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United Church of Paducah
4600 Buckner Lane
Paducah, KY 42001
(270) 442-3722
Worship Times
Sunday Service: 10:00a
Refreshments &
Fellowship: 11:15a
Christian Education
For All Ages:
11:20a - Noon
Nursery Services Provided Handicap Accessible
All Are Welcome!
A Congregation Of The
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From February 17, 2008
How Can This Be?
John 3: 1-17
On Tuesday night while Paducahans huddled in
darkness wondering when their power would be restored, Ella
Bailey was dancing around her living room. You see, Ella had
just returned from Western Baptist where she had taken her
first peek at Bailey Grace, her brand new niece.
As Ella, Crystal, and I sat by firelight talking about the
awesome miracle of birth, Ella's eight-year-old mind
stretched to comprehend the beautiful bondedness between
mothers and their babies that begins in the womb.
"Mama," Ella said, her voice brimming with affection, "I
wish I could climb back inside you, like before I was born."
Ella's comment was touching, of course. But it was also
marvelously coincidental. Earlier that day I had been
mulling over Nicodemus' darkness-draped conversation with
Jesus and his clear sense of the impossibility of returning
to the womb.
It's early in Jesus' ministry when the two men meet. Jesus
has just come to Jerusalem and has already caught the
attention of the Passover-pilgrim crowds. Not only has he
overturned the tables of the moneychangers at the temple,
Jesus has been doing and saying all sorts of things that
suggest he is a man of God.
As I said, it's early in Jesus' ministry when the two meet.
It's also late.
History has unfairly labeled Nicodemus as a sneak for coming
out after dark like this to talk with Jesus. But this
after-hours encounter might not have been fishy at all.
Night was the time when rabbis and holy men were known to do
their best contemplating, their most vigorous pondering,
their deepest theological thinking. Nicodemus may very well
have decided to seek Jesus out when they were both at their
learned best.
Thing is, as eager as he is, as experienced a Pharisee as he
is, when the two get to talking Nick has one tough time
grasping Jesus' meaning.
Sure Nicodemus recognizes that this Jesus is a man of God.
But when Jesus tells Nicodemus that in order to see what
Jesus sees, in order to understand what Jesus understands, a
fella needs to experience birth again, Nicodemus misses the
metaphor and instead clamps down on what he believes is a
literal directive.
"How can anyone be born after having grown old," Nicodemus
puzzles aloud. "Can one enter a second time into the
mother's womb and be born?"
Jesus tries, bless him, to give Nicodemus a way out of the
conceptual box he's trapped inside.
Jesus goes on to explain how beyond the visible is the
invisible, that just as we're surrounded and affected by the
wind but can't see it, so the Spirit is at work in and among
us, doing what it will, when it will. To perceive God's
reality, we have to use Spirit-given eyes, the eyes of our
hearts, not just the ones in our heads.
But try as Jesus might, the Pharisee can only go so far. And
so what began as a twilight dialogue ends in something that,
for Nicodemus, sounds utterly incomprehensible. To
Nicodemus' ears, Jesus ends up giving a nonsensical,
over-the-top monologue about woo-woo stuff like God's
kingdom, eternal life, and salvation.
I can identify some with Nicodemus. Last week I tried
watching an interview with L. Ron Hubbard, the science
fiction writer responsible for the ideas behind modern-day
Scientology, believed by some to be a cult and thought by
others to be a legitimate expression of spiritual truth.
I wasn't able to watch much of the interview because even
though Hubbard spoke fluently, confidently, and in English,
it was as if he was answering in some other language. One
that, no matter how hard I tried, made very little sense to
me.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that L. Ron is this
generation's equivalent of Jesus. All I'm saying is that
when it comes to the rarefied dimension of spiritual
matters, all men (and women) are not created equal. What is
plain to one can sound plain nutty to another.
So I can identify with Nicodemus. But I think I have some
inkling of what it must have been like for Jesus. In a
college class, I once made what I thought was a self-evident
remark about something of a spiritual nature, a comment that
sounded so foreign to one of my Christian peers that the
only reasonable conclusion he could draw was that I was a
pagan.
Before class the next week, I managed to catch him and tried
my best to translate what I had said. It was not an easy
task and it certainly was not quick. It took three hours (we
missed class altogether) and any number of times our
dialogue was so difficult we nearly called it quits.
When it comes to faith, we understand what we can, as we
can. We understand what we can, as we can.
Very few of us start out with an aptitude for the mystical,
a flair for navigating mystery.
Most of us begin our faith journey much like we began the
journey to read or write fluently, or play golf or piano
really well. With the exception of the occasional spiritual
prodigy, we have to begin with the basics. We begin with the
God of Genesis, who created the heavens and the earth. A God
who created us in God's own image. A God who, our Christian
Scriptures tell us, gave us Jesus so that we might learn how
deeply loved we are. Now and always.
For some, those basics are more than enough to last a
lifetime. Indeed, an eternity--one that could be ours, too,
if we will but latch onto those same truths and in the same
way.
Isn't that what motivates those guys who sit in the stands
during pro football games waiting for opportune times to
flash their huge "John 3: 16" signs for the benefit viewers
all over the country? They want us to have what they have.
And in the same way they have it.
Several times when I have met with families to plan funeral
services, someone has asked that John 3:16 be read. And each
time the same thing has happened. The one doing the
requesting is filled with a soaring sense of peace while
someone else at the meeting crumples up her face or grits
his teeth.
How can this be? Isn't John 3:16 one of those basics we all
learn? Isn't it foundational to the faith? It is, isn't it?
I think it's fair to say that it is foundational. But what's
not fair is to say that its meaning, its truth is found in
one particular and rather exclusive understanding.
In faith, we understand what we can, as we can. But we get
into trouble when we insist that what I understand, you must
also understand. And in just the same way.
Aren't we Christians funny, sometimes? Here we have a story
in which Jesus goes to great lengths to help Nicodemus think
outside the box and then we take what he says and fashion
from it a new box. A one-size-is-supposed-to-fit-all box.
I remember a clergy colleague confiding once that whenever
she travels, she tells people she's an educator, not a
pastor. I assumed she did this for the sake of airline
seatmates who weren't believers. I thought she kept her role
as a minister under wraps because she didn't want strangers
feeling uncomfortable with her vocation while they sat
shoulder to shoulder on a cross-country flight. But no, that
wasn't it at all. She said what she said because she didn't
want to be made uncomfortable trying to give her answer to
the inevitable question, "So, are you born again?"
As we reflect together on Jesus' nighttime remarks to
Nicodemus in which Jesus speaks of new birth and eternal
life and his place in all of this, perhaps it would serve us
well to remember that long before the Christian community
was known by the name "Christian," it called itself "The
Way."
The Way. The way to what, pray tell? The way to love. The
way to life within this life and also beyond. The way to
living with one another in community. The way to be.
We are called to be people on the way. And yet, as humans,
we are far more comfortable with the known, with the
familiar. We find comfort in the concrete and literal
because those notions are unambiguous and containable. That
need we have for the manageable tempts us to stay put rather
than to move on to deeper, more nuanced relationships with
ideas and with the teacher of those ideas.
Nothing about Jesus and his way, the way he calls us to,
suggests that he expects us to stay put with our clean,
clear answers about who we are, who he is, or what it means
to follow him.
Don't believe me? Just look at Jesus' relationship with his
disciples, all of whom were learning as they went who Jesus
was, who they were, and what it meant to follow Jesus all
the way to the cross.
Rather than insist that we produce answers born of narrow
certainty, by his example Jesus seems to suggest that all
along the way we are called to let go of our tight hold on
what we do know so that we can embrace truth that is more
expansive, nuanced, and liberating than anything we
imagined. When he spoke of this life-long process, Jesus
called it "losing your life to gain your life."
Jesus' way is a way, ultimately, of transformation.
Especially in an age where fundamentalism is on the rise in
every religion, not just Christianity, to let go of trying
to nail down the truth puts us squarely in the minority and
gives us the appearance of being spiritual relativists,
which we are not.
The question our faith needs to be putting to us isn't so
much "Have you been born again?" as it should be "Are you
willing to be born again, and again, and again?"
Nicodemus was right; we can't go back into the womb. But
neither should we try to draw boundary lines around our
faith, turning it into a bigger, comfier womb. No womb, not
the first one, not this one, not even the next one, is ever
big enough for the life God wants us to live. Amen.
© Rev. Karen Winkel
United Church of Paducah (UCC) |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie
Allen
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