One
of the very first songs that I can remember hearing that had any sort
of social commentary was called "Little
Boxes" Do
you recall it?
See
the boxes on the hillside,
pretty
boxes made of ticky tacky
and
they're all made out of ticky tacky
and
they all look just the same.
There's
a red one and a blue one
and
an orange one and a yellow one,
and
they're all made out of ticky tacky
and
they all look just the same.
And
the people in the houses all go to the University
and
they get put in boxes,
pretty
boxes just the same.
There's
a lawyer and a doctor
and
a business executive,
and
they're all made out of ticky tacky
and
they all look just the same.
There's
still a lot of painful truth in that old protest song-- and not
just
about contemporary architecture. We human beings have an almost
irresistible compulsion to shrink complex things to manageable size,
to fit them into the tiny boxes of our impoverished imagination--not
just houses, not just ourselves-- but ideals, philosophies, concepts,
causes, morals, politics, history, culture, our faith-- even our God.
When
we talk about God of course, there is the problem of inadequate
vocabulary-- human language about the Divine nature will inevitably
fall short. We’ve all met people who seem to be trying to boil
their faith down to quick and easy clichés or catch phrases-- “God
said it-- I believe it-- that settles it.” or “God is my
co-pilot” or “My boss is a Jewish carpenter” or ’WWJD” .
There’s
nothing
wrong with
any of those attitudes if we understand that they are just the tip of
the iceberg of our faith. We can never forget that there’s more to
being a Christian -- there’s more to our God-- than any slogan can
capture. The risk we run is that we end up appropriating the spacious
and infinite promises and nature of our God and reducing them to
meaningless babble.
I
recall visiting a church in another city, some years ago. A young
woman stood up to give a witness.
"People
I just want to share with you what an awesome God we have. Every
morning I pray to Him and I say, 'Awesome God, you are so awesome.
I'm filled with awe when I realize how awesome you really are Awesome
God.' And people, it's true--He's really awesome. It's just really
awesome how awesome Our Awesome God is. He's our Awesome God and
He's so awesome. I just find that so, so, so... well awesome."
Such
shrink-wrapped, boxed-in faith is easy to identify when the back
bumper
of a car reads "I
found it" or
the old classic "Honk
if you love Jesus".
The president of one of the seminaries I attended had a bumper
sticker on her door that read "If
you love Jesus, seek justice. Any fool can honk"
We
can spot this tendency to put God into a box when we see some
preacher or politician assuming his or her attitudes are identical
with those of the Almighty I can recall a street preacher in the
Loop. He’d always be standing in front of a Walgreen’s across
State Street from Carson Pirie Scott. He had a portable PA which he
carried around in a shopping bag. No matter when I’d see him, he
was proclaiming how much Jesus loved everybody but was going to be
sending a lot of people to hell. I never heard him condemn drinking
or gambling or any of the big seven deadly sins. He’d condemn women
who wore slacks on the street, women who wore make-up and lipstick,
who wore their skirts too short. They were, he’d victoriously
announce, all going to hell!
What
that meant, of course, is that the preacher himself was threatened by
the wrinkles of contemporary culture and fashion, and sheared off
the reality of God to fit through the pinched slits of his own
lusting eyes and dirty mind.
But
before we condescending chuckle at the supposed backwardness of
others, or pat ourselves on the back for our own personal
breadth, and depth, and vision, we should admit that shrunken faith,
reduced religion, trying to squeeze God into a human-sized box, is a
problem for all
religious thinking. Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox-- conservative,
liberal, charismatic, or evangelical-- we all try to do it-- Even the
most thoughtful and faithful among us.
The
dilemma is-- how
can we think of God at all except by reference
to
ourselves? We cannot get out of our skin, we cannot transcend our
own
mental
categories, and the result is that we say "God," but we are
thinking--
we
are inescapably saying-- "human" with a loud voice in not
so many words.
The
awareness of this caused theologians of a previous generation to
tremble.
"What
are you doing. . . with the word of God upon your lips? Did
one
ever hear of such overweening presumption?" asked
Karl Barth.
Indeed,
presumption is what Nicodemus brings to the table in his
late
night conversation with Jesus. Often in sermons and Sunday School
lessons
we picture Nicodemus as a restless seeker, slipping away secretly
to
Jesus under the cover of darkness to wrestle with his doubts. But
the
writer
of John actually presents another view. At first, anyway, Nicodemus
is
the picture of self-satisfied confidence and unquestionable
knowledge.
"Rabbi,
we know. . . " are
the very first words out of his mouth.
There
is a smugness here, a pretentious setting of the ground rules. "Let's
talk,
teacher to teacher, religious leader to religious Jesus. Everything’s
under control; nothing is loose. We
know."
He
speaks not only for himself, but for the religious establishment
he
represents: "We
know. . . " And
what exactly is
it that
Nicodemus and his cohorts know?
They
are confident that they know the source of Jesus' deeds. They have
him and his ministry sized-up. They know the limits to divine action,
how God can and cannot work in the world. They know the immutable
truth about human beings, that people are born once, grow old, and
die.
That's
it. They know the limits of things, what is possible and what
is
impossible. They have all the theological boxes filled. They know
o-so-very much-- just ask them.
"No
you don't," said
Jesus.
"No one can really know what is possible
with
God unless one is born from above, born anew, born of the Spirit."
With
his opening response to Nicodemus, Jesus knocks down the walls, moves
outside
the boxes, fractures the categories.
"How
can this be? How can this be?" The
rest of Nicodemus' night time
conversation
can be summed up by this refrain, by this whining attempt to
repair
the boxes that Jesus was systematically dismantling.
The
very opening lines of this story present Nicodemus as the spokes-
person of a fixed, immutable world, confident of its knowledge and
closed to the surprising and the new. The rest of the story, and of
the whole Gospel of John, is about that tightly bound world coming
unraveled. At each turn in the road, Jesus confronts Nicodemus' boxed
view of reality.
People
indeed can be born anew when they are old, life is full of mystery,
and the Spirit is beyond all human control, blowing where it will.
Jesus was wandering dangerously into the wild and unexplored
territory of the Spirit, into the unknown, and Nicodemus wanted to
rope him back into the safe regions of "we know," of his
own provincial religious map.
W.
H. Auden once observed that it is hard to be a Christian if one is
not
a poet. Auden was pointing not only to the poet's reverence for the
power
of language, but also to the poet's awareness of mystery, of the
stammering
of language after the unknowable.
Peter
and Andrew and James and John knew about following the wind. The knew
that being a disciple of Jesus meant putting down their nets and
following-- with no idea in the world where you were going. Following
Jesus means being willing to enter into new places, new experiences,
new relationships, new stages of life-- sometimes in the very face of
common sense and opinion. It means embracing the fact that we do not
have the slightest inkling of what comes next.
Our
faith is an systematic, objective, perfectly logical way of thinking
and looking at the reality of this world-- based upon the premise of
a sometimes higgledy-piggledy, highly subjective, utterly illogical
of experience of ultimate reality. Proclaiming the faith means using
your intellect to the fullest extent in order to understand Church
History, Doctrine, and Bible and then putting your intellect on hold
and using your heart in order to describe with words something
ultimately indescribable with words-- something that can only be
lived out to grasp.
No
wonder that one theologian advised young ministers that, if they were
to be good preachers, they would need "an essential untidiness
of mind." All I can personally add to that is, if you think my
desk is messy, you ought to look inside my head.
"Do
not be astonished that I said to you, 'You must be born from
above,'"
Jesus
said to Nicodemus, breaking down the boxes, stretching the
limits
of the possible. "The
wind of God's Spirit blows where it chooses,
and
it is beyond your knowing."
To
be a follower of Jesus Christ is to be willing to have our
o-so-precious
categories
redefined, to have our "God boxes" dismantled periodically,
to be prepared to be blown by the Spirit into places one would never
have dreamed of going. To be a follower of Jesus means to live with
risk and wonder and uncertainly.
To
be a follower of Jesus-- to be a child of God-- means to understand
in your gut that there are no limits to God and God’s love-- and
the only limits on us and on our response to that love have been laid
upon us by human beings.. It means refusing to accept the
conventional wisdom that we know it all and acknowledge that we dwell
in the darkness of ignorance and broken-ness.
As Jesus put it to Nicodemus, to be a child of God, to be born again
of the Spirit, is to "come
to the light," even
when it shines outside the mirrored boxes where we thought we had all
the reflections of God's truth trapped.
In
the early days of the AIDS epidemic, one of New York City's most
courageous
and tireless workers against the disease was a physician by the
name
of Joyce Wallace. To help stem the tide of the virus, Dr. Wallace
allowed
herself to be blown by the wind of the Spirit in new directions;
she
followed the light of God into dark places, not only treating
infected
patients
but also cruising the West Side of Manhattan in a specially
equipped
medical van, paying prostitutes $20 to be tested on the spot for
AIDS.
Though she experienced the skepticism of her medical colleagues and
the
daily disappointments of seeing patient after patient die, she
refused
to
be dissuaded from her mission or confined by the conventional
definitions
of what was possible.
In
fact, she drew inspiration in this breaking of the boundaries from
her
mother, a teacher of brain-injured children. One particularly
powerful
memory
was when her mother had her class stage a production of My
Fair
Lady,
and she
gave the lead role to a little girl in a wheelchair. It never
occurred to her mother, reported Dr. Wallace, that the audience, so
conditioned by life's boundaries of possible and impossible, would
weep when the little girl rolled herself across the stage singing, "I
could have danced all night."
"If
I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe,"
Jesus
asked Nicodemus, "how
can you believe if I tell you about heavenly
things?"
Jesus
was not moving Nicodemus toward a new theology, but toward a
new
experience of God and God’s love-- a new life, a new way of wonder
and worship.
The
point was not for Nicodemus to replace his little theological boxes
with slightly larger versions, but for him to fall on his knees in
repentance, to beg God for forgiveness for all arrogant thinking, and
then to be carried along by the Spirit's insistent and irresistible
breeze into a life not of his own making.
And
that’s the point for us, as well. Motivational speakers urge us to
“think outside the box”. Jesus calls us to live outside the box.
We need not become more liberal or more conservative-- we need not
stop voting for one political party or another-- we need not
necessarily change our view of the Bible or of any particular
doctrine or way or worship. What we are
called by Jesus to do is stop, and like Nicodemus-- look.
Look
around-- look within at our deepest hearts and attitudes, look at all
our o-so-confident “we knows”-- look at all the little boxes we
try to pour ourselves and others and God into-- look at the life we
are living. What Jesus calls us to do is follow-- and confess and
repent, and start living out the faith we have-- blown by the gentle,
loving, and irresistible gusts of the Spirit.
Of
course there’s a need in our lives for stability and
responsibility. Of course, there is a place in the Christian life
for doctrine, for thinking seriously about God and life, for
theological categories.
But
only when tempered by humility, by the realization that all of our
thoughts and language about God are halting attempts to come in
wonder and worship to the blazing light of the Creator of All, the
Mind of the Universe, the Divine Ultimate, the Ground of Being- -
that indescribable, omnipotent, omnipresent, transcendent and at the
same time immanent One-- the unnamable One we symbolize and worship
and pray to-- and refer to as Yahweh, El Shaddai, Maker, Creator,
Father-- our God.
So
what of Nicodemus? We see him again, of course, this time not at
the
beginning of John's Gospel but at the end of it. Jesus is dead,
crucified,
and there is Nicodemus. This time, however, he comes not as an
interrogator but as a disciple, not as a seeker in the night but a
follower of the light. If we needed any more evidence of the freedom
of the Spirit's breath, we can see it in old Nicodemus himself being
born anew.
He
shows up again at not just the end of the gospel, but at the end of
his old world. Now, he does not say, "We
know." Now,
he says nothing; he simply comes, his childlike face facing the
blowing breeze and his eyes searching the horizon for the first light
of dawn. Now he comes bearing spices of worship and praise and hope,
whose aroma will be carried by the wind that blows where it
will--Amen.
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