Always We Begin Again

Always We Begin Again

By Lee Ann Rathbun

May 27, 2018

So it may seem very unlikely to you, but this guy Nicodemus in Israel that Griff just read about reminds me in some way of me in eighth grade.  That may seem very unlikely—here we’ve got a man who was a part of the Jewish religious establishment and known as a teacher in Israel and a girl hundreds of years later in eighth grade living with her parents in Egypt.  So let me tell you more. 

When I was in eighth grade, I moved with my parents from Cairo, Egypt, where my dad worked for Esso, or now Exxon in offshore drilling.  Halfway through that year, my dad was transferred and we were on our way to London, England.  I was thrilled and excited but also felt the same kind of nervous that I always did having to show up at a new school in the middle of year, not knowing anyone. 

We lived in a community outside of London so getting to school for me meant taking a train into Waterloo station and then a subway ride after that and then a few block walk there to my school.  I remember doing the route with my mom initially and feeling a little daunted by navigating all of this public transportation but at the same time excited that I had a train and tube pass in my pocket and all the freedom that could mean as a 13 year old.

 

As it turned out I rode the train each day with several other kids from the American school and they ended up being my best friends.  Having about an hour together in the morning and afternoon during our commute gave us lots of time to get to know each other.

 

One of the things that I started noticing about that group of kids was how they talked about regular teenage stuff and we had fun and they seemed to truly care about me-- that I really mattered to them.  For the first time, I felt accepted and acceptable even though inside I carried shame about the domestic abuse and violence that was happening in my home.  I had this secret shame of not wanting others to know that while my family appeared pretty “normal” on the outside as church going Christians, I often had a pretty terrifying home life.  I felt a new freedom, though, with this group of peers to share my struggles and I felt like they heard me and cared for me.  That group of students and their love for me created the kind of community that made me feel not alone anymore and hopeful again and that I just knew I wanted to know more about what this all meant for me.

  

I knew I was a Christian and had been to Sunday School and knew a lot of Bible stories and but I didn’t know much until this group of teenagers came into my life about what it meant to really know on a deep level how much God loved me and desired a relationship with me. It was through them that I began to get a glimpse of the extravagant love of this God who loved me so much that he sent Jesus into the world to embody that love.  And I wanted to know more.

In a sense, that is in some ways how I imagine Nicodemus in this story got to Jesus.  He knew a lot about religion as a Pharisee but had maybe witnessed something else in the community around Jesus.   They had some very different, even subversive ideas about God and what the kingdom of God meant and they loved deeply.  And maybe that drew him to want to know more and show up at night and talk with Jesus himself.

 

But Nicodemus and I maybe knew in our heads about God but we just didn’t know so much about the fullness or depth of what a relationship with God can mean until we saw it with skin on lived out in real people. Woven throughout John’s gospel is this theme of the difference between religion and relationship.  The Pharisees or religious establishment, represented ritualistic religion based on a model of dominance and Jesus here is instead inviting Nicodemus or rather just flat out stating that there’s a whole other world—a kingdom vision-- to what God is offering him that comes from a relationship with God.

 

Nicodemus begins the conversation with what he knows-- “"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."  In effect he was saying what he as part of the religious establishment knew.

 

But Jesus’ response is far from what Nicodemus is expecting.  He says you may think you’ve got what this faith journey means but you don’t really.  Jesus does, as he does it seems with everyone who approaches him in this gospel including the Samaritan woman at the well, respond in a way that they don’t necessarily understand. But he calls each one to a deeper level of meaning that seems kind of confusing to them and not so easy to make sense of initially.

 

Jesus says, "Very truly, I tell you—which in other translations is “verily, verily” which basically means “listen up.”  This is important.  “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above."  Which can also mean born “anew” or “again.”

And when Nicodemus is scratching his head about what that all means, Jesus repeats it again and then again.  We must be born of the spirit—and this is indeed a radical spirit of freedom.  “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."  People led by the spirit can be unpredictable to this world and certainly not bound by the status quo.  Little did I know as that eighth grader on the train with my friends in London that that Spirit would lead me on this crazy adventure of becoming an ordained Baptist minister.

The last we hear from Nicodemus in this passage is his question, “How can this be?”  And I get that.  I would probably be stuck there, too.  He seems caught on this literal meaning of birth.  Jesus goes on in this passage that understanding what this means is about faith and belief.  And then he ends with what is most important about this new birth – that it’s all about God and God is love.

Love so extravagant and seeking of relationship with the world that God self-emptied and the sent Jesus among us so we might learn what this love really looks like with skin on.  As persons created in the image of this God, Jesus invites us to allow that “of Godness” or that spirit of Love to be birthed fully in us.

   

One of our favorite teachers, Richard Rohr, offers that “God, by every religion’s best definition, is love (1 John 4:16). What follows, of course, is that if we are God’s creatures, then love is what we are too, at our deepest core and final identity. When we live consciously within this love, we will not be afraid to die, because love is eternal, and that core self is indestructible. ‘Love never ends’ (1 Corinthians 13:8). You already know that intuitively. Life is never about being correct (or about having right knowledge about God), but only and always about being connected. Our only holiness is by participation and surrender to the Body of Love.”  Now that is something to celebrate on Trinity Sunday.

This action of God’s love sending Jesus was not about condemning the world but about healing or restoring the world to wholeness.  So how do we participate in this healing action of love in the world?

This is a question that is before our community and as Griff so meaningfully shared last week in the vision for our congregation this year, it is one of deepening and doing our faith.  It’s about building community among us and about putting hands and feet to our love through exploring with action what it means to be a downtown church.

 

In Griff’s words, “We as a community are in a time of birthing (the threshold, the middle space, the in between), of being called to that liminal space.  That place where we learn what we need to let go of and become open to the new, to what we don’t yet know.”

But all of this happens while we live and breathe the air of the world and culture around us.  Learning the ways of love is a matter of unlearning or letting go of deep patterns of domination and submission and passivity and violence.  Patterns that we, in our culture have, often without even thinking, come to believe are just the way things are.  The good news is that we are part of a tradition in which we have a great company of fellow pilgrims and Jesus followers who have also been on this path, too, of rebirth both individually and communally.

 

Going way back to the early Christian monastics, they knew that learning to live out this extravagant love for people and each other takes more than just the desire to love.  Sure, the idea of love can make us feel warm toward others but love is an action. The virtues, or these loving actions, that the monastics hold out to us stand in real opposition to our world of competitiveness, oppression, rugged individualism, envy, the need to get even for hurts and the kind of pride that will not admit fault to another person.

 

As Christ followers we make choices about ways of being love in the world that we want want to grow into—this is what the monastics call the “virtues.”  I think I’ve always tended to veer away from that word, “virtue,” because immediately I think of some holier than thou expectation of me or my life rather than simply a pattern for learning about loving.

 

But that’s what I appreciate so much about the wisdom from these desert monks.  It’s far from being about some competition to be holy but is instead a down-to-earth honoring of who we are as people living our daily lives.  It’s ways we can be spiritual midwives for one another being birthed into this extravagant love of God.

In her book, To Pray and to Love: Conversations on Prayer with the Early Church,  Roberta Bondi, writes about four virtues that are applicable to our journey together as contemporary Christians in community and in the Austin downtown.  Even if they sound a little clunky to our ears, stay with me here— these virtues are prayer, humility, discernment and consultation.

It may seem strange to think of prayer as a virtue or a pattern of being that is a way of love.  Prayer as a template for love.  In so many stories of the early teachers in these monastic communities they asked for prayer themselves.  There was a mutuality in it as they committed to prayer for each other’s growth, safety, healing, encouragement, understanding and transformation.  They knew they needed it.  We tend to offer our “thoughts and prayers” for one another in a crisis or struggle or when a need is expressed.  But how do we cultivate a commitment to each other’s spiritual growth in prayer? What might that look like to become a community that is radically steeped in prayer?

 

A second virtue is that of humility which was considered the basic of all virtues and a distinguishing mark of the Christian.  It’s about a freedom to be human among humans.  This speaks to our ego-driven culture today as a call back to our true identity as the beloved of God.  Within that identity I have the security I need to take responsibility for when I mess up or am wrong and not be humiliated.   I can also accept thanks or praise from others without feeling embarrassed.

 

We’re realistic about what it means to be human with vulnerabilities and so we can abide with ourselves and others when we make mistakes, even serious ones. It’s about letting go of the tyranny of perfectionism.

Humility is also about knowing that the little things we do count.  The daily attention to the ones we love like making lunches or taking out the trash.

 

Another aspect of humility that I thought was particularly interesting was an abandonment of purity as the main goal of the Christian life.  All the effort sometimes expended in trying to figure out whether ours or others’ motives or actions are “right” or pure can keep us from just doing the work of focusing on the real needs of people.

A third virtue is that of discernment.  This is all about seeking the wisdom to know when our ideologies or theologies or ways of relating to the world don’t apply anymore or need adjusting or updating.  It’s whatever letting go is needed in order to be more congruent with kingdom living—to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with our Lord.  It’s also about what I would consider to be differentiation.  How do we give space for reflection and then are able to separate our reactions from our responses?  It also entails careful, attentive listening to each other to seek to understand.  How do we hear each others’ needs or perspectives without our own “stuff” getting in the way?

A fourth virtue is what the monastics called, “consultation” or acknowledging and accepting our dependence on one another for growth, encouragement, support, and insight.  We need community.  As that eighth grader with my friends on that train, I desperately needed the support and compassion of that community.  As a mother, wife and minister, I need this community to love me and to help me to grow into more of the fullness of who I was created to be.

 

Admitting need can be an especially difficult challenge for us Enneagram “2’s” who  are often not in touch with our own needs and get caught up with pride that we don’t have needs while all the time being certainly willing to help others.  Another aspect of this “consultation”—kind of a strange word-- is about cultivating the kind of community in which authentic sharing of ourselves is invited.  Not requiring each other to assimilate our differences into an “acceptable” culture we’ve created or way of being that fits a particular box.

    

The 6^th century Italian monk, St. Benedict, created guidelines or precepts for the monks in his community that are now known as the Rule of St. Benedict.  One of these precepts that underlines all of them are the words: “Always we begin again.”

 

This reminds me of practicing piano and my teacher saying those words after I messed up and gently inviting me to begin again.  Living out patterns of being or virtues that encourage the reemergence or new birth of the Divine from within is based on the core of our faith—that we can and are always in this process of being born anew.  And we can indeed begin again.

Prayer, humility, discernment, and consultation.  Maybe that can be a place to start beginning again.

In the passage in Isaiah to be read in a few moments, listen for Isaiah’s response to this strange vision he has of an overwhelming encounter with the holy, powerful God.  In the presence of God’s holiness, Isaiah is acutely aware and humbled by his own sinfulness as he exclaims that “he is a man of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips.”  A way was provided for his forgiveness and his guilt departed and he offered an immediate response.    

As Jesus followers, we also have a way provided for us to be forgiven.  And for that same powerful God’s spirit to be birthed anew in each of us and in our community.  May our response to that call to be about Love in this world indeed be “Here am I, send me!”

Amen.