Scripture: Genesis 12:1-4; John 3:1-17; John 3:16; Romans 13 Series: Lent
Preached on the 2nd Sunday in Lent, this sermon pairs Abraham’s call to leave Ur with Nicodemus’s nighttime visit to Jesus to argue that faith means leaving comfort for the uncomfortable. Wilson critiques selective biblical literalism, contrasting eisegesis (reading our biases in for confirmation) with exegesis (letting God’s word change us), invoking Barth’s ‘strange new world of the Bible.’ He extends the call into communion as an unsettling, serious encounter with the body and blood of Christ, urging the congregation to go from their country to meet Jesus in the Bible, at the table, and in neighbor and enemy.
Illustrations: baseball-spring-training-optimism, dodgers-probably-win-again, medieval-fourfold-sense, luther-cuts-to-literal, mustard-seed-faith-has-no-mass, barth-strange-new-world, nicodemus-hats-cannibals-at-communion, hobby-lobby-kitchen-sign, luther-swaddling-clothes
March 1, 2026
2nd Sunday in Lent
Genesis 12:1-4 John 3:1-17
Go From Your Country
Genesis 12:1-4
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.
John 3:1-17
Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? “Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. “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.
Opening day of baseball is starting at the end of the month. It is always a time of optimism, I hope, for baseball fans. Every team is tied zero and zero. Most seasons there’s a feeling anybody could win — though the reality is the Dodgers will probably win again, and sometimes that happens.
The first mark of a new baseball season is when pitchers and catchers report for spring training. They get a little extra work in. Usually, you can tell how well your season is going by the time when you first look up when pitchers and catchers are going to report for next year. That is when you get to the point that you realize your team is going nowhere. But next year could be our year — everyone is able to think that.
My friends, it is the second Sunday in Lent. Is this going to be your year?
Nicodemus and the Messiah
Nicodemus was a Pharisee. He was waiting for the Messiah for a long time. The Pharisees were a group of very religious lay people in Israel. They were not priests or Levites. They were people who took their faith very seriously. For a lot of them, Nicodemus included, that meant expecting and waiting on the anointed one of God — the Messiah.
If you grew up in the church, you might conflate the terms “Messiah” and “Son of God,” but it’s an important distinction. In the Hebrew scriptures, there’s nothing inherently divine about the messianic texts. The Messiah is a person anointed by God, but not God. A scriptural innovation that Christians make is claiming that Jesus is both the Messiah and the Son of God.
Nicodemus was waiting for the Messiah, and he noticed things about Jesus. He noticed the teachings of Jesus and the miracles of Jesus. He had been waiting for something new to take place, and so he left what was comfortable for him and went to see Jesus. He came by night, so others couldn’t see him. He left what was comfortable in order to see Jesus. And he paid attention to the words of Jesus. He listened to them. He listened to how strange they were.
Taking the Bible Seriously
There’s been a lot of conflict within the church over the last hundred, two hundred years over biblical literalism. Different traditions talk about reading the Bible literally. That’s where it comes from — from the Latin littera, which means “the letter.” If you go back to the medieval church, they had a fourfold way of reading the Bible. The first was the literal way — that is, what do the letters say? What do they mean? The next was the allegorical — what is the symbol going on? What is the deeper meaning? The next was the tropological or moral — what is a moral teaching we can draw out of the scriptural text? And finally, the anagogical or eschatological — how does this point to the last things, or give us an understanding of our last things with God?
One of the things Luther did was kind of cut off the last three, so it was focused just on the literal: what are the words themselves saying? But he and others have to deal with the fact that Jesus uses figurative language a lot. The Bible is filled with figurative language.
So how do you take figurative language literally? “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed” — well, what size is faith? Is faith an object that has size or volume or takes up space? Is there a mass to faith? That’s taking it literally. But that’s not what people mean when they say to take the Bible literally. They don’t mean that. Obviously. But it’s these “obviously’s” that are built on ideologies, and that’s where the conflict comes in. It’s the assumptions that people make in their traditions that lead to conflict.
For most of Christian tradition, Christians have taken seriously — I use “seriously” more than “literally” — seriously, those texts which align with their ideology, and held lightly those that don’t. There are traditions that take deeply the language of the Bible around marriage but hold lightly language in the Bible around usury. They take seriously language of the Bible around authority, like in Romans 13, and hold lightly language in the Bible around being children of the kingdom of heaven, having no father or master.
Born Again
All this gets us back to Nicodemus, who took the words of Jesus seriously. He was challenged when Jesus said, “You must be born again,” because birth was what happens at the beginning of your life. How can I be born again? Must I go back into my mother’s belly? He came from where he was comfortable into a new country, and he was challenged by it. But he was willing to listen and confront it, and in that he was transformed — and gave Jesus the opportunity to share the fullness of his good news in John 3:16.
Abraham went from his country, Ur of the Chaldees, to a new land on the word of God, by faith. He was willing to go from the comfortable to the uncomfortable out of obedience to the God of all creation.
This is what it means to take the Bible seriously. Karl Barth calls it “the strange new world of the Bible.” If you’re reading the Bible and it’s not very strange, I think you need to read it differently. If it’s not very new, you need to read it differently. If it doesn’t look like a completely different world, you need to read it differently.
There’s this distinction scholars make between eisegesis and exegesis. Eisegesis is reading into the text. It’s taking our assumptions and expectations and putting them there in the Bible to give ourselves confirmation about those assumptions and expectations. We read the Bible for the precise purpose of confirmation bias, so that we have a source to confirm how we wanted to live anyway. Exegesis is reading out of the Bible. It’s God speaking to us. And what that means is change. What that means for us is change.
Nicodemus left where he was comfortable and went to see Jesus. For us, this is what it means to read deeply, to spend time with scripture. It means leaving a place that is comfortable in order to meet and see Jesus.
Coming to the Table
This is what it means to come to the table at communion. It means leaving someplace that’s comfortable to do something that is uncomfortable. Let’s put on our Nicodemus hats and come to the table.
Wait — you’re eating the body of Jesus? Are you cannibals? You’re drinking the blood of Jesus? Are you psychos? There’s a response, you know, that some Christians could say: “Oh, don’t take it so seriously. It’s just what we do.” When in fact the faithful response is to take it more seriously. Yes, we are eating the body of Jesus. Yes, we are drinking the blood of Jesus. Jesus is here. Our God, who created everything, is here. The one who sacrificed himself for us is here and gives himself to us.
We receive an amazing gift this day, one that is given freely, so we can receive it in a lot of different ways. We can receive lightly or seriously. We can come to the table solemnly, reflecting on the miracle of life given to us — that we are allowed to participate in the remaking of this world, that we are given a foretaste of the coming kingdom of heaven. It is something concrete that we can bite and chew and swallow.
And God gives us the freedom to just go through the motions. But why? Why waste this opportunity? The strange new world of the Lord’s table, offered for you. Coming to see Jesus, to touch Jesus, to taste Jesus.
The Strange New World
This is what happens when we open our Bibles. It doesn’t always happen in the easiest of ways. There are a lot of verses of the Bible that you won’t find on a sign at Hobby Lobby to put in your kitchen. We have to wrestle with that. Be unsettled with that.
Martin Luther called the Bible the swaddling clothes in which we find the baby Jesus. The swaddling clothes were dirty. When a baby is born, it’s really messy. There’s lots of fluids and blood. But it holds Jesus.
In this season of Lent, may you be willing to go from your country to meet Jesus in a new way — in the Bible, at the table, in your neighbor, even in your enemy. God is here for you.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.