“Sinners and Saints”

“Sinners and Saints”           March, 8, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

    click here to see the video                    

John 3:1-9

3Now 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?’ 

The most interesting class I took at Harvard was a course taught by the former dean,        Harvey Cox, on religious biography. We studied the lives of Walter Rauschenbusch, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Trungpa Rinpoche, and Philip and Daniel Berrigan. It was especially meaningful because Harvey Cox had personally known and worked with all of them except for Walter Rauschenbusch. Every day in class we were thrilled, both by the stories of the lives of people who had changed the world, but also by being able to literally touch history through the stories that Harvey Cox would share with us. 

I have movies about most of these people and some of them are really good. If you have never watched “Entertaining Angels” the story of Dorothy Day’s life, do yourself a favor and watch it. 

But I find that when I have a house guest and we decide that it is going to be a movie night, I usually prefer to introduce them to one of my fictional heroes rather than my historical heroes. 

I never tire of sharing my love of the mysterious Guy Fawkes character of V in the Vendetta movie, or self-sacrificing exorcist, Constantine, in the movie of the same name.  And there is Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings, and Albus Dumbledore of Harry Potter fame. And, though I am not necessarily proud of it, I have even been known to shed tears at a superhero movie based on Marvel comic book characters. 

All I am saying is that while we can draw important moral lessons from studying the biographies of world changing historical characters, that there is also a lot to be learned about character and morality in the arts and literature, whether they are fictional or even fantasy characters. Because, folks, the Bible itself is full of stories about people who are not historical characters.

We have pretty good reason to believe that Jesus and Paul are actual historical characters, and based on Paul’s first-hand accounts, we can be reasonably sure that Peter, James, and John were also historical characters. But, guys, Judas wasn’t. If you have never heard that before and you find it difficult to believe, let me quote 

our good friend, Bishop John Shelby Spong, who said, “[Judas] was a totally fictional character, a totally literary character created by early Christian Church in the ninth decade for sole purpose of shifting blame for Jesus’ death away from Romans who were certainly responsible for it, and placing that blame on the backs of the Jewish people,” 

This is my copy of the Jewish historian, Josephus’, work. Is is over 1000 pages of small type. Josephus wrote at about the same time as the New Testament was being written. So, our gospels, each of which is only 20 to 30 pages long, are not first century attempts at writing history. They knew how to do a comprehensive job of writing history at that time. Our gospels are religious stories meant to convey what amounts to a sermon. They may have been based loosely on historical events and characters but writers were not trying to record history . . . they were, and you can’t say this too strongly, they were after your heart.

Mark invented the passion narrative and Matthew, Luke, and John followed his basic narrative and list of characters. The early church had a vested interest in blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus rather than Rome because they didn’t want Rome to snuff out the church in the way that they were systematically trying to wipe out the Jews. But, historically speaking, Jesus was a Jew who was executed on Roman cross under the Roman charge of sedition. I’m not saying that the Jews didn’t throw Jesus under the bus, they may have, but what is clear is that the early church was throwing the Jews under the Roman bus in return. None of it is very noble.

My preaching professor at Vanderbilt, Dr. David Buttrick, used to admonish us, “Your people didn’t come to church for a history lesson.” 

I heard him say that over and over and yet, almost all of our classes were history lessons. They made us learn a lot of history and so, I don’t know that it is always the fault of preachers that most sermons became little more than history lessons. 

It took me a long time to appreciate what Buttrick was trying to say to us, but when preachers open their Bibles in church and start to read, they are implicitly inviting their congregation to join them in leaving the real world, the here and now, and traveling back to the dusty roads of first century Palestine, Buttrick insisted, that when you do that, you are pushing preaching off into an imaginary world where it has no power, no impact on the here and now. And, for evidence of that fact, we need only consider what I mentioned last week . . .  we are a nation full of people, the majority of whom would call themselves Christians, that currently is holding tens of thousands of children in cages where they are being traumatized, sleeping on concrete floors, deprived of contact with their parents, and churches all over America today are talking about a conversation Jesus had one night with Nicodemus . . . a purely fictional character, invented by the author of John’s gospel, to make the Jews look shallow and ignorant. 

This wouldn’t make me mad if they could use the story of Nicodemus to help people wake up to current events but I wonder, of the hundreds of thousands of sermons that will be delivered today, how many of them ever get out of first century Palestine to think about global climate change, to consider how our military budget is consuming the resources we need for universal healthcare, higher education, and a living wage? How many churches move out of that secret, dark night talk with a Jewish elder to think about our drone policy, our wall along our southern border, or the wall between Israel and Palestine? 

The gospel of John was written in the early second century. In terms of its own setting, it appears to have been written by the church in Rome to contradict the popular influence of Marcion. None of that is especially relevant to us beyond simply accepting the fact that this is not history. Nothing in John should be taken as an eyewitness account of actual events. It is a religious story intended to keep the church on the right track. And I’m not telling you that to make you mad or to make you not read the gospel of John. I’m just saying, if you read it to find out what happened it is almost as bad as watching Fox News to find out what happened . . . it is 99% spin. 

So, if I can get you to come with me on this quest, if John isn’t trying to tell us what happened, what is he trying to tell us? And to really see it, we have to pull the lens back a bit:

John pairs two stories for the purpose of contrast. Nicodemus is a leader among the Jews but he sneaks around at night to talk to Jesus because he knows that his religious faith is somehow inadequate and he is struggling to figure that out. John places his story next to the story of the Samaritan woman at the well whom he portrays as being a kind of slutty heretical Jew. I will expect some email this week from people who are enraged that I showed all three of these characters as being white Europeans in ancient Palestine . . . those letters will come from people who were not listening when I said that these are fictional stories about fictional characters. Welcome to my world. 

Without going into the historical nuances of conflicts between Jews and Samaritans or getting lost in the moral codes of marriage and interactions between men and women in the first century, let’s try to see this in something of the way that John is trying to show it to us.

Let’s say Jesus talks one night with Gandhi and the next morning with Paris Hilton. And the surprise ending is that Gandhi just doesn’t get it and Paris Hilton turns her life around and becomes a decent human being. 

You know, like happens in fictional stories. 

John is saying, in this coupling of stories, that not everyone gets Jesus and the people who don’t are sometimes blocked by a lifetime of religious indoctrination and some of the people who do get the message of Jesus are people whose lives are so broken that they are able to receive it. Now, in real life, I suspect that Gandhi would have had a deep and meaningful conversation with Jesus and Paris would probably have blown the whole thing off with a valley girl “whatever!” But let the story seep in. 

It isn’t about real people or real history, it is about potential. Whether you are reading a biography or a fiction, the real issue is to see how the story affects you, how you react to it. Beyond the politics of the early church, John is dramatically setting two characters against one another for contrast. The one you would expect to win doesn’t even get off the starting block, the one that would not seem to have a chance, becomes the hero of the narrative.

The story, as many good redemption stories do, runs counter to the expectations of society. Let me ask you, do people know you by your successes or by your failures? 

When you just say, “Bill Clinton,” do you immediately think, “Rhodes scholar who rose from an impoverished home where he had to protect his mother from his violent, alcoholic step dad in rural Arkansas to go to Yale Law School and eventually become the president of the United States?” Or is all you can think of in association with this president, an inner office affair with an aid? It is all true but somehow rising above a tragically impoverished childhood to go to Yale, become a Rhodes scholar, and then the President of the United States can’t even stand side by side with his moral failings. I continue to believe that a lot of the mess around Clinton’s life was not that his sexual dalliance was uncommon for a man in high office but it was the resentment of blue-blood Washington that could not stand the fact that what they considered to be Arkansas “trailer trash” had made it into the White House and they were going to put a stop to it. I’m not defending what Clinton did wrong, I’m just wondering, given the start he had in life, how many of his critics could have accomplished one tenth of what he did? 

We get trained to go for the jugular though, don’t we? Especially in an election year. But seriously, if your sister was going to date a politician, would you choose Clinton, or Newt Gingrich?

They both had affairs. What makes Clinton known for his affair and Gingrich’s, which, in many ways, was much more smarmy and hypocritical, why doesn’t he get that label? And, of course, the woman he was leaving impeachment hearings for Clinton to go have sex with, in the parking garage, was promoted to Mrs. Gingrich #3 and then appointed to be . . . and you couldn’t make this up, Calista was appointed to be the ambassador to the Vatican because she is such a good Catholic. Something about this seems somehow unfair. Calista and Monika did exactly the same thing, Monika becomes a term of derision and Calista become the United States Ambassador to the Vatican. Clinton gets impeached and Newt later ran for president. He explained his hypocrisy saying that his affair with Calista gave him moral clarity about why he needed to impeach Clinton. Now, don’t try to think about that explanation too much or your head will explode.

How are you known? When your name comes up in a coffee shop and someone has to say just a word or two to describe you, what do they say? That guy who . . . that woman who . . . , you know . . .

In the Bible, Nicodemus at least gets a name, the Samaritan woman at the well is just known as the woman who was married 5 times . . . which is three more marriages than I have had so she is clearly morally inferior to me! Right?

It is unfair of me to quote a song that I didn’t let Sean know that I was going to quote, especially when it is a Leonard Cohen song because, if any of us could sing at all, we would always choose to sing Leonard Cohen songs . . . the song “Anthem” contains this echo from Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack, in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

This is not a historical story about a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Dorothy Day. This is not a superhero story about a Superman or Wonder Woman. This is a story about broken people and, in this case, the one who was the most broken, the one who was able to let the light in through the broken places, becomes the hero of the story.

You don’t come to church for a history lesson. Like in this Phil Ochs song that Sean is about to sing . . . it isn’t about what Jesus did or what was done to Jesus, it is about what you are going to do. Ochs concludes:

Two thousand years have passed and gone
Many a hero too
But the dream of this poor carpenter
Remains in the hands of you
Remains in the hands of you

Our lives aren’t over. We are not a part of history. And even if the people in the coffee shop and some of our own family members think that they own us because they can gossip about some perceived past failure, we aren’t living in that history either. Whatever it was that Jesus set out to do in the world, he sure didn’t finish the job . . . this doesn’t look right to me… the world doesn’t look finished to me. Truth is, my professors told me a lot about history and theology and I’m pretty good at both. What I don’t know is how to fix this mess in the world today.  But this is the truth, the dream of this poor carpenter remains in the hands of you . . . it, remains in the hands of you. So what are you going to do now?