3-8-20
Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our
Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, amen.
During my reading week, I read Barbara Brown Taylor’s
newest book called Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Taylor
is an Episcopalian Priest turned Religion Professor at a small liberal arts
college in rural Georgia. While teaching her Religion 101 course, she and her
students would have may adventures learning about Islam, Judaism, Buddhism,
Hinduism, and in the process, Taylor – the professor – ended up learning a much
deeper and wider appreciation the central tenants of her own faith.
And really, what can be more central to our Christian
faith than the words of “John 3:16”? Plastered on bracelets and billboards, quoted
over an over again until we have heard it so much we have no idea what it
means… sort of like when, as a kid, I would say the same word over and over
again until my brain could no longer process it, and instead my ears only heard
meaningless syllables.
John 3:16 John 3:16 John 3:16 John 3:16 John
3:16 John 3:16 John 3:16 John 3:16
You see what I mean?
But of course, John 3:16 DOES mean something… it is the
verse-identifier of one of, if not THE MOST memorable and memorized verse in
the Bible. When you hear “John 3:16,” you all know that this is shorthand for
(say it with me) “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that
everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
But sometimes the shorthand gets in the way of the words
themselves. Before today, did you know remember this is a quote of Jesus? And
that he’s taking to someone else? did you remember that this is part of a
conversation? John, of course, is the book of the Bible this quote comes from
(one of the four Gospels, at the beginning of our New Testament, to be
specific)…. Coming from the third chapter of this book, and in particular the
16th verse in this chapter. We forget that there are other verses in
this chapter, others chapters in this book, and other books in the Bible.
We remember this verse but forget the situation this
happened in – for this, we might actually feel sorry for poor Nicodemus. In
Holy Envy, Barbara Brown Taylor also feels bad for poor Nick – I’m going to
call him Nick - And devotes a whole chapter in her book to talk about him, because
of how his silence has been used against him throughout the ages. He was left in the dark, both literally and
figuratively. In other words, he’s “Nick at Night.”
But why is it that he come by night – was it to be hidden
and not seen by others? We often interpret his behavior as embarrassment or
secrecy. But maybe he came by night because it’s a better time to talk about
important things. How often is it easier to talk about deep matters by
candlelight, or the flickering of a campfire, than it is to talk under
florescence lights, or by the bright light of full daylight?
Nick does not begin his conversation with Jesus by being
on the offensive. His first volley is not attack, but praise – “we know you are
close to God” he says. But “Poor Nick” is a literalist. He does not know that
he is in John’s Gospel, where nothing is ever (only) as it seems.” (164) In the
Gospel of John, Jesus loves to speak in loaded language. Water is never just
water, bread is not just bread, and night and day mean so much more than where
the sun is located in the sky. And birth is not just your everyday,
contraction-filled, counting the dilated centimeters – type birth.
No one enters this life without being born from a mother,
and similarly no one enters the kingdom without this birth from the Holy
Spirit. But what was so mind-blowing to hear for Nick at the time has become
rote for us hearing these astonishing words from Jesus two thousand years
later. Christians in the twenty-first century throw around the term “born
again” much like we throw around “John 3:16.”
Barbara Brown Taylor, in her holy quest to dig deeper,
further wonders: but “What if [Jesus’] purpose is not to enlighten Nick but to
endarken him…” and to remind him of the limits of what we humans presume to know
about God.
Nick’s problem then becomes not that he DOES NOT know… (sorry
that was a lot of nots!) … but the fact that he thinks he SHOULD know. His fault wasn’t his unbelief or his lack of
faith. His fault was placing too much faith in the wrong thing – the confidence
of his own knowledge of the divine, rather than being open to the workings of
the Holy Spirit and the unknowing that she brings. He expects an answer from
Jesus, and instead gets a whole big mystery.
“As far as I can tell, the only things Nick did wrong on
the night he met with Jesus was to leave the room.” Taylor asserts. I would
add, he also didn’t “leave room.” Nick’s un-knowing made him
uncomfortable. If only he had leaned into and made room for his discomfort a
little bit longer.
All this birth talk in reference to God and conversations
about the Holy Spirit makes us uncomfortable too. Barbara Brown Taylor goes as
far as to claim, “If I am born of HER (the holy spirit), she is my mother…. She
comes, she goes. She gives life to all creation.” The Holy Spirit is beyond our
control. She causes us to bump unto people we wouldn’t normally be in contact
with. She drops us off in unexpected places to experience new and different
ways of being in the world.
We don’t get to choose how and when we were born, and if
you have ever experienced pregnancy, you probably are aware of a profound loss
of control over your own body. Perhaps had Nick been a woman or a mother, he
may have heard these words from Jesus – and felt the movements of the Holy
Spirit – a little bit more clearly or receptively. Birthing is hard, and being
born is hard. The light blinds our brand-new eyes, and we are expected to
breath in a whole new way we aren’t used to. There is a reason that they say
the first few months of life are like a “4th Trimester”… it takes a
while for us to get used to the unexpectedness of being born… and perhaps if we
had been giving a choice, we might opt to stay in that womb forever.
But the Spirit is persistent… much like the voice that
Elsa is haunted by in Frozen 2 while her life seems to have finally settled
down into some sort of version of normal after her adventures in the previous
movie. Though the signature song of Frozen 2 is certainly no “Let it Go,” we
can all relate to Elsa’s reluctance to give up all the good, stable life around
her – to stay in her safe, comfortable, predictable sphere. She doesn’t want to
hear it; she doesn’t want to know more… because it will change things.
Similarly, Nick
might say to Jesus if Nick were a Disney princess in a Disney movie, he might
sing along with Elsa: “You're not a voice, you're just a ringing in my ear. And
if I heard you, which I don't, I'm spoken for, I fear… I've had my adventure, I
don't need something new, I'm afraid of what I'm risking if I follow you, into
the unknown ...”
Except that… Nick DOES HEAR that call again… and
he does come back into the story after he fades away. At the end of the
Gospel of John, after Jesus has died and is about to be buried, there he is,
ready and waiting, burial spices in hand. Together, with Joseph of Arimathea,
these two men carefully wrapped Jesus’ body and prepared it for burial, a task
that was normally relegated to women. In a way then, these two men also
prepared Jesus for his rebirth… his birth from above, his resurrection. These
men labored, not knowing for sure what would be next, as they laid his body in
the darkness of a tomb…. That in the end, became more like a womb for the new
life about to arrive.
I might summarize Barbara Brown Taylor’s whole book using
a quote from this chapter on Nick: “Once you have given up knowing who is
right, it is easy to see neighbors everywhere you look.” Something new is at work being born in us…
with the Holy Spirit as our midwife. Sometimes its going to feel uncomfortable,
and it might even be painful. But it is in the service of making room - making
room for the work of the Holy Spirit, making room for the new thing that is to
come, making room for all people to be welcome. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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