Our Essential Family Tree

Luke 3:23-38 John3:1-7  1 John 5:6-12

Next Sunday, as  part of the commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible, we shall be reading the whole of St Luke’s Gospel together. There are nearly 60 members of the congregation joining in that reading and people have been happy for me to choose the section each will read, except that I have had a few people say to me “Please don’t give me the bit with lots of  unpronounceable names”.

Indeed I know what they mean because in Chapter three there is a great long paragraph which traces the human ancestry of Jesus right back to Adam and there are some wonderful tongue twisters along the way. So it is that everyone will be richly entertained as the Vicar reads that section.

In our society, people have become fascinated by their ancestry and you meet all sorts of people who have set themselves the project of drawing up their family tree. To set their own lives in context with those who have gone before, to know where your own life was rooted and the influences brought upon it. At the heart of all that is an important link with the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus which forms the first part of our Gospel reading.

Nicodemus’s spiritual life has been stirred up by Jesus. He had thought that he knew all the answers about his history and his destiny, but the man from Galilee has blown his suppositions wide open.  Jesus tells him that if he is to get to the heart of the matter, he must be born again. This is a term which in some circles has been reduced to unhelpful cliché of hinting that it is only if you can use this term about yourself, that you can be counted a bone fide Christian. It is usually associated with a particular moment of conviction or conversion, which in a trice, blows open the way you see your life in relation to that of Christ.

For many such a moment, does indeed form an important part of their faith journey, but for me the term born again is the realisation that your life is immersed in the love of a heavenly father and that wherever you go and whatever you do, you are part of the family tree, that through Christ you have a common ancestry with the Godhead. To really know the depth of that may take a lifetime of faithful discipleship, but if you want to use the term “born again”, well yes, I am and I would guess that you are too.

When Jesus says in response to Nicodemus’s rather obtuse questioning, that you have to be born of water and the Spirit, I think he is pointing to the sacrament of Baptism as the initiation into this new life. Interestingly if you read on in John’s writing to his first Epistle, you will find that this described again  as accessed through “the water and the blood”, which makes us think of that which flowed from the side of Christ when he was dying on the cross. His sacrifice and now the twin sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist become the way of new life for us.

Amidst all this imagery, you and I can hold on to something important. Our faithful acknowledgement of God as our heavenly father gives the overall purpose and meaning to our lives and we enter into this through our Baptism and continually proclaim it through our sharing in the bread and wine.  These sacraments are like an anchor to us because for much of the time we are thrown back and forth between knowing of  a certainty that his love is real for us and yet encountering dark moments when we wonder at our faithfulness and whether indeed his love stretches as far as our wretchedness.

Next Sunday when I shall stumble through the unpronounceable names of the ancestry of Jesus, be entertained if you will, but as the pageant unfolds, think of one thing, the family record of Jesus is mine too and into it I place my own name and the names of those I love, both those who have gone before and those alongside me know, those who have acknowledged the reality of their Heavenly Father and those who find it a struggle to do so, those alongside me in church and those for whom I’m trying to pray for in Japan, in Libya and other places in the world where our hearts bleed for our unknown, yet fellow, brothers and sisters.

RH 20.3.11