The Verb: "Church", June 7, 2009

Isaiah 6:1-8
John 3:1-17
Imagine, that everything you thought you knew... everything you were certain of, suddenly was revealed as only a window through which to perceive, what is real! Not a mater of right or wrong, our perspective was simply far too small.

Isaiah was the Great High Priest of the Nation of Israel, who presided over the funeral of King Uzziah at Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. Imagine the opulence, the wealth and majesty, the power of all the heads of all the nations come together, at the fulfillment of a King's life,... And yet, at that moment, Isaiah opens his eyes to see that all the wealth and power of Nations and Empires is as nothing compared with the glory of God.
Too often we take phrases from Scripture out of context and miss their importance. We recall Isaiah standing in the Temple of God, and saying “HERE I AM, SEND ME”. What the story describes, is that when Isaiah saw himself in the Temple of God, he was filled with humility and remorse, saying “Woe is me! For I am a Sinner, a Mortal Man of Unclean Lips; who lives among a people who are profane.”
As if going through a metal detector, Isaiah's sinfulness triggers one of the HOLY Creatures of God, a 6 Winged Seraphim, to take up a burning coal from the altar of burnt offerings and touch it to my lips, burning away, cauterizing the flesh of my sin. Cleansed, my flesh burned raw and new, Isaiah responds saying “Here am I Send Me” and God does, but not with a Priestly Blessing and Benediction. Instead like some macabre nightmare to know that you are sent by Almighty God, to a world so much in need, and to learn that the world is deaf, unable to hear, unable even to listen.

Nicodemus was a learned Pharisee, a respected Leader in the community, who knew Jesus to be sent from God. Yet, as smart as he is, as intellectual and wise, he sees only one dimension to what Jesus describes and misses the point. The phrase Jesus uses is that a person must be born “anothen”, a Greek word that can mean “Born From Above” or “ Born Anew” or “Born Again”. Nicodemus takes this to mean Physical Birth a Second time, and both practically and in a Freudian analysis, he questions how a man could enter his own mother's womb a second time? The phrase ANOTHEN is intentionally so ambiguous, that we cannot translate one way or another, without biasing and flattening the understanding. Some have tried to say this is about being “BORN AGAIN” as an individual spiritual conversion; while others have stated that when Christ died on the Cross this was GENESIS' CREATION ANEW, like Isaiah professing I am a Sinner among sinners, Jesus died on the cross for us all and God reformed the world; and still others interpret that “BORN FROM ABOVE” has to do with God and the mystic, holy, divine descending to be present among us. There was a time, when we tried objectively to reduce everything to single absolute meanings, but Jesus face to face conversation with Nicodemus is intended to be heard in all these different dimensions simultaneously, as well as the reality that Jesus spoke face to face with one of those who later would put him to death, who later still would plead on behalf of Jesus' disciples.

In each of these passages what the believer thought they knew, what we thought we understood, suddenly becomes something far larger. From the late 1600s until the 1980s, in both the Natural and Social Sciences we were taught The Scientific Method, that there are known Laws. There is an objective Reality, from which we can postulate THEORIES, and in order to test a Theory we create a HYPOTHESIS, we operationalize the hypothesis with METHODOLOGY and observe the results, which then prove or disprove the hypothesis, creating new understandings of what is real. But in the early 1980s a new Theory was advanced, that always, in every experiment there are circumstances which do not fit, and while in earlier times we discarded those which did not fit as spurious, in truth we really could not prove anything and everything becomes subjective. All we can do is to describe that in our experience, at this time, this seems to be the reality. For those of us trained in Scientific Method this was as bizarre as Isaiah being told to Preach and Prophesy because the people will not listen, for Nicodemus to be told that he must be born Anothen, everything is possible and therefore nothing is absolute.

A decade ago, my parents began downsizing. After amassing a lifetime of stuff, they began sorting and determining what things might be given to whom. I recall being led to my father's study, where he gestured to all the books on the shelves and asked “IS ANY OF THIS OF VALUE?” On the shelves were Keats and Shelley, Browning, Shakespeare, he had had Tillich and the Niebuhrs as professors so had their first editions with notes. But what he was asking was not only whether the books had value, but whether his life had, and at the same time whether this had any personal value for us. In recent months we have sorted through all the left behind belongings, the collections of a lifetime. In the process we have come to realize there are two ways to live: one is to collect and gather and save all the treasures of a lifetime. The other is that during that lifetime, when we see something another might enjoy, we gift it to them. A civic group in our community has been collecting children's books, that they will pay the shipping charges to send around the world to children wanting to read. Imagine your Harry Potters, which gave you joy the first two times your read them, being sent to a child somewhere else in the world so that they might use them to learn to read.

For hundreds of years, we have built Churches, as a noun, a thing to be created, to be used, having place, tangible, with beginning and ending, CHURCH. What if CHURCH is not a Noun, not a thing to be created, but is instead a VERB, that we together as a community: Church. We Baptize, we Pray, we Celebrate, we Memorialize, we Remember, we Sing, in all these active verbs, we believe, we CHURCH. Faith is not a static thing, not an absolute, to be created, to be valued, to be used, to be discarded. Church/ Faith/ the Community of Believers who serve one another LIVE.

This day, we celebrate and share Communion. NOT as a thing of Bread and Wine, but as a sharing of ourselves. A realization like Isaiah, that I am an unclean sinner, with unwashed hands and profane lips who dwells among a people of profane lips and unwashed hands. Who upon realizing this, know that our sins are forgiven and gone as if cauterized pure. We share Communion as a conversation like Nicodemus and Jesus, recognizing we can never fully understand, but part of communion is in sharing with God through Jesus Christ. We celebrate and share Communion not only as a sacred ritual of the past, but as a meal that replenishes and makes us new.