Transcript
Peace and blessings everyone. It is a joy to be with you today. I find myself wondering and I invite you to wonder with me about the things we know are right but we betray with our silence.
I know I’m not alone in this when I say that it is difficult and downright scary sometimes to speak up. We don’t want to be that nail that sticks out. We don’t want to be made an example of an example that further intimidates others into silence.
But offer today that when we stay silent about the things that we know are wrong, we have not created safety not even for ourselves. We merely inhabit a false peace. A false peace where justice cannot be found and our relative safety is maintained as long as we continue to betray ourselves and our neighbors.
Dr. King puts it clearly. He says we will have to repent in this generation not only for the evil words and deeds of the bad people but for the appalling silence of good people. Carl Stoica, a Roma survivor of the Holocaust, adds further.
He says people did this just like you, you and me. These people did not come from another planet. They were human beings just like us and it was not Hitler who arrested me, not Goering, not Goebbels, the grocer, the janitor, the tailor, the shoemaker, the baker.
They were the ones that suddenly got a uniform, a swastika armband and all of a sudden were the master race. Our devotion to our personal peace and safety seduces us to passive and active participation in the oppression and destruction of our neighbors and becomes even more insidious when we use the name of God to justify our participation. Beloved, our theology and our ethics are inextricably tied.
How we treat people and how we move through the world, all of that is connected to what we think about God. And Jesus teaches us that our love for God and our love for people are connected. We cannot say that we love God if that love never shows up in how we treat people.
Dare I say that we look funny under the light if we profess to love God, yet this alleged love is nowhere to be found in our treatment of our neighbors. It’s useless for us to have rich and complicated theologies if none of that brilliance compels us to be loving, if none of it compels us to say something or to do something to interrupt the ill treatment of our neighbors. Cannot help but think that the rise in cruelty in our time, the ways in which cruelty is so fashionable now, is because far too many of us have fashioned a God of our own making.
We have abandoned the tenderness of Christ for a lesser form of strength. A lesser form of strength that preaches might is right and scoffs at any notion of the meek inheriting the earth. Yet our text today demonstrates God’s strength through God’s tenderness.
Jesus tells us that he did not enter the world to condemn it. Jesus is the conduit through which the world is saved. Our text begins with Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jewish people who is coming to meet Jesus at night.
The Gospel of John uses the themes of light and darkness often to convey the difference between what God is doing and what the world is up to. And while Nicodemus does move from the darkness of his own reasoning to the light of faith in this story, I also want us to engage with this setting in a far more literal sense. Consider how Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a ruler of his people, is taking on a risk, a significant risk, to meet Jesus.
Nicodemus coming to meet Jesus at nighttime speaks volumes. Even though it risks his reputation, perhaps even his livelihood, maybe even his life, Nicodemus shows up anyway. Now this first step reminds me that courage does not occur in a fearless vacuum.
Courage happens when we are afraid and we do it anyway. Nicodemus approaches Jesus empirically, meaning that he has seen what Jesus can do and he has deduced through logic, not faith, that Jesus must be connected to God somehow. But Jesus does not accept this demotion.
Jesus is unwilling to hold space for a backhanded compliment. You see, there are other teachers that have come from God. There are other people who have performed signs that demonstrate that indeed God is with them too.
And there’s nothing in the text that indicates that Nicodemus is saying this to Jesus with malicious intent or sarcasm, but it reminds me of t-shirts and bumper stickers that carry messages like Jesus for president or Jesus is my homeboy. You see those things and you say, I get what you’re trying to say, but it doesn’t quite fit. So Jesus lovingly redirects Nicodemus and provides him the tools that Nicodemus needs for salvation.
He provides Nicodemus the tools for faith. So when we attempt to boil down our journey with God to a mere journey of reason or things measurable, we have not left enough room for our faith to mature. We see later in the gospel of John chapter 20, where Jesus tells his followers, have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet still believed.
Nicodemus seeing is a first step, an important step, but not a salvific step. Nicodemus’s reliance on the empirical further jams him up when Jesus talks about being born again. Through his utilization of the empirical lens, Nicodemus cannot imagine that what Jesus is talking about is possible.
How can someone be born again? And truth be told, we are not too far removed from Nicodemus. How many of us live with a lid on our imaginations? How many of us couch and qualify our prayers within the confines of what we consider a reasonable request from God? How many of us approach God almost like we’re writing a formal letter to a stranger, saying things like, if possible. Beloved, I want you to consider today the limitless imagination that God offers to us through faith.
Far too many of us have normalized cynicism. So many of us cannot imagine a world beyond our pessimism. We justify our doubt as simply being realistic.
We have lowered our expectations of what life can actually be. We’ve lowered our expectation of what’s possible to subterranean levels. Collectively, we concede the possibilities of goodness and aspire solely to good enough.
We’re pretending that foul is fair. But when we are born again, we declare the limitless nature of God, that through Christ, all things are possible. That even in this night of despair, we are in a time for dreamers, a time for those who are willing to be the midwives and doulas for a new reality, a new way of dealing with one another, a time to participate in God’s work of turning the world right side up.
The ills of this world cannot be corrected in our own strength. We need the spirit to transform our worldview and give us the courage to speak life into the empirical. Speaking truth to power is costly.
It is scary to think about what the consequence could be when we say the right thing. We need courage to do that, which is deeply unpopular. Yet, when we exercise our faith, we can be confident that the Holy Spirit will give us the words that we need in trying times, the words that we need to transform the world.
I invite you this morning to imagine a world where exploitation was not accepted as the cost of doing business, to imagine a world where children being snatched off the street is intolerable, a world where fear and hatred of the other is unjustifiable. See, if we take Jesus’s words about the kingdom of God seriously, we anticipate and we press into that reality by how we live our lives and how we treat one another. Sometimes we get intimidated by what the Lord is doing through someone else, and our insecurities impede our ability to celebrate each other.
But God is not limited by our lack of imagination. While we may be confined to zero-sum games within our own logic, the spirit cannot be limited. It is not confined to man-made expectations about each other’s social locations.
God can use anybody. So Nicodemus was cautious, even afraid, like many of us are cautious, even afraid today. He knew that the truth was, he knew what the truth was, but in a particular moment, he had a lot to lose if he associated with the truth publicly.
But his knowledge of the truth led him to encounter the spirit, led him to encounter this gift of faith. Later in the gospel of John, we encounter Nicodemus. In John 19, Nicodemus is with those who mourn Christ at the crucifixion.
And Nicodemus accompanies Joseph of Arimathea, who asks Pilate for Jesus’s body secretly because he feared repercussions from the religious leaders. Nicodemus brought myrrh and aloes and aloe, and together the two men wrapped Jesus’s body in spices, wrapped Jesus’s body in linen, did what was right according to Jewish burial customs. So when we live with courage, we are living out the kingdom of God in this reality.
Our light becomes contagious. We amplify one another’s light. Beloved, I ask you today, don’t dim your light.
Seek the light. Yes, seek the light that exposes everything. Understanding that we serve the God who calls us to be transformed by our acceptance of God’s gift.
No matter who you are, no matter where you’re from, or what you’ve done, you can be born again. You can have the features of Christ. Become a light bearer that moves through the world with love as your signature.
In the name of the one who was, and is, and is to come, blessed be the name of the Lord. Amen.
