All of us have come to church this morning with the joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran on our minds. I’m sure there is a wide range of opinions on this, and since I’m not the rectorI don’t think it appropriate to share mine with you.
Christians of good will can differ on issues of war and peace. In January of 1990, as the first President Bush contemplated invading Kuwait, he called our Presiding Bishop, Ed Browning, to the White House for guidance. Bishop Browning advised against Operation Desert Storm. Unsatisfied with that counsel, the president called in Billy Graham who told him to go right ahead.
Christians will always differ among ourselves when these issues arise. But one thing we do not disagree on is that we are called to stand and work for peace. As Thomas Merton said, “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”
As events in the Middle East unfold, it is our job as Christians to pray and work for peace between nations and peoples.
In the words of the Prayer Book Litany we sang last Sunday in this building, we pray “That it may please thee to make wars to cease in all the world; to give all nations unity, peace, and concord; and to bestow freedom upon all peoples, We beseech thee to hear us good Lord.” Amen.
Now to the sermon.
Anyone who has ever taught school at any level knows the student who skips class and then comes up to you at the start of the next one and asks, “Did I miss anything?” Being the snarky cuss that I am, I was always tempted to answer, “No. We were so bereft by your absence that we sat here for an hour in the dark.”
Nicodemus has always struck me as the kid who missed class and then expects you to teach it all over again just for him. In today’s Gospel [John 3: 1-17], he comes to Jesus by night and seeks answers that he is perhaps too afraid to seek in broad daylight. To many in the church he has become the figure of the earnest inquirer, the secular doubter who is intrigued but unwilling yet to commit. To me he’s a guy who just wants super-secret special attention.
Perhaps that’s unfair. Nicodemus does display an interest in Jesus, but he is not a tortured doubter—he is after all a leader of the Jewish community. He is drawn to Jesus but perplexed by him as well. And, following my student analogy, as this passage develops he does seem to be the dense kid that doesn’t get it. He mistakes being “born from above” for literally re-entering the womb. And at the end he throws up his hands with a despairing cry: “How can these things be?”
If this were the only occasion on which we were to meet Nicodemus he would seem to be a dead-end character. But we actually see him twice more in John’s Gospel. Later in the story, he stands up for Jesus when others in the leadership want to arrest him: “Our law does not judge people without first giving them a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?” [John 7:50] And then much later, after the crucifixion, when they are preparing to bury Jesus, we learn that “Nicodemus, who had first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds.” [John 19:39] Nicodemus has an interesting faith trajectory. Although he began as a timorous inquirer, by the middle of the story he has become an ally, and at the end a committed disciple.
So the first point today is a reminder of how mysteriously God works in people’s lives. To my mind, the whole Nicodemus story is an argument for a gradual process of conversion, a progressive deepening of belief. You start out tentative, you risk more involvement, finally you’re totally committed. We are born again not necessarily in a moment of baptismal immersion nor in a blinding flash but in a process that works its way over time. At least that has been my own experience, and I presume that of many others here today as well.
Even if I find the early Nicodemus a trifle annoying, I do admire who he becomes and I find his persistence admirable. The second point of this story for me is the way it highlights the disparity between those of us who are drawn toward the holy and those who seem to live quite happily without it. [The late Louis Simpson expressed this in a poem he published in 1998, “The People Next Door”:
He isn't a religious man.
So instead of going to church
on Sunday they go to sea.
I hear them returning
worn out and glad to be home.
This is as close to being happy
as a family ever gets.
I envy their content.
When I first read this poem, I thought that the “content” he envied was that of living in a nuclear family. But reading it now, I wonder if their Sunday satisfaction is really the experience affluent worldly leisure without any perceptible spiritual depth. The people next door seem perfectly satisfied with the creature comforts of capitalism. They certainly don’t appear to question the justice of their having a boat while others live in trailer parks. And their excursion does not even explore the wonders of nature:
They cruise up and down,
see the ferry coming from Bridgeport
to Green Harbor, and going back
from Green Harbor to Bridgeport...
When the kids start to get restless
and his wife has a headache
he heads back to shore.
Neither Louis Simpson nor I think of these neighbors as “bad” people.]* We/I merely marvel at the ability of many to accept the world on its face, no questions asked. Isn’t there more to life than brunch, or boating (or cycling or playing golf or shopping) on Sunday? Isn’t there any nagging restlessness in their souls that drives them to explore what might be the meaning and purpose of all this?
Now this is not one of those sermons where the preacher beats up the people who are in church on behalf of all the people who are not in church. I know that you and I are fellow travelers in nagging spiritual restlessness. None of us would be here if we weren’t drawn at least to think about what is behind and beyond all this. As Emily Dickinson says, “It beckons and it baffles”. You didn’t have to get out of a warm bed to come here this morning. But you did, while thousands didn’t. What is it that makes worship indispensable for some and marginal at best for others?
I’ve pondered this question a lot over the course of my life, and I have never found an answer that satisfies. But as we think together about Nicodemus and his journey by night to see Jesus, I want to suggest that this nagging restlessness is neither an innate nor learned trait. We are not born spiritually curious, nor did our families make us this way. Rather, this nagging restlessness is a sign that God is at work in us. When Jesus says that we must be born from above, he is talking about the mysterious way God goes about drawing us in. As with Peter at the Transfiguration, so Nicodemus has been taken into new life. He began as a seeker and ended as a disciple. This transformation is what Jesus calls being born from above. He has experienced a change that is God’s doing, not his.
While we can’t give credit to Nicodemus for his own conversion, we can at least congratulate him for placing himself in circumstances where it could happen. The problem with contemporary life is that it offers us so many attractive opportunities to avoid thinking deeply about anything. [Louis Simpson wrote about his neighbors before the advent of social media. Today, the poem’s family could scrap the boat entirely and simply sit at home and scroll on their phones.] I’m not saying that going to church is the only place you’re going to encounter God. But I am saying that it’s hard to be open to the mystery of God’s purposes for you and your world if you never open yourself up to the possibilities of joy and wonder. And here is primarily where that happens.
God transformed Nicodemus’s inner and outer life over time. Lent is the season you have been given to let God do that same work in us. Over these several weeks you are invited to step away from at least some of life’s distractions and move toward contemplating what really matters: God, the world, other people, yourself. As Jesus says toward the end of today’s Gospel,
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.
That’s not just a slogan to be put on signs held up at ball games. That’s the clue to what this whole Jesus experience is about. God wants you to have life and have it abundantly. Lent is the season and today is the day to take God up on this offer. Amen.
*Omitted for length because of Iran attack disclaimer.
