Jesus replied to Nicodemus: “ I tell you for certain that you must be born anothen [from above] before you can see God’s reign!”[St. John 3:3]

Taste is a very odd thing. My mother always made a very special rice pudding, way better than the well-known Yorkshire pudding, with all the wonderful spices such as cardamom, dried ginger, nutmeg. When young couples come to see for pre-marital counseling, I take time to remind young men to stay away from the very unproductive, unwise, in fact very imprudent, exercise of ever comparing the admired, magnificent, scrumptious dishes meticulously prepared by their beloved mothers to those of the ambitious, adventurous, experimental, risky, and haphazard and most often not so wonderful cooking styles of their girl friends, fiancées and /or new brides. Most prudent young men take my advice seriously and they live happily ever after while others pay hefty legal fees sooner or later and go their separate ways!

Last week we were told that the flavorsome Tim Horton’s stocks have soared very profitably; Tim bits and Tim’s coffees are available these days as far as Afghanistan! Last year when one of our politicians made rather disparaging and ungenerous comments about the US President George Bush Jr. we all agreed that it was not in our traditional, neighborly Canadian good taste to tarnish the name of our best friends south of the border. My son Bram, who faithfully attends the St. Machar Cathedral Church of Scotland in Aberdeen, has only one complaint about his new church. They use the real wine but he prefers the taste of the grape juice in the United church of Canada and to make it worse, they use the same cup or chalice! He loves the large choir of gifted singers and the music at St. Machar.

Interpretation of the Holy Scriptures is very much the same as taste. Today, in my thirtieth year of pastoral ministry, I embrace universalism beautifully stated in the Gospel of St. John but in my in first year in theology in Edinburgh, Scotland, I admit I was an exclusivist! In fact, today’s Gospel lesson to some is a proclamation of exclusion. I confess those days being inexperienced and untrained in theology, the generous theological notion of inclusion of “everyone on the streets, good and bad alike” Jesus referred to in his parable of the great banquet in the 22nd chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel was hard and I agreed with those who read this as: “God so loved the world that He sent His Son in order that those who don’t have faith in Him won’t have eternal life but will perish”! Such a narrow, tight, self-serving, exclusivist view ignores the verses that precede and follow this overly abused verse by on the spot charlatans and fly-by-night peddlers in salvation. These days in our post-Christian society, John 3:16 is just another sign of protest or proclamation in a weekend boisterous football crowd. Gospel writer St. John talks about Jesus being lifted up so that all may see Him and have faith in Him. But he quickly states that Jesus did not come to judge but that through Him the world may be saved.

Latin American theologian Leonardo Boff recommends that each generation must define Jesus for itself. Isn’t it disturbing that some make Jesus a prisoner of the church or a particular agenda or formula of belief? Some for sure want this text to say that people who have difficulty with faith, people who are outside the church or unchurched - which means 90% of our Canadian population, people who might belong another faith tradition or ideology because they cannot recite the creeds are going to hell in a hurry! In the early 1990s I was involved in research in church growth with the wellknown theologian Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School and we focused on the dramatic growth of the Pentecostal movement, which is the second largest Christian group in the world today. I agree with Cox that this movement is successful in our day and generation “because it has spoken to the spiritual emptiness of our time by reaching beyond the levels of creed and ceremony to the core of human religiousness, into what might be called ‘primal spirituality’”.(Fire from Heaven, Harvey Cox 10995)

In February at the 9th assembly of the World Council of Churches held in Porto Alegre, Brazil the archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams asked the delegates a very simple but crucially fundamental question: “How do we as Christians identify ourselves? We carry the name of Christ. We are the people who are known for their loyalty to the historical person who was given the title of “anointed monarch” by his followers—Jesus, the Jew of Nazareth. Every time we say ‘Christian’, we take for granted a story and a place in history, the story and place of those people with whom God made an alliance in the distant past, the people whom he called so that in their life together he might show his glory.” The Archbishops added that Christian identity is to belong in a place that Jesus defines for us. Regrettably, Christianity has been reduced to a commodity, evolved into a system of ideas competing with others but we need to concentrate on the place in the world that is the place of Jesus, the anointed, the Messiah.

In spite of the fact Jesus frankly told us that the eternal destiny of those outside the church is none of our business, we still want to judge, we want to condemn and we unequivocally want to assert that we are “saved” and others are not! This is indeed quite the wrong way to lift up Jesus, who came to claim the whole creation including 6 billion human souls on earth and look at our calling as followers of Jesus. Yes, St. Paul says that the church is the new Israel. St. Peter adds that we are a nation of priests. Yes, we believe that we have been called in baptism into a covenant relationship with God. Remember, all these are Old Testament or Hebrew metaphors. In fact, God loves all peoples and all nations but Israel was chosen as an example of what it looks like to be loved by God. They were not and certainly are NOT closer to God than the rest of us. As Jesus did not come to condemn or judge the world but save it, so the church is faithful when it demonstrates that it is the beloved community called by God to mediate that love to all—meaning all God’s creation.

Part of our Lenten exercise and experience might well be to examine just how we are doing in these areas. How do we conduct ourselves as those who are called by Jesus? Do we look as if we are Jesus’ beloved community? How does the world around us see us? Are we accessible? Is there anything compelling about us that invites, engages, and draws people to the lifted-up Jesus? Does the world, our community, our city see in us and our congregation that Jesus who does not condemn or judge? Do those who drive by St. Mark’s see Jesus present in us or do they see a church struggling to pay our bills in a survival mode hosting suppers, dinners and sales? Being a Christian is no easy calling. As our farmers these vernal days collect the sap from the maple trees and boil it down to syrup, if we were to try and boil down the whole Bible to one word, it’s love. If our Christian faith were to have one distinct hallmark, one specific theme, one underlying principle, one solid foundation, one would have to be the all-encompassing supremacy of love and nothing else. Love of God, love of humanity, love of the world present and the world to come is undoubtedly the most important characteristic of in all of heaven and earth and St. Paul warns, without love, nothing else makes any difference. In one of the Epistles of St. John, the definition of love is decisively elevated to the ultimate extreme. God is love. Love actually becomes synonymous with God, the highest acclamation ever! God’s gift of love is meant for you and me and all the world’s 6 billion souls—that’s the good news for us today and everyday.

But we ,post-moderns have a problem with gifts. We think we get what we pay for. We would rather earn it. We don’t have faith in freebies and free lunches! A few years ago a Texan town council in the US decided to do away with the practice of charging for parking. It was formally decided and announced in the local media but the people had a hard time believing and getting used to it. They preferred putting money in the parking meters to feeling guilty of “illegally” parking. In stead of removing the parking meters, the local authorities put tape over the coin slots and some tore it off and put in the money any way. We would rather pay for God’s free gift of salvation than accepting it. When the big shot Nicodemus comes to Jesus under the convenient cover of night and commends Jesus:” Sir / Rabbi / Guru, we know that God has sent you to teach us. You could not work these miracles unless God were with you”. The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, as a young man feel in love with a woman and the two made plans to get married. However, at an enormous emotional cost to the young naïve couple, he broke off the engagement and decided to live the rest of his life as a celibate. His loneliness had more to do with touching many than his academic brilliance. Loneliness gave him an exceptional depth of understanding.

Isn’t true that when pressures and stress get to be too much, we like to run and hide from the world. All of us deep down in our hearts want to be accepted, appreciated, loved, and found. We are most of the time like that little boy while hiding received a phone call from a telemarketer. He whispered: “Hello”. “What is your name?” “Billy”, he whispered again. “How old are you?” “Four”. “Can I speak to your mom?”. “Nop”. “Can I speak to your dad?” “I don’t think so”. “May I speak to someone there?” The answer again was, “Sorry”. Who else are there?” “The police”.
“Any other grown-ups there? “Yeah, the firemen”.
“May I speak with a firemen?” “Nop, they are all busy”.
“Billy, all those people in your house—I can’t talk to any of them? What are they doing?
The little boy whispered: ”They are all looking for me”.

Jesus has nothing to do with Nicodemus’ words of adulation. Out of the blue, Jesus tells him like it is, ”You must be born from above in order to see God’s kingdom”.

My teachers in homiletics or the craft of preaching, cautioned us not to give into the temptation of wanting to look like a geek and use theological terms, names of biblical scholars, Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic words to impress the audience. But in order to shed light on the worn-out phrase, “born-again”, not that I want to perform as a geek by biting the head off a live snake, I must use the original word here in Jesus blatant reply to Nicodemus’ statement: “ Without being born anothen ( from above ) , no one can see the reign of God”. It is only a metaphor. We need to born from above, born by a new parent, born by the one who descended from above. Jesus adds inverse 8: “Only God’s Spirit gives new life. The spirit is like the wind that blows wherever it wants to.” The untamable, uncontrollable gift of the Holy Spirit of God helps us to be born from above.

Feel the breeze. Experience the wind from above.