Anne Gardner
February 20, 2005  Church of the Good Shepherd
Second Sunday in Lent

Psalm 33:12-22
Genesis 12:1-8
Romans 4:1-5 (6-12) 13-17
John 3:1-17

I offer my words in the name of God who creates us, saves us and strengthens us:
The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

About a month ago, after the flurry of the Christmas holidays had died down, I went to dinner at the home of two people I had never met before. It was really a lovely evening. They had built a fire, had opened some red wine, the conversation was moving easily between the four of us. When dinner was ready we gathered up our glasses and headed toward the table. As I sat down it occurred to me that I might be asked to say grace, a professional courtesy as it were. This is one of the things those glossy seminary catalogs never warn you about. The request is usually polite but insistent. And so as I lowered myself down on to the chair I straightened my spine a bit, waiting for, what I thought would be, an inevitable invitation.

This, of course, did not happen. The couple hosting the dinner party were neither Christian nor connected with any institutional church. But, unbeknownst to me, they did maintain a strict rule about how they approached and lived each day. When we had settled into our seats they explained to me the ritual they invoked at meal time. For just a few moments, all of us were to turn toward each person at the table, in silence, and hold their gaze. After a few seconds had gone by we would let our eyes drift to the next person, and then the next and then the next. No one was given the responsibility for speaking on behalf of all of us. Instead, each of us took a moment to behold the other, to recognize them, to appreciate their presence, to slow down just enough to really see what was in front of us.

I have thought about that moment quite a bit as Lent approached. Truthfully, it made me uncomfortable to look into someone's eyes without the distraction of conversation, particularly someone I didn't know. I quickly became aware of how intentional and intimate those moments felt. I think perhaps this is a good metaphor for how to approach the forty days of this liturgical season. To examine, in a quiet and mindful way, how to walk through the world and the role that faith plays in this journey. And so it was with this lens that I turned and gazed upon the scripture readings offered to us this morning.

Our first reading comes from Genesis, the call of Abram, and speaks of his journey to Shechem. The story of Abram is the tale of the first ancestor of Israel to settle in land of Canaan. This remarkable journey begins with a striking request Now the Lord said to Abram, ?Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. Now Abram is seventy-five years old at this point and yet he promptly, without question or comment, begins the journey to which he is called. That is unusual enough, some would say courageous, some would say foolish. But it isn't Abram's response I find as startling as the request. God, it appears, doesn't even have a location in mind for Abram. His version of mapquest is simply to the land that I will show you, a terribly vague directive at best. But this, I suspect, is how many of us experience our spiritual journeys  without a clear or crisp sense of which direction in which we are headed, bolstered by some amount of excitement but hampered by some amount of trepidation as well.

Abram's call is not so much a story of one individual's journey but a story of a society in quest of an ideal. It is not a simple errand that God has in mind for Abram but an epic voyage in search of spiritual truth. And while Abram's response is remarkable, both obedient and expedient, it is God's response that I find most provocative, most endearing - for it reflects God's faithfulness in us. He selects Abram, an ordinary and elderly man, for a truly monumental task. He promises to shepherd him and bless him and provide him with a homeland. God is interested in Abram's journey, not in his achievements. We are no different than Abram. It is our journey too that God longs for, calling us into relationship with one another and with the Divine. In a liturgical season that often labors under the weight of austere expectations and guilt-ridden indulgence, remember that more than anything God calls you to a journey. Turn your gaze upon Him, hold his eye and be enticed by promises of wholeness, and compassion, and unbridled love.

Paul continues the theme of faithfulness in the excerpt we read today from Romans. It's important to remember that the Christian community in Rome is not one that Paul had founded. As a result this epistle is often strident in tone. Paul is trying both to solicit and convince the Christian Romans of his theological perspective. We see this kind of forcefulness in the way Paul speaks of faith and works. What is it, he asks, that we can learn from the story of Abraham, our ancestor in both flesh and faith? Paul, not surprisingly, is quite succinct - it is not for his works that Abraham is praised but for his faithfulness.

Paul makes the point that we shouldn't receive a reward for our work, but rather a wage. If Abraham is being judged solely on his works, on what he does, then God's recognition should come in the form of something due him, much in the way we receive compensation for the work that we do. Instead, Abraham receives his reward from God for his faith. The text reads that Abraham believed God, in some cases the Greek here is translated as trusts God, and to him righteousness was reckoned. God's promise did not rest on Abraham's adherence to a set of rules, but on the fact that he gave his heart away. God justifies the ungodly this epistle tells us, bestowing on Abraham, and on us, His blessings fully aware of our frailties and our faults.

Finally, we come to our reading from the gospel of John, a beautifully crafted but often difficult text. Here we encounter Nicodemus, the only gospel in which this Pharisee appears, and his confusion with a quite literal understanding of what it means to be "born from above", to be "born of water and Spirit". Nicodemus, right from the start, grants Jesus a certain amount of authority. He recognizes Him as a teacher from God, but that doesn't stop him from questioning Jesus, particularly about this notion of re-birth. Does the teaching of Jesus really mandate that all of us must return to the wombs of our mothers, to be re-born after already having grown old?

This passage of the bible is often cited when people speak of being "born again", a slogan that has become, for us in contemporary times, quite linguistically loaded. After pondering this text for some time my primary conclusion is this --- that to speak of being "born again" in the context we normally ascribed to it is to favor anthropology over Christology. What I mean by that is that this phrase emphasizes our personal change, what we do, how we alter our lives, rather than the external source of that change --- the cross of Jesus, the Christ. What I ask each of you to consider is that maybe to be "born from above" means to birthed, actually to be re-birthed, through the actions of Jesus and his death on the cross --- an act of immense love and faithfulness for us. Perhaps we are not meant to be the subject of this passage but the object. We have been "born again" not as a result of our own doings, but because Jesus has done everything already. This perspective allows us to view the life and actions of Jesus with their radical edge intact, without domesticating it by our own claims to conversion.

It is with this in mind that Nicodemus' inquiry, however well intentioned, seems misguided to me. For it fails to recognize that the actions of God, through Jesus, provide us with a vision of journey that is almost incomprehensible to us. While we are called to leave our old ways, to journey toward God in faith during Lent, and during every other liturgical season of the year, God is not meeting us half way. God has already completed the journey, through the incarnation, into our hearts and our souls and our world. He is right there beside us already, patiently waiting for us to catch His eye. No doubt God's is a gaze that is so alluring and so intimate it's hard to imagine we could withstand it --- but we can, and we have, and we will...