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‘A’ // Lent 2 // 2-17-08 // Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church
Scriptures Genesis 12:1-4a Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
Psalm 121 John 3:1-17
By Night
Ah, yes: It’s February. The heart of February. The heart of the longest shortest month of the year. A month in which we’ve experienced the Super Bowl, Super Tuesday … and, for many Michiganders we know, a time for super depression.
Thanks to the lunar calendar this year (and hence, the extremely early date of Easter, March 23): For once, the season of Lent, dour and spare, lands square on the doorstep of this dankest of months.
For this year, Lent and the formal remainder of a Michigan winter overlap, in the rarest of ways. The rarest of ways, these forty days, of Easter preparation.
Ah, yes: Easter. You remember Easter. Spring. Sunshine. Flowers. New life.
Easter: The time we set aside for our rebirth.
Or … so we are often led to think.
“Jesus answered (Nicodemus), ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’”
He says this, when this leader of the Pharisees shows up at his doorstep under the cover of night. Much like the night that covers us all during this Lenten season.
“Born from above.” Rebirth. Dare we say it: Born again.
Why the need for us to be reborn – sans stockpiling our hope on the narrative of Easter?
In his own way, Nicodemus may have posed that question with his opening statement – the one that prompted Jesus’ response.
“"Rabbi,” says Nicodemus, upon first approaching Jesus, “We know that 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.”
Perhaps Nicodemus was simply flattering Jesus – setting him up as an honorable foe, that he might then find a way to shame this renegade rabbi. You know the ploy: Screen him, preen him … and then, cream him. But why not give Nicodemus the benefit of the doubt? Perhaps he truly believes God’s presence in Jesus is remarkable – “no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God” – and wants to leave it at that.
How interesting, then, that Jesus neither takes the insincere bait or the sincere affirmation – both of which (let’s face it) are cheap. How interesting, then, that Jesus responds, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
It’s of no consequence, Jesus is saying, that you, Nicodemus – you whose triumphal name means “victory of the people” – are a leader among men … and oh, yes, as well as your collateral known as women.
And it’s of no consequence that I have done all of these signs, and I am simply waiting for you, a symbol of power, to acknowledge them.
Something’s missing. Something lingering in the dark. Something Nicodemus – we – feel Jesus can best be approached by the cover of night.
Our status in life cannot save us; we’ve tried that. Neither can our specious flattery – or, our sincere statements of faith.
The evangelicals are right. They must be. When they are not huckstering conversion on the backs of our fear, the evangelicals are right: It takes an experience of God so deep, so transforming, so … rebirthing, that no February darkness can overcome it, and no long Easter vigil need diminish it.
Rebirthing: a new experience of our own birth. As Anna Carter Florence puts it,
We can assume that there is pain involved; labor; weight; responsibility. The Spirit bears with us – alien creatures, growing to fullness in the body of Christ – and the Spirit bears all that comes with us. It is messy and complicated and embarrassingly embodied. There are repercussions. There are consequences. There are stitches and secretions, not all of which are fit for polite conversation.1
Rebirthing: messy … complicated … consequential. Stitches … secretions … and yes: an afterbirth.
A process – always, a process -- that can only erupt from the womb of our despair. That can only bear fruit in the winter of our discontent.
That can often come to us in a time of Lent. By night.
With nothing to show God how good we are. With no benign affirmation needed of Nicodemus’ “the presence of God”.
As well as with no requirement of benign intellectual assent – which, alas, is what we seem to have made of that famous “belief” statement in John 3:16.
All that is required is something called our incarnation: Our presence being birthed from God’s presence. It’s as incarnational as the Spirit-wind which blows across all creation. It’s as incarnational as the water of our baptism, marking us for a life grafted into Christ’s body.
Born again of the water and the spirit. Our rebirth – which needs not wait for an Easter to begin.
Instead, rebirths seems best to begin with approaching Jesus by the darkness of our night – or even in the shadows of our day. That we may even find, in the words of the Psalmist today, that “God is the shade at (our) side.”
Let us not engage John’s gospel narrative today without at least a word about John 3:16.
Whenever I think of John 3:16, I think of the "Rainbow Man”. Born-again believer Rollen Stewart – a bearded young man with a wild rainbow wig – and his John 3:16 signs were fixtures at major events in the 1970s and 80s. He brought his message to the Olympics, the World Cup, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and The Masters golf tournament.
“Rainbow Man” and his sign were outside Buckingham Palace when Di and Charles wed. “Rainbow Man” and his sign went to see the Pope in Alaska.
Recently, I was saddened to learn that Rollen Stewart – like oh so many who display their faith for all the world to see – apparently became more fanatic than faithful. It seems he planned to assassinate the first President Bush and candidate Bill Clinton in 1992. And he's now serving three life sentences for kidnapping a maid at a Los Angeles Hyatt, also in that year.
Three life sentences, for he wouldn’t plea bargain. He wanted the publicity of a trial to get out his message based on John 3:16.2
Perhaps Rainbow Man would have done well – and all of us could do well today – to focus instead on the verse after John 3:16:
“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.”
There’s no suggestion of condemnation – no casting out – in this verse. Indeed, that ideaf is expressly eliminated. Only the hope “that we might be saved.”
As the Apostle Paul also uses this central motif of the faith: Salvation is a process. A rebirthing process: messy … laborious ... consequential … incarnational. We are to be about being saved.
Less of an assent of affirming some thing. More of an awakening of journeying somewhere.
A rebirth and reawakening we might best receive when we come to our Jesus by night.
1Anna Carter Florence, “Preaching the Lesson: Second Sunday in Lent”, in “Lectionary Homiletics”, Volume XIX, Number 2, p. 26.
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