Homily | 💸 Living As Heirs, Not Earners

Second Sunday in Lent

Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

I experimented and went a bit ‘off-manuscript’ this week, so what’s below is more of a homiletical essay I used to inspire the actual homily. And here’s the song I referenced in the homily. Okay, enjoy the good news!

Assigned Lectionary Scripture: Genesis 12:1-4a | Romans 4:1-5, 13-17 | John 3:1-17

There’s a song by Macklemore called Wing$ (2012). It’s a three-minute confession about what I’m going to call the “sideways look.” He describes growing up with those “Like Mike” commercials. If he could just get his hands on a pair of Air Jordan 4s, he would “finally fly.”

But the song takes a dark turn. A friend’s brother gets murdered for his Fours. The killer didn’t kill for leather and rubber. He killed for the glory they represented because the victim had something the killer thought he needed to finally be someone. This is the sideways look taken to its most violent extreme.

The philosopher René Girard had a name for this: mimetic desire. We don’t just want what we want. We want what the other wants. We construct our identities by scanning the horizontal plane, measuring ourselves against what we see. Whether it’s the peptide influencer in the 2020s, Air Jordans in the nineties, a certain zip code in the seventies, or a “holier-than-thou” reputation in Nicodemus’s day, it’s all the same exhausting labor of trying to manufacture a self by looking sideways.

And when that rivalry boils over into chaos (which it always does) tribes find a release valve: the scapegoat. Someone a little different, a little odd. The accusatory finger points: they caused this. Cast them out. Or, the words we approach on Good Friday: Crucify him.

Girard saw Jesus as God doing something wild: becoming human and stepping into the role of the scapegoat. In the resurrection, God absorbed our violence and returned not in vengeance, but in peace. As if to say: you cannot kill Love. Because I am Love. And Love is indestructible.

Which brings us to our friend Nicodemus.

By all accounts, he was a really good man. His life was organized around the law: right living, the prayers, loving God and neighbor and the widow and the poor. In his world, he was the influencer of influencers. The stakes weren’t just cool sneakers, they were the very standards of God.

So he comes to Jesus. But notice when. John doesn’t have to tell us it was night. But he does. Nicodemus has a reputation to protect, a tribe to remain in good standing with. Showing up at the feet of this itinerant rabbi would be like Macklemore wearing LA Gears in the Jordan heyday. So he comes quietly, in the dark. Which means, unlike other Pharisees in the gospels, he doesn’t come to test Jesus publicly, but with something almost like quiet, curious wonder.

“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.”

He can’t quite name why. But in Jesus’s presence, I imagine the tension in his jaw and shoulders melts away. He feels, somehow, more alive.

Jesus goes straight for the heart:

“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

And Nicodemus short-circuits. You know the spinning rainbow wheel on a MacBook? That’s his brain. The only categories he has, after a lifetime of earning his standing, are effort, process, achievement. Born from above? His linear mind asks the only logical question: how does a grown man climb back into his mother’s womb?

He’s not being stupid. He’s doing exactly what any of us would do. He’s trying to translate gift into the grammar of achievement. And it simply won’t work. You can’t think your way into being born. Birth happens to you, for you, from entirely outside you.

The Greek word is anothen: both “again” and “from above.” To be born from above is not to try harder or recommit. It is to receive a self you did not construct.

The theologian James Alison describes it as the difference between an heir and a laborer. A laborer is always checking the clock, in competition with the other workers. But an heir simply knows the estate belongs to her; not because she earned it or deserves it, but because of whose she is.

To be born from above is to stop receiving your identity from the sideways glance of rivalry and to start receiving yourself as a gift from the God who is, as Alison puts it, “inordinately fond of you.”

Whose love you cannot kill, no matter how swept up in scapegoating you become, on the giving or receiving end.

This isn’t another self-improvement project. It’s a new source. A new birth.

But Jesus goes further, reaching back into the wilderness. The people of Israel were dying, bitten by poisonous serpents. God tells Moses: make a bronze serpent and lift it up on a pole. Everyone who looks at it will live. The very thing that was killing them, held up, becomes the source of healing.

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

The one lifted up on the cross — expelled, scapegoated, condemned by the very systems Nicodemus belongs to — becomes the healer. The scapegoat becomes the Savior.

“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.”

This is the most weaponized verse in the Bible. And those who weaponize it almost always fail to read the next one:

“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.”

God did not send Jesus to change God’s mind about us. Jesus is God’s mind about us. You are loved before you have done anything to deserve it, and you will go on being loved after every false system of deserving has collapsed into dust. This is the shape of grace. It was never the exception. It was always the whole point.

Macklemore ends his song strangled by his laces. The very shoes he longed for become the thing that binds. The sideways look never delivers.

But this table is the anti-Wings. We don’t arrive with our achieved selves or our social media selves. We arrive with our hunger the way Nicodemus arrived... In the dark, longing for something we can’t quite name.

And we are fed by a Source that doesn’t run out. The God who came down into bread and wine and flesh to tell us: you are already heirs — no, not Nike Airs, heirs — and you don’t have to win this. It was given before you knew you needed it.

This is Lent, a season of honest seeing. Not self-punishment. Honest seeing.

What part of Nicodemus’s story are you in today? Outside the door, drawn but only coming at night? In the conversation, trying to fit gift into the grammar of achievement? Faithful by every measure, yet still aware, in the quiet hours, that you’ve been building yourself out of the wrong material?

The one who was lifted up in the dark is standing here. Meeting you exactly where Nicodemus was met: in the night, in the confusion, in the hunger you can’t quite name.

You don’t have to earn this. You couldn’t, even if you tried. You only have to receive it.

For you are born from above. Thanks be to God.