“Feral Spirituality”
John 3:1-10
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
10/23/16
There’s
a popular movie out where a very serious, ambitious man falls for a woman whose
approach to life is quite different from his. His life is defined by complete
and mercenary devotion to the corporate world. He lives out of suitcases. All
his suits are dark, and his shirts white.
The woman lives by more earthy, intuitive values. She
personifies freedom of spirit and heart. In her funky little apartment, tassels
and beads hang like Spanish moss from doorways, curtain rods, and light
fixtures. An entire wall rejoices with a painting that appears to be the lovechild
of a Sherwin Williams truck and a tornado.
These two people meet on a subway. For him, the subway is a grim
procession of caskets. For her, surrounded by all that beautiful, tragic
humanity, it’s a sacred place where holiness whispers in her ear.
Though unaware of it, the man is buckling beneath the pressures
of his cutthroat world. Empathetic to the point of clairvoyance, the woman feels
the man’s anguish. With angry compassion she challenges his conformity. But he can’t
understand. Wealth, power, and stress define the only life he can imagine. Attempting
to defend himself, he recites all the party-line clichés. When he realizes how
ridiculous he sounds, he just gets angrier.
The woman smiles at him sadly.
The
train reaches her stop first. She stands up and says, “Maybe I’ll see you
again.”
Confused
by feelings of both defeat and gratitude, he says, “Maybe.”
And
so it begins. Along the way they experience a series of adventures and culture
clashes that make for a few belly laughs and some moments of poignant awakening.
Tension
builds, and the couple reaches a crescendo of conflict in which they must
either embrace each other and the new way of life created by their
relationship, or they must let go. Finally choosing new life, they commit
themselves to their new adventure.
By now, some of you know that I’m messing with you. I didn’t
describe any one movie. This story has been told a thousand times in a thousand
ways. The Gospels offer several versions, because Jesus’ story is itself a
defining version of that story.
So, we meet Nicodemus, a Jewish leader steeped in rigid Pharisaism.
Like the man captivated with the free-spirited woman, Nicodemus recognizes something
both dangerous and compelling in Jesus. Curious, but fearful of his colleagues,
Nicodemus skulks to Jesus under the cover of night. Avoiding an outright
question, Nicodemus says, ‘Rabbi, you’re for real. Only God-sent prophets can
do what you do.’
He wants Jesus to answer his implied question with an
unqualified claim to or indisputable proof of holiness. But Jesus teases him.
‘To experience the kingdom of God,” says Jesus, “one must
experience a new birth.’
John uses the word anothen.
Birth from above. A second birth. However it gets translated, anothen means a brand new beginning.
The couple in the movie experience a kind of anothen. For the man in particular, much
is lost, but even more is gained as he discovers his new self – a self who will
be more authentic and complete because of the infusion of the woman’s bright compassion
and courageous joy.
To live his new life, Nicodemus must tear himself loose from
his legalistic moorings. He must set his sails to catch God’s Holy Spirit, the
original Free Spirit.
In ways both implicit and explicit, I was taught that following
Jesus means walking a particularly safe and pure road, a road on which I earn
my place through affirmation and through careful avoidance of unsuitable behaviors. But when I read Jesus’ words to
Nicodemus, I hear a primal call to more intrepid living, and to a kind of feral
spirituality.
“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of
it, but you [don’t] know where it comes from or where it goes.” This Wind – this
untamable Spirit – frees us from a life so structured and predictable that it
becomes sterile.
Mystified, Nicodemus says, ‘This makes no sense.’
‘How does a teacher of Israel not know these things?’ says Jesus.
After
this, Nicodemus all but disappears from the conversation, and Jesus monologues
his way to those gracious words: “For God so loved the world...” And when we
get to the part about not perishing but having “everlasting life,” don’t we
tend to imagine a strictly future-oriented promise? Only after death do we experience
“heaven.” But there is so much more to what Jesus calls heaven than the “sweet by-and-by.” For Jesus, “everlasting life” includes
the everlasting frontier within each
of us and among all of us – here and now.
Our book group is reading Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward.
Last Wednesday, we discussed the chapter entitled “Amnesia and the Big
Picture.”
“Life
is a matter of becoming fully and consciously who we already are,” says Rohr,
“but it is a self we largely do not know.” He says that humankind suffers from
“a giant case of amnesia.”1 Having forgotten the life from which we
come, we distort our conceptions of the lives we live, and the life to which
our lives lead.
Authentic,
Jesus-inspired spirituality releases us into aboriginal territory, into
experiences often declared precarious and out-of-bounds by the institutional
church. And this mystic outback mirrors the heaven from which we arrived into
this world.
William
Wordsworth wrote:
Our birth is
but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that
rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing
clouds of glory do we come
From God, who
is our home:
Heaven lies
about us in our infancy!
Shades of the
prison-house begin to close
Upon the
growing boy
But he
beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in
his joy.2
If “heaven lies about us in our infancy,” it lies
about us now, in our joy. It seems to me that Nicodemus has not failed to understand
these things. He has simply forgotten them. John Philip Newell refers to Jesus
as our deepest and truest memory restored.3 His forgiving, saving
act is to remind us who we are in
God. To explore this
truth about ourselves is to explore a flourishing wilderness that transcends the
boundaries of doctrines and denominations, races and genders, and anything else
that separates us from or pits us against one another. This ancient and eternal,
feral spirituality redeems us from our forgetfulness, and so from our sinfulness.
It frees us to love self and neighbor. It frees us to speak daring, challenging
truth into and for the sake of God’s creation.
Do blacklivesmatter protests
bother you? They bother me. They bother me because no one should have to protest to have their God-imaged humanity
valued.
No female or male, child or
adult, should have to doubt the sanctity and dignity of their bodies because of
the carnal appetites of amnesiacs.
From Flint to Los Angeles, from
Aleppo to Calcutta, should anyone have to worry about the water they drink, the
air they breathe, the healthcare they need? No! Those are basic human rights.
That’s
uncomfortable. The preacher shouldn’t say those things in church. Shouldn’t he?
Are we followers of Jesus, and
yet we do not understand these things?
Claiming
the gift of anothen, new
birth in Christ, let’s travel together into the new frontier of feral
spirituality where we no longer feel threatened by grace, where we no longer
reduce God’s Incarnate Word to repeatable precepts and manageable dogmas.
Let’s listen for Jesus reminding
us that we who struggle to love are always loved.
That we who are stingy with
forgiveness are always forgiven.
That we who feel overwhelmed with
anxiety are always accompanied by the Prince of Peace.
Let
us remember, and live our joy.
1Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality
for the Two Halves of Life, Jossey-Bass, 2011. P. 97.
2Ibid. p. 99
3J. Philip Newell, Christ of the Celts: The
Healing of Creation, Jossey-Bass, 2008. P. 9.
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