The
story of our faith community begins when God speaks to a man named Abram. He tells him to leave behind everything he
knows, and to set out on a journey. God
does not tell Abram where he going, only to go to a place that God will show
him. And he tells Abram that he is sending him for a purpose. “It is my
purpose,” says God, “but you will experience it as a blessing. And not only will you be blessed, but you
yourself will become a blessing, a blessing to all the families of the earth.”
The
story says that Abram answered the call, and set out on the journey, and his
son-in-law, Lot, went with him. So right
from the beginning this was not a solitary, heroic quest; it was a family migration. And that is the way it has been ever since. The Jewish family traces its ancestry back, through
all the centuries of dispersion and exile, and returning home, of captivity in
Egypt and Exodus, of pastoral nomadism desert wandering, to Abram (later called
Abraham). They trace their lineage
through Isaac, the son of Abraham’s wife Sarah, but the Muslim family also
claims Abraham as their ancestor, in a bloodline that began with Ishmael, the
son of Sarah’s handmaid, Hagar. In the same
way the genealogies of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Luke trace the family
tree of Christ back to Abraham.
But
in his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul says that this biological descent
is not what makes Abram our ancestor. We
may be Jews, or we may be Gentiles, says Paul, but we are members of the family
of Abram either way, because we share his faith in God. When we hear the word that calls us to leave
behind our old gods, our old ways, we set out on a great journey, toward the promised
destination of all human wandering. And our
right of inheritance in that homeland is not grounded in our genetics, but in
the grace of God who creates all things new.
When we set out in faith to make the migration, we are reborn into a new
family--a family of blessedness, that blesses all the families of the world.
Some
of you heard the story I’m about to tell on Ash Wednesday, but I come back to
it today because some of you weren’t there, and because it is about the point
of departure on a journey of faith. When
I was a boy, about nine years old, my school friend Mark invited me to church
with his family. The church I usually
attended with my parents was a large, beautiful, architecturally-significant
structure in a park-like setting, in the finest neighborhood in town, but on
this Sunday I rode with my friend’s family to a non-descript cinderblock
structure on the wrong side of the tracks.
The preacher was a younger man in shirt-sleeves with slicked-back hair
who paced around on the stage speaking extemporaneously into a microphone he
held in his hand.
And
I don’t remember anything he said, but I do remember that while he was speaking
I suddenly understood that my life was intended for me by an all-knowing,
loving, and compassionate wisdom. In a
brief but unforgettable encounter, this wisdom communicated itself to me, so
that I knew that nothing about my life was random or meaningless or wrong, and that
I had no reason to be anxious or ashamed or fearful about the future, because
the same presence I was feeling in that moment was behind everything in the
world, and would never abandon me, because it was eternal.
As
quickly as this moment had come, it was over, and as my ordinary consciousness reasserted
itself my first thought was about Jesus.
I was, after all, in a church, and there was a guy up there talking about
Jesus, so immediately I wondered, “what does Jesus have to do with what I just
experienced?” And what came to me was
that Jesus was the journey ahead. He was
given to me as the key, if you will, to making that moment the enduring truth
of my life, to integrating it into my ongoing every day experience. And I would have the rest of my life to learn
who he is and how he works.
As
I say, this entire experience happened very rapidly, maybe in just a couple of
minutes, and while it was happening my friend Mark saw tears streaming down my
cheeks and that I was powerfully moved, and he decided that in that moment I
had been “born again.” From that point
forward he took it upon himself to educate me in the rights and
responsibilities pertaining to my new status.
And I think poor Mark found it confusing that I showed so little
enthusiasm for his doctrine, and no inclination to return with him to his
church. But the thing is, what he had
to say to me about God and Jesus and salvation never seemed remotely connected
to the loving wisdom I had encountered on that day.
I
guess you could say my friend Mark was a little like Nicodemus, the Pharisee we
meet in today’s reading from the Gospel of John. He can see the outward signs of the presence
of God, the tears streaming down the cheeks, the deeds of power and
transformation. But something is missing
from his understanding. Nicodemus comes
to Jesus by night, in the darkness of his ignorance of who Jesus really is, but
he tells Jesus what he already knows: “We know you are a teacher who has come
from God.” But if there is implied in
that statement, a desire for something not yet known—a deep and searching
question—we never hear it. You get the
impression that Nicodemus may be interested in what Jesus has to say, but he is
basically struggling to fit it all into his existing conceptual and doctrinal
framework. And it’s not fitting very
well.
Because
Jesus wants Nicodemus to go on a journey. In the verses that follow, the Gospel of John
takes us on a whirlwind tour from the superficial signs of God’s presence to
the inner workings of God’s purpose in Christ.
It is a kind of crash course in the great gospel themes of the journey
of salvation, from baptismal rebirth in water and spirit, to seeing and entering
the kingdom of God; from the new freedom of the Spirit, to believing the testimony
about heavenly things; from the incarnation and ascension of the Son of Man to
the strange medicine of the cross that gives final liberation from the
captivity of death and evil. This
rushing current of religious imagination brings us at last into the very heart
of God, to the loving wisdom that sent his only Son into the world, that the
world might be saved through him.
People
sometimes speak of the season of Lent as a journey. It is a time to remember that our life in
faith is a long searching, and that we still have a long way to go. It is a time to jettison the extra cargo, to
pack light, so we can cover some ground.
And the destination of this journey is not an end, but a point of
departure. The season has its origins in
the ancient church, in the final weeks of preparation for baptism at
Easter. In those days baptism was not an
individual thing. At the center of the church’s
Easter celebration, it was a remembrance and participation in the moment when
the family of Abraham, and every person in it, and the whole created world, was
reborn.
And
even if you had been baptized already, maybe long before, every year there was
a part of you that went down with the neophyte into the dark waters of Christ’s
descent into death and hell. Every year
there was a part of you that came up out of the water, newborn, and was
anointed with the oil of the spirit and clothed with the white garment of
Christ’s resurrection. And I think that
the veterans began to join in the neophytes fast of Lent because they also wanted
to be ready. They wanted to be open so
that when the family gathered to enact again the drama of God’s love for the
world, they were open to receive the gift of the only Son. They wanted to set out on the great migration
again from the beginning, a little closer to the goal.
