Sermons

John 3:1-17

“Nicodemus Visiting Jesus” (1899)- Henry Ossawa Tanner

I spent last week in the Outer Banks.  While I was there, I visited the Wright Brothers National Memorial, one of the Outer Banks national parks.  What an inspiring place! 

Back in the early 1900’s, Wilbur and Orville Wright, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio,  were fascinated with the idea of human flight.  Although many had experimented with gliders, and Samuel Langley had created powered model gliders, no one had ever figured out how to fly in a manned, heavier than air machine that could leave the ground under its own power, one that could move forward without losing speed and land on a point as high as that from which it started.

The Wright brothers began to explore all that had already been done regarding human flight.  Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian.    After studying the information they received from that institution, the brothers realized that they had as good a chance as anyone to be the ones to make human flight possible. 

So they got busy, and for the next four years, they tested current theories about aerodynamics, many of which didn’t work.  They developed their own theories, and devoted themselves to the goal of human flight, determined to be the ones who would turn the dream of human flight into reality.    

The Wrights imagined success at what until then had been an unreachable goal.  They had faith in themselves.  And they worked hard to make what they imagined become reality. 

As they got closer to realizing their dream, the two searched for an isolated spot with unrelenting wind, high dunes and lots of sand for soft landings where they could try out their ideas about flight.

On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur lifted off for the first time in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, in their invention, The Flyer.  That day was the first time that anyone had ever flown in a manned, heavier than air machine that could leave the ground under its own power, move forward without losing speed and land on a point as high from which it had started.     

The Wright brothers’ dreams had become reality.  But even these two dreamers probably could not have imagined that only  sixty-six years later, people would take what the Wright brothers had accomplished, would add their own dreams and hard work, and would fly all the way to the moon.  Incredible!  Only sixty-six years—from the windy, white sandy dunes on the coast of North Carolina, to the charcoal gray dusty surface of the moon, thanks to incredible imagination and the hard work by so many to make the dream of people walking on the moon a reality. 

One thing I really appreciated about the museum exhibit at the Wright Brother’s memorial was the emphasis on imagination, for imagination is the source of all creativity.  God imagined the universe into being, from the farthest galaxies to the tiniest living microscopic life on our planet. “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the things thy hands hath made…..”  Not only the universe, but we ourselves have been brought to life from God’s imagination.

The whole Bible is the story of what God imagines for creation and the reality of what really happens—God’s imagination distorted by our own desires, and we can use the word “sin” as shorthand for that corruption that continually threatens to destroy us and our planet. 

Which brings me to Jesus, the ultimate imaginative act of God.  Nothing else having gotten through to us, God imagines God’s self in human form, and as we Christians believe, Jesus is born as one of us, lives as one of us, and dies as one of us. 

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Video

“Good morning! Happy birthday, happy birthday church, happy birthday church!

“This is the birthday of the Christian church. Today, the day of the Pentecost, this day and not before this day could the followers of Jesus be called Christians

“Easter is the holiest day of the year right? I know we think it’s Christmas but it’s not. It is Easter. The second holiest day of the year is today.

“Pentecost is the last day of the great 50 days of Easter, then Christmas is after that. (Maybe it’s third holiest at least that’s what the church has been teaching for more than 2,000 years )

“Today is a day of celebrating the ongoing presence of God in the community who follow Jesus.

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“The Sacerdotal Prayer” – Eugène Burnand (1850-1921)

Today is Mothers’ Day.  Mother’s Day is not a religious holiday, but like Fathers’ Day, coming up in June, we tend to acknowledge these two holidays in church because they have a lot to say about love. My mother, age 96, still lives in the house where I grew up.  I talk with her every day by phone, and I am filled with gratitude that I still have the joy and privilege of going home and finding my mother, full of love, waiting with open arms. 

But going home isn’t quite the same as it used to be since my father died in 2021.  I still long for my father’s open arms—he gave the best hugs in the world.  But since his death, I’ve had to get used to my father’s physical absence.  Most of us gathered today have experienced in one way or another the pain that death brings, that physical separation from someone we have loved and who has loved us in this lifetime. 

Part of our Christian life is to believe that our lives extend beyond our physical deaths, and that “through the grave and gate of death we pass with Christ to our joyful resurrection,” as one of the prayers for burial states in The Book of Common Prayer.  And this prayer also says something about our beliefs in the life to come, that we have in this life “the comfort of a reasonable and holy hope, a joyful expectation of eternal life with those we love.” We believe that even death cannot separate us from those we love. 

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Last week I said that in the sermons I get to share with you before I leave, I want to consider what the scriptures appointed for each Sunday have to say to this parish in this time of transition. 

Today’s gospel passage completes the gospel from last Sunday, in which Jesus tells the disciples that God is the gardener, Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches.  Jesus reminds the disciples that God the gardener must prune the branches to make them bear more fruit, and that we, here at St Peter’s, are going through a pruning with all the changes ahead.  But the promise is that since Jesus the vine to which we branches are attached, we can count on bearing more fruit because God the gardener has pruned us.   

As Jesus continues this conversation with the disciples, he moves from a focus on pruning the branches to a focus on the disciples abiding in his love.  This focus on abiding in his love is where we begin today’s considerations about the parish transition ahead of us. 

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