An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Crossing the Threshold

A sermon on 1 Peter 1: 3-9 & John 20: 19-31 by Nathan Nettleton

You will sometimes hear it said by people like me, who get a bit sick of being asked by rabid evangelists whether we’ve been born again, that the term “born again” only appears in one passage in the whole Bible, and therefore hardly qualifies for any claim to be the most important description of what it means to become a Christian. Although I have said that on numerous occasions, tonight I need to repent and take it back a little. The idea of being born again, best known from John’s gospel, also appears in the reading we heard tonight from the first letter of Peter. He doesn’t use the term “born again” as such, but he does say that God “has given us a new birth”, and I’d be hard pressed to squirm my way out of admitting that that sounds like pretty much the same idea. But before you all run screaming for the doors, I am not about to start banging on about whether or not you have been born again.

When Peter speaks of God giving us a new birth, he links it directly to the resurrection of Jesus. He says that it is through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead that we have been given a new birth into a living hope. And that connection got me thinking a bit about why we speak of this as a new birth and what that means. You see it is not an immediately obvious connection. If our experience of entering into the new life of God was paralleled to the birth of Jesus and the Christmas stories, then comparing it to being born would be perfectly obvious. But when it is paralleled to the resurrection and the Paschal stories, birth doesn’t seem like such a self-explanatory metaphor. So let me tease it out a bit and see whether I can help us to make some meaning from it that will be of relevance to what we do now as the people who have been given this new birth into a living hope.

You are probably familiar with the term “crossing the threshold” or perhaps being “carried across the threshold”. A threshold is the step that forms the base of a doorway, and so when you cross one, you pass through from one side of a doorway to the other. While you rarely hear the term used for an architectural feature these days, it is still widely used to speak of passing through significant change points in our lives. This use comes from the old marriage tradition of a man carrying his new bride “across the threshold”, and while that had a literal meaning as he carried her through the door of their new house, the idea was significant not so much for the literal door but for the passing from one stage of life to another, a passage which has permanent and irreversible consequences. Even if a person becomes unmarried again, they can never regain the position of being a person who has never been married. So from that marriage tradition, the idea of “crossing thresholds” came to be used for any major transition point in life. Starting school; reaching puberty; having your first kiss; leaving your parents home; beginning your first paid job; bearing your first child; retirement; and finally death; these are all thresholds, major points of change in our lives after which we are never the same again. There are lots of others in between, some of which are common to most people and others which only some people experience.

The resurrection of Jesus was, of course, a major transition point in the life-story of Jesus. He crossed a threshold from the state of being dead to the state of being mind-bogglingly alive. But it was also a transition point for the rest of the world. The whole creation crossed a threshold, because it entered a new stage in its history where death is no longer guaranteed to be the end of the story. And as Peter and the rest of the Apostles tell us, it can be a threshold crossing for each one of us, because we can be united to Christ and raised to new life with him. That in itself would explain Paul’s frequent use of the image of being raised from death into a new life, but it doesn’t directly explain John and Peter’s use of the birth image. I think though, that it is simply a matter of seeking to use the next most comparable experience that is common to everyone. Not many of us have had the experience of being clinically dead and then raised to life, but we have all been born, even if the memory tends to be a bit hazy on the details. And so the image of birth, with its experience of crossing a threshold into life as we know it is used to describe this crossing of a threshold from living death to life as we are only just beginning to know it.

Many threshold crossing experiences are accompanied, or even facilitated, by some sort of ritual celebration to mark the occasion. A funeral is a good example of one where the ritual is undertaken because the threshold has been crossed. Marriage is the classic example of one where the ritual brings about the crossing of the threshold. If there is no wedding, however small and private it might be, then the line dividing unmarried life from married life has not been crossed. In case you were confused last Saturday night about why we make such a big deal about baptism in our principal celebration of the Paschal event, it is because baptism is the ritual celebration that marks our crossing of the threshold into the resurrection life of Jesus Christ. It is as we are symbolically buried with Christ in the waters and then raised with him to new life that we are united with him and cross the threshold with him into resurrection life.

That’s what Peter was talking about when he said that it was through the resurrection of Jesus that we are given new birth into a new life of hope. Baptism is, at one and the same time, a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah and a celebration of the birth-like entry of another person into the life that is truly life, the life that death cannot hold. And that’s why through most of the year we remember and celebrate our status as baptised people by singing our baptismal creed and flinging water about. And that’s why I would love for us one day, to be able to install a permanent water feature baptistery over there in the entrance space of our church, although I can’t see the finances stretching to that any time soon. This threshold crossing event in our lives is as central a symbol of our faith as is the cross, and of course it is inseparable from it.

The inseparability of the cross and the baptismal pool as symbols of our death, burial and resurrection with Jesus will be further highlighted when we gather around this table in a few minutes. Because here at the Table we will encounter another related symbol of our faith and of our experience of crossing into a new and resurrected life. Baptism marks our point of entry into this life, but sharing the bread and wine, which Christ identifies as his body and blood, marks our ongoing engagement with this life. It is by coming to eat and drink from this table that we renew our baptismal commitments week by week. In approaching this table we are saying “Yes, I still mean it and I am still depending on you, Lord, for the strength to enable me to live it.”

There is perhaps no time when this is more important than when our strength and confidence and resolve are at their lowest. Remember Thomas? Just three weeks ago, he was the one we heard say, “Come on guys. If Jesus is about to get himself killed, we might as well go and die with him.” A baptismal vow, if ever I heard one. But tonight we heard him at the end of his rope, unable to believe that the Jesus he saw die could be alive again unless he sees and touches the scars for himself. And all of us who have been baptised into the life of Christ are at that point a lot more often than we’d care to admit. And it is to Thomas and to all of us that Jesus comes at this table and reaches out to us in broken bread, saying, “Here, reach out your hand and feel this, the marks of my brokenness. Take and eat; this is my body. Do not doubt, but believe.” And like Thomas, we are overcome with joy and a confession of faith comes bursting from our lips, “My Lord and my God.”

0 Comments

Add a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.