Empty Your Cup

A sermon for Trinity Sunday given at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH on June 3, 2012.

Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17

Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night.

He's a leader among the Jews, a Pharisee, and the Pharisees' official position concerning Jesus is that he's a suspicious upstart from backwoods Galilee – up to no good, no doubt about it.

But Nicodemus is curious. Nicodemus senses something more in Jesus.

Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night. Practically, because no one will see him if he's wandering about in the dark. He can maintain his confidentiality. No other Pharisees need know that he ever visited Jesus. He had gone back and forth, pacing in his bedroom, “should I stay or should I go?”

But here he comes, out of the night to see Jesus, to hear Jesus, to inquire, to resolve in some way some of his perplexities. Who is this Jesus guy anyways?

“Rabbi, 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.”

There's something new happening through Jesus that Nicodemus can't help but see as being from God.

Jesus responds in good King James English: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Or as the New Revised Standard Version puts it, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

so which is it? Born again? Or born from above?

It's both.

“Once upon a time, there was a woman who set out to discover the meaning of life.

First she read everything she could get her hands on—history, philosophy, psychology, religion. While

she became a very smart person, nothing she read gave her the answer she was looking for. She found other smart people and asked them about the meaning of life, but while their discussions were long and lively, no two of them agreed on the same thing and still she had no answer. Finally she put all her belongings in storage and set off in search of the meaning of life. She went to South America. She went to India. Everywhere she went, people told her they did not know the meaning of life, but

they had heard of a man who did, only they were not sure where he lived. She asked about him in every country on earth until finally, deep in the Himalayas, someone told her how to reach his house—a tiny little hut perched on the side of a mountain just below the tree line.

She climbed and climbed to reach his front door. When she finally got there, with knuckles so cold they hardly worked, she knocked. "Yes?" said the kind-looking old man who opened it. She thought she would die of happiness. "I have come halfway around the world to ask you one quest ion," she said, gasping for breath. "What is the meaning of life?" "Please come in and have some tea," the old man said. "No," she said. "I mean, no thank you. I didn't come all this way for tea. I came for an answer. Won't you tell me, please, what is the meaning of life?" "We shall have tea ," the old man said, so she gave up and came inside.

While he was brewing the tea she caught her breath and began telling him about all the books she had read, all the people she had met, all the places she had been. The old man listened (which was just as well, since his visitor did not leave any room for him to reply), and as she talked he placed a fragile tea cup in her hand. Then he began to pour the tea. She was so busy talking that she did not notice when the tea cup was full, so the old man just kept pouring until the tea ran over the sides of the cup and spilled to the floor in a steaming waterfall. "What are you doing? !" she yelled when the tea burned her hand. "It's full, can't you see that? Stop! There's no more room!" "Just so," the old man said to her. "You come here wanting something from me, but what am I to do? There is no more room in your cup. Come back when it is empty and then we will talk."”¹

We seek God with all sorts of baggage. Like the character in the story, we try all our own methods and read all our books and follow all sorts of trails – even climb mountains to find God. Only to find that God was with us all along. Only to find out that it's not about what we do, it's not about where we go, it's not about how we think. In fact it's actually about what we can't do, where we can't go. In fact it's about what God has already done, who God already is toward us in Jesus Christ.

Nicodemus comes to Jesus as a seeker, as a curious guy a lot like the woman in the story. He comes as a Pharisee, as someone who has power, status, who has a life already figured out, but he senses that there's something more, he senses something more in Jesus.

But Nicodemus comes in the night. Showing that Nicodemus is not ready to dispense with his former life. He wants all that he has and the “something more” that Jesus represents.

But Jesus responds: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Except a man be born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

We all come to God in what John's gospel calls the “flesh.”

“What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

Flesh doesn't mean our bodies as opposed to our souls. That would mean a kind of dualism where bodies and all of their activities are evil and souls and all of their activities are good. We know that there are good things done in the body and bad things done in the soul so we have to interpret flesh and spirit as having a different kind of meaning. Instead of meaning body and soul they mean two different ways of being embodied souls and ensouled bodies.

Simply put we could “flesh this out” this way:

Flesh is a way of being that doesn't know God, that doesn't live as if God is behind all of this.

Spirit is the way of being that lives in light of God's intervention into our world, spirit lives as if God is the source, the giver of life and all that we see, hear, and do.

To be born of the flesh, is to be a child of the realm which exists as if God does not matter or more commonly to exist as if God is secondary to myself and my own pursuits, thoughts, and activities.

To be born of the spirit is to encounter God in Christ and be changed. It is to realize that all of our great merits, all of our family ties, all of our wealth, even all of our spiritual accomplishments are just an overflowing tea cup, burning us and unable to be open to what's true and life-giving. To be born of the spirit is to lose ourselves, to forget the lives, the selves that we've built up like fancy mansions and to come before God in humble recognition that he is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being.”

To be born of the flesh is to be a child of world, to be born of the spirit is to become a child of God: in John 1:13 we read “But to all who received [Christ], who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”

and this power is the power of the Spirit of God born in the believer by faith.

But Nicodemus is not there yet, he is not ready to receive Christ, the light of God, the word of God, the revelation of God to humanity. He is still secure and settled in his Pharisee life, his comfortable status quo. He wants to remain in the flesh. He wants to keep his tea cup full.

In fact when Jesus says, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” – all Nicodemus can hear is an exhausting call to do the impossible. Here's the word “anothen” and rather than taking it to mean, “from above,” he takes it to mean “again.” And then in despair, spouts, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” What you are saying is impossible, Jesus! But Nicodemus is speaking from the perspective of the flesh and not from the perspective of the Spirit.

One cannot “see the kingdom of God” – God's new saving eternal fullness of life – one cannot see God's new if one is stuck in humanity's old.

We hear Jesus' words: one must be born from above and we are able in the context of John's gospel and the rest of the New Testament to realize that Jesus is not talking about something that Nicodemus has to go and do. Jesus is talking about the end of doing, the beginning of faith.

And faith is an abandonment of our confidence in our own works, our own pedigree, our own efforts to keep us sane, healthy, and righteous. Faith is a trust in God to fill us, to breathe into us grace that we might live not for ourselves but for God.

[I had a conversation with a friend the other day who told me how he'd been struggling for years with trying to become a healthier person spiritually, physically, emotionally. He kept trying new techniques to get himself to a better place but each technique seemed to lead him further and further away and he just felt like it was spiralling to nothingness. It brought him, he said, to his knees. And that's where it began to turn around.]

We have to empty ourselves of all of those things we're holding on to so that God can fill us with his life.

And then we'll go on, but we'll know a deeper source of strength than our ambitions and a deeper source of love than our sentiments.

The cup which was so full of self which overflowed and burnt our relationships, our own souls – that cup once empty becomes full of the Spirit of God and by faith we live no longer a slave to our fears, but alive and free as a child of God, as a recipient of the Divine gift which never ends and never alters – God's agape love.

So where does this leave us with Nicodemus? He couldn't see the Spirit, he didn't know which bookstore to go in order to get the Spirit, he didn't know what formula, what method, what diet to follow in order to get the Spirit. So John chapter 3 lets him walk off into the night, back to his fears, his attempt at maintaining the comfortable status quo life that he'd been living according to the flesh.

But later in John's gospel we see a bit more of Nicodemus. We sense that a seed has been planted, a seed has fallen to the ground and broken so that it might bear fruit.

When the Pharisees are plotting to arrest and do away with Jesus, he speaks up and defends Jesus.

Later, when Joseph of Arimathea goes to take Jesus' body to be buried, Nicodemus is with him, ready to risk being associated with Jesus. He's lost his caution, he's given up the old and embraced the new in Christ.

In today's epistle reading, we read the words of the Apostle Paul “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”

God loved the world, God loves the world. And God loves us and calls us into relationship with him by grace through faith – not through things that we do, through outward acceptance by other human beings, or human institutions, but according to God's radical grace, the gift which is unconditional and based solely on God's prior love for humanity.

God calls us to leave behind the flesh, to empty the cup, to abandon self, and breathe deep the Spirit by faith. To learn that the way up is the way down, the valley is the place of vision, it is through dying that we receive eternal life.

1Taylor, Barbara Brown. 1996. "Stay for tea, Nicodemus." Christian Century 113, no. 6: 195-22. ATLASerials, Religion Collection, EBSCOhost (accessed June 2, 2012).