John 9:1-42 "Blind Spots"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute it properly!

         Here are some essential truths that have been passed down from generation to generation of children.

         1. No matter how hard you try, you cannot baptize a cat.

         2. Never ask your 2-year-old brother to hold a tomato or an egg.

         3. You cannot trust all dogs to watch your food for you.

         4. Do not sneeze when somebody is cutting your hair.

         5. You cannot hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk.

         6. Never wear polka-dot underwear under white shorts… no matter how cute the underwear is.

         The source of each of these truths is surely buried in personal experience.  Seeing is believing, so to speak, which is perhaps why these core axioms are re-invented with each successive generation of children.  Even today, without a doubt, the cat will end up drenched and very angry.  Your mother will always find that piece of broccoli drowned in a glass of milk, and the polka dots will forever show through.  However, you do not really know any of these things unless you see them with your very eyes.

         Seeing is believing - or so they say - and perhaps that is why the Pharisees, the neighbors, and even the young man’s parents just did not get it in the story we heard about Jesus healing a blind man on the Sabbath.  Of course, the Gospel writer of John does not make it easy for us either to discern the truth of what was going on. 
         Consistent with so many of the stories the writer includes in his narrative, these verses are filled with metaphors and loaded with double meanings.  There is physical blindness and physical sight.  There is spiritual blindness and spiritual sight.  There is belief and unbelief.  There is seeing what is right in front of your nose and being blind to the workings of God.
         And it is all those various perspectives packed into a single story that makes this particular passage so intriguing.  Did you realize that, in the 42 verses it takes for the Gospel writer to tell the tale, only two of those verses deal with the actual healing of the blind beggar? The remaining 39 consider the slew of reactions to the healing.
         It all began on a Sabbath morning.  Maybe Jesus should have been in synagogue, but instead he and his disciples had come upon a blind man begging by the side of the road.   The man had been born blind, and that fact is the only thing that everyone in this story can agree on. 

         Maybe it was because it was the Sabbath and the disciples were wondering if you can worship God in the great outdoors rather than in the synagogue and, feeling a tad bit guilty about not listening to the local rabbi expound on the Torah, they seized upon this moment to inject a bit of Sabbath theology into their day.

         “Rabbi,” they queried like good synagogue goers who knew their Holy Scriptures well, “who sinned: this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?”

         “Neither,” Jesus replied emphatically. “You’re asking the wrong question. You’re looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause and effect here. Look instead for what God can do. You know (he continued), we need to be energetically at work for the One who sent me here, working while the sun shines (Sabbath or no Sabbath). When night falls, the workday is over.”

         And with that our rabbi kicked up some dry dirt from the roadside, bent over, and scooped it up in his hands.  Then he did a strange thing, according to the Gospel writer. 

He spit – and it must have been taken a lot of spitting too – he spit onto the dirt and managed to turn it into some sort of mud, mud, I love mud.  And he took the mud – that beautiful, fabulous super duper mud – and rubbed it onto the blind man’s eyes, this poor marginalized blind man whose greatest contribution to society thus far was that he had been a lifelong object of theological reflection on the origins of sin.

         The spitting and rubbing done, Jesus wiped his hands on his robe and said to the man, “Go and wash your face in the Pool of Siloam.”

         The blind man did as he was told, feeling his way along the city walls, lifting his face toward the sky so the mud would not fall off his eyes before its time, but it slid down his face anyway, and some of it got soaked up in his beard.  But that did not make a whit of difference because when he returned, he was no longer simply the man born blind, object of theological reflection on the origins of sin. 

         Now he could see.  He could see the browns and beiges of the dry dust on the road.  He could see the blue of the sky and the whites and grays of the clouds that scudded by.  He could see the hundred shades of cream in a sheep’s wooly coat.

         One would think that people would have been pretty excited and joyful for him – the man born blind but who now could see.  However, that was not so.  Take the disciples, for example.  They were still trying to work through that head-scratching question of sin and never could get past it enough to rejoice in the man’s newfound sight. 

         The town was abuzz though, and the news of a healing on the Sabbath spread like wildfire.  And yet, there was really no celebration there either.  Instead, the neighbors failed to even recognize the man and they, like the disciples, got into a big discussion, not about sin this time but about the man’s true identity.

 

          Some wondered, “Why, isn’t this the man we knew, who sat 

here and begged?”

          Others speculated, “It’s him all right!”

         But still others objected, “It’s not the same man at all. It just

looks like him.”

         And the blind man who now could see kept interjecting, “It’s me, 

it’s me, the very one.”

        But even that brief confession of identity did not sway the neighbors.  They were still wary, and so they asked point blank, “How did your eyes get opened?”

          “A man named Jesus made a paste,” he declared, “and rubbed it on my eyes and told me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ I did what he said. When I washed, I saw.”

         “Yeah, right! “ they countered.  “So where is this so-called healer?”

         “I don’t know,” the man answered, not doing a lot to strengthen his case.

         No wonder the neighbors marched him off to the Pharisees, not knowing whether this was a miracle they had encountered, some kind of hoax, or – worst of all – something (and someone) dreadfully impure that they ought to avoid.

         And so the Pharisees began their investigation.  They asked for the facts of the case, and the blind man who now could see related his story yet another time, remarking that Jesus was surely a prophet.

         “Hogwash!” countered the Pharisees, who now were unwilling to even contemplate that the man had been blind in the first place.   And so they trotted him off to his parents with the nosiest among the neighbors in close pursuit.  His mother and father admitted that their son had been born blind but then, for fear of reprisal, withdrew their parental support, indicating that if he was old enough to vote, he was old enough to handle this situation himself. 

         In the end, the man born blind who now could see was left to his own defense.  And he, like the woman at the well that we heard about last week, became an evangelist too. 

         He did his best to convince the Pharisees that Jesus – even though the rabbi broke all the rules by healing on the Sabbath – was a good man, a man from God.  However, unlike the woman at the well, whose confession of Jesus as the Anointed One, led to, as the Gospel writer said, “many believing,” the man born blind was not quite so successful.  He got expelled from the synagogue – and that is end of his story.

         Except that Jesus showed up again, and the Gospel writer uses this opportunity for a last bit of theological reflection and for sticking it one more time to the Pharisees.  You see, the man born blind who now could see proclaimed his faith.  “Lord, I believe,” he said, and in a posture of the deepest respect, knelt down before Jesus.

         And in a marvelous twisting and turning of words, Jesus spoke pointedly to the Pharisees about those who are blind who really can see and those who can see who are really blind.        

         “Does that mean you’re calling us blind?” they asked obtusely.

         And Jesus replied, “If you were blind, you would be blameless, but since you claim to see everything so well, you’re accountable for every fault and failure.”

         We who also claim to see so well have our blind spots, you know.  Everyone does – people or events or ideas that are right in front of us that we do not see – and so, like the Pharisees, we are not blameless either. 

         If Jesus were here right now, surely the question he would put to us halfway through our Lenten journey is this:  What do we see – and what are we blind to? What are we blind to - and what should we maybe ought to see?

        Jesus looks at the blind man and he sees an opportunity for God’s goodness to be revealed. The Pharisees look at the blind man and they see an opportunity to make trouble for Jesus. Even the blind man’s parents, God bless them, don’t seem to be able to see their own son. They look at him, and they see the loss of their place in the community, the threat of being kicked out of their synagogue.”

         As the writer of the blog, Magdalene’s Musing, wrote “The disciples look at the blind man and they see a question of sin. 

         But - what do we see?  Not just in this story, but in our own lives and in the life of our church?

         Do we see people living in poverty because they are lazy and do not want to work, because she should have known better than to get pregnant – again, because being on welfare is fun?  Or do we see the unimaginable struggle of the working poor, the MacDonald’s Mom whose kids do their homework while she dishes out fries, the indignity of picking up the phone and making a cold call to a church to ask for help to pay the electric bill? What do we see?

         Do we see the astounding retreat of glaciers as an event that does not matter because we have lots of water in Maine?  Is the disappearance of white birch, balsam fir, and maybe even maples trees something we are content to be blind to?  Or do we see a world swerving almost uncontrollably toward such radical change that we have cause to wonder how in heaven’s name we will ever be able to ask forgiveness from our grandchildren? What do we see?

         Do we see a polarizing debate on the origins and effects of climate change so tiring and at times so boring that we convince ourselves it does not concern us? 

         Do we see a church that is a convenient and comforting place on Sunday mornings?  Do we see a congregation that wants to grow but, deep down inside, hopes that it is the pastor’s job to get people in the door, coming back over and over again, and then joining and pledging lots of money, so the church can continue to be a convenient and comforting place on Sunday morning? 

         Or do we see the radical transformation that is possible in our own lives and in the life of this church and this town if we let the Light of the World shine in our lives and through our ministries – and actually tell people about it?  Do we see the healing that is possible when we (and our church) become the ones who carry that light to a world too often filled with darkness?  What do we see?

         Are we like the blind man who knows he can see – and more than that – understands the source of his sight?  Certainly he is the one we all like to think we are.  And maybe some of us are – at one time or another. 

         But we all have our blind spots, don’t we? So maybe in the midst of our Lenten self-reflection, we also ought to ask ourselves:  When are we like the other characters in this story?

         When are we more like the Pharisees – who convinced themselves of their 20/20 spiritual vision but were, in fact, blind as bats when it came to recognizing Jesus for who he was and his message for its power?  When are we like the disciples – so involved in analyzing the situation to fit it neatly into a theological box that we are blind to the joy of healing and the potential for transformation?  When are we like the parents who divest themselves of any responsibility in order to save their own skins?  When are we like the neighbors – unable to recognize the goodness and greatness of God right before our very eyes?

        Those are the questions of Lent, and my prayer is that when the sun peeps above the horizon on Easter morning, like the man born blind, there will be a part of us that can affirm with assurance and great high hope that, though we, like him, were blind, now we can see: see the world around us for what it is, but also see glimpses of what it can become, see the damage that we have done – and also see impressions of the role we can – and must – play in its transformation.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village COmmunity Church U.C.C.

        

         

John 4:5-42 "We All Thirst For Something"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute it properly!

         The parents of a young boy, who was maybe five or six years old, had just put him to bed one evening.  All the nighttime rituals had been dutifully done.  Prayers had been said.  The closet had been double checked for possible monsters hiding amongst the dirty laundry, and final drinks of water had been offered and received. Mom and Dad had just settled down for a quiet evening. 

         However, five minutes later, the following conversation began from the bedroom;

         "Da-ad...."

         "What?"

         "I’m thirsty. Can you bring me a drink of water?"

         "No. You had your drink of water. Now it’s lights out."

         Five minutes later: "Da-aaaad....."

         "WHAT?"

         "I’m THIRSTY. Can I pleeeease have a drink of water??"

         This exchange went on for quite some time until the father spouted:

         "I told you NO! Now, if you ask again, I’ll have to spank you!!"

         The little boy was persistent.  Five minutes later......"Daaaa-aaaad....."

         "WHAT!"

         "When you come in to spank me, can you bring me a drink of water?"

         We all thirst for something.  And it was no different for Jesus and the Samaritan woman he met at the well in Sychar in Samaria. 

         Now, it is important to understand that, if at all possible, Jews bypassed the country of Samaria, feeling it was better – purer – to travel around the outcast nation and its marginalized population rather than pass through it – even if it meant extra days on the road.

         You see, a longstanding – about 800 years actually – and deep rift existed between Jews and Samaritans.  Its basis was pretty simple.  The Jews believed that God has chosen them and, therefore, had summarily rejected the people of Samaria.  Samaritans, however, did not think it was quite that cut-and-dry.

         The source of the disagreement was two-fold.  First, the two ethnic groups disagreed on exactly where the One True God they both worshipped actually lived – on the Temple Mount as the Jews believed or on Mount Gezerim as was the Samaritan tradition.          Second, Jews considered Samaritans to be traitors because the latter had assimilated themselves into Assyrian culture during a period of exile through intermarriage with their conquerors.  It was a question of purity.  In short, from the Jewish perspective, hanging out with Samaritans was a social and religious taboo, and that is the historical context for our story today.

         Maybe it was because the Pharisees were stirring up the pot too much for comfort as they made their case against Jesus, or maybe it was because Jesus did not take religious and social taboos all that seriously.  We do not know for sure, but we do know that Jesus decided to leave Judea and return to Galilee, and he did not need a GPS to know that the most direct route was right through Samaria.

         So here we find Jesus, sitting by the deep well where his forbears, Jacob’s family, had once drawn water an eon before. A bright noonday sun was beating down on our rabbi.  It was hot, and he was thirsty. 

         Not only that; his feet were sore from walking.  His sweat formed little rivulets through the dust on his neck and his arms. At the moment, he was alone because his disciples had gone to the market to buy provisions – goat cheese, peasant bread, and a jug of wine – for a good old-fashioned and well-deserved picnic lunch. 

         The well where he sat was deep, and Jesus had a problem.  He had no water pot, no cup, no way of reaching the cool clear refreshing stream that ran beneath the earth and bubbled up here in this ancient well.  Jesus needed someone to help him – which, in most villages, would have been pretty unlikely because no one would have been caught out in the noontime sun.  Women filled their jugs and water pots in the cool of the morning or evening.  Noon was the time to seek shelter in the shade.

         However, in this village, someone did come to the well at noon, an unnamed woman marginalized by her own community.  She was unwelcome at the well in the cooler hours of the day, and yet it was this woman who ended up having the longest recorded conversation with Jesus in all of the Gospels. 

         It was this woman who, in this particular Gospel of John, was the first one to proclaim – albeit as a question - that Jesus was the Messiah. In short, she was the first evangelist, the first bearer of the Good News that the Anointed One was here – at Jacob’s well – in the little backwater town of Sychar – in Samaria, no less.

         Maybe Jesus’ thirst was really getting to him – or maybe, again, he just did not take religious and social taboos all that seriously, but he asked the woman for a drink of water and, in doing so, broke all the rules of polite convention: First, Jews did not speak to Samaritans.  Second, men did not speak to women in public without their husbands present.  And third, an upstanding young rabbi building a reputation did not speak to a woman of such questionable background. 

         In a nutshell, the unnamed woman at the well hailed from the wrong place; she was the wrong gender, and, at first glance, at least, she had lived the wrong life. One would think that in three strikes she would be out, but instead….

         “Give me a drink of water,” Jesus asked, thereby initiating a conversation.

         Her response was flip.  “You are a Jew, and I am a Samaritan. Don’t play with me.  How can you ask me for a drink?”

         “Oh, if you only knew – knew about God,” he replied, “knew about the message that I preach, knew about the life-giving water that offers hope to dry souls and love to arid, burned out hearts.”

         Taking it all in, she chose to continue to banter with him.  “You don’t have a bucket.  How could you possibly get that special water?”

         “The water in this well will run dry some day, you know,” he reminded her.  “But the water of God will be like a clear, refreshing shower as it will wash over you always.”

         Perhaps it was the image of a dry soul or an arid burned out heart or even the thought of a clear refreshing shower. Who knows?  But the woman at the well got it (in a way, by the by, that Nicodemus, whom we heard about last week, never seemed to). “Oh!  Sir!” she cried.  “Give me that water, so I will never be thirsty again.”

         You know, the story might have ended there.  After all, a point has been made, and a good one at that – all about Jesus and that living water.  However, the Gospel writer chooses to continue the narrative.

         And so a delightful dialogue follows about an array of husbands and a confession that the woman’s relationship with her current partner is more the common law type than anything legally binding.  And I must say that traditionally we have made some pretty heady presumptions about the woman at the well here.  Five husbands?  Living with a sixth?  Obviously a case of loose morals!

         But, have you ever thought that maybe she had a different history?  Maybe she was just old and had outlived her five husbands. Or – “maybe her five husbands had found her lacking, unsuitable, unlovely, unfit for their desires, and they simply rid themselves of responsibility and relationship.”  After all, the divorce laws certainly favored men, as one would expect in a patriarchal culture. (Linda McKinnish Bridges)  It is interesting to be aware of the assumptions we make and the boundaries we create because of those assumptions.

         At any rate, what follows is, first, a conversation about the origins of the rift between Jews and Samaritans and then more theology - and then even more theology when the disciples return with the picnic food to find – horror of horrors – what does he think he is doing:  to find their rabbi in the midst of spirited and spirit-filled conversation with a female outcast.         

         And in the midst of the disciples’ disapproval and Jesus’ theological explanation for his astounding behavior, the unnamed but now transformed woman at the well runs off, declaring what no one else in this Gospel at least has had the wherewithal, the courage, or the gumption to declare – albeit she does it in the form of a question:  “This man couldn’t be the Messiah, could he?” And we – thanks to twenty/twenty hindsight – can say confidently and affirmatively:  “Of course he is.”

         What a wonderful story!  And it all happened because Jesus asked a woman who was forced to be out and about in the noonday heat, in a foreign country where he was unwelcome, for a drink of water. 

         We all thirst for something.  And so the quite obvious question for us today is this:  What that YOU are thirsting for on this your Lenten journey?

         Do you thirst for the dismantling of the boundaries that separate us one from another, for the tearing down of walls between us?  Do you thirst for courage enough to put aside social and perhaps religious taboos as Jesus and the unnamed woman did? 

Like the Samaritan woman at the well who found that Jews were not as bad as she had thought they were, do you thirst for the clarity of conscience to finally see beyond rich and poor, gay and straight, man and woman even - and envision instead a wonderfully diverse humanity, all of us made in God’s image, all of us beloved sons and daughters of the Holy One?  Is that what you thirst for?

         Or do you thirst for the assurance that you are accepted in spite of who you are and what your past might have been?  Like the Samaritan woman at the well, do you thirst to experience what it feels like not to be an outcast, not to be marginalized, not to be thought of first off as stupid or fat or bald or old, but rather to be understood as someone with unique gifts to share with a family or a church community?  Is that what you thirst for?

         Or do you thirst for some sort of redemption, for a hidden strength to turn aside from the old wells in your life that have long since gone dry, leaving you cracked and broken and desolate?  Wells of addiction…Wells of failed marriages…Wells of busyness and not having enough time…Wells of living in the past or the future but never in the present moment? 

Like the Samaritan woman at the well, do you thirst to taste the Living Water of which Jesus spoke, and, perhaps more importantly, do you thirst for the humility to ask for it, pray for it?  Is that what you thirst for?

         Or do you thirst to recognize in a way you never really have before that Jesus is the Messiah, the long awaited one to put you right with God? Like the Samaritan woman at the well, do you thirst for the wherewithal, the courage, and the gumption to proclaim – even if it is in the form of a question as she did - that Jesus is the one who embodies all that God wants humans like you and me to be?  Is that what you thirst for?

         We all thirst for something.  What is it that YOU thirst for on this your Lenten journey?

         When I returned from the Southwest last fall, I read a book entitled House of Rain.  It was about the constantly migrating Native American tribes in that part of the country. The amazing thing about these clans and families was that not only, for seemingly no reason, would they pick up and move, leaving everything behind in their cliff dwellings, but two or three hundred years later, a civilization would be built again on the same site. 

         The author, Craig Childs, speculated that the tribes moved to find water.  And the way they knew that they needed to migrate was because their healers and shamans would go deep, deep, deep into the recesses of the cliff dwellings where they resided to a place where only the most holy among them could go, and there in the dark they would monitor the drip, drip, drip of the groundwater.  When the dripping slowed to a certain point, though the surface water may have looked no different, they knew it was time to leave their home.

         We are in the middle of our Lenten journey now.  We are deep, deep, deep into our own wildernesses.  We are in the dark, and we are in search of the source of that Living Water of which Jesus spoke, water that has the potential to transform our lives even as it changes our perspectives.

         Perhaps like the woman at the well, we will meet Jesus in the noonday heat, and we will have a spirit-filled conversation, and we will thirst no more.  But don’t count on that scenario. 

         More likely, we will need to go deep to find water – like the healers and shamans in the Southwest. We will need to go deep into the dark, into ourselves, into our hearts (that most holy of all places in our body), there to discover – by the grace of God – the drip, drip, drip of Living Water. 

by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church, United Church of Christ

         

John 3:1-17 "Strange, Wonderful, Illuminating Darkness"

         Some people think that Nicodemus came to find Jesus after dark because Nicodemus feared that his fellow Pharisees might discover him “consorting with the enemy,” so to speak.  Daylight would have been way too obvious, those scholars maintain – and far too great a risk for a Temple hotshot like him.  Some people think that the scenario was as Lutheran pastor Edward Markquart describes: 

         “About midnight, Nicodemus came to Jesus’ house and rapped on the door. (Knock, knock, knock).

         Jesus came to the door and said, ‘Yes?’

         ‘I know it is late, but my name is Nicodemus. I am a professor of religious law down at the temple, and I would like to speak with you a minute.’

         Jesus said, ‘OK. Shall we go out for a walk?’

         Nicodemus replied, ’O no. No, no, no, no, no. We don’t want to be seen outside. Do you mind if I would come in?’’

         However, I do not think that it was such fear that caused the Pharisee to seek out Jesus in the darkness.   You see, Nicodemus was no slouch when it came to his chosen occupation of keeper and interpreter of Jewish law.  It would take a lot to irreparably tarnish the reputation of a man such as Nicodemus, he who was one of the 71 Pharisees appointed to the Sanhedrin, the council of Jewish sages who were the de facto Supreme Court and legislative body in Judea during the Roman occupation when Jesus lived.  It would take far more than a chance meeting with a young, still wet-behind-the ears preacher to bring Nicodemus down.

         No, I do not think it was fear that motivated Nicodemus that night.  I think it was that he intuitively knew that strange and sometimes wonderful and oftentimes illuminating things happen in the darkness.   After all, the Pharisees traditionally studied the Torah – the ancient Holy Scriptures – at night.  It was when darkness fell that they had their deepest and most satisfying theological discussions – so many “ah ha” moments did they experience in the evening hours. 

         It is like when you close you eyes at night, and you are so confused with a million thoughts and scenarios playing in your head, and yet you wake up to the sunrise the next morning with a clear path forward.  Strange and sometimes wonderful and oftentimes illuminating things happen in the darkness. 

It is in the darkness that we are most apt to think outside the box and come to new understandings. 

         And so Nicodemus came to Jesus in the dead of night, moving silently through the streets and alleyways, his cloak pulled tight around him to protect him from the wind that blew in gusts every which way and perhaps to conceal himself as well from the prying eyes that might wonder for a moment what a member of the Sanhedrin was doing out and about in the moonlight. Nicodemus limped a bit down the dusty avenue because the arthritis in his left knee always acted up at night.        

         You see, Nicodemus was no spring chicken.  I picture him as late middle aged – or maybe recently eligible for Social Security – graying hair, sad and knowing eyes.  Nicodemus had been around the block a few times, especially when it came to religion.  After all, how many years of his life had he devoted to studying the Scriptures?  Surely he was one who could quote most any part of them, chapter and verse.  Yet, for too many days and too many nights, Nicodemus had experienced that niggling and rather negative and downright uncomfortable feeling that he was only going through the motions.  Was this all that there was?

         And so he sought out Jesus, the young upstart rabbi that the Temple elite was quickly coming to despise but who seemed to have a message that was resonating with the hearts of the poor, the outcasts, and the marginalized.  Not that such an audience should ever have concerned someone like Nicodemus - unless, of course, they became unruly and threatened the fragile peace that the Pharisees had been able to establish over the years with the Roman authorities. 

         But there was something about that Jesus – and the bits and pieces of that message that he had overheard – that caused Nicodemus to come out in the dead of night to find the rabbi – and maybe – just maybe – in finding the rabbi – to finally find himself.  After all, strange and sometimes wonderful and oftentimes illuminating things happen in the darkness. 

         As one should expect from the writer of this Gospel of John, the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus was filled with puns and abstract symbols and double entrendres. As smart as he was and as well-versed as he was in the religious arts, Nicodemus found himself scratching his head, totally confused as Jesus spins a theology that our Pharisee insists upon taking literally (and that at least some of us have taken literally as well). 

         But Jesus is speaking figuratively.  However, that nuance is so far removed from Nicodemus’ frame of reference that finally the Gospel writer puts the words in Jesus’ mouth that lays it all out as simply as possible:  “God so loved the world” - that God would do anything – anything – to make it right, to make it a place like the very Garden of Eden itself, to make it the Kingdom of Heaven. “God so loved the world…”

         But to get to that point, Jesus and Nicodemus have a spirited and downright humorous conversation about birth and rebirth, spirit and the wind that blows. Jesus twists and turns Nicodemus’ perspective with wordplays and repeated phrases until the old Pharisee does not know if he is coming or going. As Lutheran pastor Janet Hunt notes, “Poor Nicodemus is standing precariously on the edge of mystery and Jesus seems to push him right in.  Because this is not intellectual parsing that is called for now.” 

         It all begins because Jesus uses one of those words that in Greek (the language of the Gospel though not the tongue that Jesus himself spoke) has more than a single meaning.  Jesus talks about being born – and Nicodemus is confused.  Jesus talks about being born “from above,” and Nicodemus thinks he is talking about being born “again.”  “From above” and “again”: same word in Greek.  It is kind of a mean trick to play on Nicodemus – he who in all his time as a Pharisee had been taught to look only at the literal meaning of the text.  After all, it was that mindset that was his original spiritual birthing.

         What Nicodemus hears is this:  Jesus says “Take it from me: Unless a person is born again, it’s not possible to see what I’m pointing to—to God’s kingdom.”

         “How can anyone,” queries Nicodemus, “be born again who has already been born and grown up? You can’t re-enter your mother’s womb and be born again. What are you saying with this ‘born again’ talk?”

         Ask any six year-old.  That is a crazy interpretation that Nicodemus is insisting upon. 

He is definitely having trouble, as New Testament scholar Charles Cousar notes, grasping “the strange ways of God, who persists in making all things new." How much more sense it makes to say:  “Take it from me: Unless a person is born from above, it’s not possible to see what I’m pointing to—to God’s kingdom.”

         And then Jesus goes on to talk about this elusive and fickle Spirit that we will encounter if we allow ourselves to be born from above, that perhaps even causes the second birth, that rebirth, to happen.  Jesus says that the Spirit is like that wind blowing outside, the one that even now as the two men talked periodically rattled the window frames or tossed up little dust vortexes in the fields on a whim.  We do not know when or why or how they will happen, Jesus declares. 

         Again, because the Greek word for “spirit” is the same as the Greek word for “wind,” Nicodemus just does not get it.  He responds with another scratch of the head.  “Huh? How can these things be?” he asks.

         And Jesus replies, “And you’re supposed to be a teacher?” 

         And Nicodemus shakes his head and says, “I just do not get it.  I better head home now.  Thanks for the wine.” 

         And Jesus called out to our Pharisee as the darkness enveloped him, “God so loved the world, Nicodemus, God so loved the world….”

         And so Nicodemus walked out into the nighttime gloom, shaking his head even as the wind played with the hem of his cloak and kicked up a dust vortex or two on the road before him. 

         It sure does not seem that he was any better off after his conversation with Jesus than he was before.  Was Nicodemus’ spiritual malaise in any way cured?  Well, if nothing else, at least he tried.  At least he ventured out into the darkness. 

         And because he did so, I like to think that maybe – just maybe - the embers of his heart, at the very least, were warmed.  Maybe – just maybe - a strange and perhaps wonderful and possibly even illuminating thing happened there in the darkness.  After all, the Gospel writer of John tells us that later, when Jesus is dead, Nicodemus tagged along with Joseph of Arimathea to the gravesite, there to pay his last respects to the rabbi who had once talked to him over a glass of wine in the nighttime gloom.  

        It seemed as though, when he came to Jesus, as UCC pastor Josh Blakesley wrote, “Nicodemus saw the world, himself, and God as existing inside a small box. His perspective was limited and therefore, it was easier for him to think that he knew things. But, as Jesus pointed out, once you let your perspective of the world, yourself, and God outside of the box—you realize you don’t know much at all. When perspective is small and rigid, it’s easy to say, ‘I know this or that’ with certainty. But once your perspective expands to be bigger and freer, you tend to say: ‘I don’t know everything and therefore, I’m open to new possibilities.’”

         New possibilities:  That is the essence of the work of the Spirit.  That was what Jesus was talking about in his conversation with Nicodemus.  When the Spirit touches us, we are transformed, maybe becoming even a bit incomprehensible.  When the Spirit touches us, we cannot help but trust our life to the God who brought us into this world.  When the Spirit touches us, we can only affirm and even embrace the mystery of God and celebrate the fact that we do not have the final word when it comes to the workings of the Holy One. When the Spirit touches us, we cannot help but live our lives as if we were in fact born to love as God has loved. Like the Spirit herself, we no longer rely on what we think we are and what we think we know.

         To be born from above, to be born in the Spirit, is to realize that there is more to life than meets the eye.  There is more than the trappings of religion that we are all so used to.  There is more than the rituals that we practice year after year. There is more than the intellectual structure and knowledge of the Gospel message.  There is more than going through the motions.

         To be born from above, to be born of the Spirit, is to break free of the shackles of a life of scarcity and enter joyfully a life of abundance.  It is to break free of the old established patterns and fearlessly try out new ways of strengthening a relationship with God. 

         To be born from above, to be born of the Spirit, is to seize with great abandon the fact that God can – and will – flit through our lives, shaping and molding us into more than we ever thought we could be.

         To be born from above is to continue to walk boldly into our Lenten journey.  It is to embrace the darkness we will undoubtedly encounter – if not along the way then surely when we stand at the foot of the cross – embrace that darkness knowing that strange and sometimes wonderful and oftentimes illuminating things can – and will - happen there.

by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine