Preached on Sunday, March 20, 2011 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. Lectionary texts this sermon is based on can be found by clicking here.
There’s a story – it’s probably apocryphal, maybe not entirely true. But you know, if they keep telling a story that’s not in every particular true, that mean’s it’s a really good story. And a good story always bears repeating, true or not.
Now this story is told about Ma Ferguson. Ma Ferguson was elected governor of Texas in the year 1925, making her the first female governor of that great state. Now you might wonder if there was a great wave of feminism in Texas just five years after women won the right to vote in the United States. The answer is no, there was not such a feminist revolution in Texas in the 1920s. What there was in Texas at that time was a crooked governor named James Ferguson, husband of Ma Ferguson, later known as, you guessed it, Pa Ferguson. Now Pa Ferguson was impeached, convicted and removed from office in his second term as governor and barred from holding state office thereafter. His wife Ma Ferguson decided to run for his office, promising to follow her husband’s advice in all things and offering the voters of Texas what she said would be ‘two governors for the price of one.’ Is this a great country, or what?
But that’s not the story I want to tell. That’s a good story, but not the whole story. The story I want to tell is about what became Ma Ferguson’s most famous statement which she may or may not have actually said. It seems that much as today, there was a debate in Texas over the education of immigrant children -- in particular whether to provide Spanish language education for the children of Mexican immigrants.
Well, Ma Ferguson was having none of that. She is quoted as saying that if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas. What Ma didn’t know or maybe just found it easy to overlook is that Jesus didn’t speak English. Jesus didn’t know English, couldn’t have known English because English hadn’t even been ‘invented’ in Jesus’ Day. But for Ma Ferguson and for almost every other Christian in America at that time, Jesus not only ‘spoke’ English, he did so in the beautiful and poetic English of the King James Version of the Bible.
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible and as you know, in commemoration, our Lenten Book Group is reading a book called In The Beginning which details the process of translating and publishing this monumental and influential and beloved work. To translate the Bible into English had been a crime in England heretofore, and the idea that the people of God should be able to read the Word of God in their own language was a radical one at the time.
But James I of England was committed to the Reformation of the Christian Faith then underway in Europe -- or we should say, committed to reformation within some limits. And he called together the leading Biblical scholars of the day and set them about translating the Bible from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into English to be published in an edition authorized by the government -- a process that came to fruition in 1611.
King James’s translators did such an amazing job that Ma Ferguson and very many other Christians find it easy to forget that the way Jesus sounds in the King James Bible is not really the way Jesus sounded. That has a great deal to say about the triumph of the skilled translators of the various versions of the Bible. And it has a great deal to say about us -- those who seek out God’s word.
Because when look for God and try to hear God’s voice, when we try to find God, we like it best when God looks just like us, and God sounds like us and we like it when God lives right where we live and holds all the same opinions as we do, and we really, really love it when we come to find that our God even votes the way we do! That’s a nice God to have, a God that looks like you and sounds like you and thinks like you and lives where you live.
But that God is not the God of Abraham. Abraham met God and the first thing God asked him to do was move. God said to Abraham, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” (Genesis 12:1-3) Abraham was willing to be moved by God, quite literally. Abraham believed God and he believed in God’s promises to him -- even if he couldn’t imagine how God was going to manage to keep those promises. And Abraham followed God out of his country, away from his people, out of the life that he knew so well. Abraham was willing to venture outside his comfort zone, and to go where God led him. Abraham was willing to believe something new, something that seemed impossible. Abraham was willing to try something challenging. Abraham was willing to believe. Abraham was, quite simply, willing.
It was this willingness on Abraham’s part that Paul says is why God reckoned Abraham as righteousness. Not because Abraham followed the rules, but rather that Abraham was willing to break them. Well, maybe not break the rules specifically, but Abraham was willing to do things that others might have considered ‘breaking the rules.’ Paul’s point about Abraham is that he was willing to believe that God might be wholly other than he was, that God might call him to leave what was familiar and safe, and journey to a new, scary, foreign place. Abraham was willing to believe, to really, really believe, that what God had planned for him was better than what he himself had imagined.
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In our gospel reading today, we actually see someone having their ‘Abraham moment’. Nicodemus has come in search of Jesus, but he has come under the cover of darkness. Nicodemus is restless. His sets out on his night journey to find some answers to his restless questions. When he greets Jesus, it’s clear that Nicodemus has a burgeoning interest in Jesus, some small sense that Jesus is something special, someone that he should be paying attention to. But he’s a bit conflicted about it – he’s rightfully wary about what others, even his fellow Pharisees might think of his coming to Jesus. So, he comes by night and he asks Jesus for some assurances, some confirmation or explanation that what Jesus is preaching and the signs he is performing are really, officially from God, authorized by the Home Office.
Well, Jesus gives Nicodemus an answer.Jesus speaks the words that have become one of Jesus’ most famous quotes. Much more famous than anything Ma Ferguson ever said. A favorite Bible verse of many, many Christians down through the ages. A single verse of Scripture that encapsulates one of the most essential truths of the Christian faith. And, inspired by the Lenten Book Group, I’ll repeat it in the words of the King James Bible, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Nicodemus finds that what Jesus is saying and preaching what he is really talking about is a new kind of birth into a new kind of everlasting life. This Son of God presenting himself to Nicodemus is not one that sounds anything like the God Nicodemus knows so well from his tradition and from his no doubt extensive pharisaical studies. But in spite of these incredulous, uncomfortable, even unbelievable ideas, Nicodemus, we find, accepts and comes to believe what he has heard -- and becomes a loyal follower of Jesus.
Like Abraham, Nicodemus is asked to go somewhere he’s never been before. He’s asked to step out of his comfort zone -- not literally as Abraham was, but intellectually and spiritually. Jesus didn’t sound like the God Nicodemus has known heretofore, but there was something true, if yet shockingly new, about what Jesus had to say to Nicodemus, and Nicodemus was able, like Abraham before him, to follow God in a new direction, to a new place of faith.
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Abraham and Nicodemus had faith, and the courage that comes from faith, to hear a God that called them out of their comfort zones. And they accepted that call. Abraham left all he had ever known to follow God and in the end, came to a place that he and his people could call their own. And God granted to Abraham a whole nation of descendants -- we count ourselves among them. The hope of a family is one that Abraham and Sarah had given up on. But God brought to fruition the hopes and dreams that Abraham and Sarah had abandoned.
Restless Nicodemus couldn’t deny that Jesus was truly from God, though what Jesus said and taught was an alarming, unsettling challenge to all that Nicodemus was sure was true about God. But Nicodemus engaged this challenge to his faith and sought answers. And he came to a new understanding of God, he came to believe in a God whose promised more than Nicodemus could have asked or imagined.
Ma Ferguson and those like her hear God speaking in their own language and only their own language, confirming what they already believe, endorsing what it is easy for them to accept. But Abraham and Nicodemus were able to hear God challenge them. They were able to accept that God could be disconcerting, upsetting, they were able to believe that God wanted more than to endorse the status quo. And in accepting the challenges of God, they found that God’s will offered more than they could have ever dreamed.
This Lent, I invite you to listen for this strange sounding God, this challenging God. And I urge you to follow that God, wherever you are led. If you do, I guarantee you’ll get more than you bargained for. You may find that God does not always make your dreams come true, what you may find is something better.
You may find that God make’s God’s dreams for you come true -- and in the end, that is so, so much better.
Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation, in the church and in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 3: 20-21) +Amen.
© The Rev. Mark R. Collins
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