March 8, 2020 The Second Sunday of Lent

The Rev. Garrett Yates St. Anne’s in-the-Fields Episcopal Church

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

1 You must be born again, says Jesus. If you want to see the Kingdom of God, you must be born again. What does that mean? “You gave your life to Jesus Christ, and you were never the same after that.” So one secular writer put it about a friend who converted to Christianity. He doesn’t mean it in a good way. You used to be fun, the life of the party, and now you are holy and religious, and just aren’t the same. Some Episcopalians get a little nervous, a little anxious, with that phrase. We associate the phrase at its best with Jimmy Carter, and at its worst with the televangelist. The holy roller. The guy with iridescent teeth and a silky tent revival voice, he and his wife rocking the bouffant hair. Is that what you want from us, Jesus? Is that how to interpret this passage? What I want to say to you this morning, is YES, that is exactly what Jesus wants for you. There are coupons for the salon in the back of the bulletin. “Teased to Jesus.” I’m kidding. Some people want to say that the phrase “born again” is about being born from above. It’s an honest attempt to make sense of a difficult image. The Greek word “anothen” means both again and from above, and the “from above” interpretation feels a little more comfortable to us, a little more spiritual. But the straightforward meaning of the word probably means “again” – that’s, after all, how Nicodemus took it. “Should I climb back into my mother’s womb?” How are we born again? I want to turn to one of my top ten favorite theologians for some guidance – St. Bruce Springsteen. Bruce is a modern-day Nicodemus. He like Nicodemus is a societal leader, a high priest in the church of rock-and-roll. He has sold 135 million records, played 10,000 plus concerts; a guy adored by millions, quintessential American, a magician of identity as his net worth is 500 million dollars and yet he’s somehow managed to remain a good ol’ blue-collar guy. If you’ve seen his Springsteen on Broadway you know it has a “Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night” feel. While he is on the stage, he tells you what has motivated him all these years through all these records, for all these fans, for all this money. “I never was the mechanic.” He confesses. “I never drove fast cars or stepped foot in a factory. I come from a boardwalk town where everything is tinged with a little bit of fraud, including me,” he said. He was always trying to leave home. He wasn’t after the blessing and adoration and love of millions. He wanted the blessing of his father. And so he created an identity and a self that he thought his father might bless. And even as an adult, he would drive past his father’s house night after night with a monastic obedience searching for this blessing. And he has this haunting line in his Broadway performance that has had a hold on me since I heard it. “And those whose love we wanted but didn’t get, we emulate them. It’s the only way we have to keep them close and to get the love 2 and acceptance we desired but never attained.” In Springsteen’s journeys back home, driving to his father’s house in the night, we see someone trying to come to terms with his birth, and in so doing, he is a modern-day Nicodemus seeking to be reborn. To not just be his father’s son, to be free from that destructive pattern of emulating those whose love we never got as a way to feel okay inside. It turns out that being born again isn’t just the weird search of a few holy rollers; it’s the search of people like the Boss; and it’s probably our own search too. How is one reborn? How can we crawl back into the womb, and try it again? The first step is honesty. Who is it that I am so anxious to be, and what do I fear will happen if I don’t become that person? If I don’t get that promotion? If I don’t get that recognition? If I don’t pick up exercise, or if I can’t kick this addiction – who do I fear I will become? Our lives, so it seems, are constituted by these searches, these attempts to shore up an identity, recover a sense of self and happiness. Often, it’s a search with a faulty premise – like the search to chase down the wind. And Lent asks us to open ourselves to this search; to step off the stage and look at the person up there, and ask the tough question: why am I doing this? Who or what am I after? Whose love am I afraid of not receiving? How is one reborn? “Believe on Jesus Christ, and be saved,” announce the televangelists with a dearth of nuance. But “belief” is a tricky word. Belief is a ditch that many people like to think separates the believer and the unbeliever. And once you start to believe somehow, mysteriously, you go from the sinner column to the saint column. You stop hanging out at the Starlight Lounge, and you start hanging out… I don’t know where you hang out. But to believe in Jesus isn’t to accept a propositional statement about his divinity. Often, it seems to me, attempts to “believe” in Jesus as a way to be born again can become more about certainty and an invulnerable sense of self that closes you to the vulnerability of being birthed again into his love. Aren’t we more like infants, desperate in our world to steady ourselves in his motherly gaze, than to believe an abstract proposition about him? “Behold” might be a better word than “believe.” “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever beholds him [we might say] may have eternal life.” Of course, Christ isn’t just lifted into glory; this is principally about his being lifted on the cross. That’s where we behold the gaze that rebirths the world. As we “lift high the cross,” the Spirit blows this question into our heart: if the liberty of God can play love’s song on this horrendous instrument – is there any 3 place sealed off from God’s life? If the instrument of death, can be made into something like a windchime of God’s life, a place you can hear the distinct pitch and simple melody of the Spirit’s movement –I wonder where else we can hear the Spirit. “The wind blows where it chooses.” Where is your windchime, that place you overhear the Spirit in your life: is it in poetry, or an early morning cup of coffee, or a hike at sunset, or an Offertory anthem? Make space in your life to hear the wind. Even more, where are you sitting next to a cross in your life? Is it adjusting to being an empty nester, or grieving a relationship, or just clawing for sanity as a tired parent? This cross – maybe it isn’t a dead piece of wood that no longer rings; maybe this is the place, the place of vulnerability where God is leading you to hear the Spirit in a new way. To amend the lyric of another great songwriter, the cross is the crack in all material things and that is how the wind blows through. I was recently reading a book by a Native American shaman and also Baptist minister (unusual combination) called The Wind is My Mother, and in it Pastor Marcellus Bear-Heart Williams writes, “Someone once said to me, ‘I wish I had the same amount of Spirit as you have.’ Marcellus Bear-Heart turned to him and said, ‘We are all given the same amount of Spirit. None more, none less. The difference between individuals is allowing the spirit to have more of you.’” We don’t do anything to be born again. It’s to be wide-eyed, and open- eared to the Spirit that wants to make more and more of us ring out with the distinct and life-giving melody of God’s recreating love. That our entire life might be able to sing our recessional hymn: “Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim.” Maybe that can be our prayer: Renewing Spirit, how do you wish to have more of me this week? Where should I be listening for you? *Am I to unclog my schedule that I can have moments of time where you can improvise in my life, and blow where you will? *Am I to find someone to serve, to lift up, and to bear silent witness that you are blowing in their life? Can I be a windchime for someone else? *Or am I just to sit in meditation and behold the mystery: that the Spirit blowing in and through the Son’s cross, is the same Spirit that blows through our very lungs? Freeing us. Recreating us, breath by breath, cell by cell, moment by moment. And showing us the only love worth being emulated; as we learn to be unafraid that it will ever leave us or forsake us, we behold the Love that is worth leaving and forsaking all else.

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