Heretical Orthodoxy...

Thanks to Mark Suriano and Kathryn Matthews Huey for their insights on today's readings. The term "heretical orthodoxy" is from Peter Rollin's "How to (Not) Speak of God."

Isaiah 6:1-8

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.”
The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”

Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”

Romans 8:12-17

So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh — for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ — if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

John 3:1-17

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He 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.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus 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?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 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.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

In his book on the emergent church, How (Not) to Speak of God, Peter Rollins talks about something he calls “Heretical Orthodoxy.” The idea is that, rather than having, as Christians, to choose between an orthodoxy of absolutism (where we know everything about God, we have all the answers locked safely in our creeds and doctrines and theologies) or an orthodoxy of relativism (where we pick and chose our creeds and doctrines and theological beliefs like we choose our favorite soft drink, and it’s OK if you like Coke while I like Pepsi), there is a third way.

“Orthodoxy” is defined as “right belief”… but Rollins’ “Heretical Orthodoxy” asks: What if the Christian faith is not about right belief, but about believing in the right way? What new things could we learn about God, about one another, about ourselves, and about the ways in which the Triune God is alive and active in the world today?

In our Gospel reading, we meet Nicodemus, a man whose entire life revolved around careful, stringent orthodoxy.

The Pharisees were a sect of Judaism dedicated to carefully following every letter of the Law of Moses without deviation which, in their view, was the proper method to honor God. This translated into hundreds of laws governing every facet of life, from how far one could walk and how many things one could carry on the Sabbath to which races and nationalities one could associate with. All of this was in an effort to have lived a life acceptable to God on the day of resurrection.

The Pharisees’ polar opposite were the Sadducees, the elite and powerful group who emphasized the sacrifices and rituals of Temple worship above all. They associated with the Roman governors, adopted ever more of the food, dress, and habits of Greek culture, and did not at all believe in the resurrection. Where the Pharisees would be called absolutists, the Sadducees were the fist-century equivalent of relativists.

What these groups held in common was the fact that they had succeeded, at least in their own minds, in successfully defining God: What God expected, what God enjoyed, what God hated, who God hated, and how God reacted to specific external stimuli: do this here, and that happens over there. You get the idea.

The problem is that, in the words of Harry Emerson Fosdick, “God defined is God finished.” Once we are convinced that we know exactly what to do and say and think to get the desired result from the Divine, we in effect replace the Divine with the self.

So when our Gospel introduces Nicodemus as one who comes to Jesus by night… it isn’t just talking about the time of day when the sun is down. Nicodemus lives in the darkness of cold, idolatrous certainty, of an orthodoxy that has become an object of worship unto itself.

We aren’t told why Nicodemus came to see Jesus. In John’s chronology, this is not long after Jesus cleared the Temple, overturning the moneychangers’ tables and driving them out with a homemade whip. Perhaps this was actually something that the Pharisees appreciated, since they were constantly at odds with the elite leadership of the Temple, the Pharisees. That and the signs we are told that Jesus performed while in Jerusalem may have compelled Nicodemus to visit Jesus and invite him to join with the Pharisees. Certainly, Nicodemus’ opening words, “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,” sounds like an official pronouncement of approval.

At the same time, Jesus’ words and actions may have had an opposite effect on Nicodemus. Perhaps this Pharisee had been having misgivings about the effectiveness of his faith journey. He saw how the Pharisees neglected God-created humanity in favor of cold conformity to religious expectations. He saw that, rather than God blessing the faithfulness of the Pharisee sect with a restoration of God’s favor to Israel, the boot of Roman oppression ground harder down on the necks of the oppressed Jews with each passing day. He felt the darkness of idolatry, the worship of rules and regulations, freezing his innermost being, his very soul, to death. In this light, Nicodemus’ opening words could be seen as a plea for help.

If Nicodemus is there to make pronouncements, though, Jesus isn’t interested. If Nicodemus is there to plead for help, Jesus is quick to cut to the chase – to turn Nicodemus’ carefully orchestrated belief system, his painfully precise way of defining who God is and what God does, completely upside down.

And Jesus will do the same thing for us, if we let him.

Think of it: our reading features the most well-known verse in the entire New Testament, perhaps in all of Scripture: John 3:16. We see “John 3:16” signs at sporting events, we see its words featured on everything from billboards to bumper stickers to coffee mugs. But for many who both promote, and who read, those words, rather than understanding John 3:16 to be a joyous pronouncement that God loves all of us – every single one – so much that the only gift good enough for us is God’s only Son… the words serve as a dividing line between those who are acceptable – believers – and those who are unacceptable.

Further, “belief,” especially in a culture so heavily influenced by Evangelicalism, is at least functionally defined as mental and verbal assent to a specific set of doctrinal statements.

If salvation were so simple, Nicodemus wouldn’t have visited Jesus, because Jesus would have had no reason to come and die and rise in the first place. We’d have it all figured out.

But what if our faith journey isn’t a daily struggle to believe the right things? What if our faith journey is a process of learning how to believe in the right way?

What Jesus says to Nicodemus, and to us, is that our faith journey is not predicated upon what we know; rather we are brought into joyous relationship with the living God though being known by God. God cannot be quantified, God cannot be photographed, God cannot be predicted. God is not a crossword puzzle, a thing to be figured out. In his First Epistle, John makes the simple, bold statement that “God is love,” and love is a mystery: wild and bold, joyous and unpredictable, one does not determine the chemical processes by which love occurs, one simply jumps in and enjoys the ride.

Marcus Borg writes in The God We Never Knew about what it means to “believe.” Rather than strict intellectual assent to propositions and claims, he speaks of belief as trust, as faithfulness, and, “in a very general sense…the belief that there’s something to all of this.” Borg says that faith that “believes God” is not something we can simply will, on our own: “we are led into it. It grows....It is not a requirement that we are to meet but a quality that grows as our relationship with God deepens.” But we do have to “take the first step,” he says, “and then another (though sometimes we are virtually pushed into this by desperation or lured into it by example or experience).” So there it is, the mystery of grace and our response, however limited, however sincere. This is where we see the difference between classic orthodoxy, “right belief,” and Peter Rollins’ “Heretical Orthodoxy,” daring rather to believe in the right way.

Believing the right way means that, rather than consulting a doctrinal checklist to make sure we are “in with the in crowd,” we are open to see where God’s Holy Spirit is blowing today. Believing the right way means that, rather than drawing the circle of acceptability closer in each day, jealously guarding our glossy sheen of righteousness, we throw the circle wide, and watch who the lifted-up and glorified Son, Jesus Christ, brings in to the fellowship.

Believing in the right way meant that Phillip was blown by the wind of the Spirit to share the Good News with the Ethiopian eunuch. Believing in the right way meant that Peter was blown by the wind of the Spirit to bring the Good News to another outcast, a Roman soldier, a centurion named Cornelius.

Who, in our life, is waiting to hear that God loves them? Who desperately needs to see and hear that the only gift good enough to fully express the depth and breadth of God’s wild, unbridled grace, God’s ebullient, irrepressible love is God’s own Son? Which way will the wind of the Spirit blow us today?

A Pharisee and a Traveling Preacher Walk Into a Bar...

I stink at titling sermons, have you noticed?

Appreciation to The Center for Excellence in Preaching, as well as David Lose and Working Preacher, Kate Huey, AND Gil Bailie of the Girardian Lectionary. Though the text is not included here, I am again using "World In Prayer's weekly posting as the Prayers of the People.

Genesis 12:1-4a
Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 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. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him.

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.
For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is 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 descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) — in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

John 3:1-17
Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He 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.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus 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?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 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.”
Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?
“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

John 3:16 is, by far, the most universally well-known Bible verse of them all. You see it at football games (Tim Tebow wore the Scripture reference in his eye black during the 2009 championship game, not to mention the guy in the rainbow wig with the sign), you see it on everything from throw rugs to wristwatches to billboards, and just about everyone you meet on a daily basis can say the verse in the King James Version. Martin Luther called this verse “the Gospel in miniature.”

But we do the reading a disservice by separating this one verse, as beautiful as it is, from its deep and somewhat troubling context. Where it all began was with a late-night visit between a respected member of the religious community and a disheveled traveling preacher.

Late at night? Well, of course! You wouldn’t expect a well-known Pharisee, a Jerusalem V.I.P., to be hobnobbing with itinerant rabbis, it’s simply not done. Nicodemus is recognized, you see. People know who he is, he has wealth, influence, and a seat on the Sanhedrin, and to be knocking on the door in broad daylight, especially after this Jesus person had caused all that uproar in the Temple – knocking over the moneychangers tables, babbling about destroying the Temple and restoring it in three days!

Well, it would make sense if Nicodemus was at the head of a column of Temple guards and coming to arrest Jesus, but to simply speak with him? Preposterous!

Yet as hard as Nicodemus tried to fit in with his fellow Pharisees, as much as he tried to blend in with the other members of the Sanhedrin, he found himself up late, pacing the floor, trying to figure out what it all meant. He had to know. He had to see this Jesus fellow up-close, speak with him, and find out what made him tick.

So Nicodemus waited until all the lights were out, and made his way down the narrow, familiar streets to the house where the rabble-rouser and his motley crew were staying. The young man who answered the door raised his eyebrow when he made out who had knocked, but he ushered Nicodemus in as if this kind of thing happened every day. The Pharisee stood there as the man awoke Jesus, then returned to his own sleeping mat and almost immediately began snoring softly.

Jesus offered Nicodemus some wine in an earthen cup, and led him out to the small courtyard where they could speak without disturbing the others. Nicodemus was surprised to find that he was nervous.

Then again, if someone will overturn tables, swing a whip around, and caterwaul like an Old Testament prophet, they are, to say the least, unpredictable. But he had rehearsed his words carefully all the way over, and as Jesus settled on a rough bench, Nicodemus launched into his speech.

“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.”

Do you know how many dirt-poor rabbis from Podunk towns all over Judea would kill to have a powerful member of the Jewish ruling party acknowledge that their ministry, their preaching was blessed by God? And this upstart, this Galilean nobody, had the audacity, the gall, to interrupt him!

“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

Actually, the Greek, anothen, could mean “born from above,” “born anew,” or “born again.” Nicodemus heard it as “born again,” and was doubly incensed. Not only had he been interrupted, but interrupted with nonsense!
But Jesus, of course, meant it differently. You must be born of water and the Spirit to enter the Kingdom of God.

Over the course of the conversation that followed, Nicodemus went from angry, to confused, to awestricken. What had begun as a quest for information became a journey to an unknown land.

You see, for Nicodemus, what you do and how you live has everything to do with if and to what degree God loves and accepts you. One must keep the laws, keep the feasts, make the sacrifices, observe the rules, and if one is diligent enough in those observances, over time, perhaps you will earn righteousness. Maybe, just maybe, God will bestow love upon you.

You control the outcome. You decide whether you are beloved or not. Redeemed or not. Blessed or not. Righteous or not. In a sense, with this kind of power over your destiny, God becomes almost irrelevant.

But a baby doesn’t have to observe rules, or feasts, or sacrifices in order to be born. The baby has no say at all in the process of being born. The whole matter is decided, initiated, and controlled from outside. Being born, as far as the baby is concerned, just happens.

So the message Jesus gave Nicodemus, and is giving us, is that getting born again is something with which we have very little to do. This is something that comes from God. Further, to be born again is to first die. Marcus Borg writes, “‘Dying and rising’ and ‘to be born again’ are the same ‘root image’ for the process of personal transformation at the center of Christian life: to be born again involves death and resurrection. It means dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being…a way of being and an identity centered in the sacred, in Spirit, in Christ, in God.”

And if Nicodemus wasn’t dizzy from all of these implications which whirled madly around him already, Jesus went on to detail how it’s done, and why.

He reached back to Numbers 21 and reminded Nicodemus of when the children of Israel, wandering in the wilderness, had once again displeased God and were being punished with a rash of deadly snakebites.
God instructed Moses to make a bronze serpent and place it on a pole. When someone was bitten, they had too look up, look at the very thing which had afflicted them, in order to live.

We spoke last week about how death and sin are so intricately related. If death is to be defeated, if it is to be conquered, then we must look upon that very thing which afflicts us: we must see Jesus, nailed to a cross, dead. Dead for us. In “The Joy of Being Wrong,” James Alison writes that “God raised up this man who had been killed in this way for us. The victim of human iniquity was raised up as forgiveness; in fact the resurrection was the raising up of the victim as forgiveness. This it was which permitted the recasting of God as love. It was not just that God loved his son and so raised him up, but that the giving of the son and his raising up revealed God as love for us.”

Oh yeah, that’s the “why.” That’s where John 3:16 comes in. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

The word “world” there is interesting. Usually, when John uses the word (which is “kosmos” in the Greek), he is signifying that entity which is hostile to God’s will. Some commentators suggest that the true force and scope of God’s unfathomable love can be seen by translating the verse, “For God so loved the God-hating world...!” After all, isn’t it true that God’s love is not only unfathomable but also somewhat offensive?

God does not ask the world if it wishes to be the recipient of God’s love. God just goes ahead and loves, and not only loves but gives the world God’s only beloved Son over to death. The one who dies for you clearly has a significant claim on you, and John makes that clear. God's love – surprising, all encompassing, unasked for and undeserved – is also given unconditionally. God loves us, that is, whether we like it or not.

And lest we think that the act of believing is a kind of mental assent to a rigid set of doctrines, a pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps, some kind of self-hypnosis, or anything else that can once again place us in the driver’s seat of our own salvation, let’s return to Marcus Borg.

In his book, “The God We Never Knew,” he says, concerning the concept of belief in John, and indeed in the entire New Testament, that rather than strict intellectual assent to propositions and claims, belief is trust, is faithfulness, and, “in a very general sense…[it is] the belief that there’s something to all of this.” Borg says that faith that “believes God” is not something we can simply will, on our own: “we are led into it. It grows….It is not a requirement that we are to meet but a quality that grows as our relationship with God deepens.” But we do have to “take the first step,” he says, “and then another (though sometimes we are virtually pushed into this by desperation or lured into it by example or experience).”

Lent is a time of disorientation, or at least it should be, for all of us who, like Nicodemus, live like we have it all figured out. Lent is supposed to remind us that all our dieting, fitness, and age-defying make-up products will not keep us alive. We are dust and ashes and to dust and ashes we will return. And Lent should remind us that for all our self-help, get-rich-quick schemes and for all the ways we self-aggrandize ourselves for being self-made individuals, we are finally helpless. We need a Savior to do it all for us. We need a Savior to die for us. Sin is that serious.

Lent is a time of disorientation. But it is also, thanks be to God, a time where we, like Nicodemus, can experience a reorientation to a new perspective!

Let us pray.