“How do her sermons end?”
“Let God guide you.”
“Do you let God guide you?”
“God doesn’t talk to me,” she says. “I don’t have that.”
She is a teenager, but I know plenty of people older than she is who have the same problem. God does not talk to them either, at least not in the ways that they imagine God talking to other people. A few remember hearing God’s voice when they were younger, which prompted some of them to join churches and others to step up their involvement in the ones to which they already belonged. This kept many of them busy for decades, but sooner or later they found themselves in the grips of what the writer Barbara Bradley Hagerty calls “mid-faith ennui.”
“If you have striven to know God for a decade or more,” she writes, “you are almost certain to cross a spiritual wasteland, which ranges from dryness and boredom to agony and abandonment.” Anyone who has read the classics of the Christian spiritual life recognizes this wilderness as a predictable stop on the journey into God. Augustine’s Confessions, Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, and John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul all talk about it. As variously as people describe it, they all discover that if you are determined to walk the way of Jesus, there comes a time when you must leave the lower altitudes for the heights. This will involve lightening your pack and heading into parts unknown. You will have to leave your bags of spiritual sweets behind, along with the heavy devotional books you use to take your mind off how bad your feet hurt. Sooner or later you will have to leave all your soothing props behind, entrusting yourself to the God who cares more about your transformation than your comfort.
This lonely, heart-starving passage in the spiritual life is not any church’s fault, but it is so downplayed by a majority of white Protestant churches—most of which survive by promoting the benefits of faith and not the costs—that spiritual ennui is “the crazy uncle of church life,” Hagerty writes, “an embarrassment rarely mentioned in the company of believers.”5 When going to church makes you feel crazy and embarrassed, of course you stay home.
I understand the anxiety of mainline Christians who are watching congregations age and seminaries close, especially since I am one of them. It is hard to watch the wells from which you drew living water dry up. It is awful to watch people go away, leaving the dead to bury the dead—so awful that it is natural to try and find something else to blame. Blame the culture for shallowing the human mind. Blame the megachurches for peddling prosperity. Blame the world for leaving the church behind. There is some truth to all of these charges, which is why they generate so much energy. At the same time they obscure the last truth any of us wants to confront, which is that our mainline Christian lives are not particularly compelling these days. There is nothing about us that makes people want to know where we are getting our water. Our rose has lost its fragrance.
The students in my class may be failing Christianity, but Christianity is failing them too. If the Spirit is doing a new thing, I wish it would hurry up. Or maybe this is the new thing—a smaller, more humble version of church with less property and fewer clergy pensions; an odd collection of people meeting here and there as they try to figure out what it means to follow Jesus in a world of many faiths; a body with his name on it that is more willing than ever to let him decide who is with him and who is not.
This may be too much to ask. I like a soaring cathedral with a high pulpit and a huge pipe organ as much as the next person, but maybe it is time to swap that out for something that calls a little less attention to itself, something that frees up a little more energy for the neighbor. When everything else is gone, there is still that: the twinned love of God and neighbor, come to vivid life in the person of Jesus. Am I really meant to choose between him and my neighbors of other faiths?
I remember a night when it seemed as though I did. I was at a spirituality conference, sharing the stage with an orthodox Jewish artist. On Friday night the schedule included a Shabbat service led by a rabbi, followed by a Communion service led by a minister. The idea was that the one would flow into the other and that everyone would be welcome at both. The first part went fine. A Reconstructionist rabbi led the prayers in the auditorium where we were meeting. We thanked God for the week just past and for the opportunity to rest from it. At the end of the service the rabbi led us in some dancing and hand clapping that left us all breathless while a small crew transformed the bimah into a Communion table for what was coming next. I stood off to the side with the orthodox Jew, who made me painfully aware of what we were watching: the replacement of Jewish symbols with Christian ones as the rabbi left the room.
My companion began telling me how many members of his family had died in the Holocaust. He was named for one of them—an uncle—to keep the memory alive. He talked about what it was like for his generation to carry forward so much that had died or almost died in the concentration camps. He hoped I understood that he was not going to be able to take part in the Communion service. He would do his best to stay in the room, but what was about to happen cut so close to the pain of millions that it would not be easy for him.
Like every other Jew I knew, he was familiar with the verse near the end of Matthew’s Gospel in which Pilate washes his hands at Jesus’s trial, leaving Jesus’s fate to his own people. According to Matthew, “the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children.’” With a verse like that ringing in your ears, I can see how a Communion cup full of Jesus’s blood might drive you from the room.
I stayed with my companion while everyone else in the room circled around the Communion table. They were bathed in light. He and I stood twenty feet away in the dark at the edge of the circle. Listening to the familiar prayers from an unfamiliar distance, I wondered how they sounded to my new friend.
As our Savior Christ has taught us, we now pray.
O lamb of God.
This is my body, which is given for you.
Finally the celebrant broke the bread, and people started passing it around along with the wine. They all looked so joyous. My friend and I watched without speaking until someone noticed us and walked toward us with a cup of wine in one hand and a heel of bread in the other.
When she reached us and held them out, my friend shook his head and took a step back. Before I knew it, I had done the same thing. The Communion bearer walked away as quickly as she had come, leaving me to quiet the riot inside me. What had I just done? More important, why had I done it? I had refused the body and blood of Christ because it was painful to the person beside me. I had chosen to abstain with him rather than to participate without him. Though I knew full well that he did not expect that of me—that it was possible for a full-fledged Christian and a full-fledged Jew to stand together in their difference—at that moment I did not want to celebrate any Communion that did not include him.
I still do not know whether I failed Christianity that night or passed, but I did realize the truth of something I learned from Jonathan Sacks. “Peace involves a profound crisis of identity,”6 he said. In my case, it also involved finding a new way to follow Jesus, even if that meant leaving the marked path.
9
Born Again
“Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 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.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?”
JOHN 3:7–10
The text I settled on for my baccalaureate address at the small university in upstate New York was John 3:1–15. After auditioning dozens of passages from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes that were full of universal wisdom, I decided to choose instead a piece of distinctly Christian wisdom. What better way to demonstrate that it was possible to speak from my own tradition without sounding triumphal or exclusive? At least
I hoped I could do that, though it was up to my listeners to judge. Christians are not particularly gifted at knowing how we sound to others, especially in parts of the world where our voices are the loudest and most numerous.
The story of Jesus and Nicodemus appears only in John’s Gospel. As traditionally told, it is a story about Nicodemus’s inability to grasp the truth that Jesus reveals to him about the kingdom of God. Much is made of the fact that Nicodemus is a Pharisee, a Jew devoted to studying God’s law and educating others in it. In Christian commentary, he is most often portrayed as the blind guide who cannot see what Jesus is holding out to him as plain as day.
I was drawn to his story for a couple of reasons. In the first place, I have always felt bad for Nicodemus. He comes to Jesus with questions that really matter to him, but he cannot understand a word that Jesus says. Jesus is hard on him too, the same way he was hard on the people in his hometown synagogue the first time he preached there. Meanwhile Nicodemus just sits there feeling stupid, trying over and over to make sense of Jesus’s teaching before he falls silent in defeat. I feel bad for him because his silence is so often used against him, when it is a much more nimble response than trying to cover up his cluelessness with a lot of words. But the main reason I chose his story was because I thought it might have a hidden moral in it for young people under enormous pressure to prove how smart they were. “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?”
With Piedmont students as my baseline, I predicted that the ones sitting in front of me at the baccalaureate would be vibrating with anxiety about the future. They had been trained to perform, to please, to excel, to succeed. For the past few months they had probably been asked ten times a day what they were going to do with their expensive education. Their parents were counting down the minutes until the flow of money would begin to reverse. Whatever the seniors’ plans were, they were about to join the ranks of college graduates—a tiny percentage of the population of the planet—whose higher learning set them apart. They were the leaders of tomorrow, the people on whom the future depended, richly equipped to make the world a better place.
At least that was what the graduation speaker was going to tell them. The nice thing about being a baccalaureate preacher is that you do not have the last word. You have the next to last word, which is a good position for a subversive word—a spoken antidote to what is coming next in a person’s life, or at least an analgesic. I thought it might help if I told the students that their old life was over, and that it was okay if they were clueless about the life to come. “You are about to enter a period of deep unknowing,” I wanted to tell them, “which nothing you have learned will equip you to pass over. So relax if you can, because you are not doing anything wrong. This is what it means to be human.”
There once was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, John says, who came to Jesus by night—presumably because he could ill afford to come by day, when everyone could see where he was going and ask him why. But it is also possible that Nicodemus came by night because he knew that was a better time to talk about things that matter. How often have you asked something by candlelight that you would never have asked under the light of a fluorescent bulb? Sometimes darkness is the perfect blanket for conversations you cannot have in the broad light of day.
Nicodemus leads with praise. “Rabbi,” he says, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”
It has been a while since we pressed “Pause,” but let me do it again. This story has evoked so much anti-Jewish teaching through the years that I do not have time to take it all apart right now, but if you happen to have received any of it, I hope you will be able to set it aside long enough to listen in on a very important conversation between two rabbis about the way of life.
As I said, Nicodemus leads with praise. The very first thing out of his mouth is an acknowledgment of Jesus’s privileged relationship with God: “We know that you come from God.” Why does Nicodemus say “we”? I do not know. Why does the Queen of England say, “We are very pleased to meet you” when she is all by herself? The point is, Nicodemus seems to be making an effort. He seems to be playing nice when Jesus all of a sudden delivers a karate chop.
“No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above,” Jesus says, but Nicodemus has not said a word about wanting to see the kingdom. Is Jesus slapping his opening compliment away? Or is he just putting an obstacle in front of the visiting rabbi to slow him down a little bit? That is what it sounds like to me. It sounds like Jesus is letting Nicodemus know that he does not know the first thing about who has come from God and who has not. Nicodemus may think he does, but he does not. He cannot see one millimeter into God’s kingdom, because he has not been born from above. This conversation is deteriorating fast.
But Nicodemus does not take offense. He just keeps plowing ahead, running into more obstacles as he tries to make sense of what Jesus is saying. “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” he asks. “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Poor Nicodemus is a literalist. He does not know that he is in John’s Gospel, where nothing is ever (only) what it seems. Bread is not plain bread in this Gospel; it is the Bread of Life. Water is not plain water; it is Living Water that gushes up to Eternal Life. Every noun in this Gospel that has anything to do with Jesus is symbolically capitalized.
This birth Jesus is talking about, then, is not plain birth. It has nothing to do with talking your mother into letting you back in, so she can push you out again. The second time around, Jesus tells Nicodemus, the mother is the Spirit. Everyone who is born of her is made of her. No one enters the kingdom without this Birth. “Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above,’” Jesus says to Nicodemus, which is our best clue that even Jesus knows it is astonishing. “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.”
At this point Nicodemus realizes he is in over his head. This teacher come from God has turned out to be a Zen teacher whose koans are impenetrable. Nicodemus came looking for clarity. He might have settled for cordiality, but what he has gotten instead is a brusque teaching that seems designed to keep him in the dark, where he feels really, really stupid.
“How can these things be?” Nicodemus says, and that is the last thing he says in this story. But the teacher who has rendered him mute is not through with him yet. Nicodemus has one more sunny prop that needs knocking out. “Are you a teacher of the people,” Jesus asks him, “and yet you do not understand these things?” I hope he said that with irony, not meanness, but we will never know. All we know is that when Jesus finished talking, Nicodemus was gone—gone back through the dark to wherever he had come from, to take an Excedrin PM with a jigger of gin and try to get some sleep.
As many times as this story is told, Nicodemus is usually portrayed as the faithless skeptic—the guy who just did not get it—though there are Christian sixth graders who will shoot their hands in the air if you ask them what Jesus meant by being born again. “He meant that Nicodemus had to believe in him if he wanted to see the kingdom of God,” one of them says. “He meant that once Nicodemus was baptized, the Spirit would come into him and he would understand everything. That’s what Jesus was trying to tell him, but Nicodemus didn’t have faith, so he didn’t understand.”
Maybe that is a useful function for the story—to help later Christians feel smarter than Nicodemus, more secure in our own beliefs, more sure of our own access to the divine. Plus, it matches the pedagogy that most of us know best. When the teacher asks you a question, you are supposed to give the right answer, for which you will get points, or strokes, or both—the explicit and implicit rewards of knowing the right answer. But what if Jesus is not that kind of teacher? What if his purpose is not to enlighten Nicodemus but to endarken him, establishing the l
imits of what humans can know about God and what we cannot?
“We know,” Nicodemus says to Jesus when he first comes into the room.
“You do not know,” Jesus says to Nicodemus right before he leaves.
If you interpret this as a judgment on Nicodemus, then the story is fairly straightforward. Nicodemus does not know things he ought to know. If he knew them, Jesus’s meaning would be clear to him. His unknowing is his fatal flaw, the one that prevents him from being born again, which ends his conversation with Jesus and forces him back into the night from which he came. But that is not what the story says. If you take the buds out of your ears (the ones playing the old tape of what this story is supposed to mean) and listen carefully to what Jesus is saying, he is saying the exact opposite.
“The wind blows where it chooses,” he says to Nicodemus, “and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” This is not a judgment. It is a statement of fact, as you can tell from the very next thing Jesus says. “So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Everyone. Nicodemus is not a special case. No one knows where the Spirit comes from or where it goes. No one. The only thing that sets Nicodemus apart is that he is so uncomfortable with his unknowing. His problem is that he thinks he ought to know.
This is a difficult teaching for those who want to feel secure in their relationship with God, especially if their security depends on knowing how things work. When and where is the Spirit present? Who has access to it and who does not? What does it mean to be born of the Spirit? What must one do to experience second birth? How can one be sure it has happened, and what are the consequences for those to whom it does not happen? Are they eligible for heaven or not?
“You do not know,” Jesus says. Not because you are stupid, but because you are not God. So relax if you can, because you are not doing anything wrong. This is what it means to be human.
Holy Envy Page 15