David Grousnick
A young girl who was asked to write an essay on “birth”
She asked her mother how she had been born. Mom, who was busy at the time, said “The stork brought you and left you on the doorstep.”
Continuing her research she asked her dad how he’d been born. Being busy, Dad similarly deflected the question by saying, “I was found in the garden. The fairies brought me.”
Then the girl asked her grandmother how she had arrived. “I was picked from a berry bush”, said grandma.
With this information the girl wrote her essay.
When the teacher asked her later to read it in front of the class, she stood up and began, “There has not been a natural birth in our family for three generations…”
We are in an interesting period of time right now between the end of an awesome winter Olympics, the beginning of the season of Lent and our journey to Easter joy.
For years, the opening of “The Wide World of Sports” television program illustrated “the agony of defeat” with a painful ending to an attempted ski jump. The skier appeared in good form heading down the jump, but then, for no apparent reason, he tumbled head over heels off the side of the jump, bouncing off the supporting structure down to the snow below.
What viewers didn’t know was that he chose to fall rather than finish the jump. Why? As he explained later, the jump surface had become too fast, and midway down the ramp, he realized if he completed the jump, he would land on the level ground, beyond the safe sloping landing area, which could have been fatal.
Changing one’s course in life can be a dramatic and sometimes painful undertaking, but change is better than a fatal landing at the end.
In John 3:1-17, this is the problem Nicodemus was having. Jesus tells Nicodemus that he is facing a fatal landing if he does not change directions. But Nicodemus knows only one way and that is the way of earth. It is the only way that any of us knows.
Jesus begins speaking of Heaven, of being Born Again. But Nicodemus is confused. “How can a person go back into his mother’s womb and come out again?”
There is a reason he has come to Jesus. He has an inkling that Jesus might be able to provide a missing important detail because Nicodemus senses he is headed in a wrong direction and he should change his course. But Nicodemus is hesitant. He’s uncertain about making such a drastic change. Why? What makes this remarkable man slow to take Jesus at his word?
Sometimes what we think is most familiar is also the most unknown.
Take the case of one Midwest family. The matriarchs of the family had passed along a time-honored recipe for the traditional Easter ham. Along with the list of spices and herbs, rubs and glazes, cook times and basting procedures, was the absolutely strict instruction that the last three to four inches of the ham must be cut off – completely removed.
This order was an fundamental part of the recipe that their great-grandmother had passed down. Grandma continued the practice, as did her granddaughter.
When the great-granddaughter was initiated into the secret recipe, she dared to ask “Why?” Why the necessary amputation of the end of that holiday ham. Neither her mother nor her grandmother had an answer.
Thankfully, great-grandma was still around and had a perfectly logical, if unexpected explanation. “My roasting pan was too short,” great grandma declared, “I had to cut off the last few inches or the ham would not fit in the pan.”
Although the conditions had changed for the ensuing generations of cooks, they had all continued to follow the old instructions, without knowing why, without embracing a new reality made possible by bigger pans for bigger hams.
It’s easy to get stuck in a rut. Thinking “outside the box” requires flexing some mental muscles, pushing out the walls of thoughts and expectations we find reassuring and familiar. There is perhaps no more faith-defining expression in Western Christianity than the concept of being “born again.”
Yet, after two millennia it is a phrase that is so familiar it has become unknown.
Journey with us to the celebration of Easter this year. We meet at 10:30 am and we gather at 11th and Bullock, right across the street from Zia Intermediate School. And when the Easter celebration feast is served, you will discover that we have a bigger pan for a large ham!!
