St. Michael and All Angels
We seek to be a light of Christ in the community, where all are welcome to experience God's love and blessings.

March 5, 2023 - Second Sunday in Lent

As children, we are naturally curious and poke or bite everything we can get our hands on in order to learn more about the things we do not understand. But something about adulthood—its certainty, knowledge, experience, or maybe even access to Google at our fingertips—seems to stifle our curiosity. What is lost when we lose the ability to wonder? To ask questions without easy answers? 

 

Nicodemus, a religious teacher, has difficult questions for Jesus, yet he first tells him everything he already knows and has experienced to be true about Jesus (John 3:2). But faith – and most certainly OUR faith – is not simply built upon the things that can be seen. God requires more: a hope-filled imagination. Jesus gives him the time (again) and place (above) of transformation and new life, but Nicoodemus’ imagination doesn’t stretch that far. He can’t seem to understand that he must be reborn again from above (or anew). 

 

Nicodemus was weighed down by what he knows to be true and tangible in his world, but standing before him is the sign that he cannot yet see. Jesus is the sign from God that shows us how we live in a reality where two things can be true at once: Jesus is from this world AND not of this world. Jesus is a human AND the son of God. Jesus will be humiliated AND exalted upon the cross. Jesus died AND still lives. Jesus is the sign of God’s love AND the one who asks us to have faith in things we cannot yet see.  

 

God blesses the curious because they are ready to learn and experience something new. Nicodemus followed his curiosity about Jesus to get him into the same building with Jesus, but not truly experience the transformational new and eternal life that only Christ can give. For we know that God so loved the world that he gave his only son. 

 

And we may ask ourselves how can God sacrifice his only son, and let a cross (symbol of pain and humiliation) become the symbol of hope and love? Well, that is a great question. One that may lead you into surrendering to uncertainty AND having faith in an absurd love. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas says, “the ability to live well is the ability to live without explanation.” As you bite and chew your way through tough questions, it may cause you to wonder about your own pain, shame, and brokenness and how there might be a possibility for God’s healing presence to co-exist simultaneously. Blessed are the curious because they can be truly born again. 

 

From Kate Bowler’s book on which the Lenten study is based, we have a simple blessing for the lives that we didn’t choose:

Blessed are we in the tender place
between curiosity and dread,
We who wonder how to be whole,
when dreams have disappeared and
part of us with them,
where mastery, control, determination,
bootstrapping, and grit,
are consigned to the realm of before
(where most of the world lives),
in the fever dream that promises infinite
choices, unlimited progress, best life now.

Blessed are we in the after,
forced into stories we never
would have written.

Far outside of answers to questions
we even know to ask.

God, show us a glimmer of possibility
in this new constraint,
that small truths will be given back to us. 

We are held.
We are safe.
We are loved.
We are loved.
We are loved.

Amen.