John
3:1-17
Throughout the church season of
Lent, as we prepare our hearts for the observation of Holy Week that culminates
in the celebration of Easter, people often try to increase their
self-discipline by giving something up.
I myself have a package of Girl Scout cookies in the lower, left-hand
drawer of my desk (trefoils, if you’re curious) that is going to remain sealed
until Easter morning. But for my Lenten
sermons this year, I am calling on all of us to think about things not
to give up for Lent (or ever). One of
those is learning.
Part of the Boy Scout Oath is a
pledge to keep oneself “physically strong, mentally awake, and morally
straight”. I think it’s safe to say that
the spirit of scouting in general is in accord with that. To stay physically strong takes common-sense
steps, like getting enough exercise, eating right, and getting the proper
amount of sleep. That’s the easiest of
the three. It can sort of stand on its
own.
The other two are more challenging,
and they intertwine and support one another.
To be mentally awake is to become aware of the value of a moral life,
and to lead a moral life is to use the gifts God has given us – including our
minds – in ways that reflect glory back to God.
To be mentally awake is to keep your
eyes open to what happens in the world when somebody doesn’t bother with the
moral side of life. To live a good and
upright life does not guarantee that everything will always go well. Not to live that way, however, does guarantee
that sooner or later you’ll find yourself in situations that you do not want to
get tangled up in. To be mentally awake
is to think your life choices through.
Sometimes that will not help entirely, but not to think things through
is to ask for trouble.
One
time when I was in scouts we were on a camping trip and I remember (who could
forget?) waking up and seeing a skunk in the tent. I knew enough and had learned enough not to
move or make any loud noises, and the skunk made its way back outside after
what was probably a couple of minutes but which to me felt like an hour. If any of us in that tent had made the
mistake of sneaking a bag of Cheetos or a pack of krimpets into the tent, it
might not have turned out as well.
Last Sunday, Nico taught me a new
word: “psychophysicotherapeutics”, which means “the remedial treatment of mind
and body. That’s a fun word to
know. It’s one you can drag out
sometimes and sound really impressive.
But more important than being able to pronounce the word is to seek and
find ways to keep your mind and body well, to become or to stay physically
strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.
Some things can only be learned by
doing. I can tell you, thanks to
scouting, how to tie a bowline: you hold the rope with one hand and the end
with the other. Make a loop in the rope,
then pretend the end is a rabbit that comes out of the hole like a rabbit, hops
around the tree, and goes back in. Now,
I have told you. To actually learn it,
however, you have to do it for yourself, over and over and over again.
So, too, when the Bible recounts the
life of Jesus, we meet someone named Nicodemus who goes to Jesus and asks him
questions that end up changing his life.
Nicodemus was well beyond the stage where anyone would have judged him a
student and Jesus himself calls Nicodemus “a teacher of Israel” [John
3:10]. Given his social position as a
leader of his people, given the respect that he was due, it might not have been
easy for him to admit his need to learn from the much younger Jesus. Maybe all of that had something to do with
him waiting to visit Jesus by night [John 3:2].
All the same, he went.
He went, and he asked questions, and
he wrestled with the answers. There’s a
Greek word that means both “again” and “from above”. Jesus told him,
“No one can see the
kingdom of heaven without being born from above.” [John
3:3]
Nicodemus
took the other sense of the word and heard it as “born again” and then
set off on a track that followed that to its logical and literal
conclusion.
“How can anyone be born
after having grown old?” [John 3:4]
Then
Jesus mixes him up some more, using yet another confusing term, a single word
that could mean “breath”, “spirit”, or “wind” in a way that would
leave him having to untangle the meaning himself.
“The wind [or
Spirit] 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 [or breath;
or wind].” [John 3:8]
Neither
Jesus’ followers nor anyone involved in scouting gets off the hook when it
comes to being somebody who keeps learning throughout their whole life.
It is a major mistake to think that
there is any point in our lives where we can or should stop learning. Scouting may begin with Tiger Scouts and
Daisies, Brownies and Cub Scouts, but at the other end it points to people who
are Explorers, who go out into the world to see what is there and let others
know what the wide world holds.
And then there are those, like
Nicodemus, who go further and look to see what is beyond this world, which is
so much more than we will ever even begin to know.
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