John 3:1-17
When I was 20, I went for two months to the island of Taiwan to teach English to University students through a program of the American Lutheran Church. It was my second trip to an Asian nation, the first was to Japan when I was 19 and went to visit the family of an exchange student who lived with my family when he was in high school.
In my naiveté I imagined Taiwan and Japan would be a lot alike. The Japanese at one point in fairly recent history even ruled Taiwan. But Taiwan was nothing like Japan. There were so many differences in the people, cultures, and lifestyle I cannot begin to describe them all here.
I had traveled before to Mexico to build houses with my church and to Canada with my family. I went with a youth program to give inoculations in Central America when I was sixteen, and stayed the summer in Honduras, in Central America. However, the trip to Taiwan was the one that would cement in my life the concept that there are worlds out there that I would never know. And that there are ways of thinking I would never think, and beauty and styles of life I can only imagine. The beauty of the country, the incredible flavor of the food, the power of the Typhoon and the calmness of an ocean where the lifeguards sit in tall chairs out beyond the surf and look in at the people playing on the beach. All of it changed me.
Perhaps I was a slow learner, but it was until the age of twenty I realized how many worlds we are missing every day —other landscapes and geographies, other languages (which sometimes permit thoughts we can't have in our own), the many worlds of the sciences. Just think about the different lives of such people as diamond miners and hot-air balloonists and pearl divers and nuclear physicists and acupuncturists and farmers and brain surgeons. There are such vast areas of human experience most of us haven't even begun to experience, and probably never will.
I saw a television program recently about a woman whose interest in autistic children led her to become interested in the sounds dolphins make, and how those sounds affect the children. One day she decided to go to the Caribbean and take a trip on a dolphin boat, going way out to sea where the passengers could put on their wet suits and get into the water and swim with the dolphins.
One time, when she was in the water with the dolphins, a mother and baby dolphin began cavorting with her and remained with her for about an hour. The baby would cuddle against her stomach and the two of them would rise to the ocean's surface together, where the calf would leap high into the air, as dolphins do. It was a life-changing experience for her one she will treasure for the rest of her days.
As I watched the program I confess that I envied her experiences with the dolphins. I positively drooled over them. And I think how many wonderful experiences there are in the world that I am not having.
Sometimes we are so quick, when we are tired or bored, to conclude that the world is a dull and tedious place. But it isn't. It's anything but that. It's an incredibly rich and varied world. It is a hundred times over more fun and interesting than we imagine. The problem is with us. We are so willing to remain as we are, so content to cling to our little worlds, that we aren't even open to the richness of experiences around us.
I don’t do country western said a friend of mine. I don’t do opera said another. I don’t do the Midwest I have often said, and then had to take it all back after the beautiful trip I had last summer. I don’t church, I hear that one often all the time when people find out I am a minister. Isn't it a shame that we limit ourselves so blindly and peremptorily, and miss so much of the great variety life has to offer?
John Killinger tells the story of the time he was in Paris, France, working on a book on the theater of the absurd. He writes: I had gone, one Sunday afternoon in April, to a play by Fernando Arrabal, a Spanish playwright doing most of his work in French. It was in a little theater somewhere in the back streets of the city. We entered the theater by a ramp that had been built over the stage, because the stage completely encircled the room, and sat in revolving chairs in the center. And once we were in, the ramp was removed, so that we were essentially a captive audience. The play was staged in the absurd manner. Little of the dialogue or action made much sense. The lights—great, powerful lights—kept rotating and getting in the audience's eyes. The setting was a wrecking yard, the play was called The Car Cemetery, and there were old cars and pieces of junk everywhere. And the characters, as they marched, hollered, and stomped their way around the stage, kept banging on the cars with ball bats and metal pipes. The din was almost unbearable.
I hadn't been there more than ten minutes before I thought I had to get out or die. But I couldn't get to the door. I simply had to make the best of it. Mercifully, my mind gradually adjusted to what was happening, and I finally began to follow it with at least a mild amount of interest. Two hours later, when the play was over, the ramps were restored and we filed out into the pleasant neighborhood around the theater. I could hear children playing down the street. Somewhere there was a dog barking in the distance. And suddenly I had the feeling that this quiet world, the ordinary world into which we had come after the play, was unreal. I wanted to rush back inside, to the world of noise and confusion I had grown accustomed to.
I learned a very important lesson from that experience. I discovered that my ideas of reality are what I have been programmed to think of as reality, but that there are hundreds, thousands, of ways of thinking of reality that are always out there beyond my momentary consciousness, my limited way of seeing the world. And if I am tolerant today of worlds quite different from my own—those of Muslims and Hindus, homosexuals and immigrants, ballet dancers and opera singers—it is because I realized that day how completely I am at the mercy of my restricted vision of life, how wrong I may be about everything, not because of the things I know but because of the things I don't know. There are whole worlds out there that I am missing.
That is part of what the Bible is about, my friends, part of what it is trying to get us to see and understand. Jesus said to Nicodemus, "You can't see the things I am trying to teach you from where you've been standing. You must be born again, this time from above." He said to the woman at the well, when she was arguing with him about whether he had a vessel into which she could pour the water he had requested of her, "If you only knew who is asking you for some water, you would be asking him for a drink, and he would give you eternal water, water of such fine essence that your soul would never thirst again."
"If you only knew." That's the defining phrase, isn't it? "If you only knew." If we could only see the other worlds, the other possibilities, that come upon each of us continuously, we would enter another dimension and our lives would be twice or three times or a hundred times as rich as they are now.
"If you only knew." It is arrogant to refuse other worlds because we don't already know them and haven't already seen them. It is arrogant and foolish and tragic. If you only knew, you would ask and you would enter another world—a world you are presently missing. That is what Jesus tells Nicodemus.
Years ago I don’t remember where I read about a couple who stopped at a trading post in the Southwest. They were looking at a rug woven by a Native American woman. "Do you like it?" asked the wife. "It's horrible," said the man, not bothering to lower his voice so the woman who made it wouldn't hear. "What is it, anyway? I can't even tell what it is."
"You are looking at the wrong side," said the Native American woman. "The picture is on the other side." And indeed it was—a beautiful, artistically rendered vision of a Western sunset seen through the shadows and silhouettes of a wooded mountainside. The embarrassed couple bought the rug and took it home and hung it over their mantle, where they enjoyed it for years. Until they realized they were looking at the wrong side, they were missing the real view.
Just the way you and I may be missing another world if we become so preoccupied with this one.
…..To be born from above means that the new world God’s love opens up for us comes as gift, it is beyond what we ourselves can imagine, like dolphins, and theater and art, it is something unusual, something holy, something to receive and to be thankful for. It is a certain hope which calls for our response. Amen.