Lent II, Year A

Genesis 12:1-8
Romans 4:1-5,13-17
John 3:1-17

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In today's lesson from Genesis, God said to Abram, "You get going. Leave your native culture, your people, your birthplace, your family. You need to go to a new land, a foreign place you do not know, but I will show you. You have to break completely from your past and journey off into the unknown. I will bless you and make your name great. Through you all the peoples of the earth shall be blessed."

God's command to Abram is terrifying. It is almost as horrendous as God's later command for Abraham to take his son, his only son, his precious, beloved son, Isaac, and to offer him up as a burnt sacrifice.(1) These are two of the most demanding and painful commands we can imagine. Abraham obeys God. Abraham trusts God.

In today's epistle, S. Paul commends Abraham's faith to us. He says, "This is Christian faith." It is trusting God when the circumstances give us no reason to do so. It is acting upon the conviction that God loves us even when we don't see or feel his love for us. Abraham is our father, the father of all who believe in God's steadfast love. Paul holds up Abraham to us as a model for us because Abraham had the right relationship with God, and Abraham's relationship with God was holy and right not because of his actions, but because of his faith. Paul says that Abraham was justified with God, had the right relationship to God – the relationship we want, because of his faith, not his works.

Paul is writing to debunk the religious value of Jewish ethnic practices, practices used to distinguish themselves from others, such things as male circumcision, kosher handling of food, Sabbath observance. The Jewish law, given by Moses, requires all of these things. Paul argues that these identity markers do not set us right with God, they do not build our relationship with God.

This theme also implicitly runs through today's gospel. S. John has just described Jesus cleansing the Temple. Jesus overturned the tables of the money-changers in the Temple. It was a symbolic act to show that the time of Temple worship had come to an end, that Temple sacrifices were no longer valid or necessary. This, of course, is a great threat to the religious establishment. It undermines their authority, and indeed their very identity. It requires the entire nation to re-consider its identity and relationship to God. It is every bit as threatening and challenging as God telling Abram to leave his home and to head out into the unknown.

The Sanhedrin, a council of Jewish elites, the religious establishment, led the opposition to Jesus. Nicodemus, a member of the Sanhedrin and a learned teacher, comes to Jesus to discuss theology. He recognizes that Jesus is from God, that Jesus has authority and authenticity, that Jesus isn't like other rabble rousers. Nicodemus seems to be moved by real devotion and an openness to God. He's trying to figure out what Jesus is doing. Nicodemus is searching for God's message, trying to discern God's command – even if it's a command to break from his past and to get going into the unknown.

I like Nicodemus; he seems to me to be a brave man. Jesus seems to be un-impressed that Nicodemus is taking a step of faith to try to understand what God is doing, that God might be acting contrary to the expectations of his people. Jesus also seems un-impressed to be getting the attention of an important person, a representative of officialdom. Instead of responding with social niceties to Nicodemus confession that Jesus is from God, Jesus challenges him. Jesus tells him, "You need to be born anew, born again, born from above."

Jesus is talking about baptism – where we repent, we turn from our sin and the Spirit comes upon us and makes us new. Baptism is the beginning of our repentance, of changing our ways and orienting our lives to God. It requires humility. Baptism is something that God does to us, not something we do. In effect, Jesus says to Nicodemus, "Your understanding of what it means to be a faithful Jew is wrong. Your understanding of purity and righteousness is wrong. Your understanding of how to enter the Kingdom of God is wrong. You need to re-order your relationship with God entirely." In a way, Jesus is demanding Nicodemus to kill his only beloved son or to embark upon a journey into the unknown.

Nicodemus was a Pharisee. He strictly observed the Jewish law. In his day, like our own, many people had little real desire to follow God. Sure, some would give God some lip-service, but they hadn't really dedicated their lives to following God. Many were far more interested in worldly things than divine things. The Pharisees, however, found meaning and purpose in God. They sacrificed to God. They were committed. They tended to be relatively good neighbors – reliable, presentable, peaceful. But Jesus directs his greatest anger at them – that brood of vipers, those hypocrites, those whited-sepulchers. He says, "Outwardly you appear beautiful and righteous, but within you are full of death and impurity and hypocrisy." (Mt 23:27)

The spiritual disease of the Pharisees may also attack us and stunt our spiritual growth.(2) If we think that this disease is no danger to us, then we've probably already got it. It is a threat to all religious people, especially high-church Christians like us who have great regard for tradition. We may call the disease ‘moralism' or ‘legalism.' No moralist understands himself to be one. He understands the rules and morals he lives by to be entirely necessary, God-given, and other people are mis-informed.

Moralism and legalism are kinds of idolatry. They substitute morality and custom in the place of God. The logic is to follow rules so as to gain God's favor. A code of behavior becomes the way to win God's love. It has nothing to do with the gospel, nothing to do with faith. It does not trust in God, but in our own efforts. We forget that God saves us, and he does it for free. We don't deserve God's love, and there's nothing we can do to deserve it, but he still loves us. Salvation does not come from following rules, but from trusting God. It's a willingness to leave everything behind and to set out on an unknown journey, to grow and to change, to be surprised.

When our faith becomes legalistic, or moralistic, or Pharisaical, ugly things happen to our souls. We become intolerant and lay heavy burdens upon other people. The Torah, Moses' law, had 613 regulations, but the Pharisees added many, many more, precise rules about how to observe the Sabbath and kosher laws. The code of rules for making God happy expands and expands. People become fanatical as they seek ever harder to observe all of the rules. The exact same thing has happened in Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, as our customs, devotions, and conventions often become enshrined articles of proper faith. Rules and customs accumulate that really have nothing to do with the gospel and can be more important to us than the gospel. These rules and customs can enslave us.

Keeping all these rules and customs becomes a false test of faithfulness for the moralist. We easily become smug, full of pride, implicitly assuming that we are better than other people. We become experts at avoiding disrepute and try to gain status by a fastidious devotion to rules and customs. S. Teresa of Avila prayed, "From silly devotions and sour-faced saints, spare us, O Lord."(3) God loves sinners. He wants contrite hearts, not people who are convinced of their religious health. Someone who suffers, who doubts, who makes love his priority, who looks for mercy and forgiveness, who has shame and regret for his sin, this person is open to God and may know his love and joy.

The longer we're Christians the harder it is to keep perspective, the more likely we become obsessed by tertiary issues, or even trivialities. Initially we become Christians because we're drawn by love, mercy, justice, hope, renewal – the big important stuff, the stuff that gives our lives noble purpose and lifts us up, and then so often with time we get bogged down, worrying about little things, petty things, piddling things. Philip Yancey asks, "Does God care more about nose rings or about urban decay? Grunge music or world hunger? Worship styles or a culture of violence?" (4)

Yancey tells the story of a friend who lectures at Christian colleges and for a while began his remarks by saying, "More than ten thousand people starve to death each day, and most of you don't [care]," except he says that idea with an expletive. He continues, "However, what's even more tragic is that most of you are more concerned about the fact that I just said a bad word than you are about the fact that ten thousand people are going to die today." The president or the chaplain of the college almost always would write the speaker a letter and complain about his foul language, but say nothing of world hunger.(5)

Jesus says to the Pharisees, "Woe to you, hypocrites! For you meticulously tithe mint and dill and cumin, you meticulously look after the herbs and spices, but the big things, the meat of God's law – justice, mercy, compassion, trust – these you neglect." (Mt 23:23) True Christianity doesn't narrow, but expands our minds and our hearts. True Christianity is about trusting God and following him. True Christianity is about love, justice, compassion, forgiveness.

As we go through Lent, and most of us struggle to observe our Lenten rules, let's keep in mind that breaking these rules is not a sin. Rather, we keep these rules to show us not our strength, but our need; we keep these rules not to win God's favor, but to remind us of our lack of trust in God; we keep these rules not to show us how good we are, but to show us our self-centered-ness, our narrowness. True spiritual maturity is not about how pure we are. Rather, it is a profound understanding of how impure we are. We are all sinners, but the good news is that God still loves us, that God fulfilled his promise to Abraham, that God sent his son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved. In Jesus, God has blessed everyone – all of us sinners.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

1. Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses, W.W. Norton (2004), p. 62.

2. This paragraph to the end is derived either directly or from meditation upon Philip Yancey, What's So Amazing About Grace?, Zondervan (1997), pp. 193-210: Ch. 15, ‘Grace Avoidance.'

3. Quoted by Yancey, p. 204.

4. Yancey, p. 201.

5. Ibid.