Born Again . . . To Love the World

Photo by rockpaperpixels licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

June 28, 2020
John 3:1-20
Trinity Baptist Church
Newton, NC

There is a famous pair of truisms in the proclamation of the gospel in this morning’s reading from John 3. The first is the truism that we must be born again. The second is the truism that God so loved the world that God sent God’s Son, not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through him. Those are truisms in the proclamation of the gospel.

Truisms are common statements that are widely held to be obviously true and universally applicable. But truisms tend over time to become a mile wide and an inch deep in our understanding of them because truisms tend to be understood in isolation from each other and in isolation from the contexts of their origin and of their application. When someone states a truism, everyone nods in affirmation. Because, well, it’s widely held, and it’s obviously true. Why would anyone even need to think about it? This morning I want to us to think about these two truisms, “You must be born again” and “God so loved the world” in relation to each other, in relation to the context of their origin in John 3, and in relation to our context in the application of them.

In the gospel of John, Jesus said, “You must be born again,” one time to one person. In John 1, Jesus said to Andrew, “Come and see” (v 39). A few verses later, Jesus said to Philip, “Follow me” (v 43). In chapter 5, Jesus said to a lame man, “Take up your mat and walk” (v 8). In chapter 8, Jesus said to a woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more” (v 11). In chapter 9, Jesus said to a man who had been blind from birth, “Go and wash in the pool of Siloam” (v 7). In the gospel of John, the different paths by which different people come to faith and to following and to forgiveness and to healing are as varied as the persons themselves and their circumstances in life. As John’s gospel recounts Jesus’ ministry, Jesus reaches out to touch precisely the place in each person’s heart and soul and mind that needs healing, forgiving, changing. And in John 3, Jesus evidently knows it is not enough to say to the one named Nicodemus, “Come and see” or “Follow me” or “Get up and walk” or “Go and sin no more” or “Go and wash.” No. To this one Jesus says, “You must be born again.” “Man, you gotta start all over.” From scratch. From the get-go. Return to Start, Square One. Why did Jesus say that to Nicodemus and no one else?

Look at what Nicodemus says to Jesus at the beginning of their conversation in John 3:2: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.” Did you hear that? Who knows? “We know.” Who is this “We”? Does Nicodemus “have a rabbit in his pocket,” as they asked where I grew up when someone said “we” in place of I? Are there others with him in the room? John 3 doesn’t say that Nicodemus came to see Jesus alone, but it also doesn’t say that anyone else came with him.

When Nicodemus is introduced in verse 1, he is identified as “Pharisee.” So, according to John’s gospel, Nicodemus was a member of the first-century Jewish denomination of the Pharisees, a Jewish group distinct from the Sadducees and Zealots and Essenes and Samaritans, as Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans and Presbyterians and Episcopalians and Catholics are distinct denominations among modern Christians. Nicodemus is then also identified as a “leader of the Jews.” In John’s gospel, the expression, “the Jews,” οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι in Greek, is used as a technical term for Jewish religious and political authorities regardless of their denomination. So in addition to being a Pharisee, Nicodemus was a member of the religious and political power structure in first-century in Jerusalem and Judea.

So when Nicodemus says, “We,” to Jesus, that “we” represents the religious and political powers that be in Jerusalem and Judea. And Jesus responds to that “We” with a “Ya’ll”: “You” in the plural in Greek. “Youse guys” in Scotland and Yorkshire and South Philadelphia. “You-uns” in western Pennsylvania and Appalachia. “Youse guys, You-uns, Ya’ll must be born all over again.” That “We” from Nicodemus and that “Ya’ll” from Jesus mark the opening salvo in a gospel-long conflict between Jesus and the religious and political authorities who are represented by Nicodemus. In other words, in the context of the origin of the truism “You must be born again,” Jesus did not say it to unrighteous, unruly, unreligious people the way it is commonly applied in preaching and teaching in our time. The people whom Jesus said “must be born again” were self-righteous, rules-based, religious and political authorities who despised, condemned and excluded all but their own kind. To those people, Jesus said, “Ya’ll are so messed up in your thinking that you gotta go back to the beginning and start all over.” So, where, exactly, is Start? Where is the Beginning for someone whose thinking about righteousness and rules and religious and political power is so messed up that they need to go back to the beginning to start all over?

That’s where “God so loved the world” comes in. The beginning to which self-righteous, rules-based, religiously and politically exclusive people must go back is the divine motivation expressed in John 3:16: “God so loved the world.” “God so loved” the fallen, sin-filled, screwed-up world that God sent the Son, “not to condemn the world,” v 17 says, but that the world might be saved. Love was God’s motivation, according to John 3:16. And as God was motivated, so must we all be motivated. If the reconciling love of God does not motivate our attitudes and our actions at home and at work and at school and in our neighborhood and community and state and country and world, if the reconciling love of God does not motivate every mission and ministry of Trinity Baptist Church, then Jesus is saying to us, “Ya’ll must be born again.” We’ve gotta go back to the beginning and start all over.

That’s what the Pharisee named Paul understood that the Pharisee named Nicodemus didn’t get, at least not yet, in John 3: “In Christ,” Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:19, “God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” God did not entrust the church with a message of God’s condemnation of the world but a message of God’s reconciliation of the world. The sole motivation of the church in the world is the reconciling love of God for the world revealed in Jesus Christ the Son.

Have you looked at the Beliefs of Trinity Baptist Church lately? They are published on the website. The first of the six stated Beliefs of this congregation is “To practice being the love of God to all people within and without its fellowship.” There it is: This is a John 3:16 congregation—Being the love of God to all people within and without its fellowship because that’s how God so loved the world. No self-righteous, rules-based, religious and political power-mongering here or anywhere else Trinity folks go, right?  Right.

But before you breathe a sigh of relief that I just let you off the hook collectively and individually, our “Beliefs” are not always reflected in our attitudes and our behavior. Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 bestseller Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking provides example after example of the power of our unconscious mind, our snap judgments, our “thin-slice cognition,” as it is called. “We have our conscious attitudes,” Gladwell wrote. “This is what we choose to believe. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately.” But there is another level of attitude and the decision-making that follows. It is our unconscious attitudes by which we make decisions and act on them before any deliberation about how those unconscious attitudes relate to our stated values, the things we choose to believe.

Let me give you just one example from Blink. More than 30 years ago now, major symphony orchestras began to change the way they managed auditions. You might think that the professional musicians who served as the committee of judges in the auditions for positions in top-flight orchestras would be clear-eared and clear-minded and rigorously analytical enough to rate the performers based solely the musical talent they demonstrated in the audition. But listen to what happened when the rules for the auditions were changed.

Musicians were identified not by name but by number. Screens were erected between the committee and the auditioner, and if the person auditioning cleared his or her throat or made any kind of identifiable sound – if they were wearing heels, for example, and stepped on a part of the floor that wasn’t carpeted – they were ushered out and given a new number. And as these new rules were put in place around the country, an extraordinary thing happened: orchestras began to hire women. In the past thirty years, since screens became commonplace, the number of women in the top US orchestras has increased fivefold. (Blink, p. 250)

Even the most clear-eyed, clear-minded, most rigorously analytical of us bring subconscious assumptions to our decision making, subconscious assumptions that sometimes contradict our conscious attitudes, our stated values, what we have chosen to believe. Blink contains a host of other examples from neuroscience, psychology, personal relationships, education, business, the military, law enforcement, race relations, ethnicity. Gladwell peels away the veneer of our explanations and or rationalizations for our attitudes and our behaviors to show how often our minds were made up before we even consciously considered the decision or the person or the thing in front of us in the light of our stated values, what we have chosen to believe.

Our unconscious mind is extremely perceptive, and our snap-judgments are very often better than decisions we wrangle over endlessly in the paralysis of over-analysis. But here’s the thing: When we find ourselves thin-slicing, snap-judging people who are not like us socially, politically, economically, racially, ethnically, religiously despising, condemning, and excluding them, then we have become the ones whom Jesus called Ya’ll, Youse Guys, You-Uns: We have become Nicodemus and the Pharisees and the religious and political authorities in Jerusalem and Judea in John 3. And we must be born again.  

It doesn’t matter if the people whom we are thin-slicing are on the right or on the left or caught in the middle. We have become Nicodemus, and we must be born again. It doesn’t matter if the people whom we are thinslicing are of African or Asian or European or Indigenous or Middle Eastern or Latinx extraction. We have become Nicodemus, and we must be born again. It doesn’t matter if the people whom we are thinslicing are demonstrating for #BlackLivesMatter or  #ReopenNorthCarolina. We have become Nicodemus, and we must be born again. It doesn’t matter if the people whom we are thinslicing are unruly or rules-based, unrighteous or self-righteous, religiously and politically inclusive or exclusive. We have become Nicodemus, and we must be born again.

When we find ourselves thin-slicing, snap-judging people who are not like us, despising, condemning, or excluding them, we must go all the way back to the beginning to the divine motivation expressed in John 3:16 that “God so loved the world.” “God so loved” the fallen, sin-filled, screwed-up world that God sent the Son, “not to condemn the world,” John 3:17 says, but that the world might be saved through him.” “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

The message of reconciliation: God so loved the world that we “practice being the love of God to all people within and without [this] fellowship.” Be that person. Be that church. 

Copyrighted © 2020 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. This material may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff@jeffreysrogers.org.

I Can't Breathe

Photo by Taymaz Valley from Ottawa, Canada, 

licensed under CC BY 2.0

May 31, 2020 (Pentecost Sunday) 
Amos 5:18-24; Matthew 25:31-46  
Trinity Baptist Church, Newton, NC 

It is the rarest of weeks in which I alter my plan for the sermon after the order of worship has been printed. But it happened this week. It started Friday night. Actually, it was very early Saturday morning. I woke up about 3 a.m., lying on my stomach. I’m not a stomach-sleeper, so I was surprised to find myself in that position. It felt uncomfortable at first, and then it got worse. The horrible video from Minneapolis that I had seen far too many times during the week began to play in my head. I put my hands behind my back and pressed them together at the wrists. I imagined what it would feel like to be in that position, not in my bed but on asphalt with two men kneeling on my torso and a third with his knee pressing down on my neck. I remembered what was like years ago when I had pneumonia and every breath was a struggle. I imagined that sense of panic coming over me all over again. I imagined myself saying, “I can’t breathe.” And I wondered if among my last words, I would call out for my mother as George Floyd did in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. 

But unlike George Floyd, I was able to roll over in my bed and keep breathing. And as I did, I reflected on the fact that what happened to Mr. Floyd would not have happened to me. If I were suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill, I would not end up dead, because the four officers involved in Mr. Floyd’s death would have treated a short, old, white-collar, white male quite differently than they treated Mr. Floyd. And therein lies the problem. And that’s why I felt compelled, even though I didn’t want to, I assure you, to set aside the sermon I had prepared to preach for the sermon I can’t not preach as a servant of the Word and a witness to our Lord Jesus Christ. So here is the Word, as this servant and witness sees it and hears it the Sunday after Memorial Day in Minneapolis. 

In a tumultuous time in the eighth century BCE in the northern kingdom of Israel, the prophet Amos proclaimed in Bethel that even though God’s people were doing all the right religious things—they were giving their tithes and offerings, they were keeping the Sabbath and singing the songs and praying the prayers and giving thanks to the Lord and celebrating the festivals—like Pentecost, that I had prepared to celebrate in this morning’s sermon—even though the people of God were doing all the right religious things, Amos announced God’s judgment on God’s own people because while they went about their business of doing all the right religious things, the head of the poor in the land was being trampled into the dust of the earth, and the afflicted were being pushed out of the way, says Amos 1:7. The poor were being oppressed, and the needy were being crushed, says Amos 4:1. 

Amos’s proclamation in that time and place puts us all on notice in our time and place that no matter how high our standards are for faithfulness and devotion and righteousness in the things of God, if our standards are not equally as high for faithfulness and devotion and righteousness toward our neighbor, especially our afflicted neighbor, that double standard will be the death of us. Right worship without right treatment of all persons under God and under the law is useless in God’s sight. In fact, it’s worse than useless: it’s detestable in God’s sight. 

Listen to how Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase makes Amos 5:18-24 clear in our time and place.

I can’t stand your religious meetings. I’m fed up with your conferences and conventions. I want nothing to do with your religious projects, your pretentious slogans and goals. I’m sick of your fund-raising schemes, your public relations and image making. I’ve had all I can take of your noisy ego-music. When was the last time you sang to me? Do you know what I want? I want justice—oceans of it. I want fairness—rivers of it. That’s what I want. That’s all I want. 

It is as though in the parable that Jesus told in Matthew 25, people said, “When did we see you and we weren’t just?” “When did we see you, and we weren’t fair?” “When did we see you, and we treated you with a double standard?” And the king in the parable would reply, “Any time it happened to one of the least of these it happened to me.” On Memorial Day in Minneapolis, it happened to George Floyd. And when it happened to George Floyd, it happened to Jesus Christ. And when it happened to George Floyd, it happened to us all. It happened to me, and it happened to you. We have sown the wind of double standards, and we are now reaping the whirlwind. And all the right religious behavior in the world will not save us until we make justice and fairness and faithfulness and devotion and righteousness toward our neighbor of every of every race and every station as high a priority in every aspect of our daily lives, our neighborhood, our community, our county, our state, our nation, and our world as our faithfulness and devotion and righteousness toward God. 

Let me suggest two places to start. First, every one of us should call on our Senators and Representatives in Washington to revitalize and reinvigorate the oversight and accountability of local law enforcement agencies that was established by Congress in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. That act gives the federal Department of Justice the authority and the responsibility to investigate, negotiate, and resolve systemic “patterns and practices” of abuse in policing. There is nothing partisan about that Act, and there is nothing partisan in calling for the Department of Justice to do what the legislative branch of our federal government has charged it to do under the law. Republican and Democratic administrations alike have seen to it that the Department of Justice carried out its role of oversight and accountability for just, fair, and equitable treatment of all persons under the law and under law enforcement. 

The problem in Minneapolis on Memorial Day is not just “bad apples” on a police force who pinned an unarmed, handcuffed man down on the asphalt until he died. The problem is that people in Minneapolis, as in some other cities and towns around the country, have been crying out for years for relief from double standards in enforcement; and in the video of George Floyd’s death, we all saw an extreme example of what some people in and around Minneapolis, among other places, have been seeing and experiencing for years. We can effect change in Washington and in Minneapolis alike, and one change we can effect is the revitalization and reinvigoration of the oversight and accountability that Congress mandated in 1994 and every administration for nearly a quarter century made a cornerstone of the work of the Department of Justice in local communities. That’s the first place to start. 

Here’s the second place to start. Four summers ago, in the aftermath of two police shootings of African American men in one week, one of them outside Minneapolis-St. Paul, by the way, a peaceful march in Dallas, TX, turned suddenly lethal with what amounted to the premeditated assassination of five law enforcement officers. Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, Brent Thompson, and Patrick Zanmarripa were killed while carrying out their sworn duty to serve and protect. On Friday morning of that week, Natashah Howell, a young African-American woman went to a convenience store in Andover, MA, to pick up a few things; and here’s what happened, as she describe it in a Facebook post.  

As I walked through the door, I noticed that there were two white police officers (one about my age, the other several years older) talking to the clerk (an older white women) behind the counter about the shootings that have gone on in the past few days. They all looked at me and fell silent. I went about my business to get what I was looking for, as I turned back up the aisle to go pay, the oldest officer was standing at the top of the aisle watching me. As I got closer he asked me, “How I was doing? I replied, “Okay, and you? He looked at me with a strange look and asked me, “How are you really doing?” I looked at him and said “I’m tired!” His reply was, “me too.” Then he said, “I guess it’s not easy being either one of us right now is it.” I said, “No, it’s not.” Then he hugged me and I cried. I had never seen that man before in my life. I have no idea why he was moved to talk to me. What I do know is that he and I shared a moment this morning, that was absolutely beautiful. No judgments, No justifications, two people sharing a moment.

Her hashtag at the end of the post was #Foundamomentofclarity. Found a moment of clarity. That moment of clarity, that moment of turning to each other instead of on each other, of coming together instead of coming apart, is a model for what must happen in this congregation, in this community, in this state and region and nation and world. Every one of us must come to understand that when it happens to George Floyd, it happens to every one of us—“I can’t breathe.” And when it does, our faithfulness and devotion and righteousness in the things of God are useless, detestable, even, in the eyes of God, as Amos said. What we do or allow others to do to those persons whom we or they consider to be “the least”  among us, we do or allow others to do to none other than our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Every one of us must come to understand that if we do nothing or say nothing, we are Derek Chauvin, with our knee on the necks of other persons until they can’t breathe. There will be no justice and there will be no peace because our knees are on their necks. 

It is time for a moment of clarity to remove the double standards in our lives and in every walk of life. Hear the word of the Lord: “Do you know what I want? I want justice—oceans of it. I want fairness—rivers of it. That’s what I want. That’s all I want.” 

Start with a non-partisan call to your Senator and your Representative. And start by turning to someone instead of on them and coming together instead of coming apart.

Copyrighted © 2020 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. This material may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff@jeffreysrogers.org.