Morning Prayer: Shannon Cook Hymn of Faith *Spirit of the Living God* The Witness of Scripture: John 3: 1-17 Anthem *God So Loved the World* John Stainer. FCC Chancel Choir Sermon *Tempted to Negate* David Spain
Recorded on March 5, 2023
The gospel of John loves to tell stories—long stories which are freighted with multiple levels of meaning. When John tells a story, bread is never just grain, water is never just liquid, seeing is never just identifying, living is never just chronological, dying is never just biological. John’s gospel is complex—so rich in symbols and signs that it feels like he goes a little William Faulkner on us from time to time. John’s stories have at least two consistent rhythms—each story begins with a conversation between someone and Jesus, during which Jesus overturns what is assumed to be the accepted way of thinking. John’s gospel loves to overturn assumptions; perhaps this is why the story of Jesus overturning the tables in the Temple is at the beginning of his gospel rather than during Holy Week like the other gospels. John wants us to know that tables are not all Jesus has come to overturn. So, regardless of which story is told, John moves us from orientation (here is what we are sure we know about life and faith), to disorientation (we are not sure what we know about life and faith), to reorientation (wow, we never knew life and faith could be like this). John overturns assumptions and presumptions about life and faith in order to help us see how expansive God’s good news is.
The other rhythm to John’s gospel is that he loves the grand scale. The conversations he tells of Jesus having may start small, but very quickly they encompass the mystery, the wonder, the grandeur of God. To be fair John gave us an inkling of this when he began his gospel. Remember how John starts—not with a list of ancestors or an angel’s visitation. John’s first words are big-“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Wow! John does not start with “O little town of Bethlehem.” John’s gospel begins before there was a Bethlehem, before there were prophets or kings, before there was Moses or Abraham, before there was Eden or anything. The scale is as grand as it can be with John, for he wants us to know that the stories he is about to tell of Jesus on this darkening earth began with Jesus in the heavenly lights. John is setting us up for surprise, setting us up to be astonished.
Astonished is what Nicodemus might say, and in fact it is what Jesus says to Nicodemus—"Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’”Although Nicodemus dwells in relative obscurity compared to Peter or even Judas, compared to the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan, he is one of the great characters in the Biblical story, for even with his credentials, he shares so much in common with faithful people through the ages. Nicodemus is not a bad guy—in fact he is a credible, honorable, respected person.He is a leader of the Jews, a Pharisee whose purpose is to help people live faithful, compassionate lives. Nicodemus, who knows about Jesus, gets the conversation started with a respectful compliment. He is orienting the conversation—'Rabbi we know you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God..” The conversation happens in the dark, and we wonder why John gives this detail. Maybe Nicodemus is busy, maybe Nicodemus has concerns about being seen with Jesus, maybe Nicodemus wants one on one time—two theologians batting around the biblical ball as it were. Maybe it is all of that, and with John even more.
So Nicodemus begins affirmatively and there is no reason to think Jesus is put off.However, Jesus (not even in the gospel of John) is interested in talking about himself or his credentials. So, he takes the conversation in a new direction, and it is disorienting for Nicodemus. Frederick Buechner imagines their conversation this way—“What the whole thing boiled down to, Jesus told him, was that unless you got born again, you might as well give up. That was all very well Nicodemus said, but just how were you supposed to pull off a thing like that? How especially were you supposed to pull it off if you were pushing sixty-five? How do you get born again when it was a challenge just to get out of bed in the morning? ‘Could a man enter a second time into his mother’s womb,’ when it was all he could do to enter a taxi without the driver’s coming around to give him a shove from behind?’ A gust of wind happened to whistle down the chimney at that point, making the dying embers burst into flame, and Jesus said being born again was like that. It wasn’t something you did. The wind did it. The Spirit did it. It was something that happened, for God’s sake.” (Peculiar Treasures, p. 122)
Down in deep Jesus central Texas where I grew up, getting born again was highly valued.However, most of the time most of the churches who emphasized getting born again did not leave it to the Spirit to come whistling down the chimney. There began to be markers, signs, proof that you were born again—for some churches it wasn’t enough to be baptized by immersion, there began to be spiritual checklists. Well, okay fine—but not really! That kind of religious perspective is actually moving in the opposite direction of this story of Jesus and Nicodemus. And what’s worse, far too often and beginning not long after John wrote his gospel, Nicodemus was made into a villain, made into a caricature representing all Jews who did not get Jesus. The bitter irony emerging from 2,000 years of short-sighted interpreting of the gospel of John is that not only this story, but others have been used to justify the horrors of antisemitic belief and behavior. How can it be that all these years later, hatred of our Jewish neighbors across the globe is on the rise, which reveals the heinous truth that Christianity void of compassion for others testifies to the abject absence of God’s spirit, confirming what Pascal wrote that men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
If we can shake off the spiritual arrogance and the antisemitic echoes that have too often siphoned the grace of this story, we might be able to hear the good news, the astonishing news that John’s gospel is telling us. The story reminds us that sometimes when we look into the faithful mirrors of our lives, it is Nicodemus who looks back. We can get settled, comfortable, doctrineaire in our faith, tempted to believe that what we believe is about all there is to believe about God, about religion, about the Bible, about others. We get in our lanes and that popular mantra ‘it is what it is’ can morph into ‘and that is all there is.’ For a variety of reasons, we can all be tempted to negate.Jesus wants Nicodemus to know that God is not through with him even if he does have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. With God, there is always more to come, so we hold our beliefs gently and gracefully, not tightly and prescriptively. To be sure the Spirit blows where it will just as Jesus said, but the story reminds us that locked up beliefs and airtight dogmas are hard orientations to penetrate.So, Jesus offers a disorienting word that is a grace-filled word. God is not through with you Nicodemus, not through with any of us.
Since this is John’s gospel, we know there is so much more happening. Nicodemus coming at night is more than just reporting when this conversation happened. In John’s world view, a pre-vailing idea was that the universe existed in two tiers. The ‘world’ is the lower level, a place of hatred and darkness and scarcity and inequity.‘Heaven’ is the upper level, a place of life and light and abundance and justice. Nicodemus lives where there is more darkness than light, a darkness that surrounds him and threatens to penetrate him, not because he is a Pharisee but because he struggles to navigate the darkness and the hatred, the scarcity and the inequity. It is now that we remember the opening to John’s gospel—“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Contrary to a world view that might assume God staying distant from such darkness and hatred safely ensconced in heavenly light; John writes that Jesus, bearing the light of heaven, comes to earth. God does not play it safe; instead, as John wrote in the first chapter God has come to lodge among us—heavenly light that cannot be overcome by earthly darkness. But it is not just light that comes, it is how that light comes—not as a searing torch to annihilate but as a glowing light to infiltrate. Challenging the assumption that God would be angry and punitive, John writes that improbably, shockingly, and reorientingly, God loves the world tenaciously and vulnerably. God loves the world through the life of Jesus who lives the eternal light of grace and mercy and justice and compassion now. We miss John’s good news if we think eternal life comes only after death; instead, John says we live God’s eternal life now as well. To reinforce this reorienting life of faith, after the most well-known scripture (John 3:16) “God so loved the world,” John also writes what is seldom remembered, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but so that the world might be saved through him,” which is to say through acts of justice and mercy and love and grace, the heavenly light Christ embodies on earth is also the torch we take up. When someone slaps John 3:16 on white poster-board and sticks it between the goalposts, we miss how astonishing this story is. John wants us to know that even if someone might be tempted to negate, God will not.
John Buchanan, retired minister of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, tells the story of baptizing a two-year old child. He read the standard pronouncement from the prayer book: ‘You are a child of God, sealed by the Spirit in your baptism, and you belong to Jesus Christ forever.’ Unexpectedly the child responded, “Uh-oh.” Buchanan concludes– “It was an appropriate response…a stunning theological affirmation.” Tom Long observes, “Likewise, Nicodemus’ response to Jesus could be heard as a shocked ‘uh-oh.’ Moving politely toward Jesus with an inquiry, Nicodemus finds Jesus moving toward him…to transform him.” (
The Christian Century,
4/26/18) Thanks be to God, God is not deterred by our being tempted to negate. Uh-oh!