February 18, 2005
Understanding
Note: It’s not my usual style to be altogether personal, certainly not to appear to border on the maudlin in a preachment. Nevertheless, on reading the story of Nicodemus again in these days after no telling how many times, I am struck perhaps for the first time how deeply I resonate with what might have been — what must have been — his experience. I doubt if this “will preach,” as is said. But it will and does for me. May it not seem altogether self-serving. May your self also be served.
Lent 2A Jn 3.1-17
When Jesus told Nicodemus he must be “born anew,” it proved to be what started a firestorm of evangelical craziness in a so-called born-again Christianity. Nicodemus didn’t get it right at first. Instead, he got all anatomical and GYN about it. But he finally figured it out. I’m not so sure they ever have.
Water and the spirit, Jesus said. The image reminds me of when a football team douses their coach with a barrel full of iced-down Gatorade after winning a game. Nothing might wake up one’s spirit like a heavy dose of iced water to remind us that baptism doesn’t birth our spirits, it mostly reminds us that we have one, that we are one, that God creates us as spiritual beings for want of being human and sets us forth on a trek to discover our humanity, a discovery that bears all the resemblance to a new birth and gives us a Covenant to help shape the labor pains.
Nicodemus got a quick lesson that night visiting Jesus and lurking around to sort of stay out of sight of anybody who might get out of joint about his being there. He got a lesson that in spite of all the proper religious spin on his life, wasn’t enough. He set the same example for us that in spite of ours, we’re wasting our time — and Jesus’ time, too — unless we get our priorities straight. Unless we realize that this new birth is God reaching into our spirits and putting them back on the right track, spirits that are already there by virtue of God’s imaginative creation. But, as Nicodemus discovered, that’s not where it stops.
The twelve steps of recovery program fame contain one hurdle after another. But one of the most challenging — if the evidence means anything — is the third: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.”
Too many folk come seeking in a Meeting what they know not. More than likely, if they’ve tried the church or a parson, they’ve found something wanting. “Just have faith, and all will work itself out,” they’ve heard over and again and too often with the implication (read judgment) that faith is what enough of they don’t have or they’d get over it.
When they come up on number three with its “turn over your will” challenge and risk and its God talk, they react with “Here we go again, more religion.” Even if they get past the admitting and surrendering of steps one and two, they inevitably balk on three. I’ve no trouble wondering if maybe Nicodemus maybe had a similar experience.
Some years ago and a mere six months into this experience of recovering my humanity (which is what recovering from addiction is all about), I told my AA sponsor I was ready to get on with taking the personal inventory of the good and the bad in my life suggested by step four. I asked for his help. It was in his response that I had what I might call my own “Nicodemus moment.”
I’ll discuss all that with you, he said, as soon as you take the third step. I felt insulted. It’d not been all that easy to remain abstinent for six months. I’d had enough humiliation, mostly at my own hand, and i was all that comfortable with it. I was ready to get into the rest of the program, to walk the talk, as they say.
So I said, “What do you mean, third step? You’re an insurance salesman. I’m the theologian.” He smiled. I fumed. And back and forth we went. But he was adamant.
Later, I realized that even with some twenty-five years into priesthood, I’d never taken anything like the third step. I was balking just like all those other religion-resisters — maybe even more so. And it was not until I heard a nun at a twelve-step meeting talk about her own problem with the third step.
She realized, she said, that her problem was that what was not “working” was that she’d been trying to turn her life over to her understanding of God and not to the God of her understanding. So, perhaps with Nicodemus. So, for sure, with me.