Sermon by The Reverend Susan Auchincloss

Our lenten journey has begun. Many pilgrims, probably including us, stop after a few initial miles and ask themselves, “What am I doing here?” “What was the purpose of this pilgrimage?” That is the question I want to explore today: what is this lenten journey all about? Why am I on it? And why must it last forty days?

To begin, let me ask you to imagine yourself as the young Helen Keller – Helen before her teacher Ann Sullivan entered her life. You see nothing, hear nothing. How do you make contact with outside world? Where can you turn to find meaning? You construct reality from sudden, unexpected touches, from trips and falls, from a few senseless routines.... Being deaf and blind held Helen, not just in solitary confinement, but in a clostrophobic dungeon of silence and darkness. I am invoking this image to capture the starting point of our spiritual journey, our pilgrimage from slavery to freedom; for we set out from a place not unlike Helen’s, where ignorance and fear hold us prisoner, as reality comes to us as “through a glass darkly.”

You remember the story – how Ann Sullivan held Helen’s hand under running water and then made the sign for water on the palm of Helen’s hand. After she did this many times, all at once the light broke through; Helen broke through: from the darkness of her prison – the prison of her self – she made contact with the outside world. From that point on she leaned eagerly into life; and day by day, she dwelt more and more fully in the world, becoming more and more alive. This little acorn of a story holds the DNA of a mature truth – a truth that answers the question, what is this lenten journey all about?

Now why does it matter that Lent lasts for forty days, and not, say, for fifty or ten? You will remind me that we are, so to speak, keeping Jesus company during his forty days in the wilderness. Yes, but again, why forty? Well of course, Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness recapitulated the forty year sojourn of the people of Israel, as they made their journey from slavery to freedom. Still, why forty? Was that just how it turned out? Let us recall Noah and how long the flood lasted. Forty days. Forty is a number that signals total transformation. With Noah all of the old life was washed from the earth; a new life began when the creatures came out from the ark. With the people of Israel all traces of the old life of slavery had to be shed in the wilderness before they could enter the new life of the Promised Land. So, too, with Jesus. His old life as a carpenter, as a dutiful son of Joseph and Mary, as a citizen of this world had to be shed in the wilderness before he could begin to live as a prophet and healer, as the Son of God and as a citizen of the Kingdom of God. Forty signals to us that Lent holds a total transformation in store for us if we truly walk the pilgrimage walk.

Is there some way to envision that transformation? There is. Let’s look at Nicodemus in today’s Gospel. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. This in itself tells us a lot about him. The Gospels portray the Pharisees in a bad light; but this is not fair to them. The name, Pharisee, means separated one; because a Pharisee stood apart from ordinary people for his scrupulous following of the law. Unfortunately, it is all too human that when we believe ourselves to be righteous, we begin to think of ourselves as having slightly – or greatly – more worth than others. This was a pitfall to which Pharisees were particularly prone -- not social climbers, but spiritual climbers. From their spiritual height, Jesus looked low indeed, for he was anything but a strict observer of the law. From today’s reading we can see that Nicodemus did not share this common view of the Pharisees about Jesus, because Jesus’ miracles impressed him as coming from God. He wanted to question Jesus. But he did not have the courage to break ranks with his peers. So instead, he crept under cover of darkness to meet Jesus.

In the Gospel of John, night is associated with blindness, with trips and falls, both physically and morally. The fact that Nicodemus came to him at night told Jesus that Nicodemus was still walking in spiritual darkness. Yet he came. So when Nicodemus made his opening remark, Jesus ignored it; and responded instead to his night-time arrival, to his spiritual blindness. Jesus told Nicodemus that he would never find what he sought in his present life. Now what Nicodemus sought, all of us seek. We may call it eternal life, or the kingdom of God, or Life in Christ; or the Promised Land; or as Jesus said, “life in all its fullness.” It is the Holy Grail of our pilgrimage and what Jesus said to Nicodemus he says to us: you will not find it in your present life; you must be born from above.

Nicodemus saw the absurdity of Jesus’ words about being born again, and showed him what an idiotic thing he, Jesus, had just said. But Jesus simply repeated what he said, only this time he changed his phrase “born from above,” and said instead “born of water and Spirit.” Nicodemus, being an early scriptural literalist, didn’t get it; he had to mull that over. And when we read through to the end of the Gospel we discover that Nicodemus’s life was transformed; he became a figure of dauntless faith and courage. Now we are not scriptural literalists, but we need to do our own mulling about these enigmatic words of Jesus: about being born from above, or born of water and the Spirit.

No doubt Jesus means the water of Baptism and the descent of the Holy Spirit. But why does he speak, twice, about it being a birth? It must be, because that is how he experienced what happened to him during his forty-day sojourn in the wilderness. Jesus went straight into the wilderness from his baptism, and it was as if, forty days later, he came out of the wilderness walking on holy ground and in sacred space. He moved in a radiance that owed nothing to the rising of the sun; and with his ears he heard through the rat-a-tat-tat of this world’s busyness to the strains of angels. He tried to find words to describe it, so that others could follow him, and an image came to him.

He imagined himself in his mother’s womb, in the darkness and warmth. He imagined sensations pulsing around him: a steady, regular beat; swaying motions from time to time; his own movements within that motion; voices; occasional pressure. Then he was in the birth canal, and finally he was propelled out into the world, into the unimaginable vastness of the cosmos. Imagine it yourself. Think about all you are aware of, even to the extent of interstellar space. Think of all we can do, not only directly, but indirectly through tools and technology. This imaginary journey from the womb to the world gives us a foretaste of the change in store for us as we move from ‘this’ life to “life in all its fullness,” eternal life.

Now how does it happen? How does journeying from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday bring us to that new life? Let’s go back to the number forty, the number of transformation. Friends, every Lent is a scale model. Those forty days represent our whole life. During those forty days we practice what we want to be able to live. Like a labyrinth, the goal becomes the path, as it were, and the path becomes the goal. This does not happen without conscious intent on our part. We must do the practice; that is, practice living, the way a doctor practices medicine. I will close by listing four specific practices, four specific ways of holding our hand under running water, so to speak. And like Anne Sullivan with Helen Keller, these practices must be done over and over, with love and patience. One: daily prayer. Two: participation in the sacramental life of the church. Three: service to others. Four: daily reading of the Bible, and perhaps an additional text, such as Brother Lawrence’s Practicing the Presence of God. These four practices both lead to transformation and give us a foretaste of that life. Amen.