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Sermon - February 24th, 2008
Nicodemus
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: John 3:1-17
Prayer: We give thanks, O God, for sacred stories. Through the holy scriptures you nurture our imaginations, increase our awareness, and challenge our assumptions. May the words of my mouth and meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Most of the Gospel of John sounds like a course in metaphysics, advanced metaphysics. It would be easier to simplify any story with the Pharisees in it by making them the bad guys, except we have this story about a Pharisee named Nicodemus to make things complicated. The Pharisees were the defenders of the faith. They were in charge of keeping holy things holy, and they were suspicious of people like Jesus. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I” a lot--- I, I, I--- “I am the bread of life,” “I am the good shepherd,” “I am the true vine,” “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me.”
Those were outrageous claims for anyone to make, but for a Jew they were unthinkable. They were blasphemous. For the Jews there was only one good shepherd, one true vine, one bread of life, and that is the almighty God. Who did Jesus think he was, anyway? That was what the Pharisees wanted to know. Jesus passed himself off as a believer in God, but that was not how he sounded. He sounded like a rival, one of those dangerous and attractive preachers who get carried away by their own charisma and get the message all confused with the messenger.
In one argument, when Jesus told them, “I am the light of the world,” the Pharisees charged him like a bull seeing red and things got worse. They questioned each other’s sanity and disputed each other’s parentage. “You are from below,” Jesus told them. “I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world… you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am.” It drove the Pharisees wild. They heard what he was up to; they heard the echo that Jesus meant for them to hear—that other voice coming out of a burning bush explaining to Moses, “I am who I am.”
Can you see why the Pharisees got upset? Jesus was abusing God’s holy name, as far as they were concerned. When they challenged him on it, he told them they were the ones who were wrong. Not only that, he told them that if they did not believe that he was who he was, then they would die in their sins. “Who are you?” They asked him, and you could almost hear the exasperation in their voices. You definitely could hear it in Jesus’ response, “Why do I speak to you at all?” And the question just hung there, unanswered. The question of faith, the one question we ought to know the answer to and the one question that continues to haunt many of us because we do not know the answer, not completely, not in any way that is easy to explain.
Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a leader, and he went to Jesus by night. Now, we can understand why he went to see Jesus at night. It was a private and secret meeting. It also could have been a metaphorical description of Nicodemus’ life, he came to Jesus by night, out of his own feeling of darkness. What ever it was, Nicodemus came to Jesus with questions. Nicodemus came to Jesus seeking something. Nicodemus took a risk to encounter Jesus, a big risk.
Jesus told Nicodemus that no one could see the Kingdom without being born again, born of the Spirit, born from above. He told Nicodemus to reach into his own tradition as a teacher of the faith to understand. He spoke of believing so he would not perish. He said, God loved the world so much…and if he believed he would have eternal life. And then at the end of the conversation, the part that was not read this morning, Jesus told Nicodemus that the light had come into the world. But those who do evil hate the light, but those who do what is true come to the light.
Nicodemus came to Jesus at night and learned about being born again, living in the light, and doing what is true. Did he leave Jesus that night still in the dark, or did he see the light? We don’t know. However, he is mentioned one more time in the Gospel of John in chapter 7. He was standing in the midst of a crowd that was condemning Jesus. This one voice of authority spoke up, Nicodemus, who had gone to see Jesus before, saying, “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?” The crowd dispersed and Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
So would you say that Nicodemus was born again? We don’t use that language much in the United Methodist Church. But after what I’ve been through with my daughter, Emma these last few weeks, I’m wondering if there are times where using that kind of language is helpful, perhaps even needed. Giving birth to my children was really hard and really painful. But the kind of labor I’ve done with Emma these past weeks has been hard emotional labor.
Birth is not easy. Not when one’s whole life needs to change. We labor to be born. We strain to be delivered of darkness into light. And through all our laboring, God also labors: to deliver what is whole in us from what is broken, to deliver what is true in us from what is false. Be holy. Be healed. Be human. Because the light shines forth in the darkness, giving power to us all to become children of God. It is not easy to save us when half the time we don’t even want to be saved because we are at home where we are, even if it is in the darkness.
I’ve been learning a lot about living in darkness and living with lies. Emma, who will be 19 on Thursday, has been in residential treatment since January 31st for her addiction to alcohol. Since she was just 15, she has lived in a dark world. It is a life where the addict not only lies to everyone they love, but also to themselves. It is a life that gradually destroys everything that gives life. They don’t call it sin at the treatment center for obvious reasons-- it is a word that is loaded with guilt, blame, and threat of eternal damnation. The word sin judges and causes discomfort. I understand completely why the word sin is not used much. However, abandoning the language of sin and confession and repentance, and all those uncomfortable, loaded theological words does not make sin go away.
From the beginning of relationships, we have experienced the effects of sin. And not using the language will simply leave us speechless before these effects. Barbara Brown Taylor says in her book, Speaking of Sin, the full impact of grace cannot be felt apart from the full impact sin. So, as I have learned, during Emma’s treatment, even though they use different language, sin is Emma’s only hope. It is also our only hope because ignorance is not always bliss. Ignorance in my experience with Emma, is agony. Ignorance is agony. However, if in our agony, we begin to measure the distance between us and God, or where we are and where God created us to be, if we recognize that we are cut off from what gives us life, if we name our experience as sin, then and only then do we have what we need to begin the rough road, of turning back. It is then when sin wakes us up to the possibility to true repentance, and to life, eternal life. And I’m not talking about eternal life after you die. I’m talking about eternal life right now, where we are so much a part of life that each moment is precious, where we live attentively and with intention every moment of the day.
In the life of the addict and alcoholic, the easy way out is to continue using, to continue a life of hell here on earth. The labor is in being born again and it is a hard road to confess the truth about one’s life, the destruction of relationships, of one’s self-respect. The labor is realizing that help is needed, admitting that, turning around, repenting, and making a plan for recovery. The choice is to choose life or choose death. And it is not just something that happens once. It happens every day, every hour.
Kathleen Norris tells this story: Once a little boy wrote a poem called, “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” He began by admitting that he hated it when his father yelled at him. His response in the poem was to throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concluded: “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’”
“My messy house” says it all, with more honesty than most adults can muster. The boy who wrote the poem made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?
Repentance is the decision that it is time to clean up our messy house, to make it into a place where God might wish to dwell – and where the image of God in us can find a home as well. It is not an easy decision. Because the most difficult mess to face is the mess we create in ourselves.
I wonder about the church these days, a lot. I wonder about our relevance, our future, and what our purpose is in this post-modern world. We who love the church tend to be like the Pharisees in Jesus’ day. We are the keepers of the faith which often manifests itself as keepers of the way things are or the way things were when we were thriving. I believe that people need the church more than ever in these times because we are where people want to find purpose and meaning and a reason to live, we can be a light in a dark, messy world. However, often the church is not that helpful. Barbara Brown Taylor describes two kinds of churches: church with a no-fault theology and church with a full-fault theology. No-fault theology is where no one is responsible because everyone else is. These churches operate more as clinics, where sin-sick patients receive sympathetic care for their ailments. No one expects to be fully cured, which is why there is little emphasis on sin. Sin is excused.
Full-fault theology is where the individual is the only one responsible—especially those who do not belong to their church. It is a church-as-courtroom-style. Sin is pounded into the ground in this kind of church. Sins and sinners are named out loud, along with punishments according to their crimes.
Barbara Brown Taylor says that true repentance from our sins does not work in these kind of churches. We cannot simply excuse sin nor can we pound it into the ground. We must find a way to be a church community were members are expected and supported to be about the business of new life, of truth-telling, of living in the light. We need to be a community where people can come and see that God is calling us toward a purpose as big as our capabilities. We are here to confess all the ways we run the other direction—away from God and God’s call. We are here so that we have a community in which we may confess our sin, our own turning away from life. We are here so we have a place where we may repent of our fear, our hardness of heart, our isolation, our addictions, our loss of vision. Then having repented, we are here so we may be restored to the fullness of life—a life of living with the truth and living in the light.
Last Monday night, Emma confessed her sins. They call it her “first step” where she told the truth for the first time, the whole story of her life of addiction. On Tuesday, day after tomorrow, the labor of repentance begins, the work of recovery, when she walks out the door of the treatment center. She needs to change her whole life. And she can if she wants to, if she works her program deligently. It is the same with all of us. Sin is our only hope. Because ignorance is not bliss; it is agony. But when we name and claim and confess our sin—we can begin the labor of repentance, of walking in the light. And it will change us.
Nicodemus went to Jesus at night. He told the truth and heard the truth. And he walked home in the light. It was a new beginning for him. And all new beginnings are a gift from God, a chance to be born again, to be made new. Thanks be to God.
Amen.
1. Barbara Brown Taylor, Speaking of Sin.
2. Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith.