Genesis
12:1-4a blew my mind week #1 in seminary. Prof. Lloyd Bailey explained
how this wasn’t just a thing that happened to Abraham, but was the key to
unlock the entire calling of God’s people – to be blessed, to multiply, to be
given land (a huge problem historically!), and to be a blessing to everybody
else. That’ll preach.
God calls Abraham to go – but where? How
will it work out? I’m reminded of those fishermen who drop their nets to follow
Jesus – but where? How will it work out? Walter Brueggemann calls this “a call
for a dangerous departure from the presumed world of norms and security.”
Risky? Isn’t that what we need? Russ Reno, in his great Brazos commentary,
phrases it like this: “The divine plan injects a new possibility into the flow of history rather than
acting over or upon humanity from the outside.”
Reno sees this text as an answer, an
antidote to the Babel story in Genesis 11, how the fallen world of grasping is
what Abraham is taken from – and that “now God promises to give
Abraham-in-particular what humanity-in-general sought to achieve by its own
hands whether it gathered to build a tower to heaven: a place, a nation, a name
remembered.”
It’s a journey, a pilgrimage. Abraham never
quite arrives, does he? Odd, as part of God’s pledge to him is that he’ll have
land – the most problematical item, if you weigh what’s unfolded through
history, maybe in the whole Old Testament. This pledge of land has caused wars
and irresolvable tensions.
Brueggemann (in his great book on the promise of the land, Chosen), asks “to what extent that theological
claim has come to be or has morphed into an ideological claim that functions as
self-justification.” Indeed.
The other promise is that these chosen ones
will be the way God will bless everybody else. It’s not being chosen to be
protected, or to be granted special blessings, and certainly not to pass
judgment on others. Israel’s will not be a doing for the others, “but that the
life of Israel under the promise will energize and model a way for the other
nations also to receive a blessings from this God” (Brueggemann). Isn’t this
the church’s mission?
Romans
4:1-5, 13-17, a text I won’t linger on now or in my sermon, takes the call
of Abraham and morphs it into something about faith and being reckoned
righteous. I love to dissect Paul’s midrashic read of Abraham and why he
matters in a Bible study, but am not so good at preaching it. Psalm 121, which we read at gravesides,
is also rich in wisdom; for his long journey, Abraham lifted his eyes to uncertain
hills; and Jesus and his family, along with all pilgrims in Bible times, sang
this as they made their way to Jerusalem for Passover – including Jesus’
last.
Think
about it: Nicodemus comes in the dark – like life in the womb, about to be
born. When you were born, the first time, wasn’t it true that “God called you
out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were no people, but now you
are God’s people” (1 Pet. 2:9).
Isn’t it curious that, in explaining this
new birth to Nicodemus, Jesus speaks of being born of water and the spirit.
Recall your first birth. You were in water. Then you emerged, gasping for air,
for a breath – or we can say “spirit,” as the Hebrew ruah, and the Greek pneuma both
mean air, and then by extension, spirit. It’s always water, and then the spirit
when getting born.
That
you “must” be reborn intrigues. The Greek, deî, isn’t must as
in You must do your homework,
or You must report for jury duty.
It’s more like You must come to my
birthday party! or You must
come with me to the hospital to see Fred before he dies. It’s love, it’s a
deeply personal, can’t-miss-it necessity – like birth.
Given
the ways preachers like Whitefield and Graham conducted revivals seeking new
births that were marked by a swooning of emotion, it’s important to realize
that Jesus didn’t ask Nicodemus to feel anything. There are, of course,
intense feelings at birth. The mother giving birth may be overwhelmed with an
intensity of joy, or anything else along a broad spectrum of emotion. The one
being born though: is birth an emotional high for the baby?
Of
course, the feelings mother and child share in childbirth are the pains,
the excruciating squeezes, the tearing of flesh and sometimes the breaking of
bones. Could Jesus have imagined such agony when pressing us toward a new
birth? Jesus courageously embraced pain, and invited us to follow. Paul,
imprisoned and beaten multiple times within an inch of his life for following
Jesus, wrote that “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself
bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God… provided we suffer
with him” (Rom. 8:15-16). No wonder we prefer a happy emotional kind of rebirth
at a revival, over against the costly discipleship that is the new life Jesus
has in mind for us. It isn’t the feeling, but the fact of the new birth, and
the hard facts of union with Jesus in a world puzzled or hostile to his ways.
By
now, of course, we see that Jesus wasn’t asking Nicodemus to behave a little
better. It’s radical, a total shift of focus, priorities, behaviors and habits.
Bultmann explains it perfectly: “Rebirth means… something more than an
improvement in man; it means that man receives a new origin, and this is
manifestly something which he cannot give himself.” My first birth defined my
origin as a Howell. I have the DNA, I favor my dad, I am who I am. How could I
come by a new and different origin? Let’s look to St. Francis of Assisi.
What
is we ponder “born again” from the mother’s side? Anne Enright, who shows no
evident interest in religion: “A child came out of me. I cannot understand
this, or try to explain it. Except to say that my past life has become foreign
to me. Except to say that I am prey, for the rest of my life, to every small
thing.” Isn’t this what being with Jesus, a child who came out of his
mother, is like? The past is laughably past. Every small thing, devoted to this
Jesus, matters.
Perhaps being born again is like the discovery so many new moms
make, articulated beautifully in John O’Donohue’s words:
Once it began, you were no
longer your own.
A new, more courageous you, offering
itself
In a new way to a presence you can sense
But you have not seen or known.
I'd
be remiss, if we're trying to parse John 3:16 in light of all this Birth stuff
(and oh my gosh, if you're having Holy Communion!), if I didn't share Rachel
Marie Stone's marvelous envisioning of Mary's great gift to us: "A girl
was in labor with God. She groaned and sweated and arched her back, crying out
for her deliverance and finally delivering God, God’s head pressing on her
cervix, emerging from her vagina, perhaps tearing her flesh a little; God the
Son, her Son, covered in vernix and blood, the infant God’s first breath the
close air of crowded quarters… God the Son, her Son, pressed to her bare
breast… God the Son, her Son, drank deeply from his mother. Drink, my
beloved. This is my body, broken for you."
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