ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
Second Sunday of Lent, 2008
The Sermon preached by the Vicar at High Mass
The readings were Genesis 12.1-4a, Romans 4.1-5,13-17, John 3.1-17
A few years ago, I was asked to preach at Magdalene College, Oxford; the service was on the eve of the University Mission. I was, I suppose, one of the warm-up acts for the Mission Preacher. He was the Revd. Dr. Peter Gomes , the Minister of the Memorial Church and the Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University. In fact, Professor Gomes was in the congregation that night and we had dinner together afterwards.
So when I spotted a review about his latest book recently, I read it with interest.
Professor Gomes is not quite what you might expect from an Ivy League University. He is a black - although very patrician one, an ardent anglophile. He is a Baptist -although it has to be said a very high church one, and he is socially conservative yet gay. He holds daily services in the Memorial Chapel with traditional hymns.
One of the classes he teaches is for Divinity students on preaching. The reviewer sat in on the first class of the session.
'When I attended his opening class not long ago, he was trying to inspire and terrify his small flock of students. "If you are tender-hearted and thin-skinned, this is not the course for you,", he told them. "I will provide the sermon texts. There will be no 23rd Psalms, no Prodigal Sons this term. You are free to consult with anyone, but finally, like being born and dying, you must preach alone."
Most preachers he said, "look for the easiest way though a text - they want to preach solutions, not problems. But since most texts are problematic, you're losing a lot if you ignore the stones in the road. The stone in the road is usually there to get your attention."
This Lent, we are having a series of sermons on poets at Evensong. Poets are people who use words to explore and illuminate, , to stretch and challenge. They often use words in new ways, coin new words even, use them to startle, to make new connections. Tonight we will be hearing about Gerard Manley Hopkins who did the most extraordinary things with words. His poems were not published in his life time, even his friend the poet Robert Bridges to whom he entrusted them, did not really recognise their worth until he published them after the Great War, long after Hopkins' death.
The stone on our road this morning is to be found in the word which our version translates as "born anew". The Greek word anothen presents translators, readers and preachers with a quandary , because it has more than one meaning and these cannot be adequately expressed by a single word in English.
Anothen can mean either:
1.Born again/anew
2.Born from above
The translator has to opt for one and put the other in a footnote which inevitably means that it is seen as secondary. That was not John the Evangelist's intention. He meant his readers to understand that becoming a Christian was about something that was both in time, something that happens in the here and now of our lives, but is also something from above, from God.
Poor Nicodemus struggles with this, can't get his head around it at all. He can only think in terms of what he already knows, of what seems humanly possible. In these terms he quite rightly protests that to go back into his mother's womb and undergo a second birth is impossible. But Jesus is challenging home to think beyond the old boundaries; to see him as more than just another rabbi or miracle worker. Nicodemus needs to recognise that he is "come from God" in a far greater way than the prophets before him.
He comes not just with words from God: he is the Word of God, the Word made flesh. To accept this is to be born from above and to be enabled to begin life anew.
Nicodemus is being challenged by Jesus to accept that there is something greater about God than he or we can possibly imagine. He and we are being challenged to respond to the Spirit who blows not where we will but where he wills.
The review of Peter Gomes' book also looks at another newly-published work. It is called "unchristian: What a New Generation Really thinks about Christianity...and Why It Matters." It is based on research carried out in America in the light of the apparent dominance of a particular brand of Christianity for which the experience of being "born again" is the totem. The research has been carried out not by some hostile secular body but by an evangelical one.
They have found that the proportion of Americans who identify themselves as "Christians" has begun to drop sharply, and this largely as a reaction to what is seen as the aggressiveness of much of the religious right.
Even more significant, is the finding that 40% of Americans aged between 16 and 30 are outside Christianity and, worse still, have an overwhelmingly negative perception of it as judgemental, hypocritical and insensitive to others. They dislike its single-minded focus on conversion. This doesn't reflect ignorance or lack of information - the great majority have been to church, often for months, and found it wanting.
The reviewer goes on to say that this should be no surprise. "So much of the modern evangelical phenomenon lacks real content - to judge by many of its books and preachers, the faith is mostly about bringing people to Christ and then, when they've arrived, making them feel good about the decision, with a consumerist faith that bears little resemblance to the gospels. An earlier poll by the same organisation revealed that ¾ of American Christians believed that the phrase "God helps those who helps themselves" is to be found in the Bible - even though it is pretty much the opposite of "Love your neighbour as yourself."
What substance there is has often come in the form of opposition to "immorality" - in one or two narrowly defined areas - and it's this ceaseless judgmentalism that young people in particular notice and dislike.
Is this "Christ's religion", the religion of the God who "so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish bit may have eternal life"; the God who "did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him"?
Jesus challenges Nicodemus in that nocturnal encounter in the Gospel and he challenge us to be born anew; to have our sympathies opened out and stretched to fit the measure of God's; not to shrink God to the measure of our own. We are not likely to find this any easier than Nicodemus did.
So then, we should look to the example of Abraham, our father in faith. Today's brief passage is the fulcrum on which the whole of the book of Genesis pivots. Before it Genesis has spoken of creation and humankind in its general condition; now it speaks of one man and his wife and family taken from that humanity in order that they might be instruments of God's work to bring humankind to the fulfilment of God's purpose.
Abram is told by God, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed."
The succeeding chapters of the Abraham saga reveal how difficult a task this risky business of going out into an unknown future was for Abraham and his family to stick to. The stories that follow show us Abraham's education for the task. Even at the end of his life, Abraham gets no more of the promised land than six feet of it for a grave.
Those of us who are called by Jesus, those who are born anew, born from above, are summoned to a similar unsettling pilgrimage; to a challenging adventure of faith. The Church is called to be a blessing to the world, to the nations, to all people. To be that it needs to constantly be re-born. A Church which is to be a blessing to the nations must be one which recognises its dependence of grace; which grasps that its thinking must be renewed by its encounter with the Word of God in the Spirit; that it is a community not based on skills or power or past achievements but on faith in the grace of God.
Professor Gomes's new book is called "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: So What's So Good About the Good News?" It begins with cocktails with the Queen Mother, but takes a much daring and subversive direction. There's nothing conventional about it mostly because of its intense concentration on those most hazardous of texts, the four gospels. The gospels have always been a difficult foundation on which to build a movement, in that they call on Christians to do things they might rather not: put right the balance between rich and poor, or turn the other cheek. "It is very difficult to preach the Gospel as Jesus did without giving offence", Gomes says, adding ruefully that "the world has been filled with people perfectly capable of being offended."
The Church must be willing to think and think hard. But, as our poet last Sunday night. T.S. Eliot, said, "humankind cannot bear too much reality".
That I believe is the lesson to be learned in the aftermath of the Archbishop's speech on Islamic Law. Yes, there are practical political things about news-management - but we would be seriously mistaken if we thought it was only about spin.
There is something much more important at issue here. Do we simply want an Archbishop of Canterbury to be a purveyor of pious platitudes; a poet laureate in a mitre? Or do we want one who can address the question of how the Church of this land can be a blessing to the people of this land; one who asks how we can love the neighbours who are unlike ourselves; how we can as that latter day "teacher in Israel", the Chief Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Sacks asks in his latest book, " build a home together".
Such issues as how we live together with peoples of other faiths cannot be addressed with sound-bites and tabloid headlines. They demand that we think outside our comfort zones; in short, that we born anew.
Learning to live with and love our Muslim neighbours will be hard work for us; it may be even harder work for them.