St Luke’s, Havelock North – Lent 2, 2008 – Sermon

Readings: Genesis 12: 1-4a, Psalm 121, Romans 4: 1-5, 13-17, John 3: 1-17

“For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham … in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

Part of me feels that I should really be preaching on the Gospel reading today, including the verse that is without doubt the most well known in the entire Bible. I’m pretty sure I could stand here and just say, ‘John 3: 16’ and pretty much all of you would be able to quote it back to me in one version or another. It’s so well known, so often quoted completely out of context and so misunderstood that, as I say, I feel I should really be saying something about it.

Then there’s our first reading – Abraham and Sarah – a profound story of faith and action that has so much to say to our present situation as the Church, and especially the Anglican Church, faces an increasingly uncertain future. Even Psalm 121 [which we sadly don’t get to hear at 8am] offers an absolute cornucopia of ideas and options to the willing preacher.

But every time I started a sermon on one of those readings, every time I began to get down on paper some ideas and directions, I just kept finding myself drawn back to Romans, which is incredibly frustrating because I don’t want to preach on Romans. If you want to talk about Romans talk to Patrick or Cherry Dingemans. They’re fresh back from the theological hui in Auckland where Romans was their focus. But I don’t want to focus on it. It’s too wordy, too complex, too typical of Paul’s style of writing and rhetoric, and it’s just not something I want to get into, but I keep finding myself back there anyway.

It connects with the first reading of course. Paul uses Abraham and Sarah as the big guns in his dual arguments that firstly everyone needs God’s goodness and mercy – summed up nicely in his earlier comments about everyone having fallen short – and secondly, no one has any claim to an advantage when it comes to grace, not even the Jews who have earnestly tried to live by the Law. He’s writing to an increasingly diverse church at Rome, where there are Jews and Gentiles of every persuasion rubbing shoulders and bumping heads and Paul tries to appeal to both by describing Abraham as the epitome of faithfulness.

Unlike other examples, in Romans Paul isn’t trying to totally disregard the Hebrew Law, he’s just trying to put it in its place. Probably because of criticism about other comments he had made Paul isn’t saying here that Abraham was above the Law, just that Abraham was declared faithful and worthy by God because of his faith not his following of any aspects of the Law, those things were secondary. So beneath the often complex and legalistic sounding language, Paul is actually taking it easy here. He’s hedging his bets a bit by using Abraham to downplay the value of the Law without totally disregarding it. Faith first, Law second, and a distant and unessential second at that, is the basic message of Paul to the Romans.

If only it were that simple. This is why I didn’t want to preach on Romans, because it all starts to get a bit messy and it only gets worse as we keep trawling through his arguments. But then, in the midst of all this messiness and all Paul’s verboseness we find these incredible words, “in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

Here, finally, we discover the foundation beneath all Paul’s longwinded arguments; everyone needs God’s goodness, in Christ that goodness has been made manifest and attainable, through that now attainable goodness all people can experience the miracle of new life and new beginnings.

I’m a big fan of new beginnings. For me that’s the true gift of the gospel, the real taonga we have to offer the world around us, that in Christ we have an endless supply of new beginnings and second chances.

That’s certainly what we find with Abraham and Sarah. Just when you reach retirement and you think you’ve done your dash and you can relax, watch out. We never hear a word about Abraham until he hits seventy-five, then it’s full steam ahead. We know virtually nothing about his or Sarah’s lives up til then, but we know for sure that everything after that was new. There’s a powerful message for some of us there – when we think that life is winding down, that the play is almost over, sometimes that’s when it’s just beginning.

Nicodemus is also a story about new beginnings. To really begin to hear this story we have to go back to the end of the previous chapter where we’re told that, “many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them”. Then we hear about Nicodemus, an important man in his community, a Pharisee, a leader, ‘a teacher of Israel’ as Jesus describes him, and one of those ‘many who believed’ because of the miracles Jesus was doing.

It’s an important point to note that Nicodemus wasn’t an unbeliever - it’s just that his belief wasn’t enough.

We have to tread very carefully here. At our Lenten studies on Tuesday nights Kirsten is taking us through the Book of Job and we’ll soon find that what starts as the support of his friends soon turns into accusations as they see Job getting sicker and sicker and more and more hard done by and they become convinced that it must be because of something he’s done or hasn’t done. And we still see it often. I’ve seen so many people left devastated because their prayers weren’t answered or the hurts weren’t healed, and they’re convinced it’s because they didn’t believe enough.

That’s not what Jesus says to Nicodemus. Nicodemus comes to Jesus and pays him a huge compliment by calling him ‘Rabbi’, teacher, and says, ‘you’re obviously sent by God because no one can do the things you do unless God is with them.’ What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t that what we’re meant to do – recognize the presence of God in Jesus? But Jesus turns round and responds, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

Nicodemus, though misunderstands Jesus. “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Note that Jesus never said anything about being born a second time or born again, but rather he referred to being ‘born from above’. And what’s the result of being born from above? Then you can see the kingdom of God.

I don’t believe this is anything about heaven or the afterlife. Jesus isn’t saying to Nicodemus, ‘look, you’ve got to be born again or you’re going to hell,’ rather what I believe Jesus is doing here is responding to Nicodemus’ claims that he knows who is and what he’s on about.

Look at the reading again, Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, in secret. He’s taken by Jesus and what he’s saying and doing, but not enough to come out publicly as a supporter. So under the cover of night he comes to Jesus and says, ‘teacher I believe you’re not a false prophet because God is clearly with you.’ In other words, I’ve got you sussed, I understand what you’re on about, I know you. And Jesus, the same Jesus who elsewhere tells his disciples to go and tell everyone that the kingdom of heaven has come near, Jesus says, ‘no you don’t.’ No one, Jesus says, can really know or understand me unless they’ve been born from above – unless they’ve gone through a profound, life altering experience which changes the way they perceive the world around them.

Much as I would like to, I’m still not going to preach on John 3: 16 this morning. There’s so much in this Nicodemus encounter that we should really explore and grapple with, but I want to just touch on this one point because it takes us back to those words in Romans, “in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

What Paul and Jesus are both pointing to here I believe is the inescapable fact that one can’t truly encounter God without it becoming a life changing experience. Time after time after time in scripture and elsewhere we find that ordinary men and women who encounter God in powerful ways are changed forever. They literally face a new beginning because nothing can ever go back to the way it was.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about the whole Pentecostal born again experience idea here, in fact I’m convinced that sort of experience is often as inadequate as the experience Nicodemus had because ultimately the question is, what’s changed? What difference has this encounter with God made to the way you live, to the way you see the world you’re living in? What thing that didn’t exist before has God called into existence within you?

That’s the key I think, that’s what Jesus was trying to tell Nicodemus, that’s what Paul is trying to get across to the Romans. Being a Christian, following Christ, isn’t about a change of understanding, it’s about a change of life. It’s about allowing what we see and hear of God to not just touch us, but alter us, move us. It’s about being different today than I was tomorrow because of the effect of God on me, and that’s not just a one time thing but an all the time thing.

What things that don’t currently exist is God calling into existence in you? In us?

These are hard questions, but then Lent is a time for hard questions. May God be with us in our asking, and our answering. Amen.