Lent 2
A sermon by the Rev. Sue Singer
February 20, 2005
John 3: 1-17
Nicodemus said to Jesus, "How can anyone be born after having grown old?"
Artists in the Church have always pictured Nicodemus as an old man. He is "a leader of the Pharisees," respected in his community, occupying a position of status it had probably taken him years to achieve. As old as Abraham, maybe, and just as well-established and secure, when suddenly God intruded into his life. His coming to Jesus by night represented a humble thing for him to do; typically it would be the young, unknown teacher who would have to go to the respected elder, not the other way around.
But perhaps there was something in Nicodemus that knew that more than his body had grown old. Maybe he was experiencing a weariness deep in his spirit, a dissatisfaction with the way things were, a yearning for something new, that impelled him to do the undignified thing, to come to Jesus by night and present himself as a questioner. Perhaps there was something in him that wanted to be young again.
What was that was calling Nicodemus to new birth, and how could he be born again? These are the questions for us as well as for him, as we go deeper into another Lent. How can we, whose lives are growing old, who live with so many familiar sins, so many tarnished dreams, so many regrets, so many lost opportunities, make a new start? Can there be new life waiting for us, another chance, a clean page? Can we be born again this Lent?
Now, Episcopalians typically don't talk about such things. We're not "born again" people, in the popular sense of the term, as it is used by our brothers and sisters in more Evangelical churches. But I am reminded of what a friend of mine once said in response to an earnest person who questioned him about his "born again" status. "Born again? I am being born again and again and again. Just once will never be enough for me!" We have Lent every year so we can be "born again" again, over and over again, year after year, because that's how long it takes for us to live into Easter, into the new life, the eternal life, that Jesus offers us.
And so this Lent, like every Lent, we are once more in the process of being born, again. Birth is a messy process, and it may take a while. It happens in its own time, it is quite likely to happen at night, in the dark, which is where Nicodemus encountered Jesus. For the child being born it also happens in darkness, it involves unbelievable stress, moving through a narrow place, being given up to the mysterious forces pushing towards life. Every Lent we are children of God back in the darkness of the birth canal, if you like, undergoing the inexorable, sometimes scary, always transforming process of birth.
There's one difference for us, though - unlike the child in the womb, we can choose whether we assent to the process of new birth, whether we will give ourselves over to the power of God's Spirit to re-make us, or whether we will choose to stay safe in the darkness of the familiar and the safe. We can see Nicodemus struggling with these choices in the Gospel story. He digs in his heels, he repeatedly asks how such things can be, he clings to his old ways of understanding God and the way God works in the world, he's really not ready to be forced through the narrow birth canal into eternal life.
The same is often true for us. For more Lents than I can remember, I have read the same book - A Season for the Spirit by Martin Smith. I've tried to read other books, but it just doesn't seem to work, so I figure that God doesn't think I've finished with this one yet. There must be things in this book that are still causing me to dig in my heels, to refuse to let go of old ways of being, and I have a hunch about what those things are.
Martin Smith talks about what it is like to be born again, to encounter the elusive and powerful Spirit of God that wants to push us forward into new life. He says:
The Spirit's work in the heart is not a matter of a few adjustments here and there, a little polishing and refining. We have been given notice that the false selves we maintain... are purely provisional arrangements; they must give way to a new way of being. And so the Scriptures speak of a breaking down of the old way of being a person and the discovery of a completely new one. They speak of our need to be born again.
That kind of challenge is fearsome - maybe that's why I keep having to read this book! Going into the Lenten darkness to encounter Jesus and to accept his invitation to be born again is probably one of the hardest things we will be asked to do. To enter the darkness in our souls, to confront the places that are broken and false in us, to begin to see how our individual patterns of sin are caught up in the sinful life of our culture and our nation and our world, to open our hearts to the kind of life that might be possible if we allow ourselves to be reborn - we should never underestimate the difficulty of this work.
Martin Smith speaks of the need we have to extend to ourselves the kind of compassion we would extend to others, to stop beating ourselves up as we do this Lenten work. Jesus doesn't underestimate its difficulty either, and he doesn't get on our case when we find it hard, because he knows it will likely take us a lifetime of Lents, being reborn again and again, to come close to living the radically new kind of life into which he is inviting us.
We know this because Jesus' encounter with Nicodemus doesn't end with rebuke and condemnation but with astounding compassion. Jesus offers Nicodemus himself, simply, as the means by which God's salvation is being given. He is the person through whose death Nicodemus can be reborn, and Jesus offers the same thing to us. "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."
"God so loved the world," and "You must be born again." The one is the only thing that makes the other possible. Only the redeeming love of God in Jesus can bring us into and through the darkness of rebirth, only our experience, over and over again, of the power of Christ's death and resurrection, can make it possible for rebirth to happen in our lives. Lent follows Lent, and God calls us into the birth canal again; Lent follows Lent and we wonder, like Nicodemus, if our old lives will ever be completely reborn.
But Nicodemus is not only our companion in the questioning and uncertainty that accompany our Lenten call to rebirth. He is our companion as we encounter Christ's passion and death, and as we look for his resurrection - those mysterious things in which we are born again.
Because this is not the last time we will meet Nicodemus in John's gospel. John doesn't give us a conclusive end to Jesus' conversation with him - his account concludes by moving from the individual encounter into a more general sermon. But I can picture Nicodemus, the old man, the questioner, the person so taken aback by the implications of the new life Jesus is offering, taking away Jesus' words and continuing his struggle as he walks away into the night.
Because the next time we see Nicodemus is on Good Friday as darkness is falling once more, humbling himself once more, but this time to go to the Roman authorities, to use his influence to rescue the body of Jesus from the common grave into which it would otherwise have been cast. We see him hurrying that body to the tomb, we see him bringing pounds of spices with which to anoint it, we see him doing the work that women usually did, for the teacher he must have continued to love and to follow, even amidst his questioning and uncertainty.
We never see him again. He does not appear in the resurrection stories, or in the accounts of the early church. I wish he did, but then, maybe he wouldn't be such a good Lenten companion for us.
Every year at this season we have to do what Nicodemus did: we have to go with Jesus once more into darkness, we have to bury with him in his death yet another part of our old self, part of our false self, part of our provisional way of being We have to do this in the faith and hope that we will be reborn once more into new life. Every time we do this, every time we peel away one more layer of self-deception, every time we confront in ourselves one more pattern of destructive behavior, every time we recognize our complicity in the sin and injustice of the world and try to do something about it, it feels like death because that is what it is.
I wish we could just play at the hard work of Lent. I wish being born again were something we could embrace without questioning. I wish resurrection were a thing we could grasp and have rather than a sure and certain hope into which we have to live, because then we wouldn't have to walk the hard Lenten path with Nicodemus.
But if we are to be born again, raised from the dead into transformed living, we have to have faith in the God who so loved the world. Nicodemus had faith - it took him to a tomb with the body of his Lord in his arms. It is our faith, however imperfect it seems to us, that enables us to embrace, however provisionally, Jesus' call to be "born again" again.
It is our faith that brings us back to this table, Sunday after Sunday, Lent after Lent. Here we remember Christ's death and resurrection, trusting in their power to raise us to new life, always expecting Easter. Here we celebrate a "little Easter" each Sunday, even in Lent, when once more the "things which had grown old are being made new," and eternal life breaks in upon us as we are born again, again.