Second Sunday in Lent

In the name of the God of Abraham, Amen.

I wanted this to be a clean and tidy sermon.  But it isn’t.  In the past few days Archbishop Williams has been in a bit of a kafuffle.  He gave an interview to the BBC in which he mentioned that with the prevalence of Muslims in England, some aspects of sharia law ought, to be able to adjudicate certain legal situations for observant Muslims just as there are already orthodox Jewish courts and other ways in which the law of the land pays respect to religious observance currently.  The interview ran under the headline “Sharia Law in UK unavoidable,” and commentators who had never listened to the actual interview quickly jumped to assuming that Williams was advocating for an overthrow of the British legal system.  That’s the thing about getting your news from headlines.  Much is lost.

I would like to say that I’m the kind of news consumer that reads the paper cover to cover each morning, including Sunday.  But the truth is that I’m a lazy news consumer.  I read the main headlines in an email each morning.  If I’m really interested in the headline and first sentence I might read the story, but I might not.  If I were a journalist I would hate me.  I end up with a pretty distorted notion of what’s happening in the world.  My understanding is in snippets and sound bites, and what I can take in one paragraph or less.  On the rare occasion that I do read the actual paper, I find that the world is richer and much less awful than when I just read the headlines.

I think that that might be the situation with our New Testament readings today.  We get used to hearing them in headline form – from Romans we hear something about Law and Faith and boil it down to Christian faith trumps Jewish law and works.  And many Christians know John 3:16 as all four of the gospels in a nutshell “For God….”  But boiling down today’s readings to those two phrases I think might be dangerous.

In Lent and Eastertide many of our readings will deal with Judaisms – the various strains of Judaism and the beginnings of Christianity present in Biblical times.  Reading just the headlines or flashy snippets of these texts can easily leave us with distorted and dangerous anti-Semitic notions.

But it’s not a case of shoddy journalism on the part of the authors so much as pulling out a sound-bite from a larger story.  I think that the overall story that these texts tell might be more complicated but also much less condemning than the headlines would lead us to believe.   With different lighting and context and a little less caricature the story changes.

Have any of you ever watched the Daily Show with John Stewart?  It’s a comic news program, and one of the most popular segments is where spoof correspondents do an on-camera interview of some unsuspecting person to mock the person.  The program has become widely known enough now that many of the people interviewed know what they’re getting into, but in the show’s earlier days, the comedic value was found in taking a person’s words out of context and to an extreme.  Anyone who appeared on a segment was made into a buffoon, by virtue of the interviewer’s questions and the way he or she distorted the interviewee’s answers.    With lighting and graphics and interspersed commentary any person interviewed seems like an absolute fool.

John’s gospel can be read with Nicodemus as the fool. He comes to Jesus is the cloak of night, baffled by the concept of a second birth.  But who knows?  Maybe he came in the dark of night to give Jesus some privacy to explain himself off the record. “How can anyone be born after having grown old?  Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”  This is a fair question.  Nicodemus is a Jewish leader.  In Judaism, there is this one life, and for the most part you are either born a Jew or you’re not.  The afterlife is irrelevant.  Nicodemus is asking rather straightforward questions and has addressed Jesus in a title of respect – Rabbi, teacher, very similar to the way that all of Jesus’ chosen disciples address him at this portion in John.  But Jesus responds without welcome.  To Nicodemus the person who might seem both confused and confusing is Jesus answers by speaking of being born of water and spirit and eternal life.  As modern readers and Christian readers we read the story already having an ingrained concept of baptism and eternal life, but in his actual context, Nicodemus was no fool.  He might have merely been trying to get a straight answer to an honest question – Jesus, what are you talking about? 

And I wish that Jesus had been clearer in his answer.  The story only appears in John, not in any of the other gospels, so we don’t have any other accounts of how Jesus might have explained himself, but I have to tell you, in reading this story my sympathy lies with Nicodemus.  Sometimes I don’t get Jesus either, and if I were Nicodemus I certainly wouldn’t have.  The story is still complicated.  For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that who so ever believed in him would not perish but have eternal life, but how come Jesus didn’t explain to Nicodemus the concept of eternal life?  I don’t know.  But Nicodemus will reappear throughout John, so in some ways being confused and asking questions about second birth and eternal life is itself part of the story.

The situation in Romans is a little different.  Throughout the first few chapters of Romans Paul is using a style of writing where he debates with a hypothetical conversation partner.  Paul organizes his own softball journalism.  He puts in the mouth of first a gentile and then a Jew the very questions he wants to answer.  It’s as though he were being interviewed by Larry King the gentile, then Larry King the Jew, and in both cases Paul sent Larry the questions ahead of time.  By setting them up both as debate partners, Paul tries to show that Christ came for all people.  He ties the Gentile and the Jew back to the same ancestor in Abraham who was chosen by God for his faith, long before the law was given to Moses.

First an interview with the wealthy gentile.

Larry: What advantage has the Jew?  Or what is the value of circumcision? 

Paul: Much in every way… For God trusted them with the oracles, and the Jews were subject to law, which up until now the Gentiles were not subject to. … Now since Christ has come and shown that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, all people are subject to God’s judgment and forgiveness. 

Larry: “Is God the God of the Jews only?  Is he not the God of the Gentiles also?” 

Paul: Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. 

Larry: do we then overthrow the law by this faith? 

Paul: By no means!  On the contrary we uphold the law.

So the law stays.  It is magnified and expanded but not done away with.  Then in today’s reading from Romans we have Larry King as a hypothetical righteous Jew, speaking about Abraham – the first of God’s chosen patriarchs, who was chosen by God before Moses and the 10 commandments. 

Larry: What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh?

Paul: The promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendents through the law but through the righteousness of faith.  If it is the adherents of the law who are to be heirs, faith is null and the promise void.  For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.  For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendents, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham.

See?  It’s all about context.  We are all children of Abraham and heirs through faith of the one God.  Our readings are so much richer than their headlines.  The stories of Lent don’t condemn the Jews.  They condemn us all.  And we tell them again and again each year to remind ourselves that all have fallen short and are rightfully condemned.  Without the stories of Lent, the story of Easter doesn’t make sense.  It’s much much more complicated than the headlines would have us believe.

But we’re a sound-bite-driven, headline hungry world.  So, here goes.  HEADLINE: ‘God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.’  And that’s good news.