“Spiritual Optics”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Text: John 3:1-12
Just recently I visited the optometrist for my annual eye exam. I went through all the usual things: I sat down in the chair, I had drops put into my eyes, and I had air blown in them for pressure tests. Then I sat in front of a screen to determine whether I could see any of the letters: one of which I could see with my glasses off; all of which I could see with my glasses on. Big surprise! I was asked whether, after I had taken my glasses off, could I see better with this lens or could I see better with that lens.
I think this is the most stressful day of the year for me. Those of you who have gone through it know exactly what I am talking about, because you know that you are going to live with blurred vision for the next few years from bad glasses. It is your fault if you don't tell them which one works better, and often the margins are so fine. I find it stressful!
When the optometrist tells me that she is now actually going to look deeper into my eyes, I am starting to get really worried! She gets out lasers and buttons and lights that flash and goes deep into my eyes, and she says things like “I am going to rummage around in the back of your eyes to see if anything is going on.”
I feel like saying, “There's a lot going on behind me eyes, but most of it is stress-filled at the moment.”
She says to me something like this: “We know more from looking into the back of your eyes about your sight than from your reading the letters on the screen. What is going on the inside will tell us more about how you will be able to see in the future than anything you can tell us by looking out.”
I thought to myself, “You know, there is a spiritual principle at work here as well as a physical one.” And, it requires many facets of our existence, mainly that what is seen from the outside-in can determine a lot more than what can be seen from the inside out. That is exactly what Jesus is getting at in the Gospel of John, not only in today's text but in other parts of the Gospel, this sense in which God's Spirit is able to understand us, to empower us, to look into us, and in looking into us, by the power of The Spirit, is able to affect the way we look out.
This was the case in our passage today, where Jesus said something to Nicodemus that was earth-shaking. He said, “You cannot see the Kingdom of God unless you are born anew.” Then, he goes on to describe this new birth not only as a birth from water from Baptism, but a birth in the power of The Spirit. The birth that he is talking about is the birth of The Spirit, and the power of that Spirit enabling us to see what, with our own eyes and our own perspective, we are unable to see. Only those who have the newness of life in The Spirit can see the Kingdom of God.
I know that this passage is often problematic because they have heard it said so many times when Jesus says, “You must be born anew” or “You must be born again.” If you look at that word “again” in the Greek, it is alõhen. It does not just mean “born anew” it does not just mean “born again,” it can mean “born from above.” In other words, one is born through the power of God's Spirit breaking into our lives. When that Spirit is working in our lives, it gives us a vision of things that normally, by virtue of our own human apprehensions, we cannot see.
I know there are ludicrous interpretations and usages of both this passage and the whole notion of being born in The Spirit. There are some people, unfortunately, who distort all this by over spiritualizing everything. In other words, they look at the Spirit in every single thing, always talking about what the Spirit has done and is doing in their lives and they have a certainty about everything on the basis of some experience of the Spirit that they have had.
Often such people trivialize the power of the Spirit. They make it seem like it is just an ordinary thing rather than the very power of God. They are so “spiritual,” to use that phrase, that they apply the spiritual to everything and it becomes ridiculous.
There are others however, who are overly sceptical, who see no room and no role for the Spirit in life. They are like people who see the flat earth and nothing more. There is no other dimension, there is no spiritual dimension to life, but rather everything is just simply by virtue of what we can observe. Such people tend to marginalize the Spirit, and suggest that the Spiritual dimension isn't important.
And then, there are those who are overly sensitive to the uses of the Spirit. I don't mean being open to the Spirit, I mean they want a little bit of the Spirit in their lives. They want to be seen as spiritual but they don't want to apply that to any other aspect of their lives. Such people relativize the Spirit.
There are these three distortions. There are those that marginalize, there are those who trivialize it, and there are those who are relativists. But, Jesus, in his conversation with Nicodemus is going much, much further. He is taking us into a deep place when it comes to the Spirit. He is talking about the Spirit forming the way we can see the work of the kingdom, where we can observe the kingdom of heaven at work here on earth.
I don't want to over simplify this either. There are some people who I think make absolute statements about the role and the power of the Spirit and do not take into account the fact that in this life, as the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians, “We see through a glass darkly.” Or, we have a partial vision. After all, the Spirit is ineffable, the Spirit is not easily defined or contained, so much so that Jesus says, “Look, the Spirit blows where it wills, blows where it wishes; you cannot contain it,” you cannot put the Spirit in a box.
So, I am always cautious when talking about the Spirit, because I think some people talk in absolutes about the Spirit. Having said that, we have to come face-to-face with this presence! We have to come face-to-face with the reality of what Jesus was saying when he said, “You cannot see the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of heaven unless you are born from above, unless you have the eyes of the Spirit.” So, what do the eyes of the Spirit do? What spiritual optics do we have to change? Well, I think first of all, and this is central to the story of Nicodemus, we see Jesus in a new light through the eyes of the Spirit, through the eyes of eternity.
Central to the New Testament claim is that the Kingdom of God was present in the life and the ministry of Jesus, that in Jesus' work and in Jesus' ministry, in his healings and his teachings, the very Kingdom of God was observed and seen and was there for people to recognize.
In some small way, Nicodemus saw that. We read that he came to Jesus at night, under the cloak of darkness, in order to speak to Jesus. He had observed Jesus healing someone, and he knew that Jesus was doing special things. We are even told that he was a Jewish scholar, that he was knowledgeable about the things of the Kingdom, and that he was aware of the power of the Holy Spirit, just like the great prophets of the Old Testament. It wasn't as if Nicodemus didn't know anything before he had his encounter with Jesus. Nicodemus knew a lot. He was schooled in the Talmud. He would have been absolutely full of the knowledge of the existence of the Kingdom of God, and he comes to Jesus under the cloak of darkness and he says to Jesus, “I have seen what you have done, have observed what you have done.”
Jesus also knew that Nicodemus was not prepared to make a decision that day. Through his own perception, knowledge, scholarship, he was still overly cautious. he says to Nicodemus, “Look, Nicodemus,” and he says it probably very lovingly, “you cannot see the full workings of the Kingdom unless you are born from above. Unless you have openness to the power of the Spirit, you cannot see the full workings of the Kingdom. Unless you are born from above, unless you have openness to the power of the Spirit, you can't understand me and what I am doing. You have to have the eyes of the Spirit and be open to the very power of God's Spirit working in you and in me.”
Part of the problem that many of us have, even devout Christians, even knowledgeable people, is that we still try and look at Jesus like that flat earth group. We look at him in a single dimensional way. We look at him historically, we look at him theologically, we look at what he said and what he did, but we don't go any deeper, we don't go through the eyes of the Spirit. Why? It is because we are relying all the time on how we look out rather than inviting the Spirit in and allowing the Spirit to illuminate us and to reveal to us the very power of the Kingdom of God.
We can enter into a debate with anyone on the historicity of the life and the ministry of Jesus, but there comes a point at which a believer has to open themselves to the power of the Spirit to be able to know more of the deeper things of God.
There is a beautiful book that I have been re-reading recently. I read it 10 years ago when it first came out by the great American writer, Frederick Buechner. David, in his very last sermon, referred to him. Buechner lives in Vermont and, in my opinion, is one of America's very best writers. He has this lovely book entitled, The Eyes of the Heart. In it, he takes us into knowledge of his own family, a deeper understanding of the struggles his family went through: matters of life and death and birth and careers and faith. It is a marvellously written sentimental not overly loquacious book, beautifully written.
There is one moment when he talks about his mother, and in this there is so much that is helpful to us. His mother must have had a great influence on his life, and he noticed something as he became an adult about his mother, namely that she was always frightened of death. She wouldn't talk about it, she wouldn't discuss it, and he even noticed, and this is really fascinating, that when he went to her apartment all the photographs around were of family members who were living, but all those who had died were in frames placed in her bedroom drawer. She just didn't want to deal with death. She just didn't want to deal with matters of eternity and of life and of meaning. She hid from them.
One day, she came to Frederick and said, “Do you believe in eternal life?”
He said, “Yes, I do.” But, he didn't want to get into a discussion with his mother right there and then, because he knew that his mother would probably just get angry with him: she was trying to set him up for a fight. The last thing that everyone knows that you want to do is have an argument with your mother, right? So what did he do? He wrote her a letter - what a lovely son! In this letter he explains to her why he believes in eternal life and in the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven. He starts off with the argument that there must be some degree of justice in this life, and I think there is probably more than just what we encounter here and now, but then there is another paragraph and this paragraph is amazing! He says:
The second reason I told my mother I believed in it, apart from any religious considerations, is because I just have a hunch that it is true. I intuited it. I said that if the victims and the victimizers, the wise and the foolish, the good-hearted and the heartless, all end up alike in the grave and that is the end of it, then life would be a black comedy, and to me, even at its worst, life doesn't feel like a black comedy. It feels like a mystery. It feels as though at the inner-most parts of it there is a God of Holiness, and that we experience all the horrors that go on both around us and within us as horrors rather than just the way the cookie crumbles, because in our own inner-most hearts we belong to the God of Holiness, and all these other things are tragic departures from Him. Lastly, I wrote her that I believe what happens to us after we die is that we aren't dead forever, because Jesus said so. Jesus was another of the dead people I knew my mother wouldn't want to talk about.
Then, Buechner goes on and he suggests that his mother couldn't handle eternal life, couldn't handle matters of life and death, and couldn't handle sorrow, because in the end she would not open herself to Christ. She would not open herself to the power of the Spirit, so-much-so that her life was heavy and hard and burdened, because she could not see the Kingdom of heaven at work.
How many of us, if we are really honest, are like Buechner's mother? We hold on to our constraints, we hold on to our biases, we hold on to our own perception, and we never get to the point where we see the Kingdom of heaven at work on earth. We never have the joy and the freedom that comes from observing the power of the living God in our lives, because we are so focused on the distortions of looking out, and never allow the Spirit to work within us. It is that Spirit, and that Spirit alone, who reveals to us not only the power of the ministry of Jesus, but the power of the reign of the Kingdom of God.
There is also a sense in which the power of the Spirit causes us to look at the world differently and to look at ourselves differently. Frederick Buechner goes on (I paraphrase):
.....because of my mother's fear of death, she never really embraces the sorrows of others. She is a compassionate person, a kind and an honest person. She never really identifies with suffering. She never really goes out of her way to help those in need. She never really identifies with the brokenness of the world, because she has no affinity for the Kingdom of Heaven. She has no appreciation of its power.
Frederick Buechner would argue that If only his mother could have the freedom that he enjoys of being able to identify with those who are in need because of the power of the Spirit that enables you to see that in a whole new light.
I thought about that this past week when I watched American Idol. I don't watch it every week but every now and again I do. One really good song was sung! The guy who sung it got kicked off, by the way, but it was a great song by the Goo-Goo Dolls. They wrote a piece called Better Days. It's a great piece! Any of you old enough to know it would appreciate just how great it is. But, there are words in it that really talk about better days, a better world, and moving beyond the brokenness. The words go like this:
I need some place simple where we could live
And only something you can give
And that is faith and trust and peace while we are alive
And the one poor child who saved this world
And there are ten million more who probably could
If we all just stopped and said a prayer for them
So take these words and shout out loud
Coz everyone is forgiven now
Coz tonight is the night the world begins again
I wish everyone was loved tonight
And somehow end this endless fight
Just the stars that maybe we'll find - better days!
I think there are many people, good people, who in their heart-of-hearts want, like this song, to see better days, and who want a chance to begin again. I see that especially in many young people of our age and our day, who genuinely want to see a better world, and very often do things to make it that way. But, I would say to them in particular, and to all of us that if we want to really and truly identify with the news of the world around us, not only in distant places but right around us, not only way outside us but within us, we need a new life, we need the power of God's Spirit.
Nicodemus, you see, who was good, moral, cautious, and thoughtful, came to Jesus late at night and didn't have the power of the Spirit to see Jesus healing that broken world. We need to see the power of heaven working in our world. We need to see the power of God changing a broken world. We need to place ourselves in the hands of God in the midst of that broken world. How do we do it? By seeking the re-birth of the Spirit, by opening ourselves from the power above! But, rather than just looking out, we have God's will working within, and then, Jesus said to Nicodemus, we will see The Kingdom of God. When we do, everything changes! Amen.