Fourth Sunday in Lent

How many of you remember nursery rhymes from your childhood? How many of you remember this one? “In sixteen hundred and forty-eight, When England suffered the pains of state, The Roundheads laid siege to Colchester town, Where the king’s men all still fought for the crown. There One-Eyed Thompson stood on the wall, A gunner of deadliest aim of all. From St. Mary’s tower his cannon he fired, Humpty Dumpty was its name.” The rest, you probably know: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall…” So, Humpty Dumpty was a cannon. The image of Humpty Dumpty as an egg came from Lewis Carroll’s appropriation of the rhyme for his book, “Through the Looking Glass”.

Many nursery rhymes actually have historical origins. Old Mother Hubbard went to her cupboard to give her poor dog a bone.  But when she got there, the cupboard was bare, and so the poor dog had none. This is one of those rhymes which, when I was a kid, made me kind of sad. All I could picture was a poor old woman and her skinny, underfed dog. In reality, it’s about King Henry VIII, who was anything but underfed. Old Mother Hubbard is Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the most important statesman and churchman of the Tudor period in 16th century England. He displeased Henry VIII by failing to facilitate the King's divorce from Queen Katherine of Aragon, so that Henry could marry Anne Boleyn. In the rhyme, Henry VIII is the "dog", the "bone" refers to the divorce, with the cupboard being the Catholic Church.

Henry VIII had six wives and a notorious reputation as a glutton. And you have to wonder, what it was… What was the void that he was trying to fill? It’s pretty obvious that it wasn’t just the cupboard that was bare. There was an emptiness that he tried to fill with all kinds of things. But honestly, the only difference between Henry VIII and us was the level of his disposable income. We all experience emptiness in our lives.

In his book, “Effortless Mastery”, jazz pianist and author Kenny Werner discusses the spiritual roots of music in North America. He writes:

“As enslaved peoples [were] separated from their religion, the lyrics of the song changed.  The cry [was] for sense pleasures:  more sex, money, alcohol.  How many blues and rock and roll songs speak about that?  Desire for ‘my God’ is supplanted by the desire for ‘my man’ [or ‘my woman’].  [Humankind’s] vision decays, entangled by the search for temporary relief from its subjugation to false gods.  But the cry is still there, even if [humankind] no longer knows for what.  It is the yearning for unity, for oneness as experienced in the mother’s womb, attuned to the rhythm of her heartbeat.  The muffled song can still be heard from the God within, ‘seeking to behold himself,’ and [humankind’s] yearning to be one with [God].”

Yearning for unity.  Yearning to be one with God. There’s an emptiness inside us that refuses description: An unidentifiable, amorphous, vague but persistent sense that something’s missing.

Blaise Pascal wrote: "What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in [humankind] a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty [shape]? This [we try] in vain to fill with everything around [us]… though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with… God". And it sends us searching. Sometimes it sends us only as far as the refrigerator. Or maybe the liquor or medicine cabinet. Or to a new woman, or a new man. “[Humankind’s] vision decays, entangled by the search for temporary relief from its subjugation to false gods.” We get tangled up with our own senses and circular thinking. We lose our sense of vision. We limit it to what’s right in front of us. We become blinded to greater possibilities. We stumble in the darkness.

We need to rewind our gospel lesson for today, in order to really be able to understand what Jesus is getting at, here.  Nicodemus came to Jesus in the darkness, under cover of night, wanting to see.

 1 Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 2 He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with that person.” 3 Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” (John 3:1-3)

Blinded, failing to see. We stumble, we fall. We cower in the darkness. We try to fill our emptiness but succeed only in driving ourselves deeper into darkness. We can’t fill the sense of emptiness, because the opposite of empty is not full. The opposite of empty is connected. Connectedness. Unity. Oneness. The unity and oneness of a child in a mother’s womb. Two lives, intimately connected. Two hearts, beating a primordial spiritual rhythm. Two lives.  Two bodies.  One bearing the other.  The other, unable to live without the first.

Nicodemus experiences this same hunger, this same longing.

4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” 5 Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 8 The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” 9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 10 Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?
11 “Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. 12 If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man., 14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life., John 3:4-15

Born again, rebirth, resurrection, renewal, healing: They all are different ways of saying the same thing. We are born into a broken world. We are born and raised in a world that leaves us feeling empty, sometimes without our even realizing it. And when we experience emptiness, our natural response is to want to try and fill it. When we experience hunger, we want to satiate it. When we experience thirst, we want to quench it. But when we try to fill the emptiness, when we try to satiate the hunger, when we try to quench the thirst, we end up with the wrong thing.

Like the ancient Israelites who voiced their emptiness in the desert, like Henry VIII who tried to fill his emptiness with wine, women, and song; we find ourselves drawn to the things that the world would have us believe bring satisfaction. We’re drawn to stuff, material possessions. We’re drawn to status, prestige, power, and influence. We’re drawn to narcotics that will dull the gnawing hunger: alcohol, food, gambling, shopping. We’re drawn to fill our lives with so much activity that we have little time to contemplate, because contemplation leads us back to our emptiness. And in pursuing all these things, little by little, we force God from our lives.

The irony, of course, is that the emptiness goes back to a lack of our awareness of God’s presence in our lives in the first place. We experience hunger, emptiness, blindness, darkness (the Bible is full of metaphors for it), because we have cut ourselves off from God. But rather than recognizing that we are cut off from God, we think it must be something else. So, we look around at our friends and neighbors and we see that they appear to be happy and we wonder what it is that they have that makes them happy and we begin pursuing that!  (Whatever “that” might be). We start filling the emptiness, where there’s precious little room for God to begin with. And as we over-indulge, and over-fill, and over-stuff ourselves, what little space was there disappears. But the emptiness remains. The fire of the serpent’s bite continues to burn in our veins, in our minds, and in our spirits. A fire that leaves a scorched serpentine trail through human history, all the way back to the Garden of Eden, to another serpent, who opened Adam and Eve’s eyes to their naked emptiness.

“[Just] as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Born again, rebirth, resurrection, renewal, healing: they’re all different ways of saying the same thing. We come to a point where we recognize that the emptiness we experience is the outward symptom of our inner brokenness. The emptiness is the feeling that results from our separation from God. The sense that we somehow don’t or can’t measure up. Somewhere, perhaps even only subconsciously, out of fear that we won’t measure up we come to the absurd conclusion that God has abandoned us and so we, in turn, turn our backs to God.

The Roman Catholic theologian James Alison has this to say: “What we see in the New Testament, … is that it is not humans who offer a sacrifice to God…, but God who offers a sacrifice to humans. The whole self-giving of Jesus becomes possible because Jesus is obedient to God… In the first epistle of John… we see… the nucleus of the Gospel: ‘This is the message we have heard from [Jesus] and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.’ (1 John 1:5) What Jesus came to announce was a message about God, and God's being entirely without violence, darkness, duplicity, ambivalence or ambiguity. Again, quoting from 1 John – ‘God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that [God] loved us’… (1 John 4:8-10)

The burning of the fire is cooled and healed by the power of God’s all-encompassing love for us and for the whole world. That is what it means to be healed, to be born again, to experience resurrection: To realize the depth and the power of God’s love. To allow ourselves to be cooled and healed and strengthened. To realize that there is nothing we must do. That God has already spoken through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That God’s love has already spoken and the word that has been spoken to us is a word of love. A word that has the miraculous ability and power to fill every void, every emptiness that we might ever experience.

God hasn’t changed, but we have changed profoundly in our perception and understanding of God. It seems like such a small thing, to say that it comes down to a matter of perception. But it has huge implications for us. All the energy, time, and expense that we’ve ever gone to, in order to try and fill the emptiness within us… we don’t need to do that anymore. Because God’s love runs through us, filling every nook and cranny of our being. Filling us to overflowing. AMEN