Seeing Anew

A sermon for Trinity Sunday, June 7, 2009

I have never been particularly drawn to this portion of John’s Gospel (3:1-16) partly because it has been used as a kind of litmus-test, bull-horn theology that shouts “do this or don’t do that or you can’t have the goodies awaiting you in heaven”. I really dislike that kind of gospel spin and so I found myself prepared to dismiss this passage on Holy Trinity Sunday, but it just wouldn’t let me. Maybe the Holy Spirit of Pentecost was still hanging around talking to me: “Open up, it’s good for you.”

So I pulled down my commentaries on the Gospel of John and started to do my homework. Dr. D. Moody Smith from Duke University gave me a helpful piece of information on how to interpret the idea of being born again. The Greek word anothen has two meanings – being born anothen can mean either again or anew or it can mean from above. Of course, from above is a way of saying “from God.” I wish it were also translated “from within” but I’m not going to quibble because I found myself getting excited about this passage. If being born means to begin living outside of the womb and seeing beyond the small confines of your previous existence, to be reborn in spiritual terms must also be about an expanded way of living and seeing. Without this rebirth the Kingdom of Heaven in our midst remains unknown.

Jesus was trying to give people a glimpse of what it meant to see life as he saw it. Marcus Borg, as usual, has helped clarify what that might mean. In his book Jesus, Borg refers to Jesus as a Jewish mystic and he defines a mystic as someone who has “experiential knowledge of God” and he defines a mystical experience as a “nonordinary state of consciousness marked above all by a sense of union and illumination, of reconnection and seeing anew.” The pieces were coming together with Jesus’ words from today’s Gospel.

Mystics, particularly powerful ones like Jesus, understand that we are living in two different places at the same time. He lived in Palestine, he walked on the dusty roads, got rocks in his sandals, he looked for work, he ate with his friends, he was very clear about the realities of the world around him with its hunger and misery. But he also lived in the Kingdom of Heaven in which everything around him radiated with the presence of the sacred, he heard God’s voice in the events of his life, he saw evidence of God’s desire in the love between friends, in simple act of sharing a meal, in people’s hunger for hope. In such a place, everything is holy; everything has meaning and old pain is already healed.

William James was a great student and philosopher of religion. Over 100 years ago he published his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience – it has been continuously in print ever since. His description of the kind of experiences that Jesus had is spot on for us to understand this living in two places at once. When you suddenly see this Kingdom of Heaven, as it shines through ordinary sight, you move from secondhand religion, which is based on what you hear from someone else, to firsthand religion which comes from your own experience of what James called “more,” Jesus swam in the “more” and invites us to wade in with him.

Jesus said to Nicodemus (using The Message because it’s clearer), “I give witness to only what I have seen with my own eyes. There is nothing secondhand here, no hearsay. Yet instead of facing the evidence and accepting it, you procrastinate with questions. If I tell you things that are plain as the hand before your face and you don’t believe me, what use is there telling you of the things you can’t see, the things of God?” Hence the need to be born anew, to begin living so that you can see both worlds at the same time.

Nicodemus is like the brother-in-law in the movie Field of Dreams. Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) has built the baseball field in the middle of his corn and long gone baseball players have stepped through the veil and are playing their beloved game once again. Ray and his wife Annie and daughter Karen and their friend author Terrance Mann can see them because they believe in them. Meanwhile, the brother-in-law sits right there and can’t see them. He thinks they have lost their minds and they will soon lose the farm. It’s not until one of the players steps off the field of dreams to save Karen when she chokes on a hotdog that this parallel world breaks through to the blind brother in law. He looks around in astonishment, sees the players on the field and says “Hey, where did they come from? Do not sell this farm!” Up to that point, nothing that Ray and Annie had said could convince him, he wasn’t prepared to believe in something more.

So Jesus says, “even if you don’t see it, I do; believe in me.” This brings us back around to the difference between believing that something happened, or that someone said something and the power of believing in something or someone. When we proclaim that we believe in Jesus Christ, we are not affirming the details of his birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension. We are saying that we believe in what he helps us see. We are proclaiming that we perceive trustworthiness in him and therefore we trust him to be telling Truth when he says that God’s kingdom is already here and you can see it if you let yourself.

For those who have not been blessed with mystical experiences, those moments when religion becomes first-hand, we must take on faith and trust the one who tells us of the things that we cannot yet see. But what we can also do is to assume that this parallel world is very real indeed and keep our eyes peeled for glimmers of it. We can also absorb it in the experiences of others as they describe the different ways in which such wonders become visible.

One such experience is found in the poetry of Antonio Machado, one of Spain’s most celebrated poets. This translation by Robert Bly is found in a little book called ten poems to change your life. In it, it is said that “what mattered to Machado was the deep current that joins the human soul to the world. What mattered above all was to be awake to that deeper life.” Read Machado's poem here.

Dreams that tell you something too marvelous to be true; startling moments, when the colors of the world are so vivid that you can hear them; an unexpected sensation of being in love with everything and being loved back by it – these are the glimpses of eternal life that Jesus came to reveal. Look around in wonder and see heaven and believe in it.