Lent II                                              Seminarian Robert Hendrickson

Genesis 12: 1-4a                              Great Litany & Solemn Mass

Romans 4:1-5; 13-17                        March 9, 2008

John 3: 1-17

 

“Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God .”

 

+May I speak in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

 

This gospel reading today is incredibly popular among evangelical and Pentecostal believers who are moved by its account of the work of the Holy Spirit in the world and its insistence upon being “born-again”. What can being born again look like? One example is an experience I had in my first year of undergraduate at Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi .

My roommate that first year was a Pentecostal, I had grown up Roman Catholic and we were curious about each other's faith lives. So we agreed that I would go to his church and he to mine on a few alternating Sundays to learn about each other. I went first. His church was a large corrugated metal building out in the middle of Mississippi with no air conditioning. This was Mississippi in August, so it was about 100 degrees outside and 115 degrees inside.

 

We started singing, and sang some more. We sang for about 3 hours. I must not have gotten enough breakfast, because I started to feel a little lightheaded. I leaned forward to hold onto the folding chair in front of me and the next thing I knew, I woke up on the floor. Well, everyone around me thought I was having a sort of Epiphany or mystical experience, because they started laying hands on me and calling out to Jesus. The minister started speaking in tongues and I just about ran home after I got up. After all, growing up Catholic my main encounter with the Holy Spirit was with in the form of the Sisters who ran our school and the only tongues spoken in my church was Latin…

 

Despite my fainting spell, I suppose I never had an encounter where I could be described as being “born-again”. However there was something to that experience that I now appreciate that is akin to what we do here, in this place; that is the encounter with mystery. It was the engagement with something greater than ourselves that we do in trembling awe together as a community. So in a church like ours, how do we prepare ourselves to be reborn in the Spirit?

 

The gift of God in the Spirit is that he has dwelt in and among humanity, giving us his Son through Mary. Moreover, he dwelt in and inspired the saints. In Acts 2.17, we are told that “God's Spirit is now available to all flesh.” That availability is our rebirth.

 

  Were the saints, our models for holy living, “born-again” in the way it is now popularly understood? Some certainly had moments in which they were transformed. Yet the processes are much more likely to be the result of long struggles with themselves and with God. We now know of the long struggles that Mother Theresa had with her faith. When Saint Theresa of Avila fell off of her horse into a river, she came up covered in mud and yelled out to God, “If this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder that you have so few!”

 

For me, in many ways, despite my experience in Mississippi , the coming of the “Spirit” is not so much a lightning fast, blitzkrieg operation as much as it is trench warfare. It is that long struggle where at times I find myself yelling at God, in the way the Psalmist so often did, asking him how he can treat his friends this way. Yet, is this not part of our process, part of belief? It is part of the process of Lent. It is our grappling with a world that is not as it should be and that we are part of that flawed here and now.

 

  This holy season of Lent allows us to move closer toward the idea of being born again in the spirit for it affords us the chance to make ourselves ready to receive the Holy Spirit in our lives. Lent often reminds us of the struggles we face. We are reminded of where we fall short in our devotion or relationships or faithfulness. Yet that struggle is faith in and of itself for it is the recognition that we can be more, that God dreams of more for us and asks of nothing less from us.

 

  I am reminded of the ancient “Hymn of the Pearl ,” a beautiful text, in which the protagonist receives a letter from his parents that is “sealed against the evil ones” the letter flew to the prince in the form of an eagle and upon arriving “became speech” and the prince says…

 

  “At its voice and the sound of its rustling, I awoke from my sleep. I took it, kissed it, broke its seal and read. And the words written on my heart were in the letter for me to read. I remembered that I was a son of Kings and my free soul longed for its own kind.”

 

  We bless the God in Joseph and Mary and all the saints, and we must bless the God in one another for we are all the sons and daughters of a King. The word made flesh came to us as King of Kings. And the spirit comes on the wings of the dove rustling in the quiet of Lent to awaken us to our true path, calling our souls to long for completion in one another and in God.

 

Athanasius once said that the Holy Spirit was the means by which individuals experience themselves becoming part of God. It is the gentle rustling that comforts the dying. It is the heat that stokes the faith of the saints. It is the obedience of Mary. It is the sacrifice of the martyrs…

 

The Holy Spirit is that lingua franca, the universal language that enables us to understand one another in laughter and tears. It makes us fully human and lights in us the spark of divine love. The Holy Spirit is a gift of God, and like Creation, it is evidence that God operates from a place of abundant generosity.

 

Yet, the Holy Spirit is not always heard, not always listened to. The gift is not always readily received. Yet, that is the work of the Christian life; It is our path to being born again. God is writing the Word on our hearts with the Holy Spirit. But we must make a clean place for the writing to begin. That spot is made clean in this season of preparation.

 

Yesterday, I visited a maker of icons, an iconographer in New York . She was an incredible woman for whom art and the practice of writing icons was a form of intensive prayer and communion with God. She described the process as follows:

 

You take a piece of wood, the stuff of the tree of knowledge and of the ark and finally of the cross. You carve a border that is like the walls of the church into it. You cover the natural material in a white cloth that stretches and contracts with the living material of the wood and absorbs the natural materials of the paints and oils. Then you allow the Holy Spirit to work in you to help you to access the holiness of the saints you are trying to commune with in the icon.

 

What better description do we have of the Christian life and the work of preparation necessary for us to be born anew in the spirit? We take ourselves, the natural material that lives, stretches, and breathes. We make ourselves white and pure in our contemplation, prayer, and contrition. Finally, we meditate on the holiness of the examples of Christ and the saints, blessing the Spirit in them and in us. Finally, we ask the Holy Spirit to write on that white cloth a new icon of ourselves as we pray for God to see us. In this penitential season, when so much emphasis seems to be on the darker shades of our faith, we must welcome the Holy Spirit to paint with light on the canvass we are making clean.

 

Blessed Mary is titled, in many of her icons, the “Hadigithra” or way-pointer. She ever points the way toward the Christ. Interestingly, “hadigas” is also a term used for seeing-eye dogs, as they were way pointers, guiding the blind along. In the same way, this time in the Church calendar is when we find our way again. When the way is pointed for us and we can choose to follow the path to the foot of the cross. Choose to live in the beauty of God's call to us. Choose to be born anew of the Spirit.

 

  Works of beauty, like an icon, are rarely the products of moments or instants. And beauty is not always the soft light of a Monet painting. Beauty can have harsh realism to it; stark reminders that we are not God. Think of the frozen expanse of the tundra. The sheer edge of a soaring cliff. The surging waters of a coursing river. All are things of beautiful creation; all the site of harsh struggle. So we are too; things of a mysterious beauty, sites of perpetual Creation and struggle. Things of beauty, whether made by God's hands or ours, are not the product of an instant.

 

Even when they seem the result of an instant flash, the conditions that make the instant possible are set over time; acts of magnificent creation take time, preparation, and effort.

 

So too are we in our Christian journey. We are acts of creation with whom God is taking time. We are things of golden beauty in whom God takes pride. We are built for holiness. This is what the lives of the saints tell us. Ecclesiasticus says that “gold is tested in the fire” so “prepare yourself for testing.” We build up much around the gold of Christ in us, obscuring the natural beauty we are blessed with.

 

We build fences of wood to keep others out. We harvest crops of bitterness that we tenderly fertilize. We erect strawmen of ourselves to distract others from getting to know the real us. Being born-again in the Spirit is the burning away of all of this. The splitting of the logs. The shredding of the strawmen. The burning off of the crops. It is the opportunity to start anew, returning to the gold that Christ has left as our birthright; it is the opportunity to be born from above.

 

The activity of Lent is the preparation for new Creation, it is the making room for the Holy Spirit to work within us, the gradual reorienting of the mind toward the holy. Even maintaining this focus on the divine for a moment is a challenge for us amidst the noise and chaos of our day.

 

Quieting the mind and hearing the rustling of the spirit is the discipline of a lifetime. The saints mastered that ability to focus on the holy and still the questing heart and hear the will of God. That is the challenge of our Christian preparation, to make ourselves open to the word and to help write the image of God in the world around us. This kind of preparation is done in our prayer, in our reading the Bible, in our participation in the sacraments, and in our willingness to share our witness, friendship, and companionship with others. It is our key to being born anew.

 

Like the careful preparation that goes into the icon, our faith lives require careful preparation and a humble heart prepared to greet the mysteries of life with fear and awe. The self-giving love of God in Creation is a mystery of the Spirit at work. The self-sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is a mystery. The courage of Joseph comforting Mary is a mystery. The submission of Mary to God's will is a mystery.

 

The work of the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of John is, indeed, another mystery. Yet, the great gift is that as the Holy Spirit writes the Word on our hearts this holy season, we are unique among Creation. We are unique among the created order in that we can pause to wonder. We can pause to give thanks, to sing a canticle of joy. We can pause to bless God in the saints and in one another. We can pause to praise God that we are being transformed and born-again of the Spirit.

 

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.