20th after Pentecost 2025

Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Blessed be God's family.

Join me.

All of God.

You are all secret.

The Lord be with you.

Let us pray.

Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity.

And that we may obtain what you promise.

Make us love what you command.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reads with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

Amen.

Please be seated.

At this time, I invite all of our children to head out to the back of the church there and meet Mr.

Brian, and y'all will head off to Godly Play.

Before she writhed in labor, she gave birth.

Before her pain came upon her, she delivered a boy child.

Who has heard of such as this?

Who has seen things such as these?

Shall a land be born in one day?

Shall a nation be birthed in one moment?

Yet as soon as she writhed in labor, Zion gave birth to her children.

Shall I open the womb and not midwife?

Says the womb of creation.

Shall I, the one who midwives, shut the womb, says your God to your daughter?

Rejoice with Jerusalem and celebrate with her.

All you who love her, rejoice with her in joy, all who mourn deeply over her, in order that you may nurse and be satisfied from her conforming breast, that you all may drink deeply and delight yourselves from the glory of her breast.

For so says the Holy One of old, watch, I will extend to her flourishing like a river, and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing stream, and you shall nurse and be carried on her arm, and you shall be bounced on her knees.

As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you all.

You all shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

The word of the Lord.

We will read responsibly by the half verse.

Source of life, you have searched me and known me.

You know my sitting down and my rising up.

You come back and far.

My journeying and my resting, you watch over.

And with all days from your wait.

When there is no word, is on my tongue.

Be all seeing you know everything.

Behind and before you surround me.

And lay upon me your hand.

Beyond wonderful is this knowledge to me.

So maybe I am unable to approach it.

Where can I go from your spirit?

Or where from your presence can I flee?

If I ascend to the heavens, there you are.

If I reply, shall see it you.

If I take up dawn's wings, if I ascend the fares of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me.

And your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, Surely darkness shall cover me.

And I hope it shall light me.

Even darkness is not dark to you.

For it was you who crafted my inward parts.

I praise you, for I am awesomely and marvelously made.

Wondrous are your words.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Redeemer, Jesus Christ, who in great mercy has engendered a new birth for us into a living hope, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance that is incorruptible, undefiled, and unfaithful, kept in the heavens for you all, who in the power of God are kept through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the end time.

You are receiving the completion of your faith, the salvation of your soul.

The word of the Lord.

Now there was a member of the Pharisees.

Nicodemus was his name, and leader of the Jewish people.

He came to Jesus by night and said to him, Rabbi, we know that you came from God as a teacher, for no one has the power to do these signs that you do without God being with them.

Jesus answered him, Truly, truly I say to you, if a person is not born again from above, they will not be able to see the majesty of God.

Nicodemus said to Jesus, How can a person be born after having become old?

Surely no one is able to enter a second time into the belly of their mother and be born.

Jesus answered, Truly, truly I say to you, no one can enter the majesty of God without being born of water and spirit.

Whatever or whoever is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of spirit is spirit.

Do not marvel that I say to all of you, you must be born again from above.

The wind, like a spirit, blows where it chooses, and you do not hear the sound of it, but know not from where it comes or where it goes.

So it is with everyone who is born of a spirit.

And Nicodemus replied or said to Jesus, How are these things possible?

And Jesus replied and said to him, Are you a teacher of Israel?

These things you know not.

The gospel of the Lord Christ.

I mean, if we just kept reading, we were gonna hear that verse that you see at every football game you ever go to.

It's interesting.

Maybe she stopped it here for folk like teachers in Israel that don't get the gospel.

I want you to really consider.

She stopped it here on purpose as an opportunity for us.

I think we know what we're doing to reconsider whether we know or not.

It's an interesting beginning here.

A Pharisee, a leader of the Jewish people, comes to Jesus by night.

And boy, we all get figurative speech, don't we?

Not only is he coming at night so he won't be seen by others, because that could be embarrassing, but don't you get what's happening?

He's in the dark.

He's coming to Jesus in the dark.

And Jesus says this thing that is very disarming.

And all I can say is that probably Bishop Gene Robinson said this the best.

That we are supposed to take our faith so seriously that we don't settle for taking it literally.

What happens in this passage is that Nicodemus takes the word Anagineo so literally that it means being born again.

And he says, how can you do that?

It's not literally possible.

Well, good news, it's not even supposed to be the case.

What the author, the translator, has done for us today is put that bit, born again, born from above.

You see that?

The word Anagenea can mean both.

The problem is Nicodemus takes it so literally so as not to take it seriously.

I can't be born again.

I don't wonder to say it, Jesus says, You've got to be born from above.

Maybe you know enough, Greek, to know that the word Genesis, if you hear it, Genaio, means beginning.

It doesn't even just mean born from above, it means a new beginning that is from above.

And this is written to religious professionals probably more than anybody, because God's going to tell you, as a religious professional, uh, that's what I guess I am, uh, I've taken the scriptures so literally most of my life that I failed to take them seriously.

And I bought into a gospel that is so literal that honestly there's not a lot of life in it.

So, what's the literal teaching?

Here's the literal teachings of the good news.

That's the word gospel that I inherited.

Are you ready?

I mean, God kind of likes you, except you're all messed up and stuff.

So, look, there's this eternal torment in hell with all kinds of ironic punishments waiting for you, but God will put up with you enough that, like, if you say the right words, you won't go there when you die.

But, I mean, God really just kind of puts up with you.

And I want you to hear that this is spellcraft 101.

This is how spells work.

You say the magic words, and if you say them just right, you get the magic transformation.

One of the magic words, I believe Jesus died for my sins, and I accept him in my heart to be my Lord and Savior.

You met somebody who prayed that who had not been born again?

You met me.

Because I did that a bunch of times.

And boy, you know, we wanted to make sure we got the spell right.

So we prayed it every Sunday.

And we prayed it in youth camp, and we were told, get these words right and know right when you pray them, and then God will love you so much that God won't punish you ironically for returning.

I said, this, this is it.

The literal gospel, the good news.

And boy, I gotta tell you, that's mixed news at best, isn't it?

Hey, eternal punishment waits, but maybe not.

I mean, maybe it's mixed.

Where is the goodness in that?

Where's the goodness that God is out to punish you?

If you hear the text that way, then when you read this bit about the trials, right, which we heard in 1 Peter, the trials, you might think God is testing you to see if you'll succeed or fail instead of hearing life tests us.

Life tests us.

Not to try us, pass, or fail, but in the way that pressureless metals are tried.

Are they precious or are they covered with dross?

And I want to tell you that sometimes a literal interpretation of the scripture is full of wet.

It will sink you down and poison your heart.

Sink you down and poison your heart.

Why do we need born again?

Why do we need that?

Why do we use that phrase anyway?

And I want to tell you, this is a mistake we did in the church a long time ago.

We came up with this idea, we meaning St.

Augustine came up with this idea that there's something fundamentally wrong with human beings.

And he called that original sin.

And he said it's even genetic.

Like it's so bad that if you're born as a baby and you don't do anything right or wrong, you're still going to hell when you die.

Because you're fundamentally wrong.

He took his own idea so literally, he forgot to take it seriously.

Because here's what I want to tell you that's wrong with at least me.

And all the studies I know say this.

We are not born as a blank slate.

John Locke was wrong.

Turns out in utero, you can hear the speech patterns of your parents and their friends, and you are formed how you will speak before you were born.

Indisputable.

John will tell you there's these people who do this kind of uh work called rofing, and they say we even learn how to walk by watching our parents.

Which means if your parents walk with poor posture, you probably will be too.

Now you might be saying, well, Mike, that's all just nurture, and there's the nature.

But listen, the way we speak is not on the way we talk, is not understand by what we hear in utero.

It's epigenetic.

And that's weird, isn't it?

And I've got to tell you, my daughter talks like me sometimes, that's a little scary, right?

Not only because she hurt me, says she was conceived, because there was something in me that carried on.

Again, you can dispute this if you want, but it's scientific.

So I heard an interesting speaker at clergy conference tell me last year that perhaps the original sin of humanity was not disobedience, it was shame.

If you were born without shame, you got a lot to teach me.

But shame has become one of my native languages, and I speak it well.

So why do I need to be born again?

Because God doesn't want to sleep.

That's it.

So, no, you are not ontologically evil.

You're not.

Good news.

You got brokenness in your life, but you're not broken.

I hope you hear that.

That's the only thing you hear.

This is good news.

Your brokenness does not define you with God.

You are not broken.

You have brokenness.

And some of that brokenness you didn't earn or deserve.

I mean, let's just be honest.

This is a conversation we're trying to have nationally.

What do we do with the isms that you didn't think of?

What do I mean when I say isms?

Racism, ageism, sexism, heterosexism, the list goes on.

You ever been discriminated because you were young?

I have.

You've been discriminated because you're old.

That's called ageism.

You've been discriminated because of your accent.

Oh, I have.

I don't know what you call that.

Tribalism?

Speechism?

And I even got in trouble at my last church because most of the congregation was taught by Axe US Navy.

And I want you to hear right now, look, this is me in church saying this.

Patriotism can be dangerous.

It can be very dangerous if we say God loves us more than you.

Not healthy, not alright.

And I love my country, so I consider myself a patriot, but I don't consider myself better than somebody who happened to be born in Guatemala.

We didn't deserve to be born American, and thank God I was.

And I want to tell you one other way, I think we got this wrong.

First, and then I'll go to Lexus.

One other way we've got this wrong, I think, is that we hear that Nicodemus has come in the dark.

Do you hear that?

And I think one of the ways we take our own language so literally we fail to take it seriously.

And I'm really glad we're across the street from NASA.

And some aerospace person is going to tell me I got this wrong, but I don't think I got this wrong.

You ever been in total darkness, like in Mammoth Cave, and they turn the lights down and there's no light?

They just turn it down, there was no visible light.

It's full of light.

It's full of infrared light.

It's full of microwaves.

There is no darkness.

What we decided is some people and some places have no light.

And the Psalm tells us, here's gospel, here's good news.

To God, the night and the day are alike.

Here's some good news.

You may not see light in yourself, and God sees it.

Because God put it there.

You may not see light in your neighbor who folks differently from you.

And they are quantitatively teeming with the light of God.

Why?

Because God doesn't give like we do.

God doesn't give and take back.

God says, here you go.

Here's my light in you.

You might have taken your own spirituality so literally that you forgot to take seriously that there's more than one way to do this.

And I want you to consider if God wanted us all to be the same, why did God make us so different?

So it's very possible that you met even a Christian who worships differently than you.

And instead of asking, tell me about your story, you might have found yourself, this is my original sin, saying, Well, you must be wrong.

I mean, look, if I thought I were wrong, I would change myself.

So you must be wrong.

And it's even possible that you thought that certain expressions of God are beyond pale.

Certain expressions of piety are beyond the pale.

Now, look, I want you to know.

There's something really lovely.

I actually were really hoping the monks were going to keep working out mandala while I preach so I could say this thing.

Do not let my sermon distract you from people exercising their piety.

We come to church to celebrate the beauty of God in the world, not the beauty of my doctrine as your preacher, as your priest.

And if you haven't seen the care and the contemplation of somebody spending over a hundred hours this week laying down beauty, grain of sand by sand.

I'm going to tell you you've missed out.

And by the way, go look at it when we're done.

Or get up and look at it now.

It won't bother me at all.

The better sermon is this nothing lasts and beauty endures.

Nothing lasts.

They're going to sweep it up in an hour.

And the beauty of the making it endures.

And God is not threatened by that.

God is glorified in that.

God is glorified by people who choose to be unified in mission without having to literally be uniform.

God is glorified in that.

So look, what's my original sin?

I've got many.

I'm going to tell you, one of them for me is just how I talk.

And look, I'm not blaming my parents, even though I know who influenced me a little bit, right?

I know.

And hey, one of them probably did better than their parents before I might get that.

So our goal in parenting is to make our kids slightly dysfunctional in the way we got.

One day it'll be great, right?

If we do this long enough, it'll work out, maybe.

But I'm going to tell you, I often, and this is part of why my spouse married me, not because of the way I talk, but because I'm willing to reconsider.

And I'll tell you still, it takes me sometimes a long time.

I usually get it right in the end, but boy, I don't usually start right.

And I just wish I could take the ending and put it at the beginning.

And you know what that takes?

A lot of work.

Takes a lot of work to nourish that new way of being inside.

It takes a lot of energy.

You ever grown up, baby?

I haven't, but I've seen what it takes second hand.

It takes like your life.

Which is why I think we use this.

We use this beautiful, figurative language if we'll just take it seriously and not force it to be literal.

It takes all of our nutrients.

You know, the only thing keeping you alive when you give birth is your placenta, otherwise your baby would kill you.

So we pour our whole self into having a kid.

And then there's the birthing itself, which is the most violent thing I've ever seen.

And I grew up watching violent movies, but boy, I've never seen anything as violent as a baby coming in the world.

And of course, somehow it's beautiful because there's this new life.

And boy, Nicodemus is like, really?

It's like that?

And Jesus basically sorry is it's like that.

That is, if you're not willing to trade what you've got for something better, I can't help you.

And boy, we sure know how to be miserable with what we've got, but we're afraid to let it go.

Right?

The truth is, I know I don't do this well, but maybe I do it better than you.

Somehow that's strangely consoling to me.

I mean, talk about Stockholm sin, right?

Well, at least I'm not as bad as you, right?

These are some of the things, I'm sorry, that are original sin.

And it's not that we don't know how to lay them down, it's that we refuse.

I'm going to mix metaphors because I want to make sure you know this.

This is so hard.

Do you know how many inpatient rehabs it takes to break alcohol addiction?

Inpatient.

I mean three months living in a place would cost you probably between one and three thousand dollars a day.

You know how many it takes on average?

Four and a half.

Four and a half.

And you know the wind blows where it wants, because some people get it the first time.

And that's a miracle, I can tell you.

And some people get it the seventh time, and guess what that is?

Also a miracle.

And John's not saying, listen, we've got to be born again, or God won't love you.

God's saying we need to be born again, we need to renew our minds, we need to be born from above.

So we can enjoy it.

We can enjoy it.

Because listen, I enjoy being better than one other person, but at the end of the day, it's pretty sad knowing I'm gonna lose anyway.

I hope you hear that, right?

So, why do we want to settle for a competition where somebody's always gonna one-up us instead of this idea that God wants all of us in it?

And we're all gonna cross the finish line together, with God not only rooting us on, but sometimes shoving us from the back.

I think that's good news.

And the question I'd ask you today is you've heard some of my things, but where do you need to be reborn?

Where do you be at birth from above?

In your habits, in your thinking, in the way that you handle disappointment, and the way you confirm the fact that the world is not fair, and we've known that since we were born.

Where do you need to be born?

From above.

I think that's what the gospel is begging us to answer.

And will we settle for coming to Jesus at night and force that Jesus is not with us when it hurts?

Or can we accept the fact that God's light is all around us, even if we don't want it?

Can we accept that, hey, there's a mystery to this that we would never have come up with on our own?

That no matter where we go, God chooses to go with us.

Really interesting, Psalm 139.

I praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made.

I pray that most of my life and thought, but I wish I looked like such and such a person.

They were fearfully and wonderfully made.

The psalm was for them, but I want you to hear the song was for people who we might call disabled.

And I heard this at a funeral three years ago.

They said, You take the song because our mother had many disabilities, and God skillfully and wisely made her body.

Why do I think that's good news?

Because no matter how good you think you look, it will last.

I hope it's good news that whatever your insecurities, God wisely and lovingly knit you together.

And boy, I'll tell you, if you're a woman in this country, there's an 85% chance you need to change your mind around that.

And if you're a man in this country, there's an 85% chance you need to hear that.

And probably the rest of you are lying.

I mean, let's just be honest about this.

We choose to compare and we choose to try to outrank ourselves.

Beauty endures even though nothing less, right?

So where are we with our bodies?

Where are you with your neighbor?

And boy, we heard this lovely teaching yesterday from one of our moms who said, you know, one of the things we have to remember in our tradition, right, is how small the world is.

Like in an infinitely expanded universe, I mean the world's really small.

And sometimes we should think our problems are the biggest ones, don't we?

Don't we?

So part of our meditation is to think how small we are, and boy, our problems, which used to seem really, really big, all of a sudden aren't that big, right?

It's almost like this poem I heard one time, that there is something remarkably good newsy about seeing an affinity and a grain of sand.

Of course, I want the big things.

I want the legacy.

I want to turn the wheels to borrow a uh a Buddhist and handy word.

I want to turn the wheels of some sorrow.

Like, I want to change the world, I'm gonna do that with big things.

But really, if you parented a kid, you do it through a grain of sand at a time.

That's how we form our kids, isn't it?

Because, hey, you can do whatever you want to try to get them into an Ivy League school, but if you didn't change their diapers, then it got happened, right?

So we do these seemingly meaningless things, and the amalgam of them put together creates this beautiful mandala that will do it.

Maybe you're thinking, I'm not good enough for God because I haven't done enough.

I'm gonna tell you some good news.

The world hinges, and infinity is a grain of seed.

Maybe you've heard that there are genres of music and art that are full of darkness, but I just want to remind you that the night and the day are the same to God.

So if you can't hear God's voice and two pox a chord's rap, it's your ear that's wrong, not the song.

This is what it means to be born again.

We all think puppies are beautiful.

Very few people think naked mole rests are, but God thinks they both are.

And one other piece of good news that I invite you to consider.

You know, as a kid, I had a brother, and he was older, and uh, of course, we always asked our parents, as brothers might do, you're probably better than I am, but we always said, which one of us do you love more?

And you know what they said, right?

We love you the same.

We love you the same.

Yeah, but really, which one of us do you love more, right?

I mean, we know the right answer.

Of course, what I've come to learn having two kids on my own, boy, you talk about different kids.

I don't love them equally.

But I do love them equitably.

Why don't I love them equally?

Because I'm different.

They're different.

Just like you're different.

Good news.

God might be the only one who loves us equally.

And maybe a part of us being born from above is being able to enter into God's heart.

Can you imagine how much more you would enjoy your life that the person who drives you the craziest looked at him and you said, God loves you just as much as God loves me?

Can you imagine how much more joyful the world would be if you saw monks practicing their piety and said, Wow, there's nothing you can do to make God love you less.

There's nothing I can do to make God love me more.

That's not where it ends.

That's the center from which life begins.

From that place of security and God's love, that's where we not only change ourselves, but we change the world.