Sermons Preached at Church of the Redeemer

Sermon preached by the Rector

The Reverend Dorsey McConnell

at the Church of the Redeemer

February 20, 2005

The Second Sunday of Lent

Text:  John 3: 1-17 

Our lives begin in helplessness and end in death.  This may at first seem a bitter way of looking at human existence, but these are the blunt facts of the flesh.  To overcome helplessness, then, and to postpone death, would seem a good thing.  We encourage our children, as they grow, to increase in health, strength, autonomy, and self-control.  In many quarters they are further taught that success in life means projecting more and more of their strength into the world, leading them into ever greater control over wealth, systems and people.  Of course, we all think it is important to use this power for the right reasons, and we believe we all can.

            But the Gospel insists there is another lesson we must learn.  We can only learn it by night, when some experience brings us face-to-face with the darkness of our own soul.  There we learn that we are fundamentally self-interested creatures, that a life of autonomy and strength may make us more powerful animals, but will cheat us out of the process of becoming human.  In that moment, if we are very fortunate, we learn that the application of power, even in the pursuit of admirable goals, will lead us sooner or later to a threshold at which we must either forsake our strength or be killed by it.  If we learn this, we always do so unwillingly, surprisingly; we experience it as a death, because it is one—as Jesus put it, dying to the flesh and rising to the spirit, just as our first birth was a dying to the womb and a rising to the world.  As we pass the sill of it, we are naked, shocked and blinded: before we lived in the dark without drawing a breath and we were happy.  Thereafter, we are pushed forward onto a road full of light, leading to undreamt-of possibilities, unimaginable dangers, without all of which we never would have known what it meant to be alive.  Even more than our first birth, it is a deeply intimate and private moment, hidden from public view, for the darkness we leave behind and the light into which we walk both begin inside us.  

            There is a moment in the third chapter of John’s gospel when we are privileged to witness this extraordinary and intimate new birth, or at least its beginnings, the birth pangs of Nicodemus who begins his journey from flesh to spirit in the presence of Jesus.  Nicodemus cannot imagine that is what is about to happen to him.  He is a leader in the ruling party, a man of influence and authority. He visits Jesus to see both where this charismatic new teacher might benefit him as an ally, and to gauge his potential as an adversary.  And he goes by night to make sure there will be no witnesses, no record, nothing said or done that he cannot later deny, retract or spin. But John implies that he comes to Jesus by night because, like any of us still defined by the world of the flesh, Nicodemus is a creature of the night.  Throughout the fourth Gospel, John uses the vocabulary of darkness and night as markers for the world of human greed, ego, evasion and betrayal, and Nicodemus is completely comfortable in this setting.  He is glad to live there.  He believes that he is able to see in the dark, able to manage it, able, even, to control it.  He knows how to work the levers of power and has done so successfully in the shifting sands of Palestinian politics (if you think they are complicated and violent now, you should have seen them under Herod the Great and Pontius Pilate).    Like a master chess-player, he has always been able to think a dozen moves ahead of his opponent, and he has no reason to suspect that he will not be able to ensnare Jesus in the same way, to bind him as a friend or weaken him as an enemy. And above all, (he wishes to make this clear to Jesus): Nicodemus is a deeply religious man.  God is lucky to have in his employ so clever and subtle a servant as Nicodemus.

            There are only two forces for which Nicodemus is not prepared because he has never encountered them in all his public life, two tactics in the warfare God has declared on human sin and that Jesus will relentlessly deploy against Nicodemus, two weapons that will strip the darkness from this man of the night and leave him blinking in the light like a newborn, naked and bewildered: they are reason and love.

            Nicodemus is in the middle of some first-class flattery when God’s first weapon hits him, a salvo of reason.  It comes is so hard and fast that at first he isn’t sure what has happened. Unless a man is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.  The words are ringing in his ears, but (initially) he doesn’t grasp the damage they’ve done to his dark little world.  He tries to brush it all off with a coarse joke about entering the womb a second time, but Jesus is single-minded, and hits him again:  Truly truly, I tell you, unless you are born again, of water and the Spirit, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, and spirit gives birth to spirit.  The problem with your world, says Jesus, is that it is all flesh and no spirit. You need exactly to reverse the proportions.    And in that moment, Nicodemus, the nightwalker, the grandmaster of political chess, suddenly finds himself playing on a board in five dimensions!   He has the queasy feeling of having lost a debate without ever really knowing when it began, of being out-reasoned when he didn’t even know reason was an issue.  But he does know he has lost something, that his old assumptions about himself and the world have been demolished, strangely and with minimal effort, and that in front of Jesus he stands on the verge of something so new and so undefined that he can only ask in bewilderment:  how can this be?

            And that is when the second weapon strikes, a barrage of love.  It is not a soft-soap love, but the diamond-edged love of heaven.  And you, Nicodemus my dear, you can hear God say, who are you really?  Are you a teacher of Israel, or just one more power broker feeding on her flesh?  Are you a child of God, or just a man of religion? Like a skilled physician, Jesus palpates the site of his life-threatening lesion and then prescribing the antidote.  He does it by referencing an old story Nicodemus would have known well, a story about Moses and the people of Israel in the wilderness.  In this story, the people were so disobedient and destructive that a swarm of poisonous snakes came to bring them back into line.  The people began to die, and they cried out to God; so Moses put a bronze serpent on a pole.  As they looked on this perfect image, they were healed from the effects of the poison.  In a similar way, Jesus declares that he, the logos, the perfect image and reason of God, the love of God made flesh, once he is lifted up on the Cross, will be the cure both for the disordered affection that makes Nicodemus love the dark, and the toxic thinking that makes him believe he can control it.

            Nicodemus left the house of Jesus a different person.  His second birth had begun.  He appears only twice more in the gospel of John, but both give evidence of a new life—the first occasion, when he bravely speaks up for Jesus in the midst of the Sanhedrin, and the second, when he accompanies Joseph of Arimathea to claim Jesus’ body for burial, providing the spices for the shroud and even wrapping Jesus in linen with his own hands.  John is clear that this is a man well on the road of light, learning to walk in the spirit, no matter where it takes him. 

            Such encounters with Jesus still happen all the time, encounters by night that draw people out of the poisonous dark into the light, strange, unsought-for, irresistible meetings that unleash a new birth from flesh to spirit.  One of my favorite writers, Philip Hallie, describes how it happened to him.  Raised in a poor Jewish family in a rough neighborhood in Chicago, Hallie learned early on that helplessness and death were best pushed back by force, which he deployed often and skillfully against the bullies of his block.  This philosophy was confirmed by his combat experience in World War II, his up-close-and-personal look at the horrors of Auschwitz and (what he found especially unforgivable) the sadistic and methodical torture and degradation of Jewish children in the Nazi camps.  He became an apostle of violence in a just cause, believing that only by force could such evils be restrained.  But none of this made him happy.  The more deeply he moved into the bitter world of his pursuit for justice, the more violent and angry he himself became.  It estranged his children and nearly broke his marriage, but he did not know how any of this could change.

            Then he stumbled across the story of Pastor Andre Trocme and his wife Magda, of their little village in France called Le Chambon, of the nonviolent resistance they carried out against the Nazis throughout the war, quietly saving the lives of more than five thousand Jews, most of them children.  Intrigued, he went to this village; the pastor was long dead, but his wife Magda was still alive, and over the course of a few weeks of conversations with her Philip Hallie was first exposed to, then convicted by, and finally drawn into the way of life embodied by this village.  .  Since it was a very different kind of life than he was used to, he found it threatening, just as Nicodemus had before him, and he tried to dismiss it by concluding that Magda and Andre and all the rest of this little village were somehow exceptional by nature, constitutionally different than other creatures of flesh.  So, he flattered her in just the way Nicodemus spoke to Jesus.  But you are all good people, he said.  You are just … good.  Magda responded to this at first with vehemence.  What did you say?  What?  Good?  You think we are “good?” Then she went on with a passion that was couched in the same quiet, sympathetic voice Nicodemus must have heard from the Lord.  I’m sorry, but you see, you have not understood what I have been saying.  We have been talking about saving the children.  We did not do what we did for goodness’ sake.   We did it for the children.  Don’t use words like “good” with me.  They are foolish words.  And that was the point at which Philip Hallie had, well, a Nicodemus experience.  He discovered a new way of living, a way that was as free of self-interest as it was of control, a way of life that did not moralize over righteous deeds, but simply did them.  Though he would not have put it this way, he saw the Son of Man lifted up in the people of le Chambon.  He uncovered, then embraced,  the evidence of new birth, the life of the spirit, and began his own journey towards embodying what he called the lucid mystery … of a wide and efficacious love that came from beyond and outside him and yet changed everything inside him to point away from darkness and toward the light.

            Can we, today, so begin again?  Can we ask to be born from above in whatever words we have to offer God?  Whatever hatreds, fears and anxieties we harbor, the old unsuccessful reliance on our own control, the evidence of our reluctance to being born, can be given to God in a moment, and that moment for you, could be now.  Can you let the hand of Christ, like a skilled physician, feel out, and find, and take these things from you, all the poison of failed reason and inadequate love?  All it takes is a glimpse of the way life could be different, the moment when you ask God, How can this be?  Then, if you are willing, you will find yourself brought to the threshold of the Kingdom of God; you will look into the same eyes that searched the soul of Nicodemus. And you will, I am quite sure, hear from Christ himself, the same words heard by all those refugees who, shivering with fear, presented themselves by night to Magda Trocme, the words she repeated to them all, over and over, without exception, “Of course.  Come in.  Come in.”