John 3:1-17
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Will you join me in singing our prayer: God, listen to your children praying. God, send your spirit in this place. God, listen to your children praying. Send us love, send us power, send us grace.
When I preach, I normally like to begin with a story or encounter that has emerged from my grappling and reflecting on the text. But in this second week of Lent, it is important to begin with some context and caveats. If we follow the Lectionary—the listing of biblical texts that many Protestants follow through a three-year cycle—if we follow the Lectionary during Lent, we are often directed to the gospel of John.
John was the last gospel written- probably sixty or seventy years after Jesus’ crucifixion and twenty to thirty years after the Roman Empire destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem as punishment for the Jewish rebellion against Roman occupation. John probably wrote in Ephesus, which is in modern day Turkey. These are important because at the time John is writing, there is a huge struggle going on within the Jewish community. The center of Jewish religious, economic and cultural life—the Temple—has been destroyed. And there exist huge questions about what is faithful, who is Jewish, how is the community to survive?
Amidst these questions and grapplings, the small movement which would become Christianity is still trying to figure out what its relationship to Judaism is. Are they Jews who are part of a reformation movement? Are they something separate? Do folx have to be Jewish to be part of Christianity?
The writer of the gospel of John uses the language of “The Jews” and paints Jewish religious leaders in a bad light with language that smacks of resentment against those who have more power than the small struggling Christian movement. But the problem with the gospel of John is that we aren’t reading it as that minority community, instead we’re reading this language two thousand years later when Christianity’s relationship to Judaism is completely different. We read it after the Roman Emperor Constantine has converted to Christianity and Christian theology has had to shift blame away from Romans having executed Jesus. We read it after Jews became the scapegoat and “God-killers.” We read it after this responsibility for Jesus’ death shifts to the Jews and becomes the excuse for countless pogroms committed by Christian authorities and after it becomes the excuse for the Holocaust perpetrated by so-called Christian nations.
As some scholars who are leading the efforts to read John without anti-Semitism put it:
“Once Constantine converts, and Christianity becomes the religion of the Roman
Empire, and Christian leaders obtain positions of power within the empire, it
absolutely does not serve power — Roman Christian power – to understand their
founding stories about Jesus’s work as both an organizing strategy against
Rome’s violence, and theological strategy against Rome’s imperial theology.
The problem becomes not how we survive Rome’s violence, but “the Jews” who
killed Jesus, the “law” that’s a burden, and “works righteousness” vs. “grace,”
problems that Jesus “solves” through his faith and sacrifice.”[1]
Besides seeking to excise the anti-Semitism from the tradition that has been passed on it us, these insights also re-affirm that the Jesus-path, particularly the Jesus-path through Lent, is one that is seeking to resist Roman violence and to dismantle the theologies of Empire. Another way to say this is that the Jesus path is one of resisting domination and resisting the violence that keeps systems of domination in place. Instead, Jesus is seeking to follow the path of non-violence, solidarity and love.
But how do we do this? Our text for this morning has some ideas.
Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kin-dom of God without being born from above.”
Almost twenty years ago I was in a particularly low moment in my relatively new ministry. I was deep in despair and struggling. In that place, I attended a Fellowship of Affirming Ministries national convocation in Atlanta. Now, TFAM, as the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, is called is under the leadership of Bishop Yvette Flunder and is a network of about 40,000 same-gender loving, African American Pentecostal folx. At the time, Bishop’s mother opened every morning of Convocation with prayer. For those of us who come from white, mainline Protestantism it hard to convey the difference in the definitions of prayer between UCC culture and TFAM culture! But Bishop’s mother was a prayer warrior and prayer time would often last for an hour and a half. I had never experienced anything like it.
I had entered the space feeling battered and bruised. I’d put a lock around my heart and was in a deeply defended place. Over the course of that hour and a half, Bishop’s mother, who was herself completely transported and transformed by the Spirit, invited, cajoled, even demanded the Spirit to wash over us all. I felt myself enter into a space that felt liminal. And, slowly, slowly, I felt my heart begin to melt. Yes, God, yes, God, I ask for your healing, your guidance, your spirit. Yes, God… I can still feel myself, on my feet, hands in the air, spirit-filled. I can still feel the tears streaming down my face as my heart began to open.
Shortly after I got home, my mom called me. While I was with TFAM, she had been praying about me—deeply worried. While she was praying, she fell asleep and had a dream. In the dream, I had been beaten up and was bleeding. I was on the ground on my hands and knees but then somehow I’d pushed myself up and stood shakily. When my mom called me to tell me about it, she said that as I stood, I turned and smiled at her and she knew I was going to be ok.
Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kin-dom of God without being born from above.”
During Standing Rock, Native and non-Native people from around the world gathered in resistance and celebration. We were there to support the Water Protectors. We were there to support indigenous sovereignty. And some of us were there to repent and begin repair for the damage done by settler colonialism that resulted in the attempted genocide of indigenous peoples.
In early November of that year, a group of over 500 clergy prepared to participate in a ceremony of repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery. We had come because we had been invited to make the sacred journey. Amongst those gathered were Paula Bidle, Laurie Feille, and myself. As the sun rose, we gathered with Native elders by the sacred fire that had been lit in the Oceti Sakowin camp, the fire whose coals would burn the copies of the Doctrine of Discovery that we would repudiate. But before we began, we looked up in the early morning sky and saw an eagle circling above us.
Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kin-dom of God without being born from above.”
As the story is told, Martin Luther King, Jr. was exhausted and scared. He’d had some real success in organizing but he’d also survived the fire-bombing of his house and the deaths of many colleagues. Many of his friends had told him what he was doing was too dangerous. It seemed as if the fear of those closest to him and the silence of those who should be his allies were the things that really weighed on him. It made him scared. It threatened to immobilize him at times. And it caused him to be up, sleepless at night. In the midst of those anxiety-laden, insomnia-filled nights, he was known to reach out to his friends. One of those was Mahalia Jackson. When all he could do was grieve, Martin Luther King would call her and she would sing to him. Oftentimes it was “Precious Lord, Take My Hand… lead me on, let me stand. I am tired, I am weak, I am worn…” It was often the song of deep, deep grief, written by a man who’d lost his wife and infant child in a car accident that ministered to King.
Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kin-dom of God without being born from above.”
Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus who has snuck in to see him, coming under cover of darkness because he has a lot to lose being seen with Jesus. But at the same time, Nicodemus senses something in Jesus and the Jesus movement that draws him. Clearly, there is power in this Jesus movement. But what is the source of the power, Nicodemus wonders?
Now, Nicodemus is part of the ruling class. He’s a learned man. He is powerful. And he’s staked a lot on both his intellectual learning and his power.
And Jesus seems to both recognize Nicodemus’ openness and all the power and privilege he carries. And Jesus responds as he often does in scripture—with both a willingness to honor the seeker and a word of deep challenge. And because we are invited to put ourselves in Nicodemus’ place, we are honored and deeply challenged, too.
Jesus receives him, even welcomes him. And then Jesus says to him: you who are seeking, take a look at yourself. You are able to see my healings and my other actions and you seem to think that that’s the sum total of my ministry. It is only the physical evidence that you can intellectually confirm and understand. But, friend, my ministry is about the kind of power that challenges Empire, that shares love and justice and power with all. This path, this ministry is about the power of vulnerability that is so threatening that it can get you killed.
The only way to make this journey with me and with us is to relinquish the power you get from systems of hierarchy and power-over and cast your lot with a movement that is turning the world around.
That’s the ask: give your heart and your soul, as well as your mind, to this path. That is what makes for eternal life.
This is no easy ask—it’s not an easy ask of Nicodemus and it isn’t an easy ask of us. And Jesus suggests it is impossible unless one is born from above. It is impossible unless Nicodemus opens himself to the power of the Spirit. It is impossible unless we open ourselves to the power of the Spirit; impossible unless we let ourselves be bathed and grounded, enlivened and soothed by God.
Sometimes that Spirit comes to us as the passion of Pentecost, sometimes as the quiet of a prairie dawn with a lone wild bird circling above; sometimes the Spirit comes in the resonances of grief sung out as a statement of faith. Sometime the Spirit visits us in our dreams that are really visions.
However the Spirit comes, we are invited to open our hearts and our bodies to it, so that we might be empowered to make the journey of radical discipleship with Jesus—toward resisting all that would dominate and destroy and toward building all that would empower love and justice.
Our text ends without our knowing how Nicodemus responds. And in many ways that seems appropriate, because we don’t know yet how we will respond. The only clue we have is that later in the story, Nicodemus reappears to bear witness to the crucifixion and to provide an overabundance of the customary spices for Jesus’ burial.
On this second Sunday of Lent, we are asked to consider, how will we reappear in the story?
Amen.
[1] Rev. Anne Dunlap, Rome Will Destroy Us: Resisting Anti-Judaism in John, webinar presented by Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Faith Committee, February 24, 2020.
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