John 3:1-17
Some of us attended Sam Sheridan’s ordination to the diaconate yesterday up in Herndon. It was a magnificent affair, conducted with all the pomp and ceremony the Episcopal Church excels at. And at the center of it all, leading worship, was the bishop, dressed in a brilliant red chasuble, crowned with a colorful miter, carrying the crozier — the shepherd’s crook, showing her to be a pastor of God’s people. If you’ve ever been here when the bishop has visited us, I’m sure you can picture it. So, do a thought experiment with me. Imagine the bishop (and it can be any bishop, not necessarily Bishop Susan) taking off her chasuble and miter, then laying aside her crozier. And then envision her driving at night to the PACEM shelter to talk with a young, homeless street preacher who has been attracting large crowds and performing miracles of healing. The young man talks to her about being born from above, born of the Spirit. He conveys the wonders of God’s activity in the world. And the bishop responds, “How can these things be?” And the homeless preacher says, “Are you a bishop in the Church of God, and yet you do not understand these things?”
I don’t know what Gospel passage unnerves you the most. Maybe it’s the one about plucking out your eyes or chopping off your hands if they cause you to sin. Maybe it's the one where Jesus tells the rich young man to sell all his possessions, give the proceeds to the poor, and then leave everything to follow him. But for me, this passage from John is one of the most daunting of all Gospel stories. It shows with such vivid clarity how easily religion can get in the way of God. Nicodemus is a seriously religious man. He’s a Pharisee who rigorously keeps all the commandments — all 613 of them laid out in Torah. He is a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish High Council. He is a teacher of Israel, a man steeped in the faith of his people, respected and admired by others. And he is completely lost. When Jesus speaks of the Spirit, Nicodemus struggles to follow him. When Jesus tells him he must be born from above, he gets bogged down in crude, literal thinking — Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born? He doesn’t understand any of it, prompting Jesus to say, Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?
I am a priest of the Church, and I love the Church: the community, the rituals, the doctrines, the sacraments, the traditions — I love them all. But they don’t matter at all unless they point us to the one thing that does matter. We must be born from above, we must be born of the Spirit. Not in a one-off event, but in an ongoing, perpetual process of realizing our unity with God and each other in Christ, a unity grounded and expressed in love.
Religious practices can, surprisingly, unfortunately, get in the way of that. This is a particular danger in Lent, when we can become so fixated on what we are giving up or what we are taking on, that we forget why we are doing it at all. Sure, we can give up dessert for six weeks or we can read more devotional books every day, we can leave our altar bare and stop saying the A-word, but if it doesn’t help us love more, if it doesn’t open us up more to the movement of the Spirit in our lives, what’s the point?
Religion that is alive in the Spirit moves beyond outward observance to the vital truth. To be born of the Spirit is to see that the Eucharist, for example, is not just a church ritual, and it’s not just that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Jesus. The Eucharist demonstrates the staggering truth of the Incarnation: that God has entered fully into the material reality of the world. And as result, everything is infused with Christ: eating bread and drinking wine at church; hugging a loved one; caring for a sick person; listening to the birds sing; going to the DMV to renew your driver’s license — it’s all holy because it’s all filled with God. The Spirit moves through the sacrament of the altar to show us that the entire universe is sacramental. The Spirit moves through the ritual of Holy Communion to help us see that we are not only one with Christ, not only one with our fellow parishioners, but we are in communion with the whole of God’s creation, with every person, raccoon, oak tree, and star — all enfolded in the same infinite love. With the Spirit, we see this and we live this. Without the Spirit, none of it will make any sense. Like Nicodemus, we will be left wondering, How can these things be?
The good news is that God is self-giving love and so God is continually pouring out the Holy Spirit. That Spirit is always moving, always calling us to new life, deeper life, better life. God is never done with us. Whether we are 25 or 95, we can continually be born of the Spirit as she blesses us and renews us. The adventure lies in the fact that we cannot predict how the Spirit will do that: she blows like the wind and we cannot control her. She may push us into new experiences and unexpected relationships. She may wake us up so that we see the world in a whole new way. She may help us to care more for the people around us. She may blow away our defenses and leave us gobsmacked and speechless. I can’t stand up here and tell you how the Spirit is going to move in your life, how the Spirit is going to lead you into greater love and deeper communion. I just know that she has and she will. And we can trust that.
All of which leads me to the positive value of religious practice. When we come to worship with open minds and open hearts and hear the story, and offer prayer, and share in the peace, and get fed at the altar, or when we fast with right intent or pray with desire for God, we are giving the Spirit room to blow mightily in our lives. We are saying yes to being born from above. And no one rejoices in that more than Jesus himself. In this Gospel today, Jesus does not condemn Nicodemus; he loves him. And Nicodemus eventually moves from being an anxious inquirer to being a faithful follower, a sure sign of the Spirit blowing in his life. And what Jesus conveys to him, he is trying to convey to us. I picture Jesus leaning in to Nicodemus and with radiant eyes saying, “I know you are sincerely religious, but God is so much bigger, so much more awesome than anything you have conceived of. The life God wants for you is so much richer, so much more beautiful than anything you have imagined.”
There is only one way to conceive of it, only way to imagine it.
We must be born from above.
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