COMMUNITY CHURCH OF THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
P. O. BOX 222811
CARMEL CA 93922
(831) 624-8595
www.ccmp.org
Rev. Paul Wrightman, Pastor
Independent and United Church of Christ
January 24, 2021
Dear Friends,
The secretary of our Board of Governors, Jane Heider, asked me to include this in this week’s announcement section: The First Quarterly CCMP Family meeting for 2021 has been scheduled as a Zoom meeting on Sunday, February 28, after Zoom worship. We will provide more information each week.
I’d like to add that Zoom is just one of the four formats that will be available: conference call, email, regular mail, and Zoom. The great advantage of Zoom is that we’re actually able to see and hear each other. So if you have a computer with a webcam, you might want to give this option a try.
A CCMP Wish List will be published soon. No item is too large or too small. If you have a wish that you would like to see on this list, please let me know by email, paulccmp@yahoo.com or phone, at 624-8595.
Stay Safe, Take Good Care, and Always Remember that Jesus IS Emmanuel –
God WITH Us, Pastor Paul
WORSHIP SERVICE FOR JANUARY 24, 2021
INTRODUCTORY READINGS – A MEDLEY ON THE THEME OF TRANSFORMATION
(Again, please excuse the male-centered language from those writing before the time of inclusive language.)
The central idea of Christianity is not justification [being made “right with God”], but transformation [becoming more and more in tune with God].
--Nicolas Berdyaev
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.
--Martin Luther King
But once a man accepts Christ, he has accepted an entirely new set of standards; he is committed to an entirely new kind of life at his work, in his personal relationships, in his pleasure, in his conduct, in his speech, in the things which he allows himself to do.
--William Barclay
[Concerning God’s outreach of love:] It is one of the most moving experiences of life to watch a bewildered frightened human being, starved of friendship and hardly daring to be expectant of it, blossom out into a happy, trustful and confident personal life as the result of being so welcomed and received. It is of the essence of the Gospel that we are so received in Christ, that his Yes to men is pronounced is such directly personal terms.
--Alan Ecclestone
[Concerning Jesus’ encounters with people:] In his love for someone he brought out that which was peculiar to a person’s life, even though it lay hidden under layers of dirt; he loved it out. Therefore many who knew that he saw them and loved them became new persons and experienced the great transformation. His love was not simply a reaction to something lovable, as out love is. His love was creative. It called a ‘new creature’ into existence.
--Helmut Thielicke
A fundamental transformation is expected: something like a new birth of man himself, which can be understood only by one who actively takes part in it. It is therefore a transformation which does not come about merely through progress in right thinking for the sake of right action. . .or through the education of man who is fundamentally good. . . Nor is it a transformation through enlightenment. . .
According to Jesus, a fundamental transformation is achieved through a man’s surrender to God’s will.
--Hans Kung
SUGGESTED MUSIC Leaning on the Everlasting Arms Mahalia Jackson You Tube
OPENING PRAYER Angela Ashwin, Contemporary
I place my hands in yours, Lord.
I place my hands in yours.
I place my will in yours, Lord.
I place my will in yours.
I place my days in yours, Lord.
I place my days in yours.
I place my thoughts in yours, Lord.
I place my thoughts in yours.
I place my heart in yours, Lord.
I place my heart in yours.
I place my hands in yours, Lord.
I place my hands in yours.
LORD’S PRAYER
Our Father,
who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done on earth
as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.
SCRIPTURE READING: John 3:1-9, 16-17
Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above.” The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can these things be?’
[Jesus said to him:] ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’
SERMON: BORN. AGAIN. FROM. ABOVE.
Rev. Paul Wrightman
(The underlining indicates what I would emphasize if delivered orally.)
I think it’s safe to say that all of us have seen or heard John 3:16, the most quoted verse in the entire New Testament. It reads like this: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
We’ve read it, we’ve heard it, but many of us have also wondered what it really means. If you find yourself in that position, this sermon is for you!
The conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus is a very difficult conversation to understand. In John’s Gospel, Jesus often comes across as something of a zen master, answering questions and making observations that often come across as non sequiturs to us.
In other words, sometimes what Jesus says doesn’t seem to follow from what comes before, as when poor Nicodemus, after giving Jesus a huge compliment by saying “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God. . .”
is responded to by Jesus with the puzzling statement: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
Just as different people have different personalities and different skill sets, the four Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – tell the story of Jesus in different ways. John’s Gospel is the most different of all.
Biblical scholars think that John was a teenager – possibly no more than fourteen or fifteen years old – when he became a disciple of Jesus, that he spent most of his long life meditating on the words and deeds of Jesus, and that the Christian community he regularly shared his meditations with eventually wrote them down.
Unlike the other apostles, John had a zen-like mind which resonated with the zen-like qualities of Jesus.
Let us suppose that John, whose Gospel was written after Mark, Matthew, and Luke, was not quite satisfied with their presentations, and deliberately shared his version of the life and meaning of Jesus in a mystical, zen-like way to bring out dimensions of Jesus that the other Gospels had missed.
So much by way of introduction.
It would take several sermons on today’s text to even begin to fully mine its meaning. All I hope to do today is to provide an overview – something like the program notes to a symphony by Beethoven or Mahler – of the main movements going on in this passage.
We know from our text that Nicodemus is a Pharisee, and not only a Pharisee, but a religious leader. The specific phrasing means that Nicodemus had a seat on the Jewish supreme court, or Sanhedrin.
All the Gospels are in agreement that, on the whole, the Pharisees were antagonistic to Jesus. Nicodemus, however, is curious about Jesus, and wants to find out more about him. But because he is a leading Pharisee, peer pressure dictates that he not be seen conversing with Jesus in the clear light of day, so Nicodemus seeks Jesus out by cover of night.
Jesus can tell that Nicodemus is a sincere seeker of truth, and gives him a crash course in life’s basic choices. This is what Jesus is getting at in his puzzling statement. . .”No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
“Born from above” is the preferred translation among mainstream Christians. “Born again” is the preferred rendering among evangelical Christians. As with many areas of disagreement, both sides are right. The original Greek means both “born from above” and “born again.”
Most of us are aware that there are many issues – some of them minor, some of them major – between evangelical and mainstream Christians. One of the minor issues of disagreement is the translation of the verse just quoted.
My favorite translation is from the Christian Community Bible, which happens to be a Roman Catholic translation made specifically for the poor in third world countries. It reads: “No one can see the kingdom of God unless [that person] is born again from above.”
But what does “born again from above” really mean? I would like to suggest that the real challenge in understanding what Jesus means does not lie in the superficial difference between the phrases “born again” and “born from above,” but in the vastly different reality that both these phrases are pointing to.
Being “born again from above” points to a completely different way of being – a completely different way of living out our lives – which Jesus contrasts with being “born of the flesh.”
Now it is absolutely crucial here to understand what Jesus and John mean by the word “flesh.”
We think that “flesh” must mean anything having to do with the body.
If we insist on thinking this way when it comes to understanding Jesus and John, we are never going to understand them on this point because body is not what they mean by using the word flesh. The word “flesh” for Jesus and John, and St. Paul for that matter, means the self-destructive ways of our broken world, especially the self-destructive way of violence.
Getting caught up in the self-destructive ways of our world, getting caught up in various forms of violence toward self, other, and nature, is something that none of us can avoid.
But God wants to help us out here.
So God offers us a different path, a path that leads to peace and wholeness. To choose this different, higher, path by choosing him is what Jesus means when he speaks about having to be “born again from above.”
All too often “accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior” – for both evangelical and mainstream Christians – means simply believing the right things about Jesus, doctrinal things like “Jesus saves” and “Jesus is the Son of God” on the evangelical side, and “Jesus liberates” and “Jesus is the human face of God” on the mainstream side -- and stopping there.
Jesus had something much more radical in mind than simply believing certain stuff about him. What Jesus had in mind was nothing less than joining with him in helping to bring about the kingdom of God.
So a pattern of living on our part that embodies Jesus’ own unconditional love, relentless compassion, extravagant welcome and affirmation of the other, and creative nonviolence is, to use academic dialect regarding textbooks, not only recommended, but required.
In other words, it’s not enough for either evangelical or mainstream Christians to run around proclaiming that “Jesus is Lord.”
The only way that that over-used phrase can have any real content is if it is fleshed out in our own walking of the actual way of Jesus, which I would summarize as the way of sacrificial love.
Jesus says this himself in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel, when he states: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21)
For me, the contemporary thinker who most clearly lays out the import and implications of what Jesus really means when he says to Nicodemus, “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit,” (John 3:6) is Rene Girard, a former professor at Stanford and at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Girard observes that all human beings, without exception, are born into a violent, broken world. This broken world, through broken parents and broken social systems, determines that each of us is born with – to use a favorite phrase of Girard’s – a “pattern of desire” that includes strong elements of revenge, retribution, and aggression. In other words, our basic “pattern of desire” is one that inevitably tends toward violence.
According to Girard, violent humankind would have long ago destroyed both ourselves and our world is God had not made available to us an alternative “pattern of desire,” a “pattern of desire” which Girard sees most fully embodied in the life, teachings, deeds of power, and redemptive death of Jesus.
For Girard, God raised Jesus from the dead as God’s personal affirmation that the way of Jesus was and is the way of God.
Thus, each human being is faced with a definitive choice: either to remain with the violent, self-and-other destructive “pattern of desire” that each of us is born into, or to choose to be “born again from above” by embracing the new and life-giving “pattern of desire” embodied by Jesus.
This is precisely the choice that Jesus is offering Nicodemus.
And we know from two other passages in John’s Gospel that Nicodemus eventually does make the choice to follow the way of Jesus.
One of Girard’s major students, James Alison, points out that there is more going on in the most famous verse of the New Testament, John 3:16, than meets the eye.
Alison observes that we tend to focus on the emotional dimension of God’s love in this verse, that God loved us so much, in an emotional sense, that God gave God’s only Son.
He goes on to suggest that there is an even more important dimension to God’s love in this verse, and that this, too, is contained in that little word “so.”
On the one hand, “God so loved the world. . .” captures the emotional intensity of God’s love.
On the other hand, the Greek word for “so” can also be translated as “in this manner,” emphasizing the way in which God loved the world in Jesus – the way of sacrificial love.
This way of looking at the meaning of John 3:16 brings out the radically new, life-giving and life-affirming “pattern of desire” that God offers us in Jesus: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
In the Gospel of John, as in the News Testament as a whole, belief never means mere intellectual assent. For John, belief always means allowing oneself to be blessed by God so that one can become a blessing to and for others.
And for John, it is precisely in becoming a blessing to and for others that one begins to experience eternal life.
Nicodemus is lamenting being caught up in the destructive pattern of desire that he was born into, and yearns for something more.
Jesus offers Nicodemus – and us – that something more in today’s Scripture text: he offers us himself and his way of living.
Yet I have to admit that no matter how hard I try, I find myself rather regularly slipping away from the new, habit-breaking, life-giving pattern of desire that I find in relationship with Jesus, and back into my old, self-destructive, occasionally thought-violent, and often thoroughly selfish pattern of desire.
In other words, even as a Christian I find myself thinking and acting in un-Christian ways all too often.
Sometimes I share this frustration with fellow Christians, only to be given the platitude that if I would just turn everything over to the Holy Spirit, everything would be fine.
Well, I do try to live in conscious contact with God’s Spirit, or, as St. Paul, would say, to live “in Christ.”
But I still find myself alternating between being born again from above and sliding back into my old, dead-end self.
The only answer I have found to this dilemma is to make the choice to be born again from above every day, and sometimes several times during as especially challenging day.
I would have to say that being a Christian is like recovering from an addiction – it is only possible to do one day at a time.
And over the years I’ve come to suspect that God actually wants it this way.
After all, there’s no better way for God to have the personal relationship that God wants to have with each of us than for God to allow us to create our own failures, then turn back to God for forgiveness and strength, a touch of grace, and the encouragement to keep on identifying with the way of Jesus, no matter how imperfect our imitation of him may be.
One needs to be reborn in God’s love each and every day.
Amen.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
When and where did you first encounter John 3:16, and what was your reaction?
Which of the introductory readings speaks to you the most and why?
CLOSING PRAYER Richard Foster, Contemporary
Today, O Lord, I accept your acceptance of me.
I confess that you are always with me and always for me.
I receive into my spirit your grace, your mercy, your care.
I rest in your love, O Lord. I rest in your love.
Amen.
SUGGESTED MUSIC Be Now My Vision – Selah You Tube
BENEDICTION
Patiently and persistently, God loves.
Relentlessly and unconditionally, God loves.
Now and forever, God loves.
AMEN.