June 7, 2009 Des Moines

Sermon Text: John 3:1-17

Creating the Space for More

Once upon a time, there was a woman who set out to discover the meaning of life. First she read everything she could get her hands on -- history, philosophy, psychology, religion. While she became a very smart person, nothing she read gave her the answer she was looking for. She found other smart people and asked them about the meaning of life, but while their discussions were long and lively, no two of them agreed on the same thing and still she had no answer.

Finally she put all her belongings in storage and set off in search of the meaning of life. She went to South America. She went to India. Everywhere she went, people told her they did not know the meaning of life, but they had heard of a man who did, only they were not sure where he lived. She asked about him in every country on earth until finally, deep in the Himalayas, someone told her how to reach his house -- a tiny little hut perched on the side of a mountain just below the tree line.

She climbed and climbed to reach his front door. When she finally got there, with knuckles so cold they hardly worked, she knocked.

“Yes?” said the kind-looking old man who opened it. She thought she would die of happiness.

“I have come halfway around the world to ask you one question,” she said, gasping for breath. “What is the meaning of life?”

“Please come in and have some tea,” the old man said.

“No,” she said. “I mean, no thank you. I didn’t come all this way for tea. I came for an answer. Won’t you tell me, please, what is the meaning of life?”

“We shall have tea,” the old man said, so she gave up and came inside. While he was brewing the tea she caught her breath and began telling him about all the books she had read, all the people she had met, all the places she had been. The old man listened (which was just as well, since his visitor did not leave any room for him to reply), and as she talked he placed a fragile tea cup in her hand. Then he began to pour the tea.

She was so busy talking that she did not notice when the tea cup was full, so the old man just kept pouring until the tea ran over the sides of the cup and spilled to the floor in a steaming waterfall.

“What are you doing?!” she yelled when the tea burned her hand. “It’s full, can’t you see that? Stop! There’s no more room!”

“Just so,” the old man said to her. “You come here wanting something from me, but what am I to do? There is no more room in your cup. Come back when it is empty and then we will talk.” (Barbara Brown Taylor in “Stay for Tea, Nicodemus”, Christian Century February 21, 1996, p. 195).

Nicodemus was a man caught in a storm. He, too, was a man of fullness, a man of control, punctuality, order, and reason. But he was being blown mercilessly along the street, trying best he could to keep his hat from becoming a kite, and his coat down so that the rain didn’t soak him to the skin. Wind and water. It was a disturbing, uncomfortable situation for such a procedural man to be in. And it was all in his head; or perhaps, we might say, in his soul.

He was a Pharisee of the Jews, a leader with power and responsibility; a dedication to doing things right, and knowing right when he saw it. But perhaps Nicodemus was something more. The two verses that serve as transition words between the last story and this morning’s story say that “While Jesus was in Jerusalem for the Passover, many gave their allegiance to him when they saw the signs that he performed...” Later on in the book John mentions that “even among those in authority a number believed in him but would not acknowledge him on account of the Pharisees, for fear of being banned from the synagogue.” Perhaps he was one of those as well -- one persuaded, but afraid. And perhaps that was the source of the storm: conflict between who he was and who he might be.

Whether or not that is true, and whoever he was, he is blown to Jesus during the night and all its veiling mystery and confusion and fear. Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the darkness. In the night.

“Teacher,” he began, searching for the kinds of answers with which he was already acquainted...or not.

“Let me tell you three things,” Jesus responded. “You have to be reborn from above. You have to have Spirit. And the Spirit blows wherever it pleases.”

So what is that supposed to mean, we may well ask, and how does that happen? I don't know for sure, but these ideas come to mind:

· You accomplish your rebirth in precisely the same way that you accomplished your original birth. Which is to say that you didn’t have much hand in it. You were just floating along and somehow you got squeezed out. It didn’t require great study on you part, diligent calculations, or refinement of technique. Your primary role was simply to land in receiving hands.”

· And Spirit, that invigorating, mercurial presence and power of God. The world wasn’t blessed, we are told, because God finally relinquished God’s blessing under human pressure. God so loved the world that God gave. Grace as gift. Spirit as gift. Birth as gift.

And we, like Nicodemus, have trouble understanding. We are bright, intelligent, practical minds. Give us a book, teach us a technique, give us time to practice, and we can pull this off. “By the way, are there illustrated instructions?” It’s the way we live our lives -- even the lives of our spirit. We make our plans, we take our notes, we make a budget of our resources, and we set ourselves to work -- on prejudice, injustice, violence, and how we will live together. We have our little religious projects that we tinker with like old cars, and sometime hope to get them finished. We build our coalitions, go to workshops, draft our papers and reason out responses to the latest objection, trying to get ourselves – and our congregation – reborn. But somehow, something is missing.

We are about to move down the hall to engage our imaginations in a Conference on the Future. Over the last many months we have been preparing for it through prayer and study and rich conversation about the traditions behind us and the world around us. The Vision Task Force has listened to the collective insights and sifted and shaped our thinking, so that today we will try on for size 4 key areas through which we feel called to live out God's vision for us. Our process will evoke from us ideas and ingenuities and playful anticipations about what such living could look like over the next several years.

But if any good is to come of it all, this ministry will require more than our good ideas. It will require the movement of God's Spirit, bent on loving this world into new wholeness, blowing where it wills, not necessarily where we think it ought to blow. It will require us to refrain from so filling the cup with our own agendas and preferences and appetites and tastes that there is no room for God to add anything of God's own. We will begin, then, in a spirit of hopeful, faithful, expectant emptiness, ready to be filled. We may well need to spill a few things in order to make room for more.

“You come here wanting something from me,” the wise man told his visitor, “but what am I to do? There is no more room in your cup. Come back when it is empty, when you have gotten still enough to feel the cooling of the breeze; quiet enough to hear it rustling the leaves. Come back when you’ve made peace with your limitations, and when you’ve opened yourself to grace-filled possibilities. Come back then and we will talk. Perhaps by then you’ll be empty enough to fill; perhaps by then you’ll be available enough to the alchemy of the Spirit for the raw materials of your soul to be transformed -- born again, from above, by love.”