The Rev Richard W. Budd, Ph.D., Rector
The Church of the Good Shepherd, Richmond, VA
Second Sunday in Lent, February 20, 2005, Year A
Genesis 12:1-8; Psalm 33:12-22; Romans 4:1-5 (6-12) 13-17; John 3:1-7
“I Invite You Therefore . . .” Some of you have heard this story before—it has been making the rounds the past couple of weeks. It's about a congregation that undertook a long and diligent search for a new minister - and at last settled on one. On the first Sunday the new minister went into the pulpit and delivered an absolutely amazing sermon. Everyone was deeply moved - they laughed, they cried, they were filled with awe. On the way out the door at the end of the service they congratulated the minister on his wonderful sermon, and when they got to the parking lot they congratulated each other on the wonderful choice they had made when they selected the new minister. On the second Sunday the new minister went up into the pulpit and delivered exactly the same sermon has he had the week before. Again people were deeply moved - but some scratched their heads and wondered what was going on. But, they gave the new minister the benefit of the doubt - perhaps he had just picked up the wrong notes on the way to church that morning - and they didn't say too much. On the third Sunday the minister once again gave exactly the same sermon as he had on the first and second Sundays. This time there was widespread consternation. A delegation from the congregation immediately called a meeting with the priest and asked him what was going on. "Father", they said, "The sermon you preached today is a really great sermon - and we all are deeply impressed by your ability – but you've delivered it three times now. Don't you know any other sermons?' "Oh, yes! - replied the new minister, "I have scads of them – and they are all just as good as the one you just heard." "Well then," replied the delegation, "Why don't you preach one of them next week. We just don’t get it!” "Exactly,” said the priest, “you don’t get it! So till all of you have started following the message of the first one, there won’t be another one." I guess I sort of feel some of what that minister felt. Seems like only last week—actually it was last week—when I read these words as part of our service: “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a Holy Lent, by self-examination, and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s Holy Word.” The opportunity to fulfill virtually all of those obligations was offered last Tuesday evening in the Parish Hall—and fifteen people showed up to take part. Today, however, I have a new sermon, but I have an old message, a message that each one of us needs to hear and to accept—it's the message that challenges our own salvation. It is perhaps no accident that it treads some of the ground we walked Tuesday evening. Some of you here today probably had, at one time or another, the reaction that Nicodemus had to that word from our Lord found in the Gospel passage we just heard - the passage concerning Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus - where, he says to Nicodemus: "I tell you the truth, no one can see theKingdom of God unless they are born again."
Perhaps there is way to unravel the confusion. The readings today start out with the beginning of the story of Abraham and Sarah. The story itself twists through more than 12 chapters of Genesis; and this being the book of Genesis—it is introduced by a genealogy that links Abram and Sarai to Shem, a son of Noah. The significant thing about that for us is that the story of Abram and Sarai situates us in relationship to the God who makes promises for new life. With Noah we find a God who promises never to destroy his creation again, and puts a rainbow in the sky as a sign of that covenant with future generations.
With the story of Abram who becomes Abraham, and Sarai who becomes Sarah, we meet the God who promises new life to those who hear, trust, and follow him. This is the God who promises that, despite their age and apparent inability to have children, they will become the ancestors of a great nation; their nomadic migrations will come to an end; and they will be a blessing “to all the families of the earth.” As St. Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans, this is the God “who gives life to the dead, and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”
The Abraham saga begins with the words, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house…”
It is a call to, and promise of, new life—but Abram has to leave the world of his ancestors, break the ties of kinship, and follow wherever this promise takes him: new relationships and new territory.
It is no wonder that this aspect of the story impressed St. Paul, thousands of years later. In becoming a Christian missionary, apostle, and church planter, Saul the Pharisee, too, made a radical break with his culture and the faith of his ancestors, and entered into a new relationship with God, founded on God’s promise of new life in Christ.
Just as Abram eventually received a new name and identity as Abraham, and Sarai as Sarah, as a sign of their new relationship to the God who promises new life, Saul too had received a new name, Paul, and entered into a new life of traveling ceaselessly around the eastern Mediterranean. Perhaps he saw in the saga of Abraham and Sarah as a connection to his own life. They had set out into an unknown future with no map; they had to “think outside the box,” and so did Paul. He recognized that God’s promises and covenant of new life in Christ broke through the restrictions of the piety he had grown up with; the promise and covenant were for all—women as well as men, slaves as well as the hi-born, Gentiles as well as Jews.
Abraham and Paul had to embrace new ways of thinking and living revealed to them in their new relationship with this God and move into an unmapped future to become new “people of the Promise,” for new life.
In John’s Gospel today we find Nicodemus, a devout member of the Temple leadership in Jerusalem, questioning Jesus about God the promise-maker. We need not suppose that Nicodemus was unwilling to make the move into an unmapped future for new life, but he balks at the language Jesus uses. Jesus says that those who want to enter into this relationship with God have to “born again.” John’s language here echoes that of Paul when he says that if anyone is in Christ, he or she is a “new creation.” New birth, new life, new creation: these images of entering into a new relationship imply that God’s promise for new life entails God’s gift of a fresh start, freed from the restrictions of our past lives in order to enter a new relationship with God through the power of the Holy Spirit.
And this is the point at which, finally, the promises of God touch our own lives, especially in Lent. Despite our popular pieties, Lent is a time for engaging our new life in Christ more deeply, risking new levels of trust.
The purpose of Lent is not to dwell on suffering, or to spend 40 days bewailing our manifold sins and wickedness for the sake of feeling our pain. Lent is about engaging in the ongoing process of renewal, regeneration, and new birth, it is about encouraging us to trust, and to risk, even being propelled into te promise of new life.
If you haven't yet been compelled or propelled - let me tell you right now that it is true what you have heard -- that some things are simple - and some things are not. It is also true that good things are invariably simple - so simple, in fact, that even the smallest child can grasp them. The things of God are always simple in this way, at least when they come down to the basics. I'm talking about that basic thing in us that lets us know whether or not we have actually connected with the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob - the thing deep in down in us that tells us whether or not the God and Father of Christ Jesus our Lord actually lives within us. You see - God made us in such a way that ultimately it is not enough for each one of us simply to believe in Him as a force who permeates the world. Most everyone believes in this way, but we know as sure as we sit here that everything is not right either in us or around us. God wants us to connect to him personally - to connect to him as one who is able to guide and direct us in our daily affairs, who is a father to us - as one who is here to walk with us each day. God wants us to know that with him there is a new life to be had and awhole new world a coming - that, as it was for Abraham in this morning's old testament reading, there is a whole new land out there for us - and that all we have to do is trust in God and set forth on the journey he calls us to make, the journey of faith. "Truly, truly, I say to you - no one call see the kingdom of God unless he is born again" It's a process my friends, this being born again. It is journey: - a journey of faith that leads us to places we have not been before - a journey that calls us like Abraham away from our old and familiar and lives into a great adventure where we become part of something greater than ourselves—something that we in our blindness cannot imagine. It is an event - a process - that has a beginning - a place in which weultimately say “yes” or “no” to the Lord and an end – that we cannot know - when we inherit the kingdom that has been prepared for us. The journey of faith - the kind of journey that Abraham made and which tradition tells us that Nicodemus also made - is a tremendous journey - a journey that we should be glad we are on - a journey that we need to be on. It is a journey that gives us new life - which causes us to be reborn - and it begins - and it ends - in saying "I believe Lord, and I will follow"
“I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a Holy Lent, by self-examination, and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s Holy Word.” Amen