A sermon on Genesis 12:1-4 & John 3: 1-17 by Nathan Nettleton

Most of you will have picked up by now that the season of Lent has something to do with preparing people for baptism and church membership. The first few generations of Christians weren’t much into lengthy preparations for baptism. If a person made a decision to commit their lives to Jesus and his people, they were often taken immediately to the nearest available water and baptised then and there. In a culture and a time where becoming a Christian put you at risk of being fed to the lions, it was reasonable to assume that if somebody said they wanted to follow Jesus, they were not taking it lightly.

But a couple of centuries later that all changed. The Roman emperor, Constantine, announced that Christianity was now his religion and the official religion of the empire. Suddenly it was not only permissible to identify yourself with the Church, it was politically and socially advantageous. If you were one of Constantine’s soldiers or public servants, you were more likely to get promoted if you were known to be a Christian.

Suddenly the Churches were being inundated with requests for baptism, and suddenly it was a whole lot harder to work out whether people were really wanting to commit themselves to the counter-cultural life of following Jesus in company with his people, or just wanting to position themselves more advantageously in the world’s pecking order. So an already growing practice became all the more necessary, and that was to require a lengthy period of education and spiritual formation before baptism, in an effort to ensure that people knew what it meant and were fair dinkum in their commitment to living it out.

That process, known as the catechumenate, often lasted for a year or more, but it culminated in a particularly intense final forty days – analogous to the forty days we heard about last week that Jesus spent in the desert being put to the test to see what he was really made of. This forty days of intense fasting, self-examination, and prayer before the celebration of baptism in the Easter Vigil came to be observed as the season of Lent, and to be seen as a chance for all of us to go back to the catechumenate, if you like, and to ask ourselves again whether we have got what it takes to be the people of God, the followers of Jesus.

On each of the Sundays that break up this forty days, we are confronted with challenging messages from the Bible about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. For some of us, the challenge of tonight’s readings may be the most discomforting of all. You see, it is one thing to be warned to count the cost. It is quite another to be told that there is no way of calculating the cost, and that is a clear message in tonight’s readings.

Many of us have developed skills in risk assessment. We can do what the business gurus call a costs/benefits analysis and work out whether the costs we are likely to incur by taking a certain course of action are justified by the expected benefits. If Christian discipleship just involved predictable costs — perhaps ten percent of your income and two and a half hours of your time spent at church each week — we could easily weigh that up against the promise of forgiveness, healing and abundant life in this world and the next, and decide that it came out as a pretty good deal. But tonight we are being warned that you can’t tackle it that way.

Jesus speaks of the need to be born twice, once from the womb of your mother and once from the womb of the Spirit. His description of being born of water and of spirit may not have evoked baptismal images for Nicodemus, but there is no doubt that it would have for those who the Apostle John was writing to when he wrote it down. And when Jesus responds to Nicodemus’ bewilderment and elaborates on what he is saying, he compares the life of those who have been reborn of the Spirit with the vagaries of the wind. “You can hear the wind coming,” he says, “and you can see what it does, but what’s driving it and where it is going next is anybody’s guess. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

This is clearly not a prediction that the life of the baptised will be an orderly and predictable one. If Jesus is challenging Nicodemus and us to take a good hard look at ourselves and see whether we have got what it takes to take the plunge, then he is asking us to see whether we can bring ourselves to relinquish control over the direction of our lives. He is asking us to release our grip and entrust our future to the unpredictable and untrackable winds of God’s Spirit. It’s pretty hard to do a costs/benefits analysis when you are told that you can’t know much at all about what might happen if you embark on this journey.

If you remember the story we heard about Abraham in our first reading, you’ll realise that we can’t take the sting out of this challenge by assuming that the unpredictability only relates to some kind of “spiritual” consequences. You know, whether God will want you to get up earlier in the mornings to pray, or something like that. No, it doesn’t come much more life-changing than it did for Abraham, and as Paul makes clear, Abraham is one of the the key figures whose footsteps we are following in if we take this life of faith seriously. God called to Abraham and said, “Get up and leave your country, your relatives and the family of your parents, and move to the land that I will show you.” Abraham is not even told what land it will be or what it’s like. It’s just, “Get up and make tracks and you’ll find out what it all means as it unfolds. Just trust me.” Now if you wanted to do a costs/benefits analysis, the benefits Abraham is promised are pretty spectacular, but he has to weigh them up against the unknown. And so do we.

For most of us here, it is some years since we took the plunge and entrusted our lives to the unknown future of God. Looking back now, most of us would probably say that if we could have seen some of what it was going to mean, we probably would have been even more uncertain and hesitant than we were. But most of us will also gladly renew our baptismal promises in the Easter Vigil because the journey has been more than worth it. Perhaps it is just as well we weren’t warned about some of those consequences that might have put us off. Because as uncertain as this journey may be, the One into whose hands we have entrusted our lives is one who will stop at nothing, not even a tortured death, to ensure our ultimate safety and wellbeing.

So as you weigh up whether you will join us in recommitting yourself to a life led by the wind of God’s Spirit, or to committing yourself to it for the first time, understand that no one can tell you all that it will mean or where it will take you. It is simply a matter of putting your trust in Jesus; of entrusting your life into the hands of one who will take you who knows where, but who is utterly committed to your best interests and has proved faithful to generations of Spirit-led people before you.