“Strangers in the Night” - Sermon by Senior Minister Deborah K. Stevens, Feb. 17, 2008, at North Broadway United Methodist Church, Columbus, Ohio

Scripture: John 3:1-17

These verses from the third chapter of John contain two particular references that have so shaped popular Christianity that we can hardly afford to be strangers to their meaning. One of those is the reference to being “born again.” The second of those is that famous verse, John 3:16, the verse that so many of us learned as very young Sunday school students, the verse that we see written on a placard and displayed by some energetic evangelists wherever large crowds gather, usually at sporting events. “For God so loved the world,” this is the way I learned it, “that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Can you believe 5-year-olds were learning words like “begotten” and “whosoever believeth”? But that’s how I learned it.

So God bless Nicodemus, this stranger who comes to Jesus in the night, whose conversation with Jesus gives us these most famous and most difficult of theological issues. The gospel of John is thought to be the latest of the gospels composed. It has as its subject the person of Jesus and the question of Jesus’ identity as the Christ, questions of the purpose of Jesus’ life and the meaning of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection for people who are struggling to understand how to be faithful to the God of Israel. The entire gospel stands as one persistent question. That persistent question is posed to the potential believer and, as the gospel moves along in its narrative structure, the question grows ever more stronger: Are you with Jesus or are you with those who are against Jesus? Read all of John sometime and see how as you are the listener to the stories you are pushed and pushed and pushed with that question: Are you with Jesus?

In this section of the gospel, it’s early and so we meet the first of a series of characters who confront Jesus with questions about his identity. As we eavesdrop on their conversation, our own questions begin to become clearer. Nicodemus is a seeker after the God of Israel. He is described as a Pharisee. He has been following a religious path, but something he has seen about Jesus has intrigued him, intrigued him enough that under cover of darkness he decides to pursue his questions. We usually interpret Nicodemus coming by night to mean that he might have been ashamed to be seen with Jesus, or he was so confused that the night serves as a symbolic reference to his spiritual confusion, or that it was so threatening for him to be seen with Jesus by day that his only choice was to come by night. Any of those possibilities could be true. Perhaps all of them are. But doesn’t the nighttime setting also give us, the audience, a chance to eavesdrop on an otherwise private conversation? Doesn’t the setting by night early in the gospel minimize our risk, too? Under the cover of darkness we are given the opportunity to eavesdrop on information about the identity and meaning of Jesus that just might answer some of our own questions.

So then in what ways does Nicodemus stand as a representative for us and our struggles with the gospel, with the identity and the meaning of Jesus? Nicodemus has watched Jesus from the fringes. Haven’t some of us participated in religious life from the fringes? Nicodemus has observed some things. It’s interesting what he has observed. I think he sort of represents those of us who like to base our conclusions on what we can see and verify. The Myers-Briggs people would probably say that Nicodemus is an ‘S’. He needs sensory data from which to draw his conclusions. Listen – ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could do these things that you do apart from the presence of God.’ He has been watching Jesus and he’s put together the evidence, and so he at least has this conclusion that somehow Jesus is in the presence of God. So then we learn something about Jesus. We learn that he appears to enjoy challenging Nicodemus’ preferred way of knowing. In fact, he messes with it in a big way.

“No one can see the kingdom of God without being born” – he uses a Greek word, anothen, which literally has more than one meaning. It can mean “from above” and it can mean “again.” So, he says to Nicodemus, who wants to know for sure, “Well, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again” is what Nicodemus hears, because what in the world does “born from above” mean? Nicodemus just knows about birth what he knows from the observed world. Jesus deliberately uses an ambiguous word or at least uses a deliberately ambiguous word, but Nicodemus, being the good sensory person he is, takes it literally. And his mind kicks in and he assumes, ridiculously of course – the gospel of John is full of ironic conversations like this – he assumes ridiculously that Jesus means a grown person must reenter the womb in order to experience this birth.

Now even the most literal among us knows that that’s not true, as Nicodemus surely knows. But this conversation is structured to give Jesus an opportunity to tell us more. And so Jesus points to a birth that is both again and from above. So perhaps both meanings of the word are critical to Jesus’ answer. ‘It is birth through water and the spirit,’ Jesus said.

This is a post-resurrection gospel. This is a gospel that is taking form as the church is beginning to understand how to be the church. It is the birth that Christians experience through baptism to which Jesus refers. Well this is helpful information now, isn’t it, for us? This whole ‘born again/from above’ thing?

Now clearly there are some of us and many who claim the faith of Christ who can say with absolute certainty, ‘This is the moment I was born again.’ ‘This is the day I was born again.’ ‘This is the place where I was when I was born again.’ ‘This is the preacher I was listening to, this is the hymn we were singing, this is the prayer I was praying when I was born again.’ But many of us have been living this faith since the day we were born literally, baptized and formed in the life and words of Jesus since we first learned to sing “Jesus Loves Me” and recite John 3:16. How are we to answer those who insist that we must be able to say the moment that we were born again? How are we to respond to those who go about saying, ‘Well, I’m a born-again Christian, and therefore...”?

It seems to me that we can claim that we are being born from above, that we can claim when we are challenged by this born-again question, we can claim that the waters of baptism and the spirit of God are shaping and delivering us into new life every single day.

Isn’t it strange that so much that divides us in our understanding of Christian faith depends on absolute interpretation of an ambiguous Greek word that occurs in a conversation set under the cover of darkness?

There’s another strange thing about this conversation. Though the agenda of the gospel is the character and meaning of Jesus, do you notice that the real subject of the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus is God? By the end of the conversation, Jesus is doing all the talking, and he’s talking about God. The theological question that everyone we meet in the gospel of John poses is essentially the same question: What is the nature of the relationship between God and Jesus who is called the Christ? But these are not just theological questions. These are life-and-death personal questions.

It is likely that by the time John’s gospel is written, those like Nicodemus who have pursued the faith of Abraham through temple worship have lost their place of worship. And it is likely that by the time the gospel of John is written, those who are pursuing the faith of Abraham through allegiance to Jesus Christ are threatened with expulsion from the synagogues. These are life and death personal questions for John’s audience.

Nicodemus represents someone whose brick and mortar place of worship no longer stands as an everlasting sign of the eternal reliability of God. The Second Temple at Jerusalem has been so drastically rearranged that it has ceased to exist as a place of worship. Nicodemus’ literal understanding of Jesus’ reference to birth might just suggest that for Nicodemus the bricks and mortar of the temple were so important that his very faith in God is shaken to the foundation. A literal place to encounter God. Think about how we cling to those literal places that we encounter God.

Nicodemus speaks for all of us who have had our understanding of the reliability of God seriously shaken. He represents the darkness that threatens to overwhelm us when we find that everything familiar about our lives or our surroundings that made worship possible is gone. Where will we find the light of faith when our souls are dark with grief because we lost that upon which we have relied? Is Jesus reliable? Is Jesus as reliable as the temple? I think that underlies Nicodemus’ conversation, and that’s one way of asking the question that John 3:16 answers. The reliability of God is based not on bricks and mortar, not on things we can see, not on things we can literally understand from observation of our physical surroundings. The reliability of God is based on relationship. God so loved – love is about relationship – God so loved the world. God so loves – and the nature of God’s love is to give God’s self – that God gave God’s own son. God gives God’s self.

Well, if it’s something that we literally need to be able to touch and talk to, well, then here he is, sitting there with Nicodemus, talking to him at night. What are the limits of this relationship? we want to know. How far can we trust this relationship? For how long can we trust this relationship? Look back to the prologue of John’s gospel. ‘In the beginning...In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.’ This relationship that is lived out between the person of Jesus and the love of God has had the potential of existing from the beginning of time. God never existed without loving the world. It is love of the world that is the only real thing we know about God, in a sense. And if we want to know how far we can trust Jesus? Go to the end, when physical death does not end the relationship. Eternal life is the gospel’s word for the limits of this relationship, of which there appear to be none.

This is mystery. And the danger we literalists face is that we would miss the mystery of it, just as Nicodemus misses the point of the reference to born again/from above. It is mystery that a conversation by night can make sense of what we cannot see in the light of day.

Here’s how I imagine Nicodemus’ and Jesus’ conversation – I think about conversations in the night. I think about the street I lived on when I was a young child where in the late summer it would be so quiet at night, save for the chirping of the locusts and the quiet murmur of voices emanating from front porches up and down the last block of West Main Street. We don’t have those porch conversations anymore. Across the street, our neighbor Ruth and her daughter would be sitting on the porch swing wondering if the daughter’s husband would return safely from his post near the Berlin Wall which had so recently gone up to divide the east from the west. On the porch late at night with my mother, my younger siblings sleeping, I could find the courage to ask questions under the cover of darkness that I could never ask in the busy-ness of the day: What are we going to do? The business is gone, the house if for sale. Will I have to go to a new school? What does this mean?

I think about those late-night conversations around the campfire at summer camp when darkness has fallen and voices are dropped low and people talk about important things that you would never talk about in the light of day. I think about our most intimate partnerships and how it is, at the end of the day, under darkness of night, that we dream about our future, and sleep won’t come and the light of day is far off and we share our fears and our hopes. There is something to be said for nighttime conversations.

And when we are people who break relationship with others over the meaning of things that are not eternal, there is something to be said for having those nighttime conversations with Jesus, with God.

When God seems distant and Jesus seems like a stranger and all the things that are ordered in the world seem a little off-balance and we know that we have not been the people we could be, I think it’s time for a conversation in the night. The kind of conversation that expresses that same intimacy as our human conversations. The kind of conversation that reminds us that when the day comes that under darkness of night Jesus understands our fears. Jesus redirects our thoughts and our lives toward things eternal. Jesus reminds us that there is nothing – nothing – in this world that can break that relationship. It might be broken temporarily, it might be interrupted, we might choose to break it, but God will never not be there for us. God’s everlasting eternal relationship with creation is not subject to the finitude of bricks and mortar. God’s everlasting eternal relationship with creation is not subject to our inability to understand or honor it. God’s everlasting eternal relationship with creation is not subject to the limits our personalities place on our understanding, nor is it subject to the limits our physical lives place on our existence in this world.

God everlastingly loves the world, persistently sends love into the world, incarnate in Jesus in 1^st Century Palestine and guess what – invested now in us. Invested in us. How will the world see that God is saving the world? How will the world ever see that unless we’re invested alongside God in saving the world? God’s everlasting love – is there anything stranger than that? But stranger things await as we shall see as the story unfolds through the days of Lent and the journey of Jesus and the stories in John.

In the meanwhile, perhaps we should trust just a little bit this Nicodemus, this stranger in the night, and let him invite us into the conversation so that we might confess that when we focus only on what can be seen by day we are prone to forget what Nicodemus learns in the darkness of night – that God so loves the world. Our beginning and our end and our always, day and night...the beginning, the end, the always of the whole world...the beginning and the end of the suffering and the brokenness...the beginning and the end of the healing and the wholeness is right here before us in this strange teacher of Israel who cannot be confined by our minds, limited by our sins nor understood with our usual capacities. Thank God that Jesus points us to the one who transcends our limits and so loves us that that relationship with the world can never be broken. It takes our whole lives to figure out what that means, and so we are being born again and from above, ever and always. Thanks be to God.