SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT, YEAR A

March 5, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Genesis 12:1-4a

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

John 3:1-17

 

Some versions of Christianity have been criticized for making salvation too easy. Simply profess your faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior and you’re guaranteed a place in heaven. And I suppose that if faith is reduced to canned formulas – however sincerely recited – the criticism has some merit. But today’s readings offer us a picture of faith that’s so much more challenging and exciting than that.

 

In the epistle, the Apostle Paul holds up the Patriarch Abraham as the model of faith: “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” We’ve already encountered Abraham in the Old Testament reading from Genesis, when he was still known by his original name of Abram.

 

Contemporary readers are apt to miss the profoundly shocking quality of God’s call to Abram: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation …”

In the Ancient Near East, respectable deities didn’t do things like that. The gods and goddesses of Egypt and Mesopotamia were conservative upholders of the social and political status quo. Such societies held a place for everyone, and everyone knew their place. Kings were kings, nobles were nobles, artisans were artisans, merchants were merchants, and slaves were slaves – because the gods said so. You were born, lived, and died in your appointed station in life all according to divine decree.

 

Against this background, God’s call to Abram represented an unheard-of upheaval of the settled social universe. Abram was called to leave behind all those things that gave people in the ancient world their deepest sense of belonging and identity: “country and kindred and father’s house.” Moreover, God’s promise to make a no-account upstart like Abram into a great nation, a blessing to all the families of the earth, likely seemed downright subversive and revolutionary.

 

Abram’s faith can be fully appreciated only in relation to this radical disruption of everything that has given his world order and stability. He leaves it all behind to venture forth into an unknown future based solely on trust in God’s promise. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that the three most shocking words in the Old Testament are those in our first reading today: “So Abram went …”

Thus begins the journey of faith. Christian theology has long made a distinction between two equally valid and necessary types of faith, faith-as-belief and faith-as-trust. Faith-as-belief entails intellectual assent to the teachings that the Church proposes to us as true. But faith-as-trust is more relational, implying a personal relationship with the God in whom we believe.

 

British theologian Alister McGrath distinguishes two more types of faith, which he describes as faith-as-commitment and faith-as-obedience. All these images of faith – belief, trust, commitment, and obedience – help us to understand the fullness of what faith really involves. But as I reflect on the story of Abram, what comes to my mind is a fifth image, namely faith as adventure.

 

In the Book of Genesis, the story of Abram’s life unfolds as a series of adventures that begin with his response to God’s call. An adventure, after all, is a journey into the unknown: evoking excitement and exhilaration, on one hand; fear and trembling, on the other.

 

It’s long seemed to me that an essential aspect of Christian faith, of following Jesus, is precisely this sense of adventure—of being called out on a journey into an unknown future in which we let go of the pretense of being in control of our lives and entrust ourselves to the care of a God who leads us literally God knows where.

 

In today’s Gospel, Nicodemus is called to a similar adventure of faith. This Pharisee and ruler of the people approaches Jesus under cover of darkness for a bit of discreet theological dialogue. His opening address seems sincerely polite and respectful: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no-one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”

 

But those words represent an attempt to pigeonhole Jesus, to fit him into the ready-made categories and definitions of Nicodemus’s pre-existing worldview. In response, Jesus takes Nicodemus on a roller coaster ride of startling new ideas and images: new birth, the Spirit blowing where it wills, a serpent lifted up in the wilderness.

 

Nicodemus is left dizzy, befuddled, bemused, and confused. He’s a teacher of Israel and yet he does not understand these things. He began by acknowledging Jesus as a teacher come from God; but Jesus ends by describing himself as so much more than Nicodemus ever imagined: the Son of God sent into the world to bestow eternal life on all who believe in him.

 

Nicodemus is thus called to leave behind the settled pattern of assumptions, beliefs, and values that has given his life order and meaning. The evidence in the rest of John’s Gospel indicates that Nicodemus does in fact become a disciple. And so, perhaps in that nighttime encounter Nicodemus takes the first steps on his journey into the unknown, into his own adventure of faith.

 

I remember my own first sense of being summoned to this adventure. In my early twenties, when I was a graduate student in Washington DC, a friend invited me to the local Episcopal Church, and I went. Having grown up as an agnostic in a non-churchgoing family, I hadn’t been to a Sunday morning church service in years. And against all expectations I found myself profoundly moved by the liturgy, though I couldn’t really say why. 

 

Later that afternoon, as I was remembering my experience that morning, I felt a strong desire to return to that church the following week. Combined with this powerful sense of attraction was an equally clear feeling of trepidation borne of the intuition that I’d brushed into into contact with a reality over which I had no control, but which certainly had the power to change my life and take it in directions I didn’t know and might not want. (Little did I know!) Despite these misgivings, I did return the following Sunday, and so began a journey that continues to this day.

 

We mistake the nature of faith if we think that it’s all the comfort of settled convictions and established certainties in a well-ordered and predictable universe. Yes, faith does involve assent to the truths that God has revealed in Scripture and entrusted to the teaching and preaching of his Church. But it’s also a journey that is simultaneously exciting, fascinating, unsettling, risky, and sometimes downright scary – yet always rewarding and totally worthwhile. In today’s readings, then, Abram and Nicodemus offer two glimpses of this quality of faith as adventure.