Sermon of February 20, 2005
Presented by Rev. Julia Williamson
Scripture lesson: John 3:1-16

“Jesus Came to Bridge the Gap Between... Heaven and Earth”

I’d like you to think back for a moment, if you can, to a time when you were learning how to swim. If you never learned how to swim, imagine where you’d like to learn how to swim, and what it might be like. If you did have lessons, can you remember where you were? Was it in a pool, or the ocean, or maybe right here at Bolton Lake ? See if you can remember any details...  When I do this, I remember being on Cape Cod, in Chatham , down on the beach, before that big storm broke through the outer beach and brought the open ocean in. Back then the water was calm and friendly.  I remember my mother making me take swim lessons and I can remember learning how to float. The instructor would tell me, just relax, and she’d put her hand just lightly under my back, and say, now float! And I’d be all nervous, and not relaxed, and I didn’t want water getting in my ears, so I’d try to keep my head up, and then it wouldn’t work. But finally one day I got the idea. I put my head back, let the water come up over my ears, and relaxed all my muscles, and I was floating! This was the closest thing I knew to heaven on earth.

When Nicodemus visits Jesus and asks him all those questions, he too is trying to learn how to float. But he doesn’t quite know how to go about it. He knows Jesus is a teacher who comes from God. Nicodemus is drawn to him, but he’s also a little unsure of himself. He’s not sure he wants to be seen by the other Pharisees, so he comes to Jesus at night. And Jesus says to him, “... no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above.” There’s something very intriguing about that phrase “born from above” that the English language misses. In Greek, the original language of this text, there is one word “anothen” which means both “to be born from above” and “born again”. Because we don’t have an English equivalent, the translators have to choose one or the other, so in your Bible you may see a note indicating the other possible translation. But Nicodemus hears Jesus say at the same time, “you must be born again and born from above.”  And this makes him squirm a little and tense up his muscles because he doesn’t understand what Jesus is telling him. So he blurts out the rather silly question about going back inside your mother and being literally, physically born again. And instead of saying something like, “that’s ridiculous Nicodemus, you know you can’t do that! That’s not what I mean at all!” Jesus simply goes on to say, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” We read this and we hear water, as in baptism, yet Nicodemus still doesn’t understand. He hasn’t learned to float. He’s still thrashing about. And we’re going to leave him there for just a minute...

To back up the perspective a bit, to get the bigger picture of what this story is all about and how it can help us see Jesus bridging the gap between heaven and earth, it’s important to understand what was going on when this Gospel was being written, around the years 100-110. People were coming to terms with the idea that Jesus wasn’t coming back right away. Right after Jesus’ death and resurrection, people believed that Jesus was going to return to earth right away, bringing with him heaven on earth. This was going to be God’s Kingdom. When Jesus came back, justice and peace and all the good things people yearn for, were going to be a reality. Things were going to be different! That was the heaven everybody was waiting for.

And then the years went by, and Jesus didn’t come back. And people began to wonder if they had misinterpreted what Jesus meant. Maybe he wasn’t coming back right away after all. Maybe instead, God’s kingdom is right here, right now. Maybe we have the means inside of us to find heaven on earth. Maybe that’s what Jesus meant when he said “you must be born again, or from above.” You must learn how to float, you must learn how to find heaven right here on earth.  Just like Nicodemus, we are trying to float. By this I mean, we are trying to nurture a faith that sustains us through the tough times, and a faith that leads us into truly loving our God and our neighbor.

And one of the challenges might be that we have made our faith more a matter of the head than of the heart. And here I must tell you about this book by Marcus Borg called The Heart of Christianity and his way of looking at faith which I found very intriguing. He points out that in the past 200 years or so, faith has become a matter of the head. The idea is that if we just believe what the Bible tells us, if we believe in Jesus, all will be well and we will go to heaven when we die. This tends to make things purely a matter of the head.  And that’s where we lose some people.  And, more importantly,  I’m not sure that’s what Jesus meant. I think Jesus was more about the heart than the head.

Take for example John 3:16, that beloved verse many of us memorized in Sunday School.  “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.” It’s a beautiful verse. On the other hand, sometimes it can rub the wrong way, when it is read literally and judgmentally and not with love. The key lies in the word “believe”. What does it mean to believe in Jesus? And is this more a matter of the head or of the heart? Marcus Borg points out that the word believe is closely related to the Latin word credo. Today we translate credo as “I believe” which is taken to mean “I literally agree”, like in the beginning of our creeds. Take the Apostle’s creed here in our hymnal. It starts, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.”  Yet Borg points out that a translation closer to the Latin roots of the word would be “I give my heart to”.  So see how this feels different: “I give my heart to God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” and so on. Doesn’t it have a different feeling? For some people the literalism of the Bible is a stumbling block to faith. Like Nicodemus we thrash about trying to make literal sense of Jesus’ words, or more likely today, some people dismiss them altogether.  Yet, can you see how the words “I give my heart to” might loosen up that stumbling block a little and help more people to float and to experience heaven on earth?

So we take the word faith and reclaim the richness of meaning behind it. Faith means belief, as in credo, “I believe” or better yet, “I give my heart to” Faith also means trust, as in trusting that the water will hold you up, which could then become trusting that things will turn out OK, trusting that our children will make good choices, trusting that our spouses and other loved ones are doing the best they can in loving us and meeting our needs, so that we in turn are free to love them the best we know how. That is faith as trust. That is finding heaven on earth.

And finally there is faith as vision, as a way of seeing the whole. Do you and I look out on the world and see it as threatening and hostile, or as life-giving and nurturing? If the latter is the case, then we are beginning to float, we are beginning to find heaven on earth. There is some evidence that Nicodemus finally understood Jesus’ message and stopped thrashing about. He appears two more times in John’s Gospel. In chapter 7, when the temple police are trying to figure out what to do about Jesus, Nicodemus reminds them not to judge people without first giving them a hearing. That was a pretty bold thing to say, considering he was a Pharisee, one of the guys who didn’t like Jesus at all! Then he appears in chapter 19 with 100 pounds of myrrh and aloe and helps Joseph of Arimathea to wrap Jesus’ body and place it in the garden tomb. There it is. Nicodemus gave his heart to Jesus. He trusted in Jesus. He saw that Jesus did come to bridge the gap between heaven and earth. May all of us feel this truth deep within our hearts. Amen.

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