The Second Sunday in
Lent
16 March 2014
Saint Mark’s
Episcopal Church
Santa Clara,
California
Genesis 12:1-4a
Psalm 121
Romans 3:1-17
St. John 3:1-17
INI
You shall be a
blessing
I was walking down Bancroft Avenue in Berkeley one day when
I encountered a bunch of teachers and their preschool students. I smiled at them and went on my
way. From behind me, as I
continued on to my office, I heard one of the teachers shout out, “Father, we
need a blessing.” You can’t wear a
clerical collar and ignore this kind of request, so I turned back, and laying
my hands on each of them blessed them.
Some weeks later, I was crossing Shattuck Avenue. This is street second only to Telegraph
Avenue in Berkeley for encountering the unexpected. I was in a cross walk.
Suddenly I heard, “Father, I really need a blessing.” So I turned to face the man who had
made the request, and there on the sidewalk I blessed him and talked with
him. Finally, we were at Il
Fornaio, a restaurant in San Francisco.
After the meal, I went to the counter to buy some cookies, for which
they were well known, and to pay our check. The young woman stationed there looked up at me, looked at
my collar and burst into tears. “I
am so unhappy,” she said, “I really could use a blessing and a prayer.” And so it was, there by the cash
register and the pastries, I prayed with her and comforted her.
“I will make of you a great nation, and I
will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”
It is interesting
to me, that had I not been wearing clerical garb, these individuals would not
have asked me to bless them. And I
would have not known their need.
Abraham comes to us straight out of life. He has a wife Sarah, and a nephew Lot, and lots of servants,
and cattle. This is a man of
substance, who the Lord calls out of life and says, “I will bless you, if you go to the place that I send you.” But the final part of this transaction
is the blessing part, where God promises to bless and to make Abraham a
blessing as well. It is no easy
transaction, this promise and command that God proposes to Abraham. It has both cost and risk. It also has a future, and not just the
future hoped for by the tribal peoples of the Hebrew Scriptures. Their hope was the survival of a name,
a family, and a tribe. That will
be Abraham’s hope and conundrum as well.
In the future it will appear as if there is no future for Abraham and
Sarah’s family. It will take a
divine promise to accomplish that, and Sarah will laugh at the prospect. But right now that is all behind them –
for you see, in the Hebrew mindset the future was behind you, because you
couldn’t see it yet. By your side
was the present, and in front of you was the past, which you could revisit and
observe. The future was unknown,
and in the midst of that unknowing, God says, “Go from your country.”
Faith and Risk
We live in a culture that lives and indeed thrives with
risk. When I am flying on a plane,
my mind will sometimes wander off to think about all of the thousands, if not
tens of thousands of parts that need to function perfectly to keep me up in the
air. It’s a risk. I guess that we could say that we are a
society of faith. Not the faith
that was described to us by our parents; a faith in God, or in a book, or in a
series of dogmatic assertions, but faith in something outside of
ourselves.
Jesus tries to get Nicodemus to understand that when he
tells Nicodemus that he must be born “from above”. Nicodemus misunderstands Jesus to say that he must be “born
again,” and quickly sees the folly of such an assertion. Jesus quickly corrects him – “You must
be born from above”, and later “you must be born of water and the spirit.” The common understanding of life and
its causes are quickly brushed away by Jesus’ argument. He wants Nicodemus to be open to
something outside of himself, outside of his usual understanding of things.
Faith is risk.
It was certainly a risk for Abraham, which St. Paul thoroughly explores
in the second lesson for today. “For
if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not
before God.” Faith is to be persuaded that our
relationship with God will ensure not only our own future, but also the future
of those around us. That was
Abraham and Sarah’s hope – that the future would be ripe, full of promise, of
benefit to future generations, and that their name would continue. But did you get that one word? Did you hear the word, “hope”?
There are many
Christians who would like to describe Christianity as a collection of
certainties, of bankables and assurances.
Just as Abraham is asked to take a risk, to follow God into the unknown,
so we, in following Jesus, follow after a similar risk and hope. We do the same thing when we say the Creed,
although we are led astray a bit with the culturally loaded English verb “to
believe”. The Latin verb “credo”
involves issues of trust and taking someone at their word. The core of the word is the notion of
the heart, and the notion of placing something within that heart. As any banker will tell you, “credit” a
form of the same word, is a risk.
The Spirit and Living
We don’t know what happens immediately to Nicodemus. He shows up again as a part of the
Easter Narrative, but for now, John leaves him in sort of a stasis, suspended
between what he knew as a faithful Jew, and what it was that Jesus was
attempting to persuade him of. We
are, in many ways, in the same place.
Like Abraham, we may be asking, “where do I (we) go from here?” What might be helpful is Jesus second
comment to Nicodemus about being born of “water
and the Spirit,” followed by a saying “The
wind blows where it chooses.” If
there is something to grab onto here it is that notion of the “Spirit”. It’s a good Hebrew word “ru’ah” and it means breath and
life. Jesus infers to Nicodemus
that as God blew breath into the clay man Adam, and he becomes a living being;
in a new sort of creation, the Spirit needs to re-breath us, so that we are
living in a new way.
Why take the risk?
For Abraham it was about the future. For us it is about living. Remember the promise that is made to Abraham, “You will be a
blessing?” That is our promise as
well – that is our task as well.
So as we are persuaded, as we believe, as we trust, as we have
confidence in God, what do we do with that? Do we rest in the comfort of the Spirit? Or should we be stirred up?
Jesus makes a couple of comparisons at the end of the
reading: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son
of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes (takes a risk with, trusts, is persuaded, has confidence in, places it
in the heart) in him may have eternal
life. It is however, not just
the life to come in which we are placed but also something more than that. “You will be a blessing.”
On our sign out
on Pruneridge Avenue I had the following comment put out there: “What are you taking on for Lent?” It is the custom, you know, limiting
ourselves during Lent – giving something up; chocolate, the gym, meat, smoking,
alcohol, you name it. That’s OK,
but I think Jesus is really asking us to take a greater risk, something like that,
which was taken on by Abraham and Sarah.
I think Jesus wants us to take on one another – not only those we know,
but those who are strangers to us.
That’s what our house meetings and the IAF is all about. It’s about understanding ourselves as
both pilgrims (like Abraham and Sarah) and servants (like Paul). As we do our community organizing we
will hopefully find out what is expected of us by the community that surrounds
us, and we will hopefully begin to understand what kind of person will be
needed here, serving as rector.
Water and the
Spirit – that remembrance will help us understand who we are, and begin us on
our path to do for others. Touch
the water as you leave and remember.
You’re walking with Abraham and Sarah now.
SDG
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