Explaining God. A Lent sermon at First UMC Kalamazoo, March 5, 2023
Text: Genesis 12v1-4 / John3v1-17

At the end of Genesis 11 we have been introduced to Abram and Sarai, not yet Abraham and Sarah, just Abram and Sarai and when they are introduced to us all things point towards death and nothingness. The story makes sure to point out to the readers that Sarai was barren in a very cryptic verse that says just that. 

“Now Sarai was barren; she had no children.” 

It’s helpful then to understand that in this time and in this place Sarai’s barrenness meant death for she and her husband. There would be no one to inherit their wealth. There would be no one to care for them as they grew older. Possibly they would live in shame. Salvation was literally bound up in ones legacy – their children, particular in a male child. All things pointed to nothingness for Abram and Sarai. And then in verse one of Chapter 12 everything turned around for them. All things now pointed towards life, and newness and fullness and possibility and salvation. What looked like the end was now the beginning. The God who would come to be known as the God of Abraham spoke to Abram and said, “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…” 

This was a turning point for Abram and Sarai, a literal new beginning marked not only by God’s announcement to them but by a physical change in location as Abram, Sarai, and their nephew Lot gathered everything they had, left Haran where they had previously settled and journeyed to Canaan. From that space God would lure Abram one evening from his tent and tell him to look up at the stars and then as if taunting him saying, 

“Look at the stars and count them, if you can… so will your descendants be.” 

Spoken as words of promise from God to the 75 year old man with no children. 

There is a helpful line of questioning we can ask when attempting to understand scripture and the first of the questions is “What does this story reveal to us about God?” Now of course we could each one in here have a different answer but what I say is that it reveals a God who comes to us. God is the first mover and this is a fundamental understanding of God’s grace that it comes to us before we are even aware, before we are even thinking about it. God comes to us. In this relationship between us and God, it always begins with God’s loving action towards us. 

Look up at the stars if you can count them Abram – I’m going to do something in and through you that you cannot yet imagine. 

Today is the second Sunday in the Season of Lent and our series is titled Seeking. We are presented with a story from the gospel about a man who was seeking something from Jesus and from the Old Testament about a man and his wife who were seeking nothing, who instead were sought by God. In both stories the primary characters are given opportunity for new life, for new beginning. Abram having not previously known the God who called out to him responded without question while Nicodemus played the role of the cautiously curious one. 

As this sermon continues, as this worship continues, are you Abram and Sarai, recklessly unquestioning in your response to God’s invitation? Or are you Nicodemus, deeply curious but in need of some convincing? It can be a both/and by the way. Different seasons of life yield different responses to the God who calls us out to count the stars. 

The encounter between Nicodemus and Jesus was its own under-the-stars encounter. Nicodemus invited Jesus for a midnight meeting because he had some questions and didn’t want other Pharisees to know what he was thinking. The conversation was equal parts fascinating, bizarre, and mysterious.

Nicodemus presented Jesus with a thought that was really a question. “How is it that you are performing these miracles? It must be God within you, right?” Interestingly Jesus didn’t answer the question. He told Nicodemus to be born from above if he wanted to see the Kingdom of God. By the way the “you” Jesus spoke was spoken in the second person plural. In other words he was no longer speaking to Nicodemus alone but anyone who would read these words. 

The language for born from above can be translated three ways. 1.) Born from above, 2.) Born anew, 3.) Born again. Nicodemus heard “born again” and questioned the logistics of such a thing. Jesus answered in a dialogue of non-answers about being born of water and spirit and what is born of flesh is flesh but of spirit is spirit. And then, 

“Don’t be so astonished by all of this…The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit…” 

I think that had I been Nicodemus I might of walked away feeling like my head was going to explode. Nicodemus’s last words were simply “How can any of this be?” He presumable remained on the seen but from there it was a one way monologue from Jesus to Nicodemus…to us in our worship. 

So what happened to Nicodemus? Was he born from above? Was he born again? Did he start over? Did he walk away with curiosities satisfied? Given that the narrator has turned the voice towards us Nicodemus’s response might be secondary to our own responses and our own curiosities. My curiosities roam around verse 8. 

“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit…”

This verse honestly has haunted me for a very long time. It is one of those things that Jesus said that I sort of put into the column of things that make him a radical. The only problem is I’ve never fully understood what it is that Jesus meant was he said it. To some degree I have understood the words. When we are filled with the Holy Spirit we are driven by a real yet unseen force. We neither know where it is coming from nor where it might send us. On the other hand, Jesus tells Nicodemus that we who are born again are like the Holy Spirit, that we go where the wind blows us. It sounds a little frightening, a little messy, a little unorganized, unpredictable. I’ve wrestled with this so much. 

And then recently I was listening to a Podcast Conversation between Kate Bowler and Stanley Hauerwas. Both are professors at Duke Divinity School; Bowler, some of you may be familiar with because we read her book together last year during lent. Hauerwas is a retired professor emeritus and a bit of a giant in the theological world. He was a guest recently on Kate Bowler’s Podcast Everything Happens. Hauerwas said something that haunted me equally as much as Jesus’ words about the Holy Spirit and yet his words have brought some clarity to Jesus’s words for me as well. He began talking about the resurrection and made the comment that some people need an explanation or a theory for resurrection but really end up worshiping the theory more than the God who raised Jesus from the dead. But “God is not an explanation” he said. And then he went on said these words, “…the demand for explanation results in lives that are boring.” And that the key to good living is to “…live without explanation.” 

I cannot help but wonder if this dynamic was at play between Nicodemus and Jesus: a curious Pharisee was demanding explanation of a God whose mystery cannot be explained? 

Nicodemus was demanding that Jesus give him an explanation of something that cannot be explained. Being born again cannot be explained. The kingdom of God cannot be explained. For that matter resurrection cannot be explained and neither can redemption or transformation or grace. Why Abram among a billion other stars? It just was. God is not an explanation and the works of God cannot be explained. They can only be wondered at. We can only wade into them with a deep curiosity. For Abram it was a dive. For Nicodemus the curiosity bore tremendous risk so he waded into the waters under the cover of night’s darkness.

He held deep curiosities that perhaps we have all held, or currently hold. We ask why and how and at the end of the day God offers no explanation just an invitation to follow our curiosity. 

When I was in high school my best friend was not a Christian. I was. I was not a Christian who went about evangelizing but I did wear Christian t-shirts and listen to Christian music and went to morning prayer group in high school. So it was not a secret. But I was never into telling anyone else that they should believe or think the way I thought or believed. And so my best friend in high school was was not a Christian and I was. And he found this, well, I’m not sure what he thought about it. He would kind of poke fun at it and respect it all at once. He would ridicule me and then in kind of an endearing way might say, “Hey I’m going to this thing over the weekend but I don’t think you should go. I don’t think you’re going to like it…” We went two different directions off to college, I went to Alabama and he went to Indiana, and one year over Christmas break we got together over coffee at a Starbucks inside the Barnes N Noble in Granger, Indiana when out of nowhere he said to me, 

“My grandfather is dying.” 

“Oh, I’m sorry.” 

Then he asked me, “How do I pray for him?” 

“How do you pray for him?” 

“Yea, how do I pray for him?” 

This took me aback. Big time. But I started to explain to him how to pray for his grandfather and he stopped me and he said, 

“I guess I don’t mean how do I pray for him. What I mean to say is, how does that work?” 

And I began to explain to him how prayer is a relationship. We talk, God listens. This is how it’s done. And he stoped me and said, 

“No, like, I’ve made fun of you for being a Christian for years and I’ve mocked God and I’ve made fun of church. So my question is really, how is it that if I pray for my grandpa God is going to listen?” 

Now I already told you all that I was not an evangelist. I am not an evangelist and I have never been an evangelist but in that moment I was thinking to myself, I feel like I’m being tricked into telling my best friend about the gospel right nowand so I just went with it and said, 

“Well, God doesn’t care about that. God will still listen.” 

“Why?” 

“Why? I guess that’s what grace is.” 

“Grace? What do you mean by grace?” 

“I mean God loves us no matter what so God’s not holding anything against you. God’s always ready for you to pray and always ready to be in relationship with you.” 

“But why? That doesn’t make any sense. The world doesn’t work like that. And what about Jesus. Where does Jesus come into all of this?” 

And I’m thinking, what’s going on? 

“Jesus?” 

“Yea Jesus?” 

“Jesus is God’s son.” 

“Didn’t he die on a cross or something? Why? What was that about?” 

And now I’m thinking, okay I guess we’re doing this.

“So Jesus died on the cross for our sins and from the cross he said, “Father forgive them they don’t know what they’re doing. And from that moment God forgave everyone for all things and you are forgiven for mocking God and church and making fun of me…but for the record I never took any of it seriously.” 

“And so because God’s already forgiven me I can pray to God?” 

“Yup, and I think there’s something important about accepting God’s grace and forgiveness. Like, believing it.” 

Then he paused for a moment and finally said, 

“That’s not fair.” 
“What you do you mean that’s not fair?” 
“I mean, the world doesn’t work that way. No one just forgives that easily.” 

And I said, “That’s why God is God and we’re not. It’s different with God.” 

And he says “That’s not fair” 

And I said, “Yea, it’s the most fair thing that’s ever been and all you have to do is accept it.”

At this point he’s crying and just says “So God will listen to me. I don’t even need God to heal my grandfather. I just want to know God will listen.” 

“God will.”

“Why? How?” 

“I don’t know. I can’t explain it anymore.” 

I’m the preacher and I have more than one advanced degree in theology but I cannot explain this. God cannot be explained. Jesus cannot be explained. Grace cannot be explained. The Holy Spirit cannot be explained. Being born from above of again or anew, cannot be explained. In the middle of Jesus’s monologue he spoke the words, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” 

I cannot explain this except to say Jesus believed that in him there is newness and fullness and life that is bigger and part of something greater than what we know. That in Jesus our stories are a part of the larger story at play: the story of God’s unfolding and endless newness. That when God told Abram to count the stars one of those stars had been lit for you and for me and each one in here. 

This is a mystery that cannot be explained. But it can be pursued. And entering into this mystery is like being born again. Or anew. Or from above. Or all of it. 

…

Epilogue.

Nicodemus shows up twice more in John’s gospel. Once, briefly in chapter 7 when some chief priests want to throw Jesus in jail Nicodemus runs to his defense behind the safety of the law. Then he comes again in chapter 19, along with Joseph of Arimathea to lay Jesus in the tomb, in the light of day. It seems he waded deeply into the waters of his curiosity and found Jesus at the cross. 

This is our Lenten Journey.

May we all find Jesus at the cross come Good Friday.