The Second Sunday in Lent, Year A, 2011

John 3:1-17

The Rev. Ronald N. Johnson

In the Gospel reading for this morning, a Pharisee, Nicodemus came to Jesus in the dead of the night.  From the way that the Evangelist John tells the story, we can only guess what Nicodemus’ question to Jesus, for John tells us our Lord’s answer but he doesn’t record the question.  A good guess is that Nicodemus asked what he had to do in order to be saved.  We know the answer, of course.  It is standard Christian doctrine.  What must we do to be saved?  We must be baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus and accept him as Savior and as Lord.  God’s promise of redemption, God’s promise to include us in his heavenly family is a promise made to all who believe that Jesus is Lord and offer themselves to his love.  This is fundamental Christianity.  We can water it down; we can strive to be inclusive and politically correct.  We can say that whatever someone believes is okay as long as they believe it and it helps to make them a better person.  We can water the Christian message down, but when we do, what do we have left?  The Christian hope and the requirement of the Christian are explicit, and Saint John lays them out in the final words of the Gospel that we read this morning. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

The season of Lent began in the Christian church as a time when those attracted to the Christian faith did their final and intense preparation for baptism.  In those early days of Christianity, a decision to become a Christian, was no small thing.  It was an act of total commitment, and act of absolute surrender of the self, in which one gave himself or herself fully as a follower of Jesus Christ.  And one literally placed one’s life into the hands of God, because Christianity was an illegal religion, and the price for being a Christian was torturous death.  From the time someone made a decision to accept Jesus as Savior and become His disciple, that person studied under a tutor and mentor for at least one year.  The final forty days were days of intense, final preparation, primarily a preparation of self-examination and purification by confession. The candidate for baptism understood the commitment as absolute and final.  One did not change one’s mind.  Baptism was done by immersion, symbolically into the death and resurrection of Jesus and coming out of the waters, one was presented to the bishop and the congregation as the newest brother or sister in the family of Jesus the Lord.  The relationship was lifelong and eternal.

In the face of persecution, there were some in the church that denied their Lord in an attempt to save their lives, or who otherwise, in their humanity, gave into temptation and sinned after baptism. In the early years of the church, the church taught that there could be just a single reconciliation after baptism, and even that was a compromise.  The earliest teachings made no allowance for forgiveness after baptism.  Baptism was once and for all. But with the introduction of repentance and forgiveness after baptism, Lent took on a second meaning.  It became a time when those who in their human weakness had fallen away might show public repentance for their sin, by confession to the whole church and receive forgiveness and restoration to the community of faith. 

It is this second understanding of Lent that has lingered, and gives us the season today.  Lent is a time for us to consider our calling and the promises that we made, or that were made for us, at the time of our baptism.  In Lent, we ask how we are living out the promise.  We ask if we are pleased with ourselves and also whether Jesus is pleased.  And, we offer ourselves in renewal. We acknowledge once again that Jesus is Lord. We acknowledge that even though we are not worthy and even though we have failed again and again to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with our entire mind and might, we want to do that.  We want to be good disciples.  Like Thomas, the apostle, known to history as the doubter, we pray, “Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief.” We try to surrender, as best we can, our lives to Jesus, knowing that we are doing it imperfectly.  Is this enough?  If we are sincere, the answer is, “Yes, it is enough.”  Jesus does not ask for perfection because we cannot give him perfection.  We can just give him our best.

Lent is a time for us to realize that Christianity is serious business.  In our time, we’ve seen the faith watered down, to make it relevant, to make it inoffensive to non-believers, to make it fit the American pattern of increasing secularism.  If we are much beyond our forties in age, we remember a time when the American pattern of life was friendlier to Christianity.  Hopefully, we are in a time when the pendulum is starting to swing back.  Lent is our personal time for swinging back, if we’ve drifted away.  Lent is a time to reaffirm in our faith that Jesus is our Lord. Amen.