Grace,
Peace, and Mercy are yours from the triune God.
Amen
I am
humbled and honored to preach my very first sermon at House today. I am so thankful for the witness of love and
grace that this community is to me and to each other and for your support as I
prepare for ministry.
When I
saw that today’s gospel reading included John 3:16, I have to admit that I was
more than a little apprehensive. John
3:16 is probably one of the most often quoted verses of the Bible and we hear
it so frequently that we think we know exactly what it means. I was afraid to
even touch this part of John’s gospel because it has so many heavy connotations
that can be painful, but since here at House we are committed to faithfully
wrestling with the texts, I am going to suggest that it might not mean what we
think it means.
I hesitate to even say the words “born again” here because I
know how painful this particular expression of Christianity has been for some
of my friends in this room. I would like to suggest that we look at being born
again not as a decision that we make as individuals but as something that God
does for us. We are born again not
because we are such great people, but precisely because we need to be saved
from ourselves. We are trying to be our
own God, instead of letting God be God.
I
absolutely think that “born again Christians” have it right when they say that
we must undergo a massive transformation.
But we find ourselves getting into trouble when we try to domesticate
and dictate that transformation for ourselves and others. This is just as
easily seen in evangelical Christian communities as it is in progressive
Christian communities.
In the text, BECAUSE God so loved the world,
God gave his only Son. God’s gift of
love and grace in Jesus Christ came not because we deserved it, but precisely
because we needed it so badly. In our desire to keep God on our side, we ignore
the first part of the verse, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only
son,” in order to get to the part that we think makes us special, “…so that
everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Because
we can be so intent on being saved and comfortable once we have faith, we miss
the first half of the verse, God so loved the world. Not just the clean-cut evangelicals
or the progressive church. All of
it. The entire world. Where we also fall short is thinking that
when we are born again in Christ our lives will be safe and will make
sense. But the fact of the matter is
that being born again can break our hearts.
It means that God has gotten ahold of us and is going to use us in spite
of us. That has been my experience this
week.
As some
of you may know, this past Tuesday I started CPE or Clinical Pastoral Education
at St. Anthony hospital. For the next
ten weeks I will be serving full time as a hospital chaplain, assigned to the
Neuro ICU and Trauma ICU floors, as well as rotating shifts in the Emergency
Room. As I finished a particularly
emotional shift yesterday, I realized there was no way that I could discuss
being born again today without the idea of dying. But this is not the physical kind of dying
that you might associate with a trauma center.
This is about me dying to myself and my ideas of perfection and letting
God be in charge. This is about me
letting go of any control that I think that I might have and instead just being
who God created me to be and being born again in Grace.
Earlier
this week I sent an email to the House prayer list asking for prayers as I
began this internship. I wrote that I
was terrified that I had no idea what I was doing and that I would not be able
to be of service. God proved me wrong on
my second day. Wednesday afternoon I was awaiting the arrival of a Flight For
Life helicopter. As my heart was
pounding, I realized that there was nothing in my life up to this point that
could have prepared me for what I was about to see. There are some things that you wish that you
could un-see, but at that moment, the gruesome trauma was not what I saw. That came later. At that moment, I saw the face of God. I saw Jesus in the bloodied and bruised man
on the stretcher and in the people who were working in perfect harmony to save
his life. This leaves no doubt in my
mind that the Holy Spirit is intimately involved in emergency medicine. Before I was even aware of what I was doing,
I was praying that God be present in that trauma room, and let that
unidentified man on the table know that he was loved and cared for.
This
sort of instinctual letting go and letting God move through me happened a
couple more times this week. Yesterday I
was holding the hand of an exhausted mother when she learned that she would
out-live her middle-aged daughter. There
are no words to say in that situation, but as a dozen people frantically tried
to save this woman’s life, her mother asked me to pray. I said a silent prayer to God that my words
would be what God would have them be, and before I knew it, words were coming
out of my mouth and there is no way that they were my own. My prayer book was six floors below me in the
office, so I needed to fully trust that God would help me find the words to
pray for this family.
My
prayers this week were not perfect, and neither am I, but I learned something:
I am born again each day in Grace. I have
only myself to offer and that is enough if I am open to trusting God and seeing
what can be born through me. My ideas of
perfection in ministry died this week, and were replaced with the
transformative understanding that being fully present requires complete trust
that God will do for me that which I cannot do for myself. I have been born again.
Which
makes me wonder, what if being “born again” has nothing whatsoever to do with a
decision that WE make…has nothing to do with having words, or prayers, or the
right answers, or even self-confidence?
What if rather, it is the result of the wild, all encompassing love of
God? God so loved the world that he sent
his only son to dwell among us in order that we may be saved. God knows just how foolish we can be when we
try to orchestrate our own transformation and has given us the incredible gift
of life in Christ, but first we must die to ourselves in order to be
reborn.
What if
instead of trying to transform ourselves and others, we fall in to the arms of
a God who wants nothing more than to love the entire world back into wholeness?
As I collapsed into my car after my shift yesterday I collapsed into the arms
of a loving God who says you are mine, brokenness and all. You are enough and I love you. Isn’t John
3:16 nothing more than God falling madly in love with us? At our physical birth
we come into the world through no actions of our own. We do not get to choose to be born. We spend
the rest of our lives trying to gain control over ourselves or others or our
surroundings. But these things we grasp at were never ours to hold, much less
control. We also have no control over being born again in Christ. Christ says I love you and you are mine. Welcome to the world.
What if
we look at being born again as something that happens each day through the
boundless grace of God, just as surely as the sun rises? That being born again is not something that
we decide to enact for ourselves, rather it is something that happens to us
every single day. What if being born
again meant acknowledging the brokenness of our humanity and living out God’s own
passion for putting what is broken back together again? Is it possible that being born again by the
power of the spirit has less to do with our own actions, beliefs, and judgment
of others and EVERYTHING to do with falling into the promise of God’s love?
Daily
we die to ourselves and are born again in the baptismal promise of Christ. We
do a pretty great job of screwing things up that we try to control and thinking
that we are running the show, but thanks be to God that we are claimed by
Christ and loved anyway. And that we are
born again tomorrow in love. WELCOME TO THE WORLD…Amen.
