Didn=t See It Coming
Polk City UMC
February 24, 2002
Mark Haverland
John 3:1‑17
Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of
the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that
you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you
do apart from the presence of God." Jesus answered him, "Very truly,
I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from
above." Nicodemus said to him, "How can anyone be born after having
grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be
born?" Jesus answered, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the
kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the
flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished
that I said to you, 'You must be born from above.' The wind blows where it
chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from
or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit."
Nicodemus said to him, "How can these things be?" Jesus answered him,
"Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?
Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have
seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly
things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly
things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from
heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the
wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him
may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so
that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in
order that the world might by saved through him."
On Thursday morning of this past week, I had one of
those premonitions which spook us sometimes.
As Kate drove off to school at 7:00 am, I thought about but neglected to
holler out to drive carefully. The
driveway had been surprisingly slick at 6:00 when I walked down to get the
paper. Every time I watch Kate drive
off on snow covered roads, I remember the girl that was killed the first fall I
was here at PCUMC. A new driver, she
drove off on the first snow of the year and never came back. Faith and I have ever since driven Kate to
school or ridden with her on bad weather days because we remember the horror of
that crash.
So, I was not surprised when the phone rang five
minutes after Kate drove off. AI=m in the ditch,@ she said. ACome get me.@ I did just
that and sent Kate on to school with the Jeep while I waited for the tow truck,
which took a long time since Kate was not the only one to get into trouble that
morning. I had intended to go for a walk
that morning anyway, so I just walked back and forth on the block where the car
sat nose down in the ditch. Of course,
the trucks came by sanding the intersection twenty minutes after I rescued
Kate. The drivers seemed sheepishly
unable to catch my eye as they applied sand a couple of hours too late to be of
much help to me and likely lots of other drivers.
I told the tow truck driver that I was disgusted to
watch the roads get sanded after my car slid into the ditch. AThey should have been here at 5:30, not 7:30,@ I whined. AThey didn=t see it coming,@ he said. AThe weather service
predicted 35 degrees this morning. Lots
people were surprised.@
AThey didn=t see it coming.@ Man, it seems
that some of the best and worst things that happen to us happen this way. We drive off expecting life to go on as it
usually does, and bam, we=re in the ditch.
We wake up expecting warm weather and an ice storm forces us to hustle
out too late with our sand truck. We
start out knowing were we are going and end up some place entirely
strange. It happens often that we get
startled out of our complacency by something we didn=t see coming.
Such surprises seem to happen most often when we are
just following the normal rules of the road, expecting normal results from
normal actions. Remember last week, I
showed a clip from a movie, Bless This Child, in which the obvious Jesus
role is played by a six year old girl.
It packed a wallop because it jarred us out of our normal
expectations. Jesus is a tall, bearded
white guy who lived 2000 years ago - right?.
We all know that B or do we?
Sometimes Jesus comes in very strange ways. I read this week about a high school drama teacher who cast the
lead role in My Fair Lady to a little girl in a wheelchair. It never occurred to the girl=s mother that the audience,
conditioned by life=s boundaries of possible and impossible, would weep
when the little girl rolled herself across the stage singing, AI could have danced all
night.@ We all know what life is supposed to look like, don=t we? But God appears usually when we are
surprised by something that we didn=t see coming.
Take a look at this clip from the Apostle. A bull dozer driver comes to do his job, to
enforce the rules of civil society. He
thinks he is just obeying the law by enforcing an eviction notice on a bunch of
no-account, simple minded church people.
He starts out his day just like he always does, assured that the law and
civil order is on his side. He doesn=t realize that he is about
to have the experience of a life time.
Show clip
Nicodemus nearly had such an experience with Jesus
2000 years ago. But Robert Duvall made
more progress with the dozer driver than Jesus does with Nicodemus. Nicodemus was not quite as open to change as
our dozer driver. Nicodemus was too set
in his ways to make the radical turn-around that people often experience when
they encounter God. Nicodemus came to
Jesus expecting to learn a few things from a good preacher he had heard
about. He brought his intellect, his
learning, and the values of his culture to the conversation and found himself
invited to crawl back into a womb and be born again. Nicodemus comes to Jesus with a pretty reasonable comment,
"You must be someone from God."
Jesus replied that if Nicodemus wanted to know the kingdom of God, he
had to be born again.
Nicodemus must have felt like a character in the Abott
and Costello routine, AWho=s On First.@ It all made sense to Jesus,
of course, but not to Nicodemus, nor perhaps to many of us.
Nicodemus may have been one of the first people
confused by Jesus and what he said, but he was not the last. We, too, think
that the application of our intellect, our education and the values of our
culture will get us to an understanding of Jesus, but we are kidding
ourselves. Tell me what there is in our
intellect, training, education or culture that helps us understand this
statement by Jesus: "if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn and
offer the left." Is that advice that makes sense? Is it safe to even to
whisper in the wake of 9-11. Is turning
the other cheek advice that fits the way in which we are trained and educated
and the direction of our society? It is indeed a mysterious teaching that often
goes right past us, doesn't it? What about when Jesus said, "If you would
follow me, you must take up your cross"? We have so much made the cross a
work of art or a piece of jewelry that it is easy to forget that Jesus said,
"Take up the instrument of capital punishment and follow me. " That
is not something we easily comprehend, understand, assimilate just through our
intellect. Our education does not give us the tools necessary to deal with such
a teaching. Peter Gomes once said that Amystery is not an argument
for the existence of God; mystery is an experience of the existence of God.@[1]
Or what about when Jesus said, "If you would save
your life, you must lose it"? There is not a single self-help book on the
shelves of the bookstores that advises that life can become great by giving it
away. That does not fit. The papers are full of self help seminars and advice
columns advising us how to live life to the fullest, and how to marshal our
resources to see that we can continue to spend forever. Saving for our retirement, establishing our
IRA accounts is spawning a whole new industry in financial advice. Save, save, save, advises one segment of the
economy. Of course, the president now
tells us to spend, spend, spend, echoing the TV, radio and newspaper
advertisements - more convincingly from all appearances. We like it a whole lot more to be told to
spend than to save. And hardly ever
does anyone tell us that in order to save our money, we should give it away. My belief is that money is like
children. We just have our children on
loan from God for a few years while they grow up. Our real job in life to turn our kids lose equipped to be
Christian disciples. I heard someone
say this week that God created seniors so their parents would be happy when the
kid leaves for college. Money is like
that. It finds its greatest value when
we give it away. Talk about being
counter culture, however. If we treated
money as Jesus would have us treat life, and in many ways our money is our
life, our economy, not to mention the entire banking and investment world,
would crumble. In regard to our money
and our lives, Jesus said, "Throw it away and then you will find it."
That is not something we easily can understand by running it through our normal
ways of thinking.
Perhaps most mysterious of all is Jesus' statement to
Nicodemus and to us that we must be born anew.
This is the glorious message that we don=t have to be forever what we
now are. What a wonderful thought. Who has not rejoiced with the saved sinner
who cries out: A I know that I am not yet the person I ought to be, the
person I want to be, nor the person I=m gonna be.
But I sure am glad I=m not the person I used to be.@ This is what it means to be born again B and all of us here know the
feeling.
When Jesus says we must be born anew, he says it is
like the wind. The wind blows, and we really don't know where it comes from or
where it is goes. You can=t see it coming.
If we are to know the Gospel, we must come to know the Gospel of Jesus
Christ by being open to the mysterious and surprising ways of God. The wind blows where it will and often we
find that our sails are set for a different direction, the wrong direction, the
direction we have been led to expect, the direction the world anticipates and
tells us to prepare for. Nobody told us
it was gonna snow this morning - the weather service predicted warm sunshine.
Nicodemus may have been right to question the metaphor
of new birth. Jesus doesn=t mean that we are as
helpless at our new birth as we were at our first birth. If we want to move on to perfection, as John
Wesley suggested, we have to work at it.
Unlike a biological birth, our spiritual birth can be stopped if we do
not open ourselves to its invitational grace.
Unlike our first birth, we can make choices about whether, to whom, and
when we will be born again. Unlike our
original wombs, the womb of the new life in Christ is what we make of it. Unlike the birth to our earthly mothers, the
new birth does not give us a new body, does not create a new physical presence,
does not eliminate the physical limitations of the flesh. The new birth is a spiritual birth which
results from our opening ourselves to the fire of God=s mysterious spirit alive in
us and all around us.
But you already know this. You work at it and you are open to it. You know from personal experience that the wind of the love of
God in Jesus Christ can sweep over you.
You know you are not the person you ought to, want to, and are gonna
be. But we are all thankful not to be
the person we once were. We already
have our new birth and we know what Jesus was talking about in these
nonsensical teachings: Turn the other cheek.
Take up the cross. Find life by
losing it. We who follow Christ have
already been born anew. The grace and
love and mystery of God has swept over us as the wind blows across the land,
taking us in directions we never imagined possible. Thanks be to God.