During lent we are watching for encounters with God, in the biblical text and in our own lives. We are told Abram is 75 when he finally has an encounter with God, or at least one that is worth being recorded. We receive this encounter as a pivotal moment in Genesis, in biblical history.

After the beautiful creation stories in the first two chapters of Genesis things, take a drastic turn. We have expulsion from the garden, fratricide, intermarriage between angels and humans and sinfulness so extreme God has to destroy the whole world. Immediately after the new covenant with Noah and his family, we have a scandalous incident of incest in the family. People continue multiplying but God is so disgusted by the people and their quest for power that communication is made impossible at the Tower of Babel. It all looks futile.

Then the son of Terah, shows up.   —-  This is Abram. We are told that the family, father Terah, and his grandson Lot, along with Abram – married to Sarai, set out on the road. They get as far as Haran when they decide to stop and make a life for while. This is where Terah dies.

It is at this point, after the death of his father, that Abram hears the dramatic voice of God: “Leave your country, your people, the home of your parents and go where I will show you.” There are no specific directions of where to go but Abram heads toward Canaan, the original destination of the family trek.

The instruction comes with a promise: “I will make of you a great people. I will bless you. All the people on earth will be blessed through you.”

Abram did fairly well for himself in those intervening years in Haran. He has an entourage of servants and livestock – even if his family has not multiplied. He takes these with him as well as the promise of blessing from God and the knowledge that he is to be a blessing to others, to the whole earth in fact. It is a big load, especially if no one else hears the voice of God. His wife Sarai doesn’t hear the voice; his nephew Lot doesn’t hear the voice; the “many people they have acquired in Haran,” don’t hear the voice, just Abram.

Last week we read about Jesus hearing a voice, tempting him to grab power and safety.  But it was just him, there were no other family members involved though perhaps Jesus did feel the whole of Judaism resting on his shoulders.

Here we have Abram – before Judaism has even started. He has all these other people who are also effected when he hears the voice telling him to go, to leave what they know, and go to another place.

Amazingly Abram doesn’t ask questions, at least that we are told. He just packs up and takes off toward Canaan. In subsequent encounters with God, after Abram gets to know this voice better, he asks questions, he even challenges God. But this time, in this first encounter, he just responds. After all, his father has just died.

Today a good grief counselor would say not to make any big moves right after a death in the family. The emotion is just too present; it is hard to make a sound decision. But Abram doesn’t have the luxury of waiting. Or maybe –  Abram shows us that it is just at these times of loss when we are most able to hear God’s voice. Losing a parent is a huge psychic shift. Losing the second parent means that now it is all up to Abram. Now he is the parent (though he has no children) and the “grandparent” to his nephew Lot. With this loss of his father, he is ready, more than ready to receive a blessing, even to be a blessing. He listens to the voice of God – and the rest of the biblical story unfolds.

Generations and generations later, maybe it is a voice in his head that sends a member of the Sanhedrin, the governing Jewish council, out in the night to find Jesus. Nicodemus is a trained Pharisee; he knows his stuff. And yet he comes looking for something more. As a keeper of the law it would not look good for him to be seen with this upstart young rabbi who has recently run the moneychangers and sellers of sacrificial animals out of the temple. So he comes at night, with his questions, to meet this man of God.

Nicodemus has questions.  In the movies, rabbis answer a question with a question, this time Jesus doesn’t do that.  He says over and over again “the truth of the matter is…”  A more literal translation says “Amen amen I say to you, unless someone is born anew, he is not able to see the reign of the God.” (http://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2014/03/water-flesh-spirit-wind-breath-newborns.html)

This may all be as confusing to us as it is to Nicodemus. Is this about being “born again” in a prescribed religious way? Is this about staying attuned to the spirit? What is this saying about our earthly bodies that are born from the waters of our mothers womb?  Do we also have “heavenly” spirits that are born from the Spirit?

Gail O’Day, in The Women’s Bible Commentary says, “The physical birth and the spiritual re-birth go hand in hand…because flesh and spirit belong together in the new birth Jesus envisions…One is reborn to a new life within the physical body.” (p.521)

Jesus is God incarnate, the body and the flesh together in a way that cannot be separated. And this is the invitation Jesus gives to Nicodemus: Join your spirit and your flesh, become one whole person, integrated in this body.

This little sermonette that Jesus preaches, while familiar, is still sort of confusing. Jesus gets mystical with all this spirit and body talk and then refers to an episode in his Jewish tradition that just doesn’t seem to follow.

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so the Chosen One must be lifted, so that everyone who believes in the Chosen One might have eternal life.

 

Jesus is referring to the story in the book of Numbers 21. The people of Israel are wandering in the desert, reciting that whiney refrain: How long til we get there?  “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread and no water and we detest this horrible food.”

God gets as impatient as the people, and sends poisonous snakes among them.  Many people get bitten by the snakes and die. This makes the people reconsider their complaints against God and Moses.  Now they ask Moses to do something. So Moses goes to God and God tells him to make a poisonous snake out of bronze and put it on a pole. Moses is to hold the pole up high and whenever the people look at the snake after a bite, they will live. Moses makes the serpent, holds it high on the pole, the people look at it and live. It works just as God said it would.

This snake remedy is not something new for the people; they remember that back in Egypt snakes are associated with healing. It was part of the local religious belief. http://www.planetseed.com/node/41335  Perhaps they are not only longing for the security of slavery but the religion they knew then as well. Is this bronze snake another golden calf or has Moses adapted the Egyptian religion in a way acceptable to God?

Nicodemus is a well trained Jew; he knows this episode in the desert with snakes and the people, so no further explanation is necessary.

It is immediately after this allusion to Moses and the serpent that we get the verse known more for its reference than for its meaning – John 3:16.  For God so loved the world as to give the Only Begotten One, that whoever believes may not die but have eternal life.

 

We are so used to hearing this verse out of context that it is hard to put it back into its context in this setting –  with Nicodemus and Jesus in the dark of night.

What might Jesus be saying about this Beloved Son being lifted up? We are most often told that this is a reference to Jesus being raised on a cross, lifted up in death. Just as Moses lifted the snake, so God lifts up Jesus on the cross.  And when we look at Jesus there on the cross, and pray, we are healed and saved.

But there is nothing in the text here about a cross. The next verse says God sent this Beloved Chosen One to save, not condemn. Yet we have so often been told that without this Jesus on the cross we are doomed, condemned. (Some scholars posit that these verses and the following ones are not words of Jesus but are commentary about Jesus by the writer of John.)

What if instead of going forward in the story to the cross we go back a few verses to what Jesus says to Nicodemus about flesh and spirit? Jesus is calling for an integration of flesh and spirit, seeing God incarnated in the world. It is when we look to Jesus, who is flesh and spirit in one, spirit and flesh wholly integrated, that we are healed.

When we experience God in body, mind and spirit, that is an encounter with God that brings life, that heals, that moves us toward being healers ourselves. It is not an experience that happens once and we are done.  It is a way of life that demands that we keep our eyes on that Beloved, Chosen One, raised up as an example of how healing can happen. It is an encounter that happens again and again when we commit ourselves to living fully in the flesh and fully in the spirit.

Living this kind of integrated life – body, mind and spirit – is not one that is easily embraced. As Christians in this culture we more often prize the spirit and mind and endure the body until we will be released from the burden of it in heaven. But Jesus reclaims the body. The writer of John tells us from the beginning that Jesus is the word made flesh, the spirit and mind in the flesh.

This kind of spirit and flesh integration is a hard truth for Nicodemus. He does not do as the fishermen and tax collector, leave his work and follow Jesus through the city and across the country side. We are led to assume that he goes back to his life as a Pharisee. Nicodemus appears two more times in the text. In John chapter 7, the Pharisees and temple police are in an uproar about Jesus. Nicodemus calmly suggests that the law does allow for a hearing. The other Pharisees immediately accuse Nicodemus of being “also from Galilee.”  That shuts him up completely.

We hear no more of Nicodemus until after Jesus’ death.  Nicodemus comes with another secret disciple, Joseph of Arimithea. Joseph brings the grave cloth and Nicodemus the expensive spices to anoint Jesus’ body. Perhaps now in death, Nicodemus understands the power of the body and the Spirit fully integrated.

We still struggle with this today; for many it is still a scandal – that God is not someplace far away but right here among us, in the flesh.
In the flesh of women, children and men;
in the flesh of black and brown, olive and white and all shades in between;
The flesh of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and straight,
of disabled and old,
young and able,
the flesh that is wounded and living in poverty;
the flesh of observant Pharisee and reforming Jewish upstart;
the flesh that is struggling to make sense of the world.

God is here among us in the flesh. Let us pay attention.   (song – I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely)