The Second Sunday in Lent, Year A

February 17, 2008

Genesis 12: 1-4a; John 3: 1-17

The Rev. Thomas William Blake

Somewhere adjacent to a ropes course, a church youth group I was helping to lead gathered to do “trust-building” exercises. I think it was part of the Journey to Adulthood curriculum. If groups and communities and relationships are going to thrive, someone said, their members need to trust one another, have faith with one another, have faith in God.

So first thing, standing there, each of us was asked to fall backwards, trusting the other members of the group to break the fall; afterward we were told there would be a new level of trust in the group; we’d know that we could count on one another. The youth, the adult leaders, all of us were supposed to do this. We were all in it together.

I don’t remember exactly the order in which all this unfolded, but my vague recollection was that I was among the first to be chosen. I was an adult, a leader, someone called to set an example. “So you want me to fall backwards and they are going to break my fall?” I asked while glancing at the overly enthused and scrawny middle school kids behind me.

“But what if they don’t catch me and I really fall to the ground?” I said. “You have to have trust that they will catch you,” I was told. “But look at them, look at who we’re working with here; I’m bigger than they are,” I retorted. “You’re their leader; you have to set an example.” But sometimes,” I said, “Shouldn’t that example be demonstrating some common sense?” They replied something back, I don’t remember exactly.

So there I was ready to fall, ready to show that I had faith. “Come on, Father Tom; you can do it,” they shouted. I think I had mentally reconciled to the idea, but now the problem was physical. Our bodies tend to freeze up when we’re about to do something that isn’t natural, something that puts us out of control, something that could hurt us and maybe even kill us.

I was more like Nicodemus that day than Abram. I asked questions—a steady stream of them. I tried to reason my way out of the situation; I tried to underscore what I thought was wrong with the whole idea, what didn’t stand up to logic. My doubt was transparent. “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born? How can these things be?” On the other hand I wasn’t much like Abram, who “went as the Lord had told him.”

The readings for this Second Sunday of Lent are sort of “bare bones”; they don’t give us some sort of tangible object lesson or cast a fresh, interesting perspective to share at a cocktail party; they steer us away from talking about good works; they don’t fit neatly into reasonable categories; they can’t be explained. They talk simply about faith.

And maybe that why we have Lent in the first place: to simplify things, to get back to the basics. A liturgy professor used the image of a snowball to help us make sense of the twentieth century liturgical reforms. You can form a snowball and hold it in your hand, but then you start rolling it and soon the original snowball is buried under layers upon layers of more snow, and you end up with something that looks very different from what you started with.

The church, my liturgy professor reminded me, once simply combined a simple Jewish synagogue service with a simple Jewish table ceremony, but over the centuries additional things were added, layer upon layer, and things became increasingly complex until liturgies hardly resembled those of the early church. There was a need to strip these away, to get back to the basics, to rediscover the core of our identity. That’s what Lent is about, too: getting back to the basics, remembering why we’re here, what our faith is about.

But as the trust building exercises illustrate, faith requires our giving up our quest for control; it calls for stripping away the layers upon layers of barriers we have erected and under which we are buried. Somewhere underneath lies the core of our individual and corporate identities in Christ. Exposing our core, we reason, will put us in a place of vulnerability. But that place of vulnerability is also the place where our faith resides: the place where God is.

Abram is called to strip away the familiarity of his homeland: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you… and I will bless you…. I will bless those who bless you.” And Nicodemus is called to strip away, at least for the time being, the worldly lens through which things make sense to him. “Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above,’” Jesus tells him.

God gives us the simple gift of faith and there’s a tendency to want, like Nicodemus, to talk our way out of it or to view it as too good to be true. God says, “look, just trust me, I’m working out this great plan of salvation and you don’t have to understand it, it doesn’t have to make worldly sense; just receive it, accept it as a gift, see the hope in it, let it change you.

But I said to my spiritual director, well you know that’s all well and good, and indeed I pray the daily office, I read the Bible, I try to live a good life; but then there are those stirrings of the Holy Spirit and I feel God calling me in one direction or another and it boggles my mind; I want things sorted out; I want things to fit neatly into this corner or that corner, I want to understand.

My spiritual director said, “Why do you need to understand? Why not just be? Why not let God sort things out? Why not just put aside your worries and relish the peace of God in the moment?” “The wind blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you don’t know from where it comes or where it goes. So it is with the Spirit.” Be a little more like Abram and a little less like Nicodemus; have faith; follow God’s path for you.” But sometimes that path seems so naïve.

Here we are in this season of simplicity, striving to strip away all that would get in the way of what God has in store for us, and that is hard. It’s like the television show I watched the other day; this consultant was helping someone remove clutter from her kitchen, and he threw some of the woman’s things away and told her she didn’t need them.

And understandably the woman reacted emotionally. She insisted she did need them and then she started to cry. The consultant, however, stood his ground: “Tell me,” he said. “When are you going to prepare shish kabobs for fifty people?” he said. “These things represent for you who you want to be, not who you are. It’s time to throw them away, to simplify your life, to get to the real you.” Maybe that’s what Jesus was trying to say to Nicodemus, too. Maybe that’s what God is trying to say to you and me.

We don’t know how things turned out for Nicodemus: whether he heard what Jesus was trying to say, whether he ever grasped it, whether it changed his life, whether it went in one ear and out the other. We simply know that Jesus ended their conversation plainly and simply: not by telling a parable, not performing a miracle, not going to synagogue or doing the rituals prescribed in the Books of Moses.

Jesus ended his conversation with Nicodemus with clear and unambiguous words, words that sum up what God is doing for us, words that reveal God’s carrying out his plan of salvation: mending a broken world, turning death into resurrection, words that some would call naïve. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”

A part of me hears those words and recalls church ladies making me recite them as a young child. And sometimes I want to think I’ve moved beyond them, that my faith has developed into something more “grown-up,” flashier, better reasoned. But then I remember all those times when I look back on things that once worried me and realized they really were part of God’s plan; or, there were those times when I didn’t want to do something that God wanted me to do—something I thought was absurd—, but when I finally got around to it, there was peace.

….So there I was that day, standing there: anxious, fearful, uncertain, listening to a chorus of assured voices chanting plainly, simply, naively, “Don’t be afraid, Father Tom; why are you worried; you can do it; just let go; have trust; have faith.”

Amen.