilish ilk.
But
several weeks ago, NPR did an interview with two of Phelps’s granddaughters who
had been disavowed by the WBC after they left for, you know, not being hateful
enough. And one of the daughters, Megan
Phelps-Roper, who is my age, said:
I’m at a complete loss…I was afraid we
were going to hell. Many times when we
were driving, I thought God was going to kill us…but I do know that I want to
do good, to have empathy.
So
now the sisters travel the country, speaking to groups and conferences about
religious respect. And what struck me
was that, essentially, they were doing this homeless—Megan even said as much,
saying, “We don’t have a set home.”
And
I thought to myself—that is exactly how Jesus did it. And even then, we didn’t understand.
Okay,
with Thanksgiving coming up this week, it no longer sounds so crazy to say:
this will be the last sermon series before the holidays are upon us. And this is it—the last sermon series before
we spend four weeks on Advent and two more on Christmas, but also for this
particular series, we end it here today.
This is a series that I have wanted to do for a long time, but never
quite found the right spot in the calendar until now. And it’s a bit different than my usual
series, which are often about a book of Scripture or a book by a contemporary
author, or some other theme…this series is centered around a person: Clive
Staples Lewis, the 20th century Christian writer and apologist who
wrote a great many books you may have heard of: the Chronicles of Narnia, the
Space Trilogy, and Mere Christianity.
He’s a popular fellow in a great many Christian circles, and so I
decided to use him as the proverbial guinea pig in this new experiment of mine
in taking a slightly different approach to a sermon series. We began the series by touching on perhaps
Lewis’s most famous work, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” which
contained allegory about the most basic of Christian belief: Christ’s
crucifixion and resurrection. We then
turned to not just belief, but practice, in Lewis’s 1942 book “The Screwtape
Letters,” and last week we arrived at Lewis’s most famous nonfiction book,
“Mere Christianity.” Last week we pivoted
from practice once more to otherworldly matters in Lewis’s 1946 book on the
nature of heaven and hell, “The Great Divorce,” and finally, we end this week
not with a book that Lewis wrote, but with a play based on his writings, a play
that supposes that Lewis and the great atheist psychologist Sigmund Freud had
met and had tea one day. It is a play that
Carrie and I saw in New York, and I enjoyed it immensely…here’s what the
(fictional) Freud and Lewis say (in part) to each other in a debate concerning
the nature of Christ in Mark St. Germain’s play entitled “Freud’s Last Session:”
FREUD.
…Christ was a lunatic.
LEWIS.
That(‘s an) option.
FREUD.
It’s more than an option, it’s a likelihood. Why should I take Christ’s claim to be God
more seriously than the dozen patients I’ve treated who claim to be Christ?
LEWIS.
Did you find a single person whose concept of reality was otherwise
sound?
FREUD.
No.
LEWIS.
So let’s put aside the possibility that Christ was delusional for the
moment. The second alternative is that
he was consciously deceiving His followers for some other purpose.
FREUD.
Power. His followers deified
Him. He performed magic trick
miracles. His strategy was a complete
success.
LEWIS.
I wouldn’t call any strategy ending with crucifixion a complete success.
FREUD.
If he truly died. His
reappearance to His disciples after the crucifixion could have been designed to
mislead them.
LEWIS.
After which he changed His name, hung up His shingle as a carpenter, and
was never recognized again? Not even by
his enemies desperate to discredit Him?
FREUD.
I concede it is unlikely.
LEWIS.
So if the man was neither a lunatic nor a sham, it forced me to consider
the only choice I was left with…I accepted that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
What
the playwright Mark St. Germain is drawing on is, in fact, a famous passage
from Lewis’s “Mere Christianity,” which we tackled two weeks ago, but which
contains more than enough material for a sermon series all its own. And in “Mere Christainity,” Lewis presents
the following argument, aptly referred to as ‘the Lewis trilemma:’
A man who was merely a man and said the
sorts of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic—on a level with
the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God;
or else a madman or something worse. You
can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you
can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.
But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a
great human teacher. He has not left
that open to us. He did not intend to.
Now,
this passage has attracted much attention and with it, much praise and
subsequent criticism, and there is one critique of it I do agree with: that
Lewis forgoes the possibility of Jesus also being made into a legend of sorts
by some of His earlier followers like the Gnostics, who believed that Jesus was
entirely divine and not at all human.
And so the trilemma becomes, in fact, a tetralemma: is Jesus a lunatic,
a liar, a legend or Lord?
This
is where the passage from John 3 comes into play. Jesus is talking with a Pharisee, Nicodemus,
about the nature of the Spirit, and Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Unless you are
born anew, you cannot see God’s kingdom,” to which Nicodemus says wha has to be
the ancient equivalent of “WTF?” “It’s
impossible to enter the mother’s womb a second time, isn’t it?”
Well,
sort of. The Greek word Jesus uses here
is anothen, which has two
meanings. One is “anew,” or “again,”
which is where we get the phrase “born again.”
But the other meaning is “above.”
And what if both of those meanings apply here? We have already been born “below,” of the earth,
by emerging from our mothers’ wombs, but we also must be born “above” by
emerging from God’s creative hands, set into the world with the charge of Adam,
to care for it.
Jesus
is trying to get this through Nicodemus’s head, and Nicodemus is so slow on the
uptake that eventually, Jesus just throws up His hands in frustration and
basically insults the poor chap: “You’re a teacher of Israel, and you don’t
know these things?” In other words, from
the immortal Lucy Van Pelt to Charlie Brown: “You blockhead!” (Yes, in this case, Jesus is Lucy, so apparently, Jesus offers deranged psychiatric advice for a nickel. I admit, it is not a perfect metaphor.)
Nicodemus
is struggling with the exact same tetralemma I described earlier—that began as
the trilemma from Lewis and expanded by his critics: he is more than willing to
accept Jesus as a teacher, because he is clearly willing to be taught by Him,
or he wouldn’t have welcomed Him in. But
accepting what Jesus has to say about the nature of Himself and the
Spirit? That’s another kettle of fish
for poor Nicodemus, and he just isn’t ready to take that leap of faith yet.
And
maybe you feel like Nicodemus too, sometimes—more than willing to say, yeah, I’m
open to Jesus’ teachings. Love thy
neighbor? I’m fine with that. Do unto others? Check.
Turn the other cheek? Sure, I’ll
give it the old college try. What? You’re the Son of God? Whoa, there, kookyboots, I only signed up to
be taught, not saved. Let’s keep this relationship
at first base, mmmmmkay?
(I’m
probably going to hell for just comparing my relationship to Christ with the
milestones teenagers use when making out...no, wait, 90s era contemporary Christian
music did that first…)
But
Jesus asks more of us. And it is right
that He should do so. Jesus asks us to
take, as Soren Kierkegaard called it, a leap of faith—a leap of faith in Him as
the One who saves us from evil, who saves us from death, who saves us from
ourselves.
I
do not pretend it is easy to understand—that is simply a part of my privilege
in having been born and raised in the church, having been brought up under God
from a very early age, just as we hope to do for little Lucian as we dedicate
him here this morning. And so I can’t
say for sure that I would understand your own reservations or hesitations,
whatever they may be. I’d like to think
that I could, being your pastor and all, but the truth is, sometimes, it’s
difficult for me to.
Which
is why, even for those of us who have been in the church our entire lives,
recognizing Jesus for who He is—not who we want Him to be—is often a trying
assignment. Just because I can see Jesus
in the quests of these two young women who extracted themselves from the most
hateful of Christian cults does not mean that others would—although I hope they
do. And just because someone sees Jesus
elsewhere does not mean that I always will myself...it's like artwork--someone can look at a Jackson Pollock piece and see a masterpiece and be moved to tears, and I am left trying to understand it.
In
other words, there will always be moments where we are like Nicodemus in this
story, no matter how strong our faith or how great our spiritual journey. Sometimes we will fail to recognize Jesus when
He is trying to teach us something. And
that makes us human. Just like everyone
else—everyone else whom Christ loves and calls us to love as well, despite
ourselves.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
November
24, 2013
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