Creative Transformation: Sermon for 5 Lent, April 2, 2004

Last week, we read from the Gospel according to St. John a portion of Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus, the member of the Jewish Sanhedrin who came to see him late at night. In that conversation, Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up....” In today’s Gospel lesson John again quotes Jesus saying similar words, “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” After quoting this, the Gospeler, John, adds this commentary, “He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.” Now this may be, but keep in mind it is only John’s interpretation. Might it not be that Jesus had another “lifting up” in mind? Are there not two other “liftings up” to come: the Resurrection and the Ascension?

Dominican preacher, Jude Siciliano has suggested as much in his comment:

It isn’t just Jesus’ offering on the cross that John invites us to gaze on with eyes of faith. This being "lifted up" also points us to Jesus’ resurrection. After all, if he just died what value would that have been for us? Death would have had the final word. Jesus would have been just one more victim of one-more repressive regime...one more dead martyr for a cause. Instead, God raised Jesus from the dead; he was "lifted up" for us. Now we look upon him and believe in our own future resurrection. But not just in the future. John writes in the present tense; he is speaking of something that is true for us now.

Episcopal priest and process theologian Paul Nancarrow offers a similar insight:

John conceives of Jesus’ death and resurrection as a creative transformation of earthly life into eternal life that animates the whole of Jesus’ ministry. To be crucified and to be glorified are, for John’s Jesus, not two separate things, but two simultaneous aspects of one single reality. Jesus’ whole mission is to reveal that reality and call others to share in that reality. Death-and-resurrection is a mystery not unique to Jesus, although to be sure he is the first of the human family to experience its fullness; but it is a reality of new life in which all are invited to share. Jesus underlines the universality of the invitation to resurrection with a very down-to-earth agricultural metaphor: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” To die is prerequisite to bearing fruit. That is why, for Jesus, to be “lifted up” on the cross in death is also to be “lifted up” to God in new life. That is why being “lifted up” is, as we saw in last week’s Gospel, the sign that will draw all people to new life in Christ. The Gospel passage thus serves to sum up the themes of Jesus’ ministry given to us in Lent, and to turn our attention ahead to the Passion and Resurrection stories of Palm Sunday and Easter.

“Death and resurrection [is] a creative transformation of earthly life into eternal life.” That’s a great way to summarize “liftings up” to which Jesus must be referring in this Gospel reading today.

Creative transformation is what God, through the Prophet Jeremiah, was offering to his people when he said, “I will make a new covenant with [them] ... I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” It is our appropriation of that transformation, our claiming it as our own, that happens when we gather in worship each week.

Richard Norris, an Episcopal priest and theologian, wrote a book entitled Understanding the Faith of the Church. In it, he wrote this about the Creeds:

The creeds ... speak of the way in which the promise of creation and the Word of redemption take root in creaturely existence ... and transform it from the inside. This is the process customarily referred to as sanctification. That term ... means "making holy," and the same Latin root can be seen in the word saint, which signifies a holy person ....

When Paul calls his Corinthian friends "sanctified," he means that they are "called to be holy" and so belong to God (1 Cor. 1:22), not that they always do or think the right thing. People who are holy, then, are in the first instance people claimed by God. This means, though, that they are also made open and available to God. God has, as it were, tapped them on the shoulder to get their attention. A conversation has started, and it will be a holy conversation because God has begun it. To be sanctified is to be called to answer God consciously and explicitly, and so to be set apart for God's purposes and (God's) company.

[T]he conversation which God has started with us becomes one which flows more easily and calls up deeper and deeper levels of our selves. In the presence of (God's) Word to us we experience the disturbance of joy, and we reach out to God by agreeing with (God's) Word, by making it our own Word back to (God). Then two things happen. The way we live begins to be shaped from the inside by this internalized Word of God; and the promise of our nature is fulfilled in a sharing fo God's life.

This is the creative transformation promised in God’s commitment to write his law in our hearts, a commitment with which we are called to cooperate.

Another story from the Hebrew Scriptures also speaks of creative and cooperative transformation.

In the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, we read the story of God taking Ezekiel to a valley filled with bones. “[T]hese bones,” God says to Ezekiel, “are the whole house of Israel.” (37:11) In God's eyes, his People had become (as the Mayor of Munchkin city describe the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy’s house fell one her) “morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, absolutely, positively, undeniably, and reliably dead!” So dead, were they, that their bones were completely dried up.

God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones and that is what Ezekiel does: in the words of that great old Negro spiritual, “Ezekiel cried them dry bones, 'Now hear the word of the Lord.'” So toe bone connected to foot bone, foot bone to ankle bone, ankle bone to leg bone, and so on. Then God told Ezekiel to prophesy to the air, to the breath, to the Spirit, to that irritable and changeable wind that blows where it will. Ezekiel did so “and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.” (37:10) And this was not just a rattling of the bones, but a resurrection of the House of Israel for the dry bones did not merely become walking skeletons: they received flesh - muscles and sinews and skin and everything else that goes along with being a living entity.

What we should note about this story is that God doesn't just do this on his own. He has Ezekiel engage in the spiritual practice of prophecy. God and Ezekiel accomplish this movement of air, of breath, of spirit, of life, of resurrection, together.

Charles le Roux, a professor of religious studies at the University of South Africa, has drawn on the Buddhist tradition to offer some insight into this cooperative activity of humans with God to accomplish the creative transformation. He writes:

Casting oneself into the house of God, one is activated by God (in the Spirit) for the Christ-life of resurrected existence – an existence marked by a radical self-giving love which reaches every place in total healing intimacy. With “reaches every place” we make a hermeneutical switchback to Buddhist enlightenment .. and a ... metaphor ... seen in the following story told by Dogen.

Ch'an Teacher Pao-ch'e of Mt. Ma-ku was fanning himself one day when a monk came and asked: “The nature of the wind is always abiding; there is no place to which it does not extend. Why do you still use a fan?”

The master replied: “Although you know only that the nature of the wind is always abiding, you do not yet know the truth that there is no place to which it does not extend.”

The monk said: “What is the meaning of 'there is no place to which it does not extend?'”

The master just kept fanning himself. The monk saluted him.

Now, “the nature of wind is always abiding/constancy,” that is, the Buddha nature cannot be consummated without the act of using a fan (practice). Practice, intrinsic practice is the “fan” that makes the wind of enlightenment eternal and existing everywhere.

Professor le Roux then returns to the Christian understanding:

[B]eing cast into the house of God means that one is activated by God's Spirit (wind) for the Christ-life that reaches every place - the wind of enlightenment existing everywhere. The Christ-event and the Spirit of God/Christ, are the God made known in every place of our life - saving and fulfilling it.

Thus, it is only with our cooperation, our involvement, our practice, our fanning, our giving voice to the prophetic spirit within us that God’s Spirit is truly activated, that God’s Word is written in our hearts, and that we are fully drawn to the lifted-up Christ. Salvation and fulfilment is offered by God, but we must appropriate it through our active cooperation with God. We must set our minds on the Spirit, as Paul suggested to the Romans, or as he put it somewhat differently when he wrote to the Philippians, we must work out our own salvation. God offers creative transformation, we appropriate it through our cooperation.

This is what our gradual psalm today is all about. Listen again to the Psalmist’s words:

How shall a young man cleanse his way? *
By keeping to your words.
With my whole heart I seek you; *
let me not stray from your commandments.
I treasure your promise in my heart, *
that I may not sin against you.
Blessed are you, O Lord; *
instruct me in your statutes.
With my lips will I recite *
all the judgments of your mouth.
I have taken greater delight in the way of your decrees *
than in all manner of riches.
I will meditate on your commandments *
and give attention to your ways.
My delight is in your statutes; *
I will not forget your word. (Ps. 119:9-16)

As we continue our Lenten preparations to celebrate Christ’s glorious Resurrection, let us continue our efforts to keep God’s words, to treasure God’s promise in our heart, to delight in God’s statues, to cooperate in God’s creative transformation of our lives. Amen.