February 17, 2008
The Second Sunday in Lent (Year A)
Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5,13-17; John 3:1-17
Flannery O’Connor wrote, “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is like a big electric blanket when, of course, it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.”
Ms. O’Connor wrote many millennia after Abraham was told by God to leave his country and his kin, and go to the land God would show him – along with the promise that he would make of him a great nation. But, I would imagine, he would have resonated with Ms. O’Connor’s thought. Faith is tough. It is not all warm and fuzzy, and it often requires of us a costly decision, a costly life change.
In the gospel lesson from John, Nicodemus argues with Jesus about the way one needs to be born, as he seeks a tangible, doable system that assures a believer of righteousness and faith. Nicodemus finds instead, in the dark of the night, a metaphorical example: “born again,” Jesus tells him. You must be “born again,” not from what is on earth, not from your mother’s womb, not of the flesh of humanity, but of the water and Spirit of God.
To be a Christian means we must be remade from the inside out over and over again. For God keeps working in us the miracle of grace and the miracle of faith every time we are open to surrendering a bit more of ourselves to God. That is what faith is, that is what a calling is It is rarely warm and fuzzy, cozy and warm. It is almost always demanding. It always requires letting go of what we think is our life and accepting another.
That for certain is what Abraham did when he packed up his people, his tribe, and moved them from the land they knew and started roaming around following God’s directions -- which were not tidily to be found on an ancient GPS system. They wandered endlessly. And Abraham wondered and questioned but always, by faith, followed, even at the cost of his people questioning his leadership, even at the cost of doubt by the elders of his tribe. His faith was unswerving. He followed God.
Faith is like that. All faith journeys call us to places we would not have thought to go on our own. Had you told me when I was ordained that I would then end up in a little town in Massachusetts, single and living in a condo, living a life so foreign to the one I had and knew, an electric blanket life, I don’t know that I would have had the courage to accept God’s call to priesthood. But I didn’t know. I only knew that I was to follow where God led. It has been a marvelous journey and one for which I am grateful, and fortunately I didn’t know the way the path would go any more than Abraham did. A faith journey is like that. You step off into the abyss trusting in an un-seeable God, and you go. Along the way you learn to serve God’s people as faithfully as you served God when you agreed to begin the journey, when in the flash of faith, of irrational but deeply felt faith, you stepped onto the spiritual path, and began to wander using God as your navigation system.
Nicodemus was a powerful and highly regarded religious man. If people saw him on the street they would have pointed and said, “There goes a Holy Man.” And so he could not afford to be seen with Jesus who was at best sketchy and at worst a heretic, a rabble rouser out to destroy the people of faith. So in the darkness Nicodemus came to Jesus because he was drawn by some irresistible force. That force is, of course, the one people of faith all recognize. It is the Spirit of God that draws us to God even when it doesn’t seem, at least in the eyes of the world, doesn’t seem to be in our “best interests.”
It could not possibly have been in Nicodemus’ best interests to be seen with Jesus. Yet there he was, not with the cozy, electric blanket covering him, but taking the risk that more resembled the cross. There he was conversing with Jesus. I would imagine the darkness covered his fear. It allowed him to hope things would be as they had always been. But, no, Jesus called him to risk going to the depths of faith.
And the good news, of course, is that he ultimately did take that risk of being associated with Jesus. Right there in the broad day light, after Jesus was crucified, he claimed the body, and gave his own tomb for the burial of the Messiah he had come, by faith, to know.
That is what a Spiritual Journey does. It encourages us to take risks. Risks that cost us our very lives. I do not mean literally die on a cross like Jesus did, but I do mean faith costs us our lives as we would like them to be, under the cover of the warm fuzzy blanket. Faith exposes us, instead, to the hard wood of reality. It calls us to risk being perceived as foolish, to risk being seen with the “wrong” people, to risk giving up life as you know it or want it or as it is valued by the culture around you.
That is what the cross is all about, and that is what faith is all about.
If our faith makes us “more” in the eyes of the world, richer, more powerful, gives us more status, allows us to judge others, or in any way elevates us in our own minds or in the minds of others, then it is the electric blanket of secular faith we seek and not the cross of Christ.
This is the hard message of faith that Lent calls us to remember. We are journeying by the mysterious wonder of God’s grace along a path that will lead us where we cannot imagine at the start, in ways that will cost us a tidy self centered life, in ways that will cost us things we think we value until we learn new values in a way that will cost us the shame of climbing up on the cross with Jesus.
If we are snuggled under that blanket, even in this cold winter, then we need to be wary. For our faith is not really serving our souls. And it is the soul that must be born from above, the soul that Jesus seeks to save, the soul of each of us that God created and loves and blesses with grace upon grace if we but have the courage to start down the path of faith as Abraham did, as Paul did, as Nicodemus did.
May your journey be rocky that we might let go quickly of our self centered, self controlled, self navigated life, and follow where God leads.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd