A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley

Second Sunday in Lent, March 8, 2020

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

We have many ways to think of Lent. It can be a season for bringing more discipline and focus into our lives, a season to renew our attentiveness to God in prayer and meditation, a season for spiritual stimulation through reading, a season for cultivating quiet and centeredness, a season to reflect on our mortality—it does start off with those admonitory ashes! These can all be good ways of practicing Lent. They meet a variety of needs in our spiritual lives. Perhaps each of us has our own preference—a preference that may change at different points in our lives. 

But today’s readings have prompted me to think of Lent in yet another way—as a season of adventuring, of risking a break with our existing assumptions about life in order to see if God has something more to tell us, something more to give us, something more that we hadn’t been aware of yet or, if we were, were perhaps feeling inadequate to.

Begin with Abram. In antiquity, leaving your family was a very chancy business. People in our time and place move pretty freely away from their families. You can stay in touch by electronic means; you can go visit without too much trouble; the laws may even be more or less the same in your new place. In other ages, there was much more risk involved. And, at this point, Abram had nothing more to rely on than a promise. 

When he left Haran, he couldn’t know exactly what problems he might face, what resources he might have to face them with, what enemies he might encounter, what allies he might find. Nor could he know what family of his own he might build, still less what an extraordinary history would attend his many descendants. He started out trusting the God who had promised him a blessing, and he ventured everything on it. And all the rest of the Biblical story, from this point on, of course, depends on Abram’s venture. 

And in the process—through dangerous times and peaceful times, through hard times and prosperous times—Abram came to know the God who called him more and more deeply. He come to understand that God’s call was a sign of love for him, something he could never have expected, much less worked for. He came to see that God had offered him friendship and that God wanted Abram’s friendship, too.

Would God have abandoned Abram if he’d refused to take the risk? I don’t think so. The God I have come to know in my life isn’t short-tempered or huffy or quick to break relationships. God would still have been at Abram’s side. But Abram came to know God in ways that became possible only as he took that initial risk, stepping out into the unknown on the strength of a promise.

It’s not so different with Nicodemus in the story we heard from the Gospel of John. Jesus is inviting him to an adventure—a different kind of adventure, but still an adventure. Nicodemus is a person who ought to know God pretty well. He’s very devout; he’s even a teacher of religion. And he’s a person of high status both religiously and politically. And yet, he recognizes, in Jesus, odd outsider though he is, someone who is closer to God than he is himself. 

Nicodemus isn’t a unique figure. It’s fairly easy for people to be very devout or to know a lot about religion without in fact being very close to God. Religion can become an end in its own right—a way to organize your life, a fascinating subject to dig into and learn more about, perhaps a way to reassure yourself that you are among the chosen, while God really couldn’t much like all those rather careless, indifferent, self-indulgent people around you. 

It’s not that religion is bad in itself. It’s almost the only way we have of thinking and speaking about God. But like everything human, it’s subject to abuse. That’s one reason why so many people are deeply suspicious of religion in our time. They’ve seen the abuse in action. But Jesus doesn’t ask Nicodemus to give up religion. He asks him to pass more deeply into it and through it to communion with God’s own self, to a new awareness of God’s love. Nicodemus has all the right words, but he needs to grasp the poem. He has the right notes, but he still has to grasp the tune. He has the right moves, but he isn’t dancing the dance. He needs to be born anew—or from above (the Greek word in question can mean either thing). He needs to be born of the Spirit. 

That could be a big risk for a community leader who is an expert on his religion and a prominent practitioner of it. It could wind up getting him in a dangerous spot in terms of public opinion. But it could also be like Abram arriving in the Promised Land. “Oh, this is what it’s all about—this trust, this hope, this love, this friendship with God, this new way of being in the world.”

And it seems that Nicodemus took the risk. For we will meet him again later in John’s Gospel. As a member of the Sanhedrin, he will later try to secure a fair trial for Jesus when some of his colleagues are more in the mood for a lynching. After the crucifixion, he will join Joseph of Arimathea, another secret disciple, in burying Jesus (19:39). It seems that he did indeed find something of what Jesus was pointing him toward. His first adventure was in looking deeper into his religion and finding there the love and friendship of God. And the adventure continued as he began to live that love and friendship out in his world, sometimes at real risk to himself.

And Paul is making the same point when he brings us back to the figure of Abraham. What was so distinguished about Abraham? Was it his piety? No. It was his willingness to venture. Abraham didn’t wait till he had made himself worthy of God; he just took the gift of God’s love as it was offered to him and launched out into the world. And that, says Paul, is what we all need. 

It sounds good, doesn’t it? God loves you, has always loved you, will always love you. You don’t have to be perfect. In fact, you can’t make God love you any more than God already does because there isn’t such a thing as more love than God is already pouring out on you. It’s the whole bucketful, dumped right on you. 

It should make us glad, right? Actually, it tends to make us nervous.

Why? Because love like that is pure gift, pure grace. You don’t own it. You can’t take charge of it. You can’t even manipulate it, because God knows you inside and out already—probably better than you know yourself. All this can be a little scary. We may wish we had some claims of our own in the matter, some virtues of our own in the bank that we could leverage for what we want. I think that’s why religious people are always to some degree in danger of shutting ourselves up inside our religion and treating it as something that belongs to us and makes more worthy. That way, we think we can earn God’s love.

But there’s nothing of ultimate importance in this life except the love of God, which invites you to share love with God and with all the others God loves. And it’s the consciousness of that love that enabled Abram and Nicodemus and Paul and any number of other saints since to take risks, to venture out, to do new and wonderful things in their lives. 

Perhaps your call, like Abram’s or Nicodemus’s, is to new places or tasks or spiritual discoveries. But for all of us, always, the call is to accept the reality of this extraordinary, all-embracing love of God for each one of us and to take it as our intimate companion as we step into the future that lies ahead of us.

And our Psalm today gives us the right music for the adventure. Bear it in mind this Lent:

I lift up my eyes to the hills;

from where is my help to come?

My help comes from God,

the maker of heaven and earth.

God will not let your foot be moved;

the One who watches over you will not fall asleep.

. . . . . 

God shall preserve you from all evil,

and is the one who shall keep you safe.

God shall watch over your going out and your coming in,

from this time forth for evermore.

[translation from The Saint Helena Psalter, copyright 2004]