(No recording of this sermon is available.)

Texts: Genesis 12:1-4; John 3:1-12 (see also John 7:45-52; 19:38-42)

Over this past week, I have become absolutely enthralled by Nicodemus.  Who was this pious old man who shows up in the middle of the night?  What brought him out through those moonlit streets to Jesus’ door?  The Pharisees are so often portrayed as the villains in John’s gospel, so what was it about Jesus that had so captured Nicodemus’ attention that he was willing to cross those enemy lines?

What were the questions that were guiding his inward journey, causing his feet to stumble through dark pathways, perhaps risking everything he had built his life around?

And maybe more importantly, what ever happens to Nicodemus in the end?  Does he get it?  Does he find what he is looking for?  Does his inward journey ever connect with his outward journey?  Does he ever experience the new birth Jesus tells him about?

Maybe the question I should be asking is, “Why am I so enthralled by Nicodemus?” 

Nicodemus is a character that shows up only in John’s gospel, but he shows up three separate times, in this passage toward the beginning, another near the middle, and in a final scene toward the end of John.  These three episodes give us just enough of a glimpse into Nicodemus’ journey to make me think that the writer of John is not just relying on a few stock characters and haphazardly peppering them here and there throughout the text.  No, to me, there is something more to the story of Nicodemus. 

And I think I am enthralled by him, because I see myself in that story.  He stokes the fire of my imagination because his journey speaks to and perhaps reflects my own.  In his fumbling through the dark, his confusion, his seeming…

Texts: Genesis 2:8-9; 15-17;   Matthew 4:1-11

If you’ve read the Lent devotionals, looked at the bulletin cover, or found the pattern in the hanging dots behind me, you’ve likely noticed a visual theme.  We’re using the labyrinth throughout Lent as a symbol of the Inward / Outward journey.

It’s an ancient design.  Not necessarily this particular one, but the labyrinth.  One site in northern India has a labyrinth pattern estimated to be 4500 years old.  A cluster of islands in northwest Russia have over 30 stone labyrinths that may be as old as 3000 years.

Greek mythology includes the story the part human/ part beast minotaur who wreaks havoc on the population until the great architect Daedalus designs and builds a labyrinth whose sole purpose is to contain the minotaur at its center.  The hero Theseus eventually enters the winding labyrinth and slays the minotaur.  Some labyrinths still portray a minotaur at the center.

In later medieval times stone labyrinths show up in regions like Scandinavia, frequently around the coast.  Fishing communities likely built these with the superstitious hopes of trapping harsh winds and trolls that may endanger a successful fishing outing.

Around the same time, the labyrinth was being adopted more fully as a Christian symbol of pilgrimage.  Labyrinths were embedded into the pavement of grand cathedrals.  Worshipers were invited to pray their way along the path, into the center, a place of holy encounter, and pray their way back out.  Some writings suggest that walking the labyrinth was an alternative option for those unable to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as Christian crusaders regained and then lost control of the Holy City to the Muslim armies.  There’s a real bright spot in religious history.

In the last few decades the labyrinth has made a resurgence in the Christian imagination.  Labyrinths are popping up in…

Text: Matthew 6:24-34

Within the final 10 verses of Matthew chapter six, Jesus mentions “worry” 6 times.  Worry, Anxiety, take your pick translation wise.  Worry, as in “Do not worry.”  Anxious, as in don’t be.

In itself, telling someone not to be anxious can be predictably counterproductive.  Like we know we’re not supposed to be anxious.  We don’t want to be anxious.  When we feel anxious we get anxious about that.  We worry that we’re worrying too much.   So it goes in the land of mental loops.

In Jesus’ teaching, he highlights food and clothing as primary sources of worry.  These are basic human needs that far too few, past and present have had enough of.  And, when we do have plenty of both, we manage to find other causes for anxiety.

Jesus points away from the world of humans.  He points to the birds.  “Consider the birds of the air,” Jesus says, “they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns.”

Consider the birds.

Consider that humans have not always been sowing and reaping and gathering into barns.  As best scholars can tell, agriculture is a relatively recent experiment.  For the vast majority of our existence our ancestors were foragers, bird-like.  About 13,000 years ago humans started relating in a new way with particular plants and animals.  We domesticated them, or they domesticated us.  In different parts of the world, we started doing less foraging of perennials, less roaming, and more planting of annuals, more settling – sowing, reaping, and gathering into barns.  Even though food diversity and nutrition went down, food quantity went up, as did population.  Towns and villages got bigger and more permanent.  We cut or burned trees to plant fields in the rich soil, rerouted water sources for irrigation.  Having food reserves, we specialized into a division of labor.  And…

Text: Matthew 5:38-48

If and when word gets out that you’re a pacifist, or that you’re committed to nonviolence , you will no doubt, at some point, encounter questions like these:  What would you do if someone broke into your home and attacked a family member?  If we have another 9/11 should we all just turn the other cheek?  And what about Hitler?  If we were all pacifists, Hitler would have won and Nazism would have taken over the world.  Sound familiar?

These questions carry certain assumptions about what it means to live nonviolently.  They may be asked out of genuine curiosity – like, really, how would it work?  I’m interested.  Or they may be intended to make peaceableness appear weak, ineffective, intellectually ridiculous, and just downright impossible, even immoral.  After all, what kind of person would just stand by and do nothing while someone they loved was being harmed?  Perhaps you’ve been asked questions like these in conversations where you’ve “come out” as being against violence.  Perhaps you’ve asked questions like these to yourself, wondering if nonviolence is a path you are able to take with integrity.

It would be hard to overemphasize how key to this discussion are Jesus’ teachings in Matthew 5:38-48.  Packed into this short passage are the core principles of Christian pacifism.  And just as an aside, you may already notice that I’m using some language interchangeably so as not to get hung up on “pacifism” as a rigid ideology.  Nonviolence.  Peaceableness.  A newer field of thought talks about Just Peacemaking.  Within this core teaching are also phrases often used as weapons against pacifist understandings to prove their impracticality.  It’s a passage Mennonites, more than most streams of Christian tradition, have tried to live out.  Although since I said something good about Mennonites I have to follow…

Text: Matthew 5:21-37

When I was in college, I made a discovery about the Bible that I thought was going to be revolutionary.  I thought this thing that I had stumbled upon was going to change the way people read their Bibles and thought about Jesus and generally just blow people’s minds.  I was ready to accept my honorary PhD in Biblical Studies for my contribution to the field and sit among teachers like the young Jesus fielding questions. 

Ok, so maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole, but I did come across something that, at the time, made me think differently about the way I read the Bible. 

Before I can fill you in on this life-changing discovery, we need to back up a little bit. 

Last week we started this new series that will run through February up to the beginning of Lent: We are Sermon on the Mount People.  The Sermon on the Mount, three solid chapters of Matthew’s gospel containing the longest continuous teaching by Jesus in the New Testament.  As Joel said last week, these three chapters make up a sort of Christianity- or Discipleship-101 course that covers a lot of ground for those who want to understand what this whole “following Jesus” thing is all about. 

And we are Sermon on the Mount people.  Or at least we aspire to be. 

And still, before we can get to my amazing discovery, we need to back up to just a few verses before the passage that was read this morning.  Even though Joel covered them last week, those few preceding verses form an important bridge into the section for today. 

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.  For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth…