March 1, 2026 | Word Out!
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READINGS AND SERMON
First Reading: Genesis 12:1-4a
1 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. 2 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. 3 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.”
4a So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him.
Second Reading: Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
1 What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? 2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. 3 For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” 4 Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. 5 But to one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.
13 For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. 14 For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. 15 For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law, neither is there transgression.
16 For this reason the promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace, so that it may be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (who is the father of all of us, 17 as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”), in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.
Gospel: John 3:1-17
1 Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 2 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 unless God is with that person.” 3 Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” 4 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?” 5 Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 8 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.” 9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 10 Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?
11 “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. 12 If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16 “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.
17 “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.”
Sermon: Rev. Terry Kyllo
Would you please pray with me?
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts and our lived love for our neighbors each day of the week be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer, Amen.
So, as you may remember, probably not, that, about 10 years ago, I left parish ministry to counter anti-Muslim bigotry, in discernment with the Bishop of the Synod, and also my family, of course, many clergy, and the Episcopal bishops and their clergy as well. And in that time, I have learned that we've been kind of “burying the lede” sometimes in the church. I've learned many other things too. I left parish ministry in part because the well-funded anti-Muslim hate industry that was and still is at work in the world was attempting to dehumanize our American Muslim neighbors, and understand that dehumanizing language has a purpose, and all too often in human history, it has been successful. That purpose is to propose violence against a group of people and to say that that violence is moral and required, and necessary. That kind of dehumanizing narrative is not simply an attack on that one group, however. It is attack on the social contract of the country. It tears apart societies. It creates fear in the hearts of everyday people. It separates neighbors, and it prepares the way for an authoritarian takeover of a government. It destroys societies.
And while I might not have been able to say it quite that clearly 10 years ago, that was my fear; that America was on a path, not just to the dehumanization of American Muslims, but the dehumanization of all of us. Because, unless all of us are human, then none of us really are human.
What I've encountered out there as I've talked with people atheist to Zoroastrian, I have quite literally talked to Antifa, to the Proud Boys. I've talked to people in rural areas and in urban and suburban. I've talked to rich and poor. I've talked to people in almost every identity group you could possibly imagine, in the midst of this work, and what I have found that nearly every single group feels vulnerable.
So, you think you feel vulnerable? Yeah, you do. Are you vulnerable? Maybe. But every other group feels the same way. Every group that I've heard feels that they cannot trust their neighbors, that their neighbors are somehow withdrawing from the social contract of human dignity and love of neighbor, and that we're somehow all on our own.
This is made worse, of course, by the felt reality, the experiential reality that we just simply do not know each other across lines of difference. We do not tend to interact. We drive by in our cars, hermetically sealed. We come to worship on Sunday morning, hermetically sealed from our neighbors, even though the doors are open. This is true for almost every group, because there is a great temptation in this 360-degree dehumanization, where we've learned not to know each other and to trust each other, to withdraw even further from each other, and then what happens, is the space between us becomes even more filled by our phones, and by leaders that seek to drive us apart.
But I've also learned something else in engaging with all these people, atheist, the Zoroastrian, quite literally: is that in the church, we often have undersold the importance of the notion of one Creator. Because from that everything else flows, including our beloved “justification by grace, through faith, apart from works of law.”
So the idea of one Creator is, isn't there's just one God, and if you worship that God in a particular way; the idea of one Creator is a kind of a moral framework for how we engage with people across every difference, and how we deal with the rest of creation— because how can you or I respect the Creator unless we also love and respect everything we see, everyone we see?
So in the first reading today, we see an example of this. Abram had been living in Ur; that's where he grew up, him and Sarai. And if you want to understand Ur, kind of think about Egypt under the rule of Pharaoh, when the people of Israel were enslaved. It was the same sort of society, a pyramidal society where the wealth flowed upward and control flowed down. Some people were enslaved, some people were captured and brought in to be slaves, and a few people benefited at the top.
And God said, “Get out of there, because that is not my intention.” The people in Ur, just like the people in Egypt, used God-language to support the idea that the gods had made the world into pyramids: that God put the pharaoh in place, the king of Ur in place, or the Caesar in place. And so you dare not question the pyramid.
But God said, “Get out of there.” And what God could have said to Abram—and you would think from some Christians that this is actually what God said—God could have said “So Abraham, I make of you a great a great tribe, and your job is to convert or kill anyone that become part of that's your job.” But that is, in fact, not what Genesis 12 says. One of the great Hebrew terms in this passage is the word mishpacha. I think every Christian should know that term, because that's the term for nation and then family. In this text, it really means clan or tribe, and it was understood that every single clan or tribe had its own religion, and spirituality, and theology, and stories, and food, and ways of making homes, and ways of organizing governance.
What this passage says is that God will make of Abraham and son a great nation, that God will, in fact, bless them and make them, make their name great, but with a purpose: so that you will be a blessing.
Now there is in the passage this phrase, “I will bless those who bless you and curse those that curse you.” That is does not mean that God is running around attempting to curse everybody. That is probably an old oath that you took when you joined a mishpacha, when you joined a tribe, and they would make the oath, because in those days, there weren't really governments all over the place. The tribe was your protection, and you were theirs.
So this means that Abraham is being invited into God's tribe. But again, this is with a purpose: in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. In other words, this passage itself, in the very calling of Abram and Sarah to create a new mishpacha, is the recognition that there is more than one mishpachain the world. There's more than one religion and tribe and clan and way and culture and ways to pray.
And God intends that the mishpachas will bless each other. So, pluralism is built into the very notion of the Abrahamic tradition. Pluralism is built into the very notion of “one God.”
But if you heard many Christians say it, and all too often we ignore it, or poo-poo it, or do not push back adequately, you have to be “born again” in order to be human. Have you ever heard that before? And what is meant by being born again is that you have to have a certain kind of emotional experience where you give your life over to Jesus, and you're able to tearfully recount the story to everyone you meet. It has to look and feel a certain way.
Is that what Jesus means when he talks to Nicodemus? Now, you heard me say as I read the passage I called him “nike demos.” Did you hear that? That was maybe rude of me, but it was purposeful. Nicodemus is not just a person. There's no person in the first century named Nicodemus. It's really two words put together: demos from which we get our word democracy. It means people, the everyday people, all of us, humanoid life forms out there. And what does nike mean? Anybody know? Victory, specifically military victory. So, when the Imperial heralds would go out, when a new area was colonized by the Roman Empire, they would say they would give praise to Nike, the goddess of victory. That's why Nike, the great tennis shoe company, is named Nike.
And so if there's going to be a victory of the people, what does that require? It requires someone to lose. And the people desperately wanted a victory, and it was understandable that they did, because the Roman Empire was taking all their land, and resources, and ruling, as the Romans explicitly stated, through division. Divide and rule. And they were very good at taking the population, chopping them up into little bits of factions, working them against each other, whispering into each other's ears, that that other group over there is taking your stuff, that other group is a threat to you, and then coming in, and justifying their police action when people began to fight with each other.
Now in the first century, Jesus did say, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see or be a part or enter the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
And because many of us have felt sort of bullied by this text, or at least bullied by people who seem to use this text to tell Lutherans, and others, that if we don't have that particular kind of emotional conversion experience, that we're not really Christian and therefore not really human, that we tend to want to like sidestep this passage; to sidestep what Jesus is saying.
Partly because, it's not until fairly recently, that we understood maybe, what it meant. What does it mean to be born from above?
You may have noticed in the gospels that Jesus is often asked, “Where are you from? Whose family are you from?” Well, why would they ask that question? It's much more than just a “hey, where did you grow up?” kind of a question. Because the family you were born into had a status in the caste system of the first century. And if you're born to a low-ranking family in the caste system, then you had to behave, and you had the possibilities of someone low in the system. You had no chance, almost no chance, of heading up the up the rank, up the ladder, even though you would try. And if you were born to a family of high reputation, of high honor and high wealth, often, then you would have more doors opened for you.
What this served to do in the first century, much as it does today, is as another way to keep people separated from each other. They were separated not only by mishpacha, but by rank; by a pecking order.
And so what Jesus is suggesting here, is that his community, working toward the kingdom of God, is going to require that everybody give up their birth status, whether that is high or low, and recognize the status given to us by one Creator—which means that there is only one status that matters. It's not how rich you are, it's not what tribe you're part of, not what culture you're part of, but that you're just a human being, made in the image of God. But that is the only status.
Now, Jesus says that, because, unlike “nike demos,” that is, a group of people that wanted to really hurt the Romans and force them to leave by raising an army, Jesus does not describe his movement as anti-Roman. It might have been critical of the Roman Empire; but Jesus is not an Italianophobe. Because the Kingdom of God is open to everyone. Because Jesus was a radical monotheist who believed that there was one Creator, and thus there is one humanity, even though we are pluralistically a part of a world in which there's lots of different groups; lots of different cultures and traditions; lots of ways to be. And so Jesus saw this kingdom of God, this kin-dom of God, this government of God, as one that could include many people, but would require a kind of second birth given by God, so that we would be able to recommit ourselves to the fundamental moral vision and set of commitments of one Creator—which is, that when we look out our eyes, or hear with our ears, or sense, with our heart and soul, another person, another life form, whatever kind, that we recognize our essential unity with that person, or with that life form. Because we see, in that person, the same one that fashioned life within us, that gave us life and health, in whom we live and move and have our being.
And so, what's happening here is really interesting, because, this summer, at a family reunion that I was helping to host for my wife's family, one of my new nephews came and decided that he was going to convert me. He wanted me to have the experience of being “born again,” because he thought that, in fact, he was helping me. While I would say, that he was trapped in a theological system, much like Ur in Egypt, which said that the world is built into a pyramid, and you have to, you know, convert over to his way, or else you're not human.
He's coming over in a couple of weeks to my house. That's going to be interesting.
And I understand that his motivation was a kind of love for me, like I get that; and I'm going to honor that when I talk with him. But it seems to me that he sees the world as a penal colony, that God made us all to be members of a penal colony, and that Jesus is the parole board. And my young nephew thought of himself as my parole officer, trying to reform me into an experience that would allow me to escape the prison.
But what does that kind of system immediately do? It tells us that we're not really human until we conform to somebody else's notion, until we convert to Christianity, and his version of Christianity. That is yet another form of divide and rule, of saying that there are winners and losers, there's us-es and themses, and that the only blessing we can offer is to make other people like us.
That is not what the text in Genesis 12 says, and I don't believe that is what the text in John 3 says. I believe Jesus is saying that we have to give up our other status so that we can recognize our unity with the human family, to recognize that there is only one status that matters.
I think, in talking with rabbis and imams and Hindus and Buddhists and Zoroastrians, including atheists— I recognize that nearly every tradition in the world aspires to recognize the dignity of every human person. I believe that Jesus is asking us to be born again, so that we may do the same.
Amen.