Spirit of Restlessness

Lent 2A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Sometimes change comes when we, like Nicodemus, start to ask questions. Sometimes change simply knocks us off our horse like Paul on the road to Damascus. Less often change comes when we, like Abraham and Sarah, have a radical new vision of what’s possible. More often we resist change with a combination of recrimination and denial.

It took nearly 250 years after the invention of the microscope, from 1590 to 1850, to convince doctors to wash their hands and their surgical instruments to prevent infection. It took nearly as long after the invention of the telescope, from 1608 to 1835 for the Church to admit Copernicus and Galileo were right. The earth is not at the center of the universe.

Civil war, Jim Crow, civil rights, mass incarceration, health disparities parsed by zip code, and cell phone videos have repeatedly exposed the ugly original sin of America that we refuse to fully reckon with. Add to this the violent history of gender equality and sexual orientation. Christian nationalism has brought us face to face with the fact that our religion is more concerned with protecting patriarchy, privilege, and wealth than with the gospel teaching of Jesus. We are all of us, bound up in a culture and economic system of extraction, exploitation, and extinction.

We don’t know what we don’t know, so can hardly be blamed for our ignorance. But once we have seen the truth, how do we unsee it? Willful ignorance is but another name for our sin. But God does not live us in our brokenness. Nicodemus, Abraham, Sarah, and Paul are hunted and haunted by the Holy Spirit to reach for something new they struggled to name that called for change, promised liberation and demanded sacrifice.

Jesus said to Nicodemus, “…no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” (John 3:3). “Teacher, we know,” Nicodemus replied. People who want answers to fit in with what they already know are operating within what psychologists call confirmation bias: they only want to hear what conforms to and confirms their current thinking. Like many people today, he is focused on protecting the superiority of his in-group. (Brian McLaren, “Seeing the Word in Radically New Ways,” Sunday Musings, 2/28/26).

Nicodemus is operating on what we might call a conventional and literalistic level, unaware of his biases and the limitations of his current perspective, so he asks questions that demonstrate his cluelessness. Jesus keeps challenging him to break out of his childish thinking and to join him, not in working for himself alone, or even for his own little group or clique, but to work toward everyone’s welfare, everywhere, no exceptions.
We still struggle just like Nicodemus today. Jesus said, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). Jesus includes everyone. Yet many people have used Jesus’ words to exclude most of humanity, shunting them away among those who don’t believe, or don’t believe properly. This, according to British theologian, Lesslie Newbegin, has become the greatest heresy in the history of monotheism. You can’t claim God’s blessings for yourself, your race, your culture, or your religion, Newbegin says, and leave out and “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” God’s blessings are not exclusive, but rather instrumental.

The profound image of being born again is not about getting a free “get out of hell” card. Jesus wasn’t teaching Nicodemus how to be saved in order get to heaven,’ but to liberate or set people free from the current corrupt kingdoms of this world. The people are ‘perishing’ not by ‘going to hell’ but quite literally by dying through war and oppression. Jesus pointed Nicodemus toward ‘eternal life’ not in heaven’ but to “life of the ages,” in sharp contrast to “life in this present age or regime.” Life “from above,” is life lived on a higher level than life within the current economic, political, and social systems of our human civilization. ‘Eternal life’ becomes a synonym for what Jesus later calls “abundant life.” The “kingdom of God” is not the afterlife where souls go after death, but “what the world would be like if God were sitting on the throne instead of Caesar and Herod.” Imagine a world in which Jesus gave the State of the Union Address. What would the applause lines be? Who would stand and who would remain seated if equality, justice, and restorative love animated public policy?

When we are born from above, we are re-born to the perspective of the oneness of God and humanity. “Being born again,” suggests to us the image of the mother. Historically, the church as faith community, described itself as this mother and the font as the womb from which birth in God arises. What God is bringing to life in us is a new mind and new heart, new eyes, new ears, new hands, and voices. See all has become new. Anyone in Christ is born a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).

We see but do not see. We hear but do not listen. The way to abundant life comes by way of seeing and living according to the mind of God in Christ. The story of Nicodemus is the first of four intimate portraits of followers of Jesus that we will read from John’s Gospel in coming Sundays this Lent. They are the stories which the ancient church chose for those preparing for baptism at the Vigil of Easter. (With joy, we prepare with three of our siblings here at Immanuel who are On the Way and will affirm their baptism at the Easter Vigil—Saturday April 4th, at 7:30 PM.)
Martin Luther once wrote, “faith is a free surrender and a joyous wager on the unseen, untried and unknown goodness of God.” Jesus, the incarnate Word, enters the dark and fearful world with grace like a mighty wind, or a stirring breeze, or a calming breath of fresh air.

The Spirit of Christ confronts the rejecting, unjust world with an invitation and a decision, to believe or not to believe, to see or not to see, to wager or not to wager, to love or not to love. Today Jesus bids us enter the goodness, the otherness, the awesomeness and the mystery of God that surrounds and moves among and within us. The Spirit takes us beyond our words, our understanding. Leave behind what you know or think you know. Like the turbulent winds of March, the winds of the spirit signal that change is coming. See, a new church, a new humanity is being born. Let us be carried by Christ ‘to a new land that God will show you’ (Genesis 12:1)—a land flowing with milk and honey—where “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)