A sermon preached for The Second Sunday in Lent Year A on John 3:1-17
There is an interview making the rounds on social media at the moment between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams. The idea of a debate between one of the Horsemen of the New Atheism on the one hand and the philosopher, poet, theologian, and former Archbishop of Canterbury might sound like a recipe for fireworks, but it is actually a very thoughtful one.
One beautiful feature is that each of them is asked to explain the point of view of the other. What is striking is that Williams does a good job of describing Dawkins’ science-themed atheism, but Dawkins is entirely unable to describe what Williams believes. It’s an interesting thing to listen to, because you can hear Dawkins trying really, really hard. He doesn’t want to treat Williams with disrespect, but he just can’t fathom what he apparently thinks. He can’t even describe it.
He is, in fact, a lot like Nicodemus trying to talk with Jesus. Nicodemus obviously sees something worthwhile in what Jesus is saying – he has after all come to see Jesus under the cover of darkness. But Jesus says that he can’t even begin to grasp what is going on until Nicodemus has been born again. This evidently doesn’t help Nicodemus very much – after all, it’s a completely bizarre metaphor when you first encounter it. And it’s not like being physically born again would help much, were that even possible. A physical re-birth would leave you in precisely the same situation as you were to begin with, because you wouldn’t have that extra… something that Jesus is talking about.
But what is it that Jesus is talking about?
Before we get to this, because we are all good Protestants here, I want to increase your Bible knowledge a bit, so I have an Interesting Fact, and a very short Bible quiz.
The Interesting Fact is where I am going to use my once per service authorisation to say “in the Original Greek,” and it is about what might be the most famous Bible verse of all. Famous enough to be held up at sporting matches all over the world as a powerful summary of the whole Christian faith. Can anyone tell me what it is? We read it just a moment ago in the reading from the Gospel according to John.
John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son.”
However, the thing about that text is that, generally, people misunderstand it. People tend to read it as “God loved the world so much that he sent his only begotten son.” But, actually, a more accurate rendering of the Greek would be “God loved the world in this way: he sent his only begotten son to redeem the world.”
Obviously I’m not disputing the sentiment of God loving the world soooo much. Of course God did. I’m just pointing out the meaning of the passage. I can direct you to a podcast from By The Well where this is discussed if you are interested in hearing more.
Now, here is my Bible Quiz. When Jesus says “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up” what is he referring to? Any Hebrew Scripture scholars here? Or people who were struck by the passage in Sunday School or Scripture class like I was?
Jesus is referring to an event in the exodus journey where the Israelites are completely fed up with their life in the wilderness. It contains what might be my favourite of all lines in Scripture: “there is no food, there is no water, and we detest this miserable food!” As a result, God sent a plague of venomous snakes. It sounds like history’s worst church potluck. The people turned to Moses, who turned to God, God told Moses to put a bronze snake on a pole and anyone who looked at it would live.
It’s a weird old story, but perhaps it’s a bit easier to take if we think of the snakes as a kind of physical symbol of what was going on for the Israelites. The serpent in Genesis was all about tempting Eve and Adam away from God, and the serpents in the Exodus story are there to symbolise that desire to be free of God and of one another, to put ourselves at the centre of the story.
It is, the story says, a way that leads to death.
Sidebars done, Bible Knowledge increased, back to my point: I’m sure we have all had conversations where we just can’t seem to connect. It’s like two different ways of seeing the world, like speaking two completely different languages. I’m starting to learn Dutch, and it is quite a weird experience. It feels tantalisingly close to English, but, generally, I just can’t quite get there.
That is what Jesus is saying to Nicodemus here. To understand what is happening here, you need an entirely new way of seeing the world. You need to be “transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2.) More exactly, you need to be born again, born from above. Even if you were somehow able to re-enter your mother’s womb and be born a second time, while it sounds pretty drastic, it wouldn’t make the necessary difference because you would just be born as you all over again, rather than this new creation of water and Spirit that Jesus is talking about.
This is going to sound a little banal, but, again, bear with me. There is a business studies concept which is surprisingly useful here. This version of the idea comes from a thinker at Havard University named Ronald Heifetz, and he draws a distinction between “technical problems” and “adaptive challenges.”
Technical problems can be big problems. But we already know the solution. Trying to lose weight and get healthy, for instance, the solution is, generally, is to eat your vegetables, get enough sleep, and get enough exercise. Lots of problems are like that – just do the things we know we should do, and the problem will be solved.
At a community level, it’s the sort of problems that can be solved by a more careful attention to the budgeting process and making sure the rosters are up to date and so on.
Adaptive challenges are different. How does one become someone who naturally eats their vegetables, gets enough sleep, and takes sufficient exercise? Not as a continual struggle, but as naturally as I brush my teeth or wash? It takes a change at the motivational level, even at the existential level. You need to become a completely different sort of person.
At a community level, adaptive problems are those where the solutions we can tick off a checklist just aren’t working anymore. It’s not so much that the rosters aren’t up to date, it’s more that the people who used to fill the rosters are no longer willing, or indeed able, to do so.
At one level, this is what Jesus is saying to Nicodemus. Your way of seeing the world, your way of being in the world, is no longer working. It isn’t adequate to this new reality where God breaks into the world and turns everything upside down.
The place where my analogy about technical problems versus adaptive challenges breaks down is where the new way of life turns on a gift. A gift from God which Jesus presents as an existential choice.
The thing is, like Nicodemus, the world without Jesus is trapped in a way of seeing the world that is not working. Like the Israelites in the desert, our basic attitude to life and to God is wrong. It’s not even just that we have the wrong ideas and need to be corrected, which is the vibe Nicodemus is giving off. After all, he calls Jesus Rabbi, which means teacher, and he, too, is Pharisee, a teacher of the Law. He has dropped around for a nice cozy chat about theology between faculty colleagues. Jesus has something a lot more radical in mind.
It is not so much that we have some incorrect ideas; it is much more like being bitten by a venomous serpent. We don’t need new and better ideas so much as we need healing lest we die. We don’t need learned disputation, but rather redemption.
I started off trying to understand the story in terms of technical problems versus adaptive challenges, as though all we needed was some new information. But it doesn’t take us far enough. It ignores the basic human reality of sin. The Israelites in the desert didn’t need new information – they knew all about the terrible food. They needed a new heart, a new motivation. They needed to be set free from their grumbling.
What do we need to be set free from?
The solution is, it turns out, an old one. As old as the story of the covenant, when two people, who were themselves already pretty old, trusted God. Abram and Sarai heard God’s call and, based purely on their faith, stepped forward.
God said “go”, and so Abram and Sarah went.
This is the core of what Jesus calls Nicodemus to do. To step forward into this new way of seeing the world that God is offering, through Jesus. More than that – to step forward into a new life, not based no our expertise in the law, but rather based on our trust in God, and the one Jesus has sent.
In the lectionary today there are, as always, three readings listed. We only did two of course, three if you count starting with psalm 121. The missing reading was from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and I was sorry to leave it out, because it names a really profound idea for the Christian tradition, which is that, when God said go and Abram and Sarai went, it was “accounted to them as righteousness.” That’s a pretty technical idea, but perhaps we could think of it, in a low resolution sort of a way, as meaning something like this: As far as God was concerned, trusting God in that moment completely made up for a life in which God had not had much of a look in. Islamic tradition reckons that Abram’s father Teran ran an idol workshop, presumably manufacturing statues for devotional use. We don’t necessarily need to go that far, but we I think we can take it as read that Abram didn’t know God, and certainly wasn’t keeping all the intricacies of the Law, because the tablets of stone were still hundreds of years in the future.
But, because Abram and Sarai trusted God, trusted God enough to put their whole lives in God’s hand and leave their sensible life in the big city and set off into the complete unknown, that put them right with God.
And that is exactly the call on us today. Of course, we all know lots about God, and none of us have worked in idol shops, though, as John Calvin said, the human heart is a factory for idols. But the thing that makes all the difference is trusting God. Stepping out with God. Believing in the God who is revealed to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who can set us free from all that binds us, all that separates us from one another and from God and even from ourselves. God can, and will, give us a new self, a new motivational structure, if only we let the Spirit do exactly that.
It is sometimes hard to say what God is calling us to. It was evidently pretty unclear to Nicodemus, and it must have been completely opaque to Abram. We don’t know what the future holds for us – not for any of us, and, let me be topical, not for the church to which we are so committed.
But God calls us forward, into new life. The God who offers us new birth by water and the Spirit, the God who only has Godself to give, offers Godself to us. Offers to take us into the three-personed life of the God who loves each of us personally, specifically, and by name, and who is the only one who can give us the water of life, the water that gushes up into the only life of eternal value.
To the holy, blessed and glorious Trinity,
three persons and one God,
be all glory and praise, dominion and power,
now and forever.
Amen.
Alister Pate 