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, 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 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?” (Common English Bible)
“Reconnecting with a
Loving God: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week Eight
Some
of you know this about me. Many of you may not. But to understand why I even am
a pastor, why I take so much meaning from my life’s work of ministering in the
name of Jesus Christ, you need to hear this story.
Back
in high school, I was scheduled to preach at my home congregation the day after
my senior prom on the Good Shepherd passage in John 10. It was a very
challenging sermon for me to write because I used it to share about a little boy
named Reese I used to supervise at a day camp. One day in the summer of 2002, I
spent the entire day with him and his camp class at the American Royal rodeo.
The very next day, he went on a lake trip with his adoptive parents and while
swimming in the lake, drowned and died. I had spent so much time with this
child on the last full day of his life, and years later, I wanted to talk about
how Jesus had shepherded me through that.
But
the night of my senior prom (or, really, early in the morning), we got that
two-in-the-morning phone call that no family ever wants to get. The son of a
family friend, coincidentally also named Eric, had been in a car accident, wasn’t
wearing a seat belt, and was killed almost instantly.
I
was still supposed to preach, though, obviously—even though I would now be
doing so on an hour-and-a-half of sleep and in a state of shock and grief.
As
I was preaching during the 11:00 am worship service, I couldn’t get my lapel mic
to work—I think I had accidentally muted it—and I was absolutely exhausted, no
energy, no voice, nothing. Then the sun came out from behind the clouds and
shone through the skylights in our sanctuary’s ceiling so that the sunlight
fell right on me, like through a magnifying glass.
My
temperature erupted, I could feel the gooseflesh on my skin, and I regained my
voice. I vaguely remember some of what I said, but I am told that it was
lovely. It was, for me, like the Pentecost story—a light came down from the
heavens and enabled me to speak so that I was understood, even as I was
grieving. I knew that if I could preach in such circumstances, I could preach
in any circumstance. So I became a new thing that morning, from a teenager to a
minister in formation.
That
was my first of a couple of mystical God experiences, what we might call a
born-again experience, except that being born again tends to carry a specific
connotation, of living an exciting life of sin, then finding Jesus and becoming
a boring ol’ Christian! But can it mean even more?
This
is a sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that takes us
all the way to Advent. Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the pastor
and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it
from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or
otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers
permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church
hurts.
If
that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a
sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the
truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a
better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet
so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to
us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can
actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have
before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on
being better and doing church together.
We
began this series with a passage from Carol’s first chapter, “A Tree Grows in
My Bedroom,” and then we heard passages from the following chapters: “Finding
Shalom,” “Healing Our Image of God,” “Recovering Our Emotions,” “Redeeming Our
Broken Selves,” “Reclaiming Our Bodies,” and last week, “Reclaiming Our Hope.”
This week, we arrive at the last full chapter of the book, “Being Born Again,”
before ending this series later this month with the book’s epilogue. In “Being
Born Again,” Carol writes of her own mystical experience as a youth, and
described the lead up to it:
The first time I rejected
the model of Christianity I learned throughout my whole life was during the
summer before I graduated from Moody. I was home in the Florida humidity that
coaxed the corners of the grass-cloth paper to curl off the walls. Seeing the
paper reminded me of the sacrifices that my parents made. They went without
air-conditioning in the Florida heat to pay for my Bible school.
I was thankful for my
parents and for the many people who contributed to my education, but I had come
to the realization that I could no longer drink from the same theological
stream that they did. It was too poisonous for me. So I tried to appreciate the
education for what it was: an opportunity that allowed me to grow spiritually.
It offered me the chance to flourish in my own understanding of God.
I felt so out of place in the familiar living room. It shrank somehow, and my family had become different people. Of course, that wasn’t the case. The walls didn’t diminish. I had grown. My parents hadn’t morphed. I had.
Carol
frames this mystical experience that follows as an expansion of her faith for
her, beyond the strictures of assigned roles in the church, especially gender
roles. And truthfully, that is what born again, mystical, God experiences—whatever
you want to call them—ought to be able to do in part for the church: serve as a
tonic against the strictness of having your role defined for you because of who
you were born as, not who you were and are called to be.
The
religious teacher Nicodemus comes to Jesus for a theological discussion, but it
quickly becomes a one-sided teaching because Nicodemus cannot quite grasp what
Jesus means when Jesus says one must be born anothen (in the Greek), which means “again,” but can also mean “from
above.” Nicodemus takes this to be a literal, rather than spiritual,
rebirthing, but it can just as easily mean a mystical rebirthing.
Birthing
necessitates the feminine, because aside from those adorable little seahorses,
giving birth is the realm of femininity. Jesus is using feminine imagery to
describe this mystical experience of being born again, and the church’s own
history is populated with a great many female mystics, from Hildegard of Bingen
to Julian of Norwich.
So
we hopefully ought to be able to look beyond the surface level optics of two
men debating theology with one another to see both the femininity and the
universality in what Jesus is trying to teach Nicodemus. He can experience
being born again, and indeed, all of us can experience being born again. Even
if you do not fit the stereotype of a called-and-redeemed sinner, you are still
one, just as I am, and as such, you too can experience that birth from above,
or that birth again—in whatever form it may take in your life. It need not be
so dramatic as mine, or as Carol’s.
It
needn’t even be as dramatic as Nicodemus’s, although there is more to it than
meets the eye. Jesus is a carpenter from Nazareth (“Can anything good come from
Nazareth?” is the joke in John 1), and Nicodemus is a religious teacher in
Jerusalem. Yet in a sublime, if perhaps frustrating for Jesus, moment of role
reversal, it is the blue-collar carpenter from somewhere north of nowhere who
is educating the religious teacher. There is something good in that, and
something mystical. Their previous roles count for little, and only the truth
of God’s love matters.
The
fruit of that experience of the truth of God’s love is borne at the end of John’s
Gospel. The other three Gospels depict Joseph of Arimathea’s mission of mercy
to ask Pontius Pilate permission to take the body of the crucified Christ and
bury it as a solo endeavor, but in John’s Gospel, Joseph of Arimathea is joined
by Nicodemus—indicating that perhaps, just perhaps, Nicodemus too had had a God
experience by encountering Jesus Christ.
What
is your mystical God experience? What in your life has made you born again, a
new thing freed from the shackles of wrong expectations or unnecessary societal
roles? What has liberated you to be who you are in Christ, not simply what you
are to the world?
Because
ironically, that is what the world needs. That is what the church needs. And it
is what we all *most* need—to be set free in spirit and in truth to follow God
and love each other with reckless abandon.
Unchained,
unshackled, and free to pursue that following as God’s own child. And in so
doing, may you too, were you not already, be born again in Christ.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
November
5, 2017
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