“People Don’t Change Much…But They Can”     

Lent 2   March 12, 2017    Community Christian Church

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Roger Ray, pastor

John 3:1-10               

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.²He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” ³Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” ⁴Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” ⁵Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. ⁶What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ ⁸The 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.” ⁹Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”¹⁰Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

I had an uncle named John Ray, Junior. In his youth, he was called “Junior” but as my father completed a household of nine children, brevity demanded that John Junior’s name be shortened to simply “June.”  John Junior grew up to marry a woman named Maxine and, again, in the abbreviation common in that rural setting, she became “Mac.” So, in rural Kentucky, I had an Uncle June and an Aunt Mac, and that seemed normal enough to us even though their names always seemed to come as a surprise to my friends.

Uncle June was a farmer, and like every other farmer in the area, his real cash crop was tobacco. In that part of the world, in those days, a man who didn’t smoke was a rare person indeed. I grew up setting and topping tobacco. My best paying agricultural jobs came in the early fall when we cut, staked, and housed the tobacco crop.

But this was the time when the dangers of tobacco were reaching even into rural Kentucky. My father quit smoking, as did our family doctor, our pastor, and most of the people at our church. But not Uncle June.

In fact, when he began to find it impossible to breath well enough to help in the fields, he would sit on a stool and smoke and watch us as we brought in the fall harvest. His doctor told him that he had emphysema and that smoking was going to kill him. And Uncle June did what a lot of devoted addicts did; he found another doctor, who, in the end, told him the same thing. He then went on a search for a doctor who smoked and found one nearly a hundred miles from his home and he remained in the care of that doctor until his untimely death.

My high school had a smoking area just outside of the cafeteria… for students. Teachers could smoke inside in the teacher’s lounge. When I started college, people were typically allowed to smoke in class, and the same was true, even in seminary. In those days, people smoked in the hallways of hospitals, in grocery stores, and even in airplanes.

In my early years as a pastor in southern Kentucky, I presided over a lot of funerals for men who were very much like my uncle… persistent addicts to the end. All during this time there were public information campaigns going on. Warning labels were affixed to packs of cigarettes. And society changed but very slowly.

First there was evidence that it was bad for your health. Then it became less socially acceptable. There were smoking and non-smoking sections of restaurants and airplanes and finally public places all became non-smoking areas, even to the point to prohibiting smoking in outdoor spaces such as hospital and university properties.

But there were decades between knowing without plausible denial that smoking was bad for us and actually banishing the few remaining smokers to a smaller and smaller space.

This goes to why I absolutely hate for people to give me dieting advice. I am not overweight because I lack information about what causes obesity. I don’t need any more diet books; I just need more willpower.

In the world of psychology, the debate that has gone on for centuries is whether we are who we are because of our DNA, our nature, or if we are a product of our environment, our upbringing. Clearly, the answer is at least some of both.

We know what almost every child molester was molested as a child. But not all children who were molested grow up to be pedophiles. We know that almost all cases of domestic violence are perpetrators grew up in a home watching domestic violence, and yet no where near all of the little boys who saw their mother being a victim grew up to be victimizers.

In the field of addiction, we know that the children of alcoholics have a much greater chance of becoming an alcoholic and a child with two alcoholic parents really should avoid all contact with alcohol because the statistics for them are horrifying. But, having alcoholic parents does not determine the outcome of their children.

There are those who use their family of origin as their excuse for all of their personal failings but, there are reasons that are not direct causes.

Most of us grew up prejudices in the environment of our homes… racial prejudices, prejudices against gays and lesbians, against communists, illegal immigrants, and people of other religions. And for the most part, we did not give those prejudices up either easily or quickly.

I was disgusted by the first openly gay people I knew in college but my graduate school education dispelled all of the bad information I had been taught in my childhood but it was not information alone that changed how I viewed same sex relationships. I can trace my own change of heart directly back to 1992 when two women friends of mine, Misty and Marilyn, fell in love with one another. I had known better for a decade but the real change of heart for me didn’t come until the information was applied to two people I loved.

Probably everyone here could tell a story about having to confront the racism or prejudices that you inherited with your mother’s milk when you were young. You know that there were years between the realization that your prejudice was wrong and when you were able to really change…. If, in fact, we ever totally change. Some shadows can linger within us for a long long time.

But any substantive change we ever made started with a willingness to confront the flaw in ourselves. My Uncle June probably knew very well that smoking was killing him, but he was resolutely unwilling to face those facts.

More than 25 years ago a young man at MSU asked me if I would meet with his parents to help them to accept the fact that he is gay. They came into my study with large Bibles under their arms.

His mother was red-faced and hostile. She simply could not believe that a pastor could be telling her son that it was OK to be gay. She tried every angle from religious guilt and fear to threats of being cut out of the will to persuade him to just stop being gay.

Finally, she said, “Look, when I see those TV commercials with those beautiful models shaving their legs, I feel very sexually attracted to them but that doesn’t make me a lesbian.” The young man looked at me and then at the floor, and I turned to his mother and replied, “Well, actually, that’s a pretty good indication.” I will not repeat what all she said as she ran up and down the hallways of the church but suffice it to say that while it is possible to give someone an explanation, it is not necessarily possible to give them an understanding.

People can change, but it is not easy. People can change, but not very many people change very much, and the ones who do, usually do so very slowly.

In the gospel lesson we read today from John, chapter 3, a thoroughly indoctrinated religious scholar has come to talk to Jesus under the cover of night. You can almost feel the timidity of Nicodemus in the dialogue. There is something about the teachings of Jesus that had taken away his comfort, his certainty, but he sincerely questions whether it is even possible for him to change.

Can a person, once born into a culture with all of its prejudices, preferences, beliefs, and practices ever really change?  Look, there are a lot of people who will go to their graves believing that no one ever changes.

When I was married, it would infuriate my wife when someone approached me in a restaurant to praise one of my columns in the paper. After one very effusive fan walked away, she exploded on me saying, “You are wasting your life. No one listens to sermons. No one is changed by your articles. You are kidding yourself if you believe that you are making a difference.”

Marriage was mostly like that for me, but as horrible as you may think that was for her to say, look at the evidence. Most people don’t change and when they do they don’t change much, and even that, only after a long time. She had seen the seamy underbelly of church politics. She had seen people who pretended to be saints doing the most horrible things. I wasn’t angry about her lack of support for the work that I feel compelled to do because I know that she was more right than she was wrong.

But, and I think that Henry David Thoreau said it best:  “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.” We can change if we are willing to be self-critical. If we are willing to let evidence creep into our skulls and change the way we think and then, if we can let that information slowly, over time, work its way from our head to our hearts.

Everyone in this church and probably 99% of the people who listen on line are self described liberals and yet how many of us started out in life that way?

I grew up in a gun-toting, George Wallace voting, racist, evangelical home and I know that the ideological ground that I covered in my young adult life was territory covered by most of you as well. We changed, so you can’t really say that people just don’t change.

The largest single hurdle we face is our willingness to even look in the mirror and honestly face our own dishonesty.  We listen now to Shawn Spicer giving White House briefings that contain more falsehoods than truths but do you think that he knows that he is lying?

In President Trump’s recent speech delivered to a joint session of congress, a speech for which many pundits were giving him a lot of praise, but a fact checking review showed that he told 51 lies in just over 65 minutes…still, do you think that he allows himself to be aware that he is lying at the nearly breathless rate of once every minute, even in a closely prepared speech?

But here is the trap folks, we, who are predisposed to hear these guys critically, we can hear their lies and be horrified by how lacking they are in self-awareness. But the question I would like to pose to us all is just this, can we hear our own lies as easily?

Granted, we had to face down some ugly demons to even make it into this room, to be able to swim against the tide of the religion and politics of our part of the world to become progressives, but are there parts of ourselves that we refuse to yield to that progressive honesty?

The question echoes through the centuries: can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?  Jesus said that it not only could be done but that it must be done.

Like you, I watch the news through a moral lens and I am not likely to stop doing that anytime soon. I’m just inviting you to use the same lens when you look in the mirror, because, not only can we be renewed, but I know of no more encouraging fact than that we can all change through honesty, conviction, and conscious choice to be better people. Otherwise, what are we doing here. This is not, after all, a graduation ceremony for those who have arrived, it is a laboratory where we hope to make something new out of ourselves.