Nicodemus in All of Us

Each of us has a bit of Nicodemus in us, I think.

Nicodemus was a smart guy; a scholar, most likely, and a leader of the Jews. He was a Pharisee, which has an incredibly negative connotation, but the impression that is given is that Nicodemus heard about Jesus, and simply had to see for himself what was going on. The impression that is given is that Nicodemus is yearning for something that he cannot precisely explain.

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, the Gospel reads, and he was set on asking Jesus questions. Already things are not as clear as they seem. Why did Nicodemus come by night?

There are a few  different interpretations. Many believe that Nicodemus was hiding who he was, that he was ashamed that he was asking questions of this crazy new prophet, Jesus. If that is the case, however, he was singularly unsuccessful, considering people recognized him enough to name him specifically. 

 

Perhaps, as some people believe, Nicodemus was there to spy on Jesus for the Pharisees, as happens in other places in the Bible. This is also unlikely; the language Nicodemus uses is simply not appropriate for a non-believer to use; “We know you are a teacher who comes from God.”

Another interpretation is that Nicodemus wanted to talk to Jesus, and that at night was the only time Nicodemus could get through the crowd. Jesus had just performed his first miracle, the turning of water into wine, and had just driven the money lenders out of the temple. I can’t imagine people not crowding around him and hearing him teach, to hear him speak.

Regardless of the reason, Nicodemus came by night, which in the Gospel of John is not just speaking of the time of day. John’s Gospel starts off with the famous words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The spirit of God moved over the waters like a wind, creating the world.

 

By the fourth verse of chapter one, John has called Jesus the Light. “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it,” says John. This is a recurring theme throughout John’s Gospel; that Jesus is the light, and it is possible that every instance of light or of darkness mentioned in this Gospel is intentional and is a reflection of the light of Jesus.

So Nicodemus comes in the night to Jesus. As one in the Darkness, Nicodemus does not understand, is currently unable to understand what Jesus is talking about. After declaring that Jesus must be from God, as “no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God,” Jesus says that no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.

Have you heard the term, born again Christian? I’m sure that you have, and that idea actually comes from this verse. “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” In Greek, the word for from above has two meanings; it can also mean born anew.

 We need to read that passage with both meanings in mind in order to fully appreciate what it is that Jesus is saying.

“No one can see the kingdom of God without being born anew from above.” You can practically hear Nicodemus’s agony as he asks the next question. “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born again?”

Nicodemus is more than a little distressed. I can imagine him being exhausted with his spirituality, finding it stale, searching for answers he is unable to find. When he finally hears about someone who is clearly from God, he CANNOT GET A STRAIGHT ANSWER FROM HIM.

Jesus, our ever more confusing Savior, does little to relieve Nicodemus’s confusion. Jesus says you must be born of water and Spirit; that the wind blows where it chooses, and while we can hear the sound of it, we cannot know where it goes to or where it comes from.  There’s that wind again; the same wind that moved over the waters and formed creation.

 

Nicodemus’s retort is absolutely priceless. “Huh?”

How often are we left just as confused? This world is broken; there is hate and suffering. Why God? Why is there sickness, is there pain, is there hunger, why do we yearn for things that we cannot find, yearn for something we cannot express. why Why WHY?

Very truly, Jesus says, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen. No one has ascended into heaven except the Son of Man who descended from Heaven. No one can understand until we have experienced the Spirit in a way that we cannot here on earth experience it.

Yet there is hope, Jesus says. “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.” In fact, Jesus goes on to say, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through the Son.

We do not know if Nicodemus was satisfied by the answers that Jesus gave him. We do know that Nicodemus later defended Jesus in front of the chief priests and other Pharisees, and with Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus wrapped Jesus’s body in linen and myrrh after the crucifixion.

Nicodemus knew that his life was missing something, and went to Jesus to see if the answers were there. He certainly got answers, but not necessarily the ones he was looking for.

Nicodemus was frustrated with Jesus. Nicodemus has all of these really solid questions, he found out how to meet up with Jesus, and Jesus won’t give him an answer he can comprehend.

Nicodemus was filled with doubt, but Nicodemus chose to follow Christ anyway, even if everything was confusing and slightly unclear. 

I think there is a little of Nicodemus in all of us.

As I was reading information about Nicodemus, I came across a poem by a gentlemen named Andrew King. I absolutely love it, and I encourage you to read Heart Becoming Morning.

Whoever would be first among you, must be slave to all.

In the diocese of Nebraska, the Lenten challenge is called 20-1-4. 20 minutes of prayer a day, one hour of worship a week, and four hours of service a month. It’s 2014, so it’s not too hard to remember. 20 minutes of prayer a day, one hour of worship a week, four hours of service a month.

praying 20 minutes a day; not that easy for me, but not impossible either. I am able to sit down and pray pretty much every day, and I often (though certainly not always) able to pray for 20 minutes. It’s a great discipline to continue working on.

Worshiping one hour a week. Check. The good news for you is that you are here, on a Wednesday. It is very likely that you do not find this particularily challenging as you have started already. The good news for Tom is that this is a short sermon, and the service won’t last an hour, so I’ll see you all on Sunday, too.  

Serving other people, for four hours a month doesn’t sound like much, but for me, it is by far the hardest to accomplish. I work at church, I work at Miller Park, and I really like my days off. With as much as I have had going on this year at Resurrection House, and here at All Saints, I have really failed in this regard. I do not serve others enough.

The Gospel reading for today is explicit. Whoever would be great among you must be your servant. We are called, while we are here on our Earthly journey, to serve others. To feed the hungry, house the homeless. To do what we can to make other people suffer less.

Serve Others, Jesus says.

At All Saints, we have many opportunities to serve others. The first Sunday of every month, All Saints sends a team to the Sienna/Francis House to literally serve food to the hungry and house people who are homeless. The Dean Fricke Pantry is a partner of All Saints, and they literally feed the hungry. We all have opportunities to serve.

I was in the car the other month, and my friend Caleb was driving. Just as we passed an exit, I noticed that there was a car on the side of the road with what looked like a flat tire, and pointed it out.  Caleb drove for about five miles to the next exit, and turned around on the freeway.

“Don’t you think they will have it fixed by the time we get there? It just looked like a flat,” I asked him.

Well, as we drove to the exit BEFORE where I saw the car, it was still there, and was in fact still there as we finally got there (having driven about fifteen miles at this point).

It turns out that there was nothing that we could do anyway, and ended up just chatting for a bit and then heading on our way. It was a flat and the jack in our car didn’t work on his, and he had someone coming with a proper jack.

As we were driving away, Caleb then told me that it is just like the parable of the vineyard, where two sons are asked to help out and one says yes, and the other no; they then do the opposite of what they said they would do. Which was God pleased with?

If your intentions don’t lead to a change in your actions, is God pleased?

I am aware that I have actively failed to serve others. I do not do enough of what Jesus is explicitly calling me to do. Every week I see the Habitat for Humanity signup sheet in the Narthex, and every week I walk by without signing up. For the last two or three weeks, there have been no names on it at all.

This is Lent; a time of year that people often give something up to improve themselves. I am going to take something on. I will be at the Habitat site this Saturday. In this Lenten season, pray. Worship. And Serve Others.  

What's That On Your Forehead?

There I sat jealous of the other kids, it seemed like all of them had it, but me. No matter where I looked, I could find a forehead with that big black mark. Growing up, this happened every Ash Wednesday, and I wanted to get ashes just like all the other kids. In elementary school those ashes meant that those kids got to leave school during the day (which I never got to do), they got to go to church and get ashes on their foreheads, come back to school and walk around with what I considered a badge of honor.

Don’t worry though, I still got ashes on Ash Wednesday. But since both of my parents were teachers, we always went to the service at night, which meant I never got to show off my big black cross. At the time, not only were those ashes super cool, but they are an outward sign that I was a Christian, and that was the really important part, right? Jesus wants us to spread his words and teachings, and what better way to do that than on Ash Wednesday, when everyone can see me sporting a big black cross on my forehead. I can’t be more obvious than that.

Wait a minute I am seeing a contradiction here. In the gospel reading that is exactly what Jesus warns us not to do. He says it blatantly, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” Alright, but does that really refer to what I wanted in elementary school. Let’s look at the piece of scripture in the context of the time. This piece of scripture is a part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He is speaking to a group of primarily Jewish people about their own individual piety, or how they should each practice their devoutness to God.

The commentaries I read on this passage were quick to point out that Jesus was not being critical of the Jewish ideas of piety. What he was emphasizing was the intention behind performing those acts of piety. When Jesus states, “So when you give alms, do not sound the trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others.” Jesus wants his followers to understand what their intention should be in performing those acts of piety. If someone gives alms for the sake of being praised, that’s not the reason for practicing that piece of piety. Giving alms is supposed to be a way of becoming closer to God, not for being praised and rewarded by our peers.

Why did I want to get those ashes again? What was I centering my idea of getting ashes around?

During the book study on The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, Lewis portrays this same idea in a young painter. While in Heaven, the painter is having a conversation with a Spirit about his pieces of art. The Spirit tries to help the painter remember the reason he started painting. Initially it was to share the pieces of heaven he witnessed around him. And the painter was successful artist because his paintings enabled others to see those glimpses of heaven. But now in Heaven, the painter doesn’t understand that idea. He believes that it was the painting was what people were impressed with and appreciated. Frustrated, the Spirit tries to make the painter understand what his paintings really meant to people, and says, “Light itself was your first love; you loved paint only as a means of telling about light.”

You loved paint only as a means of telling about light.

Lewis perfectly illustrates how and what we should be centering our lives on, the light. Which I took to mean the light of Christ. And this is exactly where I fall or get lost sometimes. The point of getting ashes on my forehead was not for me to boast about the classroom and to show off how pious I was or wasn’t. The point of practicing piety is to grow closer to God, to feel the love God has for us, which enables us to share that love with others.

Lent is not simply a time for giving up candy or Facebook for the sake of practicing obedience. It is an opportunity to strip away those distractions and practice forms of piety that bring us into a closer relationship with God. It is a time for us to reflect on how we share how much God loves us. And this is overwhelming sometimes, at least for me to truly comprehend. God loves us so much that he gave us his only son. Jesus was on Earth to show us how to share God’s love with others. And because of him, we can share that love through whatever means we feel conveys the light and the love God, just like the painter. Perhaps in elementary school, my intention for wearing a black cross on my forehead wasn’t the best way for me to share God’s love with others. Although the silver lining to that story is that God doesn’t condemn me for wanting to do that.

There is a particular line during the service today that reveals this good news, it says, “He pardons and absolves all those who truly repent, and with sincere hearts believe his holy Gospel”. Even though I got wrapped up in sporting a black cross on my forehead, God knows where our hearts are and if we get lost, will guide them back into the light.