March 1, 2026 (Second Sunday of Lent) - Mr. Matthew Sanaker

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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

So I prepared a sermon for this week before the war started in the Middle East. And so my sermon doesn't really speak to that. But I think it's important to name that this war that was started there—there's no reason for it. It's unconscionable. It is not something that a nation that claims to be a Christian nation should be doing. There’s a lot of that going around these days. So I just wanted to acknowledge that.

And I think there are other places in the liturgy where we can pray for the people who are suffering, pray for the people who are serving over there who may not have really known what they were getting into when they volunteered.

So the Rabbi Nicodemus had been hearing stories about a wandering teacher, a Galilean named Jesus, who had come to Jerusalem and was performing miracles. He was healing lepers. He was casting out demons. He was giving recovery of sight to the blind, and he was causing the lame to walk.

Nicodemus approached Jesus both with faith and with curiosity. Nicodemus believed that Jesus was a man sent from God, and he wanted to know more. So he sought out Jesus to find out more for himself.

In this first encounter, Jesus cuts right to the heart of the matter. He says, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. 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.”

When Nicodemus heard Jesus say these things, he must have heard the echoes of the prophet Ezekiel, who spoke of God saying, “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.” Or the words of Jeremiah: “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

So when Nicodemus asks Jesus, “How can these things be?” I wonder if he was truly asking that question of Jesus, or whether he heard Jesus speaking these words that would have been so familiar from his study of the prophets, and he was amazed. And he was simply wondering out loud, perhaps even afraid to hope: Am I standing in the presence of the Messiah? How can these things be?

So Jesus answers Nicodemus with his own enigmatic question, essentially saying, “You are a teacher of Israel. You know the words of the prophets.” And in his answer he reveals to Nicodemus: Yes, I am the one that Isaiah spoke of—the Son of Man come to bring salvation to all of humanity, to set right the relationship between God and His creation.

And the righting of that relationship requires not only a ritual cleansing with water, but a renewal of the Spirit. As the psalmist said, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Give me the joy of your saving help again and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit.”

The religion—or the spirituality—that Jesus was proclaiming was not a performative religion. It was a transformative religion. It was a transformative spirituality. And for us, it still is a transformative spirituality.

There was a Father of the Church in the late second and early third century named Tertullian. And he said, “Christians are not born, but made.”

So Christians—when we are born in the flesh, as wonderful as it is to have a new baby born into a Christian family—that's not the essential thing that makes us Christian. We become Christians when we are born in the Spirit, through water and through the Holy Spirit in baptism.

So a Christian identity is not an ethnic identity. A Christian identity is not a national identity. It is an identity that we find in Christ as we become, through baptism, members of the Body of Christ.

So this journey of Christian transformation begins in baptism. In baptism, by the grace of God and the working of the Holy Spirit, there is an ontological change that takes place. That's a fancy theological word, but it means a fundamental transformation of our being. After baptism, we are no longer the same. We are born again by water and Spirit.

And when we allow God's grace to transform our hearts, when we choose to follow Christ as his disciples, we are made a new creation.

Christian discipleship is a journey of lifelong conversion. It is a journey of lifelong transformation.

Scripture tells us that God's plan of salvation is that all of creation will be made new. This renewal of creation was begun through the death and resurrection of Christ, which we remember every Sunday and which we will celebrate in full at Easter.

Through the initiatory rite of Holy Baptism, we are baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ. We die to sin—that is, our attachment to and our vain attempts at seeking wholeness through the flesh alone—and we are raised to new life in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, in which we live no longer for ourselves but for God and for one another.

We are freed from the bondage of sin to live a new and unending life in Christ.

By living in Christ, we become the true human beings that God created us to be. We become participants in God's renewing of creation.

So this new life is a gift for us, but it's not a gift for us alone. It is the sort of gift that makes us want to share it with others.

With the Spirit of Christ in our hearts, we live our lives within his life. God gave himself to us in Christ so that we might see what it looks like and what it feels like to live as a human being entirely united to God's will. He came into the world to save the world, not condemn it.

Christ lived his earthly life with compassion and love for everyone that he met. When we are given new life in Christ, our spirit communes with the Spirit of Christ, and we also feel compelled to have compassion and love for all of the people that we meet.

Granted, sometimes we do get in the way. Sometimes we fall back into sin—that state of disconnection and disharmony with the Spirit of God. But that's one of the reasons that we gather together as a community of Christians. We gather to support one another, to encourage one another, and to serve as examples for one another.

And when we gather, like this morning, we humbly confess our sins together. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

And then we join together around this table to share in the holy meal. We share in the Eucharistic feast with one another, eating the bread and drinking the wine that is for us the Body and Blood of Christ.

We are fed with spiritual food because human beings do not live by bread alone.

It is this spiritual food that unites us in these physical bodies with Christ so that we are renewed and strengthened to be his hands and his feet and his heart in this often broken and confused world.

In the rite of Holy Baptism, we renounce the temptations of the flesh. We turn away from them as a means of seeking wholeness, of filling that empty space that we may sense within us. And we turn toward God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the source of true wholeness and the source of life itself—not only life in the flesh, but life in the Spirit, a life perfected in Christ, that is, a life made complete in Christ.

Humanity was created from the dust of the earth, but it was not until God breathed His Spirit into the first human beings that they were truly alive.

It is the Spirit of God which makes these mortal bodies truly alive and whole.

So as we journey together through this season of Lent toward Holy Week and Easter—toward baptism and the renewal of our baptismal covenant—let us remember and contemplate what Jesus said to his disciple, the Rabbi Nicodemus: What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of Spirit is spirit.

Amen.