For the Second Sunday in Lent
FLUENT
I
would love to live
Like
a river flows,
Carried
by the surprise
Of
its own unfolding.
John O’Donahue
1.
There are many, many
ways to experience the world fresh and new, as if for the first time. Many ways.
There’s standing on a hillside, early in the morning, and watching the
sun rise over the coastal range. And there’s
singing an old hymn in church and remembering the way your mother used the hum
the same tune in the kitchen on Sunday afternoons. And there’s falling in love; and there’s eating
a great meal with friends; and there’s reading a poem that knocks your socks
off. So many signs of grace, clues to God’s
mercy and delight. There’s a lovely
verse in a Mary Oliver poem that says,
Whoever
you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Isn’t that delightful? Isn’t that, in a sense, the gospel? “The world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese…” The next time you hear the morning birds warbling or the sea gulls howling or the wild geese yelping—remember that. The gift of it all. The interconnectedness of it all. “The world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese...announcing your place in the family of things.”
Just the same, there’s
something a little different in this morning’s exchange between Nicodemus and
Jesus; there’s something a little different about the way Jesus advances this
notion of conversion and renewal and rebirth.
It may be the most famously misunderstood text in all of scripture; it’s
certainly one of the most misused. And it
seems to me the key to Jesus’ teaching here, the key to hearing the liberating
word, is found in the 16th verse.
Forgive me if I do this every year, but I just love the way this sounds in
the original Greek: 'Οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν κόσμον.' For God so loves TON KOS-MON, the cosmos,
that God gives an only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but
have eternal life.
HO KOS-MOS, the
cosmos, is the biggest word, the most inclusive word, in the language and
thought of the Hellenistic world. HO
KOS-MOS, the cosmos, begins in the blades of grass beneath my feet, in the land
I cultivate with my family, and extends far and wide to other lands and other
fields and distant ranges. HO KOS-MOS begins
in my home, in my neighborhood, in my church—and extends well beyond to other
homes, and other neighborhoods, and other faith communities. HO KOS-MOS includes those whom I love with
all my heart and those I’ll never, ever love; it gathers up all that we know
and all that we don’t. And this is the
verse, even the word that seems like the key to conversion, renewal,
rebirth. 'Οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν κόσμον.' For God so loves TON
KOS-MON, the cosmos, that God gives an only son, that whoever believes in him
should not perish but have eternal life.
To limit God’s love in
any way is to miss the radically challenging and delightfully liberating
implications of this text. To say that
God’s simply interested in my personal salvation, in my solitary journey to
eternal life—is to miss the stubborn truth in Jesus’ teaching. God loves the whole of us, the entirety of
the universe or the multiverse or whatever kind of verse it turns out to be. God loves the Russian soldiers lining up to
cause mayhem in Crimea and the brave Ukrainian protestors ready to risk
everything for freedom and democracy.
God loves the endangered Leatherback Turtle, the melting glaciers of
Greenland and the guy guzzling gas for fun in his off-road H3 alpha-elite
Hummer.
 |
| "Christ and the Children," Emil Nolde, 1910 |
Maybe Jesus is saying
that rebirth—spiritual rebirth—has to do with appreciating or even celebrating
the cosmic dimensions of God’s love.
Maybe it has to do with releasing our grip on little truths and human
dogma—and turning our lives over to the One whose love is always bigger than
our ideas. Maybe we are born again when
grace fills our hearts and humility shapes our lives and the only question on
our lips is: “How can I serve?” You see,
the third chapter of John is not about rising above the rest of the world,
proving our spiritual superiority to all other beings, winning the salvation
Super Bowl. It’s about living in the
light of God, dancing to the choreography of cosmic love. And that changes everything.
2.
I want to tell you a
brief story about a class I’ve been teaching this month with my friend Rabbi
Paula Marcus down at Temple Beth El. The
idea’s been to read some Christian texts—and explore the different ways Jews
and Christians hear those texts and respond to them. So we've talked about the
cross, we’ve talked about Jesus, about resurrection, about communion—ideas we
sometimes take for granted in the church, but ideas our Jewish friends question
with deep integrity and feeling.
A couple weeks ago, I
shared with the class my own appreciation for Jesus’ last words on the
cross. The cross is a complicated thing,
as we know, in Jewish-Christian dialogue; and I was searching for a way to
articulate its meaning in my life. Not
as a sign of judgment, but as an invitation to something deeper, something more generous. I told the class that night that I’m drawn
again and again to those last moments in Jesus’ life. When his friends have deserted him. When his body is frail and flayed and the empire
mocks his suffering. And Jesus cries
out, calls out from the broken heart of all that pain: “Father, forgive them
for they know not what they do.” I’m
drawn to this: Jesus calling on the forgiving power of God and praying for the
people and powers that have hurt him most.
How does he do this? Where does
forgiveness come from? And what would
the world be like, what would religion be like, if we made
forgiveness the living cornerstone of our practice and faith?
I shared all
that. And the group listened
politely. But a young woman, a Jew,
started to weep, quietly off to the side.
I was particularly aware of this young woman, throughout the night,
because she’d been one of my daughter’s favorite middle school history
teachers. I was glad to see her, and
attentive to her reactions to things.
But this bit about Jesus and forgiveness troubled her deeply. And finally she summoned the courage to
speak. “When I hear a Christian friend
or a door-to-door evangelist say, ‘Jesus forgives you,’ I am very, very
troubled,” and she wept some more at the memory of these things. “For they’re usually saying that they forgive
me for being Jewish,” she said, “as if Jesus feels badly for me for being
Jewish.” And the whole room breathed
deeply with her. I confess I felt a
little lump in my throat. “And I don’t
get that,” she said bravely. “I don’t
want that. It hurts me and it offends
me.” And she wept some more.
3.
So there I was—with
one of the stories that shapes my faith in the most meaningful way and the hurt
it’s caused a colleague, a teacher, a Jew I respect deeply and truly. It turns out that the very devotion I feel to
the Jesus who forgives from the cross is a source of pain and even humiliation
for a friend I care about, a teacher my daughter loves. These are the contradictions, I think, that
invite prayer and reflection among us.
These are the painful edges of our tradition, and they take us places we
may never have imagined. But they’re
also, I suggest, opportunities for renewal and rebirth. When we see how big God’s love really is,
when we glimpse the cosmic dimensions of that love, we hear the old story in
new ways; we unpack history’s baggage and find the heart of the gospel; we
allow for the fresh winds of spirit to sweep clean our souls. We’re born again.
When we’d all taken a
deep breath, our brother David Dodson leaned forward and looked kindly in that
teacher’s eyes. “I’m offended too,” he
said, “by the notion that Jesus forgives you, or has to forgive you, for anything. It has nothing to do with my faith and
nothing to do with the Jesus I want to follow.”
And, as you can imagine, David said this with the most generous and
respectful spirit, with genuine feeling and friendship. To my left, Rabbi Paula wept gratefully, and
off to the side, the young woman nodded appreciatively. I had the sense that God was powerfully
present in this exchange, palpably present, tenderly present. And she was a bigger God, a wiser God, a more
dynamic God than the God I’d asked for guidance earlier in the evening.
So friends, I want you
to believe it’s possible to be born again.
I want you to trust that you’re never too old, or too cynical, or too
worn out, or too run down. It’s not an
easy thing—to be born again—and there’s no quick and easy formula and then
you’re done. Instead, it’s an
orientation of your heart. It’s a
willingness to entertain the contradictions of spiritual life. It’s an openness to the suffering of others,
the dreams of your neighbors and the cosmic dimensions of God’s love.
I want you to take these lines from
John O’Donahue home and read them every day this week.
I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
I want you to rip that page out of your bulletin and take it home. I hope you'll memorize the poem. Say it over and over again. Make it your Lenten prayer.
It’s a little risky,
but I can promise you this. If you turn
your heart to that love, to that river, to that sweet grace—you will be reborn,
and reborn, and reborn, and reborn. Now,
like all labor, it’ll be difficult at times, the contractions will make you
howl, and the process may be bloody. But
your life becomes a gift in the process, a sign of peace, a rolling river of
compassion and grace.
And the world will be
the better for it. The KOS-MOS will
rejoice.
Amen.
