Throwing a Brick – A Lent 2 – March 20, 2011
“When God Throws a Brick” by Rev. Sam Lloyd with adjustments by me…
I recently heard a talk given by a Minneapolis businessman named Ward Brehm
, who with no warning at all began to see his life being turned upside down. It all started when his minister stopped him after church one day and asked him if he’d like to go to Africa. “He might as well have asked me if I’d like to go to the moon,” Brehm said.
Seeing his resistance, the pastor asked, “Will you pray about it?” Brehm looked him square in the eye and said, “Arthur, you’re the minister, you pray about it. I’ll think about it.”
About two months later this businessman found himself at an airport with a ticket booked to Ethiopia. But there were more surprises ahead. When he finally met up with the group he would be traveling with, they were surrounded by a group of “church ladies,” as he called them, there to send them off. This isn’t looking good, he thought. And just before they boarded, the group decided to hold hands and pray right there in the airport lounge. Brehm said he prayed all right, but his prayer was that none of his clients or business partners would walk by and see him.
Well, they went off for ten days in Africa. And, he says, he’s never been the same. “The moment I stepped onto African soil,” he said, “my life was altered.” He saw a world that before had only existed for him as a set of statistics. In Ethiopia he listened to surviving family members telling stories of loved ones lost during the years of famine; in Uganda he saw people everywhere dying of AIDS. For the first time, the senselessness of people starving to death overwhelmed him.
Brehm’s experience began to scramble the ways he had put his life together. As he puts it in his book, “White Man Walking,” everything he thought he knew about the world, his life, and God was up for grabs. God seemed intensely close, much closer than back home. Back there, he thought, with all our comfort and privileges, we are usually only able to see God when things fall apart. Now he was beginning to see God everywhere.
And he recalled an old saying, that sometimes God uses a pebble to get a person’s attention. If that doesn’t work, sometimes a larger rock. And for those who refuse to pay attention, God resorts to a brick. “Africa,” he said, “was my brick.” Since that first trip in 1992, Brehm has traveled to Africa regularly taking groups, especially of business executives, getting to see and experience what he had discovered.
I said his name was Ward Brehm. But I believe his real name is Nicodemus, that upstanding Pharisee leader Jesus encounters in the 3rd chapter of John’s Gospel. His career has gone well. He goes to synagogue, he prays regularly, probably has well-behaved children to boot. But for some reason he’s restless enough with his life to slip out under cover of night to find this rabbi named Jesus.
It’s by any standard a bizarre conversation. There’s a lot of talk but not much communication. Nicodemus leads off with a little cozy familiarity: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God…” “We know… ” You can almost hear the smug pretentiousness. After all, he’s a ruler of the synagogue. You and I know the deal. Everything is under control. And what are they supposed to “know?” Probably that God is nice and safe and not very interesting or creative. People are supposed to keep the rules, be responsible. Live a good life. That’s about it.
But Jesus blurts out, “You’ve got to be born from above, born anew,” which confuses Nicodemus completely. What does that mean? So Nicodemus tries to get a grip: “But how can anyone be born after having grown old? Can somebody go back into the mother’s womb and start over?” Our friend is a little literal-minded, you have to say.
And then Jesus just makes it worse when he says, “The wind blows where it chooses, you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going.” What kind of god is he talking about? Jesus uses two of the most uncontainable, uncontrollable phenomena, birth and wind, to talk about God. In both, something has to happen to you. We don’t get ourselves born; a birthing process does it to us. We don’t generate the wind; it drives us. Nicodemus can’t find God, or the kingdom of God, on his own. He has to start over, be born again. He can’t plan it, achieve it, or put it on his resume. It has to come “from above,” Jesus says, from beyond him.
This conversation was Nicodemus’ brick. God got his attention in a confusing exchange he would never forget. We aren’t told what happened to Nicodemus after his night meeting. Apparently nothing immediately. It must have taken some time for it all to sink in. But something shifted somewhere, because he turns up two more times in John’s Gospel. He’s in the Temple later when Jesus is accused by crowds demanding that he be arrested. One man stands up to defend him. His name is Nicodemus.
And at the very end, Jesus is dead, crucified, and there is Nicodemus right beside him. This time he isn’t there at night as a seeker, but as a disciple, helping to take Jesus’ body away.
Whether it’s a pebble, a rock, or a brick, God wants to get through to us, but that’s not so easy when we are all so focussed on other things. Right now it might be finances, maybe health, maybe relationships, or maybe it is just survival – just trying to get to tomorrow. Meanwhile we’re fighting battles of faith. It isn’t easy for God to get some time on our calendar, to get our full attention, to get us to take a chance on a deeper, different life. I believe that deep down most people would love to have God change their lives, but they either don’t expect it, or are afraid that if that started to happen it would ask too much of them.
When God throws a brick, anything can happen. The wind blows, the Spirit moves, people start getting born from above into whole new lives.
Have you noticed God tossing any pebbles your way lately? Or stones trying to get your attention? Maybe there’s a brick coming at you right now. Our God is a restless God, a relentless God who won’t turn us loose. God wants us to be born anew, to let the wind of the Spirit blow through us and fill our sails.
I don’t know how God will get through to you: through a trip to Africa, or Honduras maybe; in a personal crisis that sends you reeling; though a conversation, a book, a friend, a sermon, a hymn, a course.
“I pray that each of you will find your Africa,” Brehm writes. Africa is the place where you need to go so that God can find you, whether your Africa is a faraway continent or in Camrose or Holden or Edmonton, in your longtime job, or heading off in a new direction.
So where is your Africa? Is it John 3:16,17 – “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.”
This verse is foreshadowing the next couple weeks, because God is about to throw us a big brick, and as we go through this Lenten season, may we remember that God has redeemed us from a life of sin and death. Now that is a brick. Amen.
Reference: http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/lloyd_5208.htm
