Sermon for Sunday, June 29, 2008

NICODEMUS AND BEING BORN ANEW

4^th in a series on The Uniqueness of the Gospel of John

By

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture:  John 3: 1-10

¹ Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. ² He came to Jesus by night and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God." ³ Jesus answered him, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." ⁴ Nicodemus said to him, "How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?" ⁵ Jesus answered, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. ⁶ What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷ Do not be astonished that I said to you, "You must be born from above.' ⁸ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." ⁹ Nicodemus said to him, "How can these things be?" ¹⁰ Jesus answered him, "Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?”

Today’s reading from John’s gospel has in it one of those scary phrases for some in main stream Christianity. It is almost as scary as the “e” word – evangelism. We all know what evangelism used to mean – manipulation, street corner preachers, going door to door asking people if they have been saved, and collecting another scalp for Jesus.

And yet St. Andrew church is recognized as a good example of the best of evangelism – gaining almost 700 new members since we relocated three and a half years ago, inviting people like Andrew did, to come and take a look at this Jesus fellow for themselves, trying to live so that our light so shines and our joy is obvious enough for others to at least be curious, and putting our faith into action.

This scary word from today’s passage, maybe as scary as that “e” word evangelism, is actually two words and they are ones we rarely use but I think we need to recover: “born again.” Many of us rarely use them because of what Marcus Borg says about the phrase on the front of your bulletin:

Most of us know at least one person who was born again in a remarkably unattractive way!! When being born again leads to a rigid kind of righteousness, judgmentalism, and sharp boundaries between an in-group and an out-group, it’s either not a genuine born again experience or it has a lot of static in it!!

If we have seen that narrowness in those who say they have been born again or who describe themselves as “born again” Christians, we tend to shy away from the words and be suspicious of those who use them.

What I would like to do is to reframe this image like I believe we have tried to do with the word evangelism – a word whose definition we have said is “One hungry beggar telling another hungry beggar where to find bread.” I think to be a follower of Christ means that we are born anew, that we allow God to transform and change our life direction, that we see many stories of new birth and changed lives and transformation throughout the Bible – sometimes accompanied by a new name – and that this sort of changed life and new direction and new identity are part and parcel of saying yes to Jesus Christ. And I want to offer at least one litmus test for how we discern if someone is born anew.

Let’s look at the passage. Nicodemus is a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews. There were several Jewish groups in the first century and the Pharisees were one of those. There were the Sadducees, the clergy group who also gave Jesus a lot of trouble. There were the Essenes, a monastic group who had withdrawn from most of Jewish life and lived outside of Jerusalem near the Dead Sea in what is called the Qumran community. They withdrew because they thought the Temple bureaucracy was corrupt and they practiced a stricter form of religion. This is the community who had preserved what we call the Dead Sea Scrolls, scriptures that are some of the oldest versions of the Bible.

The third group was the zealots who believed in organizing a violent revolution against Rome, taking up swords and killing as many Romans as possible so that the former glory of Israel under King David would be restored. One of the disciples of Jesus was a member of this Jewish party-Simon the Zealot!

And then there were the Pharisees. They were lay persons, very faithful Jewish lay persons who studied the Bible and took it very seriously and had many admirable qualities. In fact, some scholars think that Jesus may have felt closer to the party of the Pharisees than any of the other groups. But they had some negatives traits. They tended to just be legalistic. They were very big on following the rules, strictly obeying the law, the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law, and they were vocal in criticizing Jesus and his friends often because Jesus didn’t follow the Jewish law to the letter. Jesus violated the law about working on the Sabbath because he healed people on the Sabbath. He and his friends were walking by a field of grain on the Sabbath and the Pharisees scolded them. Jesus told them a story about how king David violated the Sabbath when his soldiers were hungry and then Jesus said, “People were not made for the Sabbath; the Sabbath was made for the people” In other words, if the rules and the laws get in the way of helping and serving people, the priority is to serve and help people. It is a radical idea but one that most of us believe in today if we talk about following the spirit of a law or rule instead of the letter of the law.

This is not the only time we meet Nicodemus in this Gospel, the only Gospel that mentions him. He shows up later defending Jesus against some other Pharisees and they criticize Nicodemus for advocating for Jesus. And there is one other time he is mentioned: when he and Joseph of Arimathea get together after Jesus has been executed and remove his body from the cross, wrap it in linen and place it in a new tomb in a garden along with 100 pounds of spices.

Nicodemus was a Pharisee and he represents some other Pharisees because he uses the pronoun “we.” He and others see that Jesus is a teacher who has come from God. But John tells us something else in that phrase. Nicodemus comes to see Jesus by night. Why do you suppose? Does he not want to be seen by others? Is he a secret admirer or disciple of Jesus? If so, I think there were others like him. What do you think? Is that a good thing – to be a secret admirer or even a secret disciple of Jesus?  What is the benefit of standing before others in confirming one’s faith in Christ? It is important to take a public stand – to say in front of God and everyone, I am basing my life on the example and the words of Jesus of Nazareth, whom I believe is a teacher sent from God. That is what people do when they join a church, when they confirm their faith as disciples of Jesus – whether they are youth taking those confirmation vows at the age of fifteen or so, or adults at the age of 40 or 50 or 60 or 70!

Nicodemus came by night. Is this where the TV channel Nick at night comes from? I think John’s gospel also means us to know that Nicodemus was in the dark!! Light and dark are important images in this gospel. Jesus says that he is the light of the world and whoever follows him will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life!

Why do you think Nicodemus seeks out this controversial preacher from Galilee – in John’s gospel someone even asks, “Can anything good come out of Galilee?” Like someone today saying can anything good/important come out of Bugscuffle, Texas?

The Pharisees were good and faithful spiritual leaders. They were conscientious and loyal to God and to their faith. Why does Nicodemus come here? What else is he looking for? Is he like the very successful man who seeks Jesus out in Mark’s gospel and asks what he must do to have a really good life? Jesus tells him to follow God’s instructions in the commandments and he says he has done that all his life. And then Jesus sees that something is missing: he had been going through the motions but his heart is not in this, so Jesus tells him to do something that will let him really offer his heart to God.  It is too scary, so he decides to just keep going through the motions even though his life feels empty.

Maybe that is why Nicodemus comes here. He is respected by others, he has been following the rules and rituals but still there is an emptiness. Do you know what that is like – have you felt that way? You have been climbing the ladder of success and it should feel good with all the trappings of success but something is missing, something important. And maybe you think that though you’re close to the top of the ladder, that maybe the ladder has been leaned against the wrong wall. Is that Nicodemus’ feeling? Is he having a mid-life crisis, a spiritual breakthrough?

What happens with Nicodemus next is that he and Jesus just talk completely past each other! Completely! Have you had that experience with someone – they say something and you say something and there is just nothing in common at all? I felt that last week when the computer expert came by the office to help me adjust something in my laptop that just was not synchronizing when I brought it from my study at home to the church office. He told me to do something with a right click here and right click there that I just got lost in. He could have been speaking Chinese. I nodded gracefully and decided to just keep on doing the old, time consuming way of dealing with the problem. He and I were talking from different worlds.

Nicodemus and Jesus were talking from different worlds: Nicodemus from a religion of dry rules and rituals, Jesus from a spirituality of dying to an old way of thinking and being, into a new way of offering our hearts and lives for God to renew and form in God’s image. The Greek words in this phrase can be translated three ways: born again, born anew, born from above. Nicodemus misunderstands: nobody can do that, crawl back into their mothers belly and be born all over!!

Jesus says, living the abundant life is like letting God reform and renew us and change us into a new person, a different person. It’s not about rules and ceremonies; it starts with your heart!!

Born anew. Born again. We need to recover this image because it needs to be true of every disciple of Jesus Christ. It usually does not happen in a thunderbolt or a crisis, though it does for some people like St. Paul. It usually happens with a decision to let God form me and change my heart and then it develops over some time. One of my favorite movies about this sort of new life, being born anew, is about 25 years old now. Robert Duvall stars as a country western singer who is in trouble. He is an alcoholic. He is going nowhere but down. He meets a woman who loves him. She starts bringing him to church with her. He is not sure about all this churchy stuff but he comes along and does decide, with her young son, to be baptized and to join the church. On the Sunday when Duvall’s character is baptized he is driving home with the boy and Duvall asks the boy if he feels any different after being baptized and they both agree that they don’t feel instantly different. But that baptism is a turning point for Duvall. His life begins to be different, better, healthier. He stops abusing alcohol. He is a changed person. The old has gone and the new has come now, in the words of St. Paul who also talks about baptism and dying to the past and starting a new life with Christ.

There are stories of change and transformation like that all through the Bible. Sometimes they even involve a person taking on a new name to signify being born anew. Abram gets a new name in the book of Genesis when he starts over at the age of 75 and goes to the Promised Land. Jacob gets a new name when he wrestles all night with God and goes away limping but he has a new name and a new direction – the name God gives him is Israel – one who wrestles with God. Peter gets a new name. Jesus says, from now on I will call you Rocky! The name Cephas in Greek means rock. Jesus says you are going to be, after a while, like a rock.

New life, new direction, being born anew: we see that in the story of the prodigal son returning to his father from a reckless life spent in exile, in the story we will look at next week of Jesus healing someone who has been paralyzed for 38 years.

Following Christ as a disciple means a new identity, a new set of values, a new direction. Dr. Tom Long tells of the business man who was known for his ruthless spirit of competition and destroying his smaller competitors without any qualms. His only ethic was to make a profit at any cost. But when he went to the funeral of his grandmother with whom he had been close as a child, he heard the minister read the verse from Proverbs that says, “The teaching of kindness was on her lips.” And the phrase set him back. He had gotten so far away from what his grandmother taught him about the teaching of kindness, the practice of kindness, that he had lost a part of his core identity and he decided to turn in a new direction that was not so ruthless.

Marcus Borg says the litmus test of whether someone has been born anew, born again, is if we see compassion in their life. If being born again makes us judgmental and rigid, it is not real. Jesus tells us that we are to be compassionate just as God is compassionate. If we do not see a life of compassion in those who claim to be born again Christians, it is not real.

One of our members was in Dallas last week on a business trip with some partners. They were sitting on the patio of a Mexican restaurant when a homeless person stood at the corner of the patio trying to sneak some chips from a basket on another table. Our church member could see the hunger and the need and she got up, went to their server and told the server about the hungry person, gave the server a little money and asked the server if he could get some food for the man. The server came back with a large bag with several items, took them over to the man at the corner of the patio and spoke with him respectfully for several minutes, pointing out the several items in the bag. Our church member told me the story not to praise herself but to tell me about the compassion of the restaurant server, who took her small amount of money and made it go a long way and then treated the lonely, hungry man with respect and compassion.

Jesus says, if we want the best life possible, it is not about rules and rituals. It is about a new beginning where we give our hearts and lives to God for God to change and renew and transform into lives and hearts of compassion. Dear God, send us further on that journey-or let us begin it right now today. Amen.

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