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April
7, 2002 Dave Dustrud Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ! By his great mercy he has
given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ
from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and
unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God
through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to
suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith--being more
precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire--may be found to
result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not
see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious
joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your
souls. 1 Peter 1:3-9 Even the most conservative parties have their moderates.
The Pharisees were no different. As
Jesus' prominence rose and disagreement ran amongst them about what Jesus meant
for their future and for the future of Israel, there was one (at least) amongst
them who wondered if something couldn't be worked out--who wondered if he
couldn't reach across the aisle, find what was best about what He had to say,
and come to some sort of common understanding, find some common ground.
His name was Nicodemus. In
John's gospel in the third chapter, he tells us that Nicodemus, under the cover
of night, went out on his peace mission looking for Jesus, to see if they could
find this middle ground. In John's gospel it says he came to Jesus and said, "Rabbi, we
know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could perform the
miraculous signs that you are doing if God were not with him."
And the questions behind it just hang in the air without being spoken:
So why can't we just find something in the middle? Why do you have to bring us all this ruckus?
Do you really disrespect us this much?
Do you really want to reject all that God has done so far?
If Nicodemus intended to say those questions out loud, he didn't get the
chance because Jesus responded in the middle, cutting him off, saying, "I
tell you the truth. No one can see
the Kingdom of God unless he is born again." You've heard those words before.
Nicodemus had not. "How
can a man be born when he is old? Surely
he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb!" Jesus answered a longer answer this time, going into people being
born of water and of Spirit. You
must be born of Spirit. The Spirit
moves like the wind. And by the
end, Nicodemus' head is spinning and he figured Jesus' answer was like the wind
itself. He could not follow it.
And all he said was, "How can this be?" We don't know, we don't see, that Nicodemus received a straight
answer from Jesus about how it is possible for one to be born again.
Nicodemus went away. It was
not the last time to hear, however. Somehow
Jesus' response to his question stayed with him, even if he didn't have a direct
answer. We see Nicodemus turn up
again in the seventh chapter of John as the feud within the Pharisees and the
arguments about, "What are we going to do with this man, with this Jesus,
with this problem?" It's Nicodemus who says, "Maybe we should at least
let Him testify. Maybe we should at
least let him give His side of the story directly to us." Nicodemus himself probably thought maybe he'll find an answer
to that question, "How could this be?
How could one be born again?" For his sticking up for Jesus, Nicodemus was ridiculed and put
down. And yet that didn't stop
Nicodemus from being hounded by this question for the rest of Jesus' ministry.
Matthew, Mark and Luke tell of a man named Joseph of Arimathea, a
disciple of Jesus--a secret disciple because he feared the Jews.
Joseph of Arimathea, who asked Pontius Pilate for Jesus' body so that He
could receive a proper Jewish burial. John's
gospel tells us that he had a helper, this Joseph:
one Nicodemus. It says that
Nicodemus, in fact, brought the myrrh and other spices--a hundred pounds
worth--to help Joseph with the burial. And
as he wrapped Jesus' body with the traditional spices and cloths, the mystery
must have turned to irony: "This
dead man told me I needed to be born again.
How can this be?" We must assume that Nicodemus heard the claim to an empty tomb, but
we don't know if he was able to respond in faith to those claims.
The burial of Jesus' body is the last the Scriptures tell us about
Nicodemus. We don't see his name
mentioned in the leadership of the new church.
We don't see him, turned by faith, out starting new churches, and making
new disciples. We don't know what became of Nicodemus. What we know, even with the ringing in our ears of "He
is risen!" from last Sunday, is that we at times have the same question in
our hearts: How can this be?
What did Jesus' resurrection have to do with me? For Nicodemus' question and for ours, it's Peter this morning who
has the key to the answer. It's
Peter's words which unlock that door for us.
Peter says, as Dave read for us this morning, "In God's great mercy he has given us a new birth into a
living hope." He uses the phrase "new birth" again.
He calls back to Jesus' response to Nicodemus.
But here's something Peter does that no other writer in the New Testament
does. He takes the Greek word that had been commonly used for
"born again," for "new birth" that has been given to us, and
he puts three letters in front of it that make the word mean this:
"God has caused us to be born again."
"God has caused us to be born again."
How can this be? Well,
we don't decide to change. We
don't decide to be born again. God
has caused something to happen, and in this Peter announces the end of
religion. He announces the end of
our striving to try to please God in the hopes that we might be accepted.
Peter announces the beginning of a new way of being, a very new thing
entirely for ourselves. Nicodemus was concerned about the womb: "How can we go back to the womb?"
And what Peter tells us is that Jesus' point is not about where we've
been born from, but rather it's about where we are being born to:
To what are we being born? And
the other half of that sentence for Peter is that we are being born to a
living hope. God has caused us
to be born again to a living hope. All of us have experiences with hope. What does "living hope" mean? I myself am hoping greatly that spring might finally come to
this blessed state! I found myself
last night, with 59 seconds left in the Gophers national hockey championship,
hoping like hope that they might somehow escape what seemed to be a certain
outcome. Is that living hope?
Is the sort of vague wish that things will turn out right--is that living
hope? What does Peter mean by
"living hope"? In 1998 a Category 5 hurricane named Mitch smashed into Central
America, destroying everything in its path.
Rain, delivered by 155 knot winds, caused flooding and mud slides that
literally washed villages away. They
killed over 9,000 people. In
Nicaragua alone, 3,000 people perished. Over
750,000 lost their homes or all of their possessions. That's the western suburbs, at least--their homes were gone.
Literally hundreds of villages washed away in one grand sweep. I had the privilege of visiting one of those villages just over a
couple of months ago. I was able to
travel with a group from Luther Seminary--students and professors--to see what
the Lutheran Church is doing in Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
We spent six days in Nicaragua and learned that even thought the Lutheran
Church had only been there 12 years, even though they only have two ordained
pastors, they've seen that the power of the gospel is not limited by time or
short-handedness. With the help of
22 lay pastors, there are now 47 worshiping Lutheran communities in Nicaragua.
Most pastors--the lay pastors--share a couple of congregations and they
travel out every week to visit them. We
had a chance to visit one, to travel with Nestor who was about to begin his
first Sunday at the church in the little town of Lafragua. Lafragua lies near the Honduran border. If we were to jump in our autos here and drive on 494, it
might take about an hour and a half to get there.
We drove a truck. Seventeen
of us sat in the back of an open-bedded truck with a canvas curtain over the
top, a metal floor, and wooden benches along the two sides.
There were not enough seats on the two benches.
With no unplanned stops, the ride in that truck--in, and around, and over
potholes--took five hours. Because
of one and then two flat tires, it actually took us seven hours to reach
Lafragua. I had a perception about what suffering was like, about what
hope was like ("I hope the ride is over soon . . .")
Wind blew through the truck. We
were covered with grime, literally, by the time we got there.
My back was as sore as it has ever been.
You know after a long trip (even in a jetliner) how weary you feel and
how you just want to have some time to yourself.
("I just want to get cleaned up.
I just need to get a little something to eat and watch TV and then I'll
be fine.") We missed worship that morning.
We were well over three hours late.
And yet when we climbed out of the back of that truck, the entire village
was awaiting us in their Sunday best, clapping, and cheering, and singing.
People I had not met grabbed me and hugged me, kissed me on the cheek and
they invited us into their little church--a three-sided structure with a slanted
roof. They sent all the children in the village to the front--who
sang a song which was translated to us, about how happy they were to see us and
how glad they were to have us in their midst.
Because there is no electricity in Lafragua, they wrote the song the
night before by candlelight. And then, since they
had already eaten, plates of food came out only for us. We had the humbling experience (us dirty but well dressed
Americans) sitting in their seats, eating their food, while they watched us with
smiles on their faces. Chickens
walked amongst us on the dirt floor of the church. Cattle were just on the other side, and our noses knew that
was true! After lunch, they walked
us down to what was the pride of their town, the river. The only place where they bathed, where they washed clothes,
where the children played. It was
the source of life for their town. We
taught them the game of tag, and children ran, and screamed, and laughed.
And when we left, the smiles never, ever left their faces.
They hugged us again. One of
the women in our group at that point apologized to one of the men in the town: "We're sorry that we missed church," she said.
He said, "You didn't miss church.
Sunday is our day together. We
worshipped a while ago, but we spend the entire day together celebrating what
God has done for us." You see, when that flood hit Lafragua, it was Christian men and
women who walked into that village and helped them rebuild it.
It doesn't look much different now, probably, than it did then.
The town is still made of sticks and dirt.
And yet they know that even if it were to be washed away again, they'd
have reason to hope because Jesus Christ resides in their midst. The people of Lafragua do not simply have living hope.
They are living hope. Have we experienced hope to that degree? Why is it that we, who have so many comforts that so much the
world does not have, find ourselves worried, and anxious, and wondering if our
time will finally come. If we're
ever going to experience the kind of hope that Lafragua has, we're going to need
to fight our temptation to think that faith is simply a means to make life more
comfortable for us. I'm told that birth is not a comfortable thing, whether on the
giving or the receiving end. I
doubt there are few here who would argue the point that there's a fair amount of
trauma involved. (I was at one of
them once, and I don't remember it!) But
I've seen, you know, on television--on ER and all that--it seems there's some
trauma going on. It wouldn't be
hard to imagine any one of those fresh-in-the-world newborns being rather taken
with Nicodemus' idea of going back to the womb.
("Put me right back! That
was far more comfortable.") And
even we people of the empty tomb at times find it difficult to embrace the new
life that Christ's resurrection has brought us. We may want to just stay where we are. In fact, Elton Jones in his new book Passion for Pilgrimage
puts it this way: Is the resurrection in some sense harder for us
than the crucifixion? At least our
little crucifixions are familiar to us. We
know what to expect from them. Crucifixion,
or resurrection? Am I up to bearing
the glory of a new life? The
resurrection means trouble for us who are comfortable with being only half
alive. What, then, in me needs to be raised from the dead?
What part of you, long since rejected and forgotten, needs to be touched
and restored to life? What part of you must die in the tomb? You know, it's not just as individuals that we experience the
hardship, the challenges of change--the discomfort that comes from new birth.
Communities experience the same thing.
Congregations of faith experience new birth, trial, change--like this one
is about to. Next Sunday Gary and
his family say farewell to us and we say good-bye to Gary as our Senior pastor
for the last 11 1/2 years. Our
statistics tell us that over half of you here have never known anyone but Gary
to be the Senior Pastor of this church. There
are others, such as our friend Ray Tesarek, who tells me he was baptized in this
church in 1915. Ray has been
training in senior pastors for his entire life!
And he has not slowed down. (I
can attest to this because I tried to follow him from Glen Lake to the church
this morning and I couldn't keep up with him!) We all are going to experience this change in different ways.
It will have its triumphs. It
will have its hardships. And yet
there is the possibility that God is in this new birth and that He intends to
bring us even more joy. We
certainly wish joy for Gary and for his family.
We wish God's blessings on you (and we know that you will have them), and
we will miss you. And we know that
Gary has that same trust that God, through the risen Christ, will be present in
this community, helping us into that new birth and into a new direction that is
better than we can imagine in our limited world. Nicodemus had a body. We
have an empty tomb. And more than
that, we have a risen Christ that you and I can attest to because He has
revealed Himself in our hearts and in our lives.
We believe that this risen Jesus is here now, in this room, causing us to
be born again. Jesus' resurrection
is your resurrection. He is for
you. And may God help us all this
morning to embrace this new life. To
step out of the tomb and into the joy of the inheritance that has been promised
us. And in our daily life, may we
show the world what it means to have living hope.
Amen. Dave Dustrud Director of Youth Ministries Faith Presbyterian Church Minnetonka, Minnesota [Transcribed from an audiotape of the 9:00 a.m. Worship Service on
April 7, 2002] |
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