A long time ago, I was a young priest seeking a new cure, and I dutifully sent my resume and profile to wherever the church’s computer said that I might be a decent match. One of those churches was in Virginia. They called me up for an interview. Now they were polite, but they were not really interested in a newbie priest from Connecticut, no matter how nice I was.
That is, until I mentioned that I was born in Virginia and was baptized at
an old, historic parish there. My, did their tone shift! It did not matter that
for all practical purposes I had not set foot in the Old Dominion since I was
two, my pedigree had clearly improved.
On the other hand, I only grew up in Massachusetts
and Connecticut, which never made me a true New Englander. I once asked a
parishioner of my first parish in Northeast Connecticut (a woman who could
trace her ancestors back to the first Puritans in New England) about this and
she said “Well, if a cat has kittens in an oven, does that make them biscuits?”
Now, I’ve lived in Southwest Florida
for five years and all I know is that because I live here year round and don't make the annual southbound trek down either I-75 or I-95, I am no longer a “snowbird,” but does
that make me a Floridian? Who knows? Whatever the case, where we are raised has
an effect on us. Location matters.
Jesus was not born in his hometown,
either. In today’s Gospel he talks about something far more serious and he
talked to Nicodemus about how our spiritual birth is far more important than our
physical birth. Nicodemus came to Jesus with a sort of hesitant curiosity.
Nicodemus was a leader of the Pharisees and he had questions.
Now, this may come as a surprise to you, but despite what you may have heard, the Pharisees were actually the good guys of Jesus’ day. Think of them as sort of first-century Episcopalians. Today, we think of Pharisees as legalistic, my way or the highway kind of folks, maybe even fundamentalist. But of all the different movements and styles of Judaism in the first and second centuries, Pharisaism was probably the closest to what Jesus taught and what Christianity became.
One of the great errors that many
Christians make today is to assume that to be a good Jew meant (and means) following
all these arcane rules and rituals strictly and by the book. It is one of the
great slanders that Christians perpetrate on our Jewish sisters and brothers
(and by extension our Muslim siblings): that their faith is all about rules and our faith
is all about grace! You hear it all the time from pulpits and Christian radio, "They are all about "law," but we are all grace all the time!" And nothing ends an argument among Christians more quickly
than when one side evokes a kind of theological Godwin’s Law by accusing their opponent of being
“pharisaical.”
Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar who teaches New Testament and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University wrote about the bad rap that Pharisees get from many preachers and New Testament scholars and sums it up this way: "After two millennia, surely the time has come to stop bearing false witness against Pharisees and their Jewish descendants. Christianity does not need to bear false witness against Judaism in order to proclaim its good news."
Okay, then, so just who were these guys, anyway? The fact is that the Pharisees sought to modernize things—to revise Jewish consciousness about faith and geography--to get Judaism out of the Temple in Jerusalem and into the places were Jews actually lived, all across the ancient world. They represented the working and merchant classes of 1st century Jewish culture.
Before the Pharisees, many (but not all) Jews whether they lived in Galilee or Alexandria or Rome or Ethiopia, may not have felt complete until they went to the Temple in Jerusalem at least once in their lives. The Pharisees, on the other hand, said that being Jewish is a matter of knowing who you are and about loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind and our neighbors as ourselves. They wanted the Jews of their day to live their faith from their hearts, and their ethics to grow out of that faith. Pharisees taught that the local synagogue—their local community—was the center of Jewish life, not the Temple.
Jesus was deeply influenced by Pharisaism from a young age. I'll bet that the rabbis who taught him as a youngster were Pharisees (Luke 2:41-52). Pharisees set the stage for Judaism to survive the destruction
of the Temple in 70 AD and their exile and dispersion outside of Palestine and into
Europe, Africa and Asia Minor. In short, modern Judaism in all its forms is a direct descendant of Pharisaism!
So Jesus and Nicodemus have a lot in
common! Both want to relocate the heart of Judaism from a place to a people…
not just of ancestry but of faithfulness. Both teachers agree that our morals
and ethics grow out of the heart of our faith… that what we do shows who and
whose we are. But while both Jesus and Nicodemus understand that the Spirit is
not confined to a building, no matter how local, or even a nation, for that matter, Jesus takes it a step further
when he says, "Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God
without being born from above."
I am sure that you’ve heard the phrase before. It’s usually translated as being “born again.” It could mean that, or "You must be born anew." But, basically, the word means "from above." When Jesus tells Nicodemus that one must be born from above, he is talking about a kind of spiritual awakening that is initiated and animated by God which enlivens and re-defines us.
Archbishop William Temple, the Archbishop
of Canterbury during World War II, was once asked if he was born again. He
said, “I’ve been born again, I am being born again, and I hope to be born again
tomorrow.” He was not talking about salvation, but about sanctification. He was
talking about the life of holiness. All of us have the chance to change, to
grow, to deepen our life in Christ, as Jesus reminds us in John 3:8 that
"The wind blows where it chooses."
Listening for that wind is one of the
great disciplines of the Christian life. Awaiting the chance to be born again
and again is one of the great disciplines of the Christian life. And a good
place to start is in our Lenten discipline today.
The wind of re-birth is the wind of
freedom and love, and it is far stronger than where we typically imagine where
we find stability in life. It is stronger than the place where we were born,
stronger than our ancestry, stronger than what Jesus calls the flesh. So, even
though it may blow us to new places, we are – in the Spirit – more stable than
ever!
One of things I’ve discovered since
moving to Southwest Florida is that everybody here is from someplace. But, as
Christians, we are natives of that place which Jesus calls the kingdom of God,
which is a kingdom which we enter by faith and baptism. Life in God’s reign is the
life of walking with Jesus and letting our identities be shaped and re-shaped
by this marvelous wind, this breath of the living God.
The location that matters the most is our heart. In living our life in Christ, we have
a choice: we can think of it as a punch-list of tasks we have to accomplish; or we can see the movement from
baptism and Eucharist, of daily prayer and sacraments, as the places where we
discover again and again our identity in Christ.
Lent is our time to discover again
that no matter where we are or where we are from, God is always present to us
and that our identity is found with Christ. As baptized people, we are always at
home with Christ.
You have been born. By faith and
baptism you have been born from above. And as you grow and mature in Christ, in
your prayer, your encounter with Scripture, in your Sacramental living you have
been born again and again and again. Every time we allow ourselves follow the
wind of God, the Spirit of God, we find ourselves located in the heart of God
and our identity is located in of grace and power.
Lent is our time for us to discover
again that no matter where we are or where we are from, God is always present
to us and that our identity is found with Christ. As baptized people, we are always
at home with Christ.
Here is the website for St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida
Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here
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