'Beauty So Ancient, So New'; Datchworth Holy Communion; 17 February 2008;
Usha Hull
Gen 12 1-4a, John 3 1-17
Let us go to a small garden in Milan on a summer’s day. The sun beats down,
somewhere a bee drones, the air is heavy with the perfume of flowers and sleepy
contentment. A young man sits in the silence of the garden, only his clenched
hands and the tears that run his face betraying the inner turmoil he is
experiencing within. Suddenly, from a nearby house the voice of a young child
breaks the silence. The voice says over and over again, ‘Take it and read it,
take it and read it.’
The young man snatches up the Bible lying next to him and reads the first
passage on which his eyes fall, ‘Not in rioting or drunkenness, not in
chambering and wantoness, not in strife and envying, but put ye on the Lord
Jesus Christ.’ At that moment, the young man’s heart is filled with light and
his life is about to change. He is to become from that day forth one of the
giants of the Christian Church.
The year was AD 386. Years later, the young man Aurelius, whom we know today as
St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, was to write, ‘Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty
so ancient and so new, late have I loved Thee!’ And for many of the giants of
the Christian Church, this first step in encountering God, this first step
towards rebirth in the Spirit, this conversion of heart, comes with some quite
small object or event that touches some inner core, that reaches into the
ordinary and everyday routines of our lives to transform and make new, for such
is the power of rebirth in the Spirit. For St Paul, for instance, a voice spoke
on the road to Damascus, for St Francis, a voice seemed to come from the
crucifix, for St Catherine of Genoa, a picture revealed at a crucial moment of
her life the beauty of holiness.
The Greek word for conversion is metanoia, which literally means a change of
mind. It means to be born again. Now I would say that the average Anglican, and
I’m sure we’re all good Anglicans, shies away from this particular phrase,
‘born again’ with all its connotations. Yet in the history of Christianity,
this insistence on rebirth has had an immense influence on thought. And it is
incredibly important in the New Testament. For instance, 1 Peter 1:3 says: ‘In
(God’s) great mercy he has given us the privilege of being born again, so we
are now members of God’s own family.’
The concept of rebirth had its parallels in Judaism, and therefore should not
have been a new one to Nicodemus, a respected Pharisee and member of the
Sanhedrin. For a learned and intelligent man I’d say he is being remarkably
obtuse when he talks of being born again literally. Yet it was obviously a need
that drove him to seek out Jesus and he comes after dark, so perhaps he was
afraid of what his peers would say and think. He comes across as a man of good
heart and earning. I expect he tried to keep the laws and traditions and
teachers as much as he could but was probably puzzled by Jesus’s sometimes
apparent lax attitude to some of the laws and rules by which he lived.
Later, when Nicodemus perhaps understood that Jesus was truly the Messiah, he
was to speak up boldly in his defence at the Supreme Court, and to join Joseph
of Arimathea in asking for Jesus’s body to bury, so we know that despite his
awkwardness in today’s reading from the Gospel, Nicodemus continued to grow and
to change.
And so it is in our own lives that God looks for steady growth and change, not
instant conversion necessarily, but a gradual seeking out of the light, of
being available to God to enable His Spirit to move us and renew us in His love
and character. The Spirit, says Jesus, is like the wind, it blows where it
will. We have not seen it and we cannot tell where it comes from or where it
will go next, but we know it is ever present, a constant force for love and
change.
Abraham felt this wind of change in his life. God told him, ‘Leave your country
behind you and your own people and go to the land I will guide you to.’ And
being asked thus to step out into the unknown, Abraham undertook a massive
journey of faith from Haran in modern day Iran, all through the Middle East,
and Palestine and into Egypt, a journey that was to end with him being the
father of a great nation as God had promised. But it all began with Abraham’s
willingness to make that first step in faith, that willingness to obey God’s
call and go where the Spirit led.
In our own lives you and I are on this journey too. We do not know where the
Spirit will lead us, but we like Abraham too are asked to move from darkness to
light, from doubt to faith, from death to life. In the season of Lent, we too
seek a rebirth in the Spirit of God.
True birth always comes from the Spirit. A photograph that has always
fascinated me is one sent back to earth from the Hubble Space telescope. It is
a close-up of the Cone Nebula, a cloud of gas and dust around 2,500 light-years
away. It is a picture, full of light and radiance. And it’s beyond the scope of
the human mind to fully grasp. You realise you are looking at a celestial
pillar that spans light years. Stars and worlds are being born within the cloud
as dense knots of gas collapse and flare with nuclear fusion. Five billion
years ago, when our sun was still a newborn, it was probably shrouded in a
cloud just like this one. ‘By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and
their starry host by the breath of his mouth’, says Psalm 33:6. And it is awe
inspiring to reflect that at the beginning of time God’s Spirit was at work in
the universe, creating order out of chaos, giving birth to worlds without end.
It’s very humbling to think that this same Spirit, the Spirit of the Universe,
the Spirit that created worlds without end, galaxies without number,
immeasurable space, infinite time, should be at work in our own lives too. You
cannot measure God, Jesus is telling us in today’s Gospel. Reason is all very
good, he tells a man of Nicodemus's learning, but you cannot explain all things
solely through logic and argument and deduction, for the power of God’s Spirit
is immeasurably above the limitations of the human mind.
Like Nicodemus and his fellow Pharisees, many of us like order and neat rules
and commands. Many of us would like to keep things just as we have always known
them, with nothing to disturb our comfort and sense of place. But Jesus taught
and showed that the power of the Spirit is that of freedom. It is glorious in
its unaccountability, blowing like the wind where it will, all powerful, all
loving. For above all, the Spirit of God is the Spirit of love. You cannot
tell what will happen when God calls us in our lives.
‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that who so
believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.’ At the heart of
Christianity is a great mystery, the mystery of God’s great love for us. When
you consider it, love is indeed a great mystery. Who can explain to the logical
mind why God should love us, we who dwell on a tiny planet orbiting one small
star, on the outer rim of one insignificant galaxy among thousands, we who are
in the scheme of things are so small, so seemingly insignificant, so utterly
undeserving in ourselves? Who can explain why, despite rejection after
rejection in the history of the Bible, God should persist in loving the human
race, even to sending His own son for our salvation? Who can explain why His
love continues to work in our lives even when we stray from Him?
The Spirit of God is wild and free and moves where it will. And yet God chose
to break into history, to come to this small world, to a people who rejected
him, He did it in great love, in the hope that some would be grasped by the
wonder of that love and love him back, and so be changed by that love.
And in coming to this world Jesus set into motion a conversion that emerged
from humankind’s innermost and secret nature, from the heart of us into
society. He asked for a changed way of thinking, a new scale of values, a new
awareness. For Christians, Lent is always a time for conversion, a time when we
seek God in the highways and by ways of our heart, in the paths that we tread
in the depths of our souls, in our daily lives when we strive to recognise the
presence of God.
For St Augustine, the love of God was beauty, beauty so ancient so new,
present before the world began, yet with us in the daily workings of our lives.
And I leave you with a prayer for Lent by him. Let us pray.
‘Almighty God, in whom we live and move and have our being, thou has
made us for thyself so our hearts are restless until they find rest in
thee. Grant us purity of heart and strength of purpose, that no
selfish passion may hinder us from knowing thy will, no weakness from
doing it, but in thy light we may see light and in thy service find
perfect freedom. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
Amen