John 3:1-17
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
We occasionally use the work of the 13th century Sufi mystic Jal?l al-D?n Mu?ammad R?m?, commonly known simply as Rumi, in worship. When we do so, we do so in translation, as we are not as a whole fluent in Medieval Persian.
Rumi has been popular in recent decades, especially in translations by Coleman Barks, who died earlier this week. The problem is that Barks stripped the poetry of its Islamic context, often suggesting human romance where the ancient author expresses love of God. Secularizing and popularizing is great for sales, and more accurate translations are criticized as inaccessible, but we are left with a thing that is not the real thing, a sort of fraud that has been critiqued as literary colonialism.
If Rumi remains exotic even in Westernized translation, the Bible has been wholly domesticated, from the familiar cadences of the Authorized Version translated in late Renaissance England to colloquial translations like the Good News Bible and even the scholarly standard, the New Revised Standard Version, recently in an updated edition. Few Christians question the translations themselves, much less the theological lens through which we read them.
We should.
Today’s reading from the gospel traditionally attributed to John is a textbook example of mistranslation. Ironically, the exchange with Nicodemus depends on wordplay, a double-meaning in Greek. But, if this represents historic memory, the two men would have spoken in Aramaic.
The Koine Greek word “anothen” can be translated two different ways, as I’ve mentioned in the past, as “again” and as “from above.” There is a hint of humor here, as Jesus proclaims that one must be born “from above,” while Nicodemus hears that one must be “born again.”
American fundamentalists do mental gymnastics trying to make this ancient text, written across centuries in different political, social, and religious contexts, say only one thing, this transactional relationship with the divine. They turn to today’s passage again and again. And because they are not fluent in Biblical Greek, they neither recognize the wordplay involved, nor do they realize that these words that they insist are literally true cannot possibly be, for there is zero chance a Pharisee on the Sanhedrin and a street-prophet from Galilee spoke to one another in Greek.
And that is only the start of the problem. In the beloved singular line, tattooed as chapter and verse number 3:16 on so many Christians today, God’s love is the trigger, the result is eternal life. Except that is not what the text actually says, and what we think it means is most certainly not what it means. This text does not read life after death. Jesus is not the golden ticket that ushers us into some Wonka-like heaven with angels instead of Oompa-Loompas.
The Greek phrase traditionally translated as eternal life is more accurately rendered “life of the ages.” This is in contrast to “life as lived in this age,” a frequent trope in the teachings of Jesus. It sounds very much like life in this age equates to the Marxist idea of false consciousness. Salvation, as later revealed in this same gospel, is living in relationship with God. John begins not with a nativity story, but with a Christological account that draws on Greek philosophy: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was toward God. We’ll leave why Jesus is the Word and what the Koine Greek term “logos” implies for another day.
Now, I’m not saying there is no existence after our bodies fail. I’m agnostic on that matter. I’m just focused on this life, because I look around and see suffering in this life. If there is no life after death, then choosing to focus on doing good now seems to be a life well lived, and if there is a heaven, I suspect the entry fee in measured in deeds, not magic prayers, Jesus-fish tattoos, or the number of university buildings named in your honor.
Which brings us to where I have been heading all along on the winding road of this sermon, Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome. He begins with an argument about faith and works. This is one of his primary messages throughout his authentic letters. Paul was a Pharisee before he started following Jesus. Judaism, in both the pre-Rabbinic form of Paul’s time and in what would, after the Jewish War, develop into the religion we know today, Rabbinic Judaism, focuses on orthopraxis, doing the right thing.
Paul argues that you can never do enough of the right thing to earn God’s love. Not that doing doesn’t matter, but that it doesn’t matter enough on its own. For Paul, all good things from God, forgiveness, salvation, are freely-given gifts, what we Christians call “grace.”
You know how sequels are sometimes better than the original? Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome was way better than The Road Warrior, Terminator 2 superior to the original, and can we talk about AI and SkyNet for a moment?
In the case of Pauline theology, not so much. Paul’s formula, “doing plus believing plus grace,” gets twisted again and again until you get “born agains,” thank you Nicodemus, who are saved because they uttered the magic Jesus prayer, because Jesus died on the cross to appease the bruised ego of of God, to pay for our sins. Salvation is mostly mental, which seems to me to be exactly that, in British slang, completely mental.
Since I don’t believe in that type of God, a giant domestic abuser in the sky, I can’t really buy grace as one factor in that bloody formula. I’m good with grace, but I need a sort of Grace 2.0, a reboot to replace the bad sequels, less angry God, less faith vs. works, more original blessing and existence itself as grace.
And here, I get to turn to one of my theological heroes, one who did not die a martyr’s death. The Rev. Dr. Friedrich Schleiermacher of Germany is sometimes called the founder of modern theology. I suspect American liberal theologians like Hartford’s Horace Bushnell and Rochester’s Walter Rauschenbusch don’t happen without Schleiermacher, and Thomas K. Beecher is profoundly influenced by Bushnell, so the magic sauce that makes Park “Park,” with T.K. in the pulpit and with me in the pulpit, likely owes a debt to this guy most people have forgotten.
Schleiermacher lived as the Enlightenment was giving way to a new age. The surge in knowledge during the Enlightenment revealed new truths and exposed old lies. The theologian tried to construct a Christian theology that could co-exist with the new knowledge, a theology that was grounded in community. He had no time for dogmatic debates about the two-natures of Jesus, for example, which he believed lead to logical impossibilities and useless speculation.
We’ll leave Schleiermacher’s Christology for another day, and note in appreciation his claim that it is the community, the lived religious experience, that transforms and saves.
It is in Schleiermacher’s understanding of God that I find what I understand as grace. He states that humans, while having agency, at the very same time experience “a consciousness of absolute dependence; for it is the consciousness that the whole of our spontaneous activity comes from a source outside us.” He goes on to say that this source, this “Whence we came,” is designated by the word “God.” He is one of the first to identify that word as a placeholder, a convenient shorthand.
For me, and I’d suggest for Schleiermacher, grace is being itself as we acknowledge our utter dependence on this source, this Whence, this God. A quote often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt states that “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift.” And today is a gift for most people on most days.
And again, let us pause and admit that life does not feel like a gift for all people on all days, and some of the horrors we face are beyond our individual control. I choose to believe, as the late Rev. Dr. Marilyn McCord Adams states in her book “Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God,” that “it would be cruel for God to create (allow to evolve) human beings with such radical vulnerabilities to horrors, unless Divine power stood able, and Divine love willing, to redeem.”
I absolutely choose to believe in the goodness of “Whence we came,” in that mystery we call God, believe that the kin-dom of love and justice Jesus proclaimed was breaking into the world is, in fact, already here, grace the call to be in community, being born from above the decision, made daily, to see the million improbabilities that surround us, the extravagant beauty and serendipitous creativity, and to choose that as our story and path. May it be so. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Rohingya refugee who was mostly blind and spoke no English, was arrested in February of last year when he got lost and wandered onto private property, the curtain rod he was using as a walking stick described by police as a weapon. He sat in jail for most of a year before the matter was resolved with a misdemeanor charge. On February 19th, he was released to U.S. Border Patrol agents, who drove him to a Tim Horton’s Coffee Shop in Buffalo, and abandoned him. His body was found on Tuesday.
Let us pray.
Divine Mystery,
whether we call you Source, Whence we came,
or simply God,
we gather together in awe before You
but also in sorrow
at the ease with which we destroy.
We pray for the family of Nurul Amin Shah Alam,
and repent of the ways that systems of safety
become systems of cruelty and chaos,
at our participation in a system
that routinely kills the vulnerable,
people on the spectrum,
with mental health challenges,
struggling with addiction,
who do not speak English,
repent that we send hammers when what is needed is healing,
send assault weapons where what is needed is compassion.
Jesus believed in a better world.
Help us to believe
and to act,
as we pray the prayer he taught us, saying:
Our Father who art in heaven…