Lent II. During Lent this year, we have chosen to preach from this Lectern, instead of the pulpit and I must admit, it makes me feel a bit more exposed. And for a time, maybe that’s a good thing.
This sermon is going to feel a bit like that as well, as I choose to share that lately I’ve felt a bit more in the dark than I have in a while. I share that because I expect that the darkness I’m about to describe is not so foreign to the rest of you from time to time.
Let me tell you what I mean.
There is a heaviness or darkness that threatens our world at the moment.
We have barely begun to grasp the magnitude of the disaster in Japan and we live with a sense of bated breath as we wonder how extensive the nuclear part of this disaster may turn out to be.
We have yet to know how the violent human struggle in Libya will continue to unfold. The United Nations’ resolution to establish a “no fly zone” above Libya and the United Nations’ authorization to “use all necessary measures” to protect civilians against Gadhafi’s forces will inevitably lead to continued violence, even if Gadhafi’s progress to wipe out the rebels in Bengazi has been halted. My suspicions when I wrote this were borne out over night. Allied fighting in Libya has begun.
These are only the most gripping of the world’s troubles at the moment. I don’t need to name the rest, as we are only too aware of them.
This is the external darkness that has weighed on my mind and heart lately. The other type of darkness is internal. And what I think I’m talking about is not depression and not quite a dark night of the soul (both of those would be much more prolonged and much more terrible to experience, I imagine) but rather a darkness that is a struggle between belief and doubt – where doubt has been threatening to tip the scale in its favour.
And so in this frame of mind I or we (if you ever share this experience) encounter the conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus. This is “the” Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, who came to Jesus at night. We don’t know and can’t know what was going on inside the mind of Nicodemus. In this story, he begins his conversation with a first-person plural and a statement. Either he represents more people than just himself with this use of “we” (plausible) or he wants to keep a safe distance between his own deepest needs and what attracts him to Jesus (also possible). “Rabbi,” he says, “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.”
Nicodemus finds
safety in numbers, the “we,”
safety in stating a truism, “we know that you are a teacher come from God,”
and safety in evidence, “for no one could do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”
Let’s add to this list “the safety of the night” and this begins as a pretty safe encounter.
Nicodemus has been painted in so many ways, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt here and see him as a genuine lover of God, who knows the presence of God when he experiences it as he does when he meets Jesus. In this encounter, he genuinely, albeit cautiously wants to know more. And Jesus obliges Nicodemus by inviting him to a deeper level of belief. At the end of an image packed theological discussion – where Jesus has all kinds of fun playing with words that have dual meanings, like
born from above or being born anew,
Spirit and wind or wind and spirit
or the paradox of being lifted up – which could mean being exalted as in crowned King or humiliated as on the cross.
At the end of this fascinating discussion, Jesus says to Nicodemus, “so the son of Man must be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
Belief. In all my years of studying the gospels, I had never noticed before how often the word “believe” is used in the gospel of John. Maybe some of you have, but I had not. At a time when the darkness of the events of the world and the recent darkness of a long, cold and not very sunny winter and an internal darkness has been nagging me – when I looked at this text and then looked at it within its context, the only word I could see was the word believe. I started at the beginning of John and read all the way to chapter 10 before I ran out of time and then I did a quick word check online in order to corroborate my dawning insight with the facts.
The gospel of Matthew uses the word ‘believe’ and its variants 7 times,
The gospel of Mark uses the word ‘believe’ 15 times,
The gospel of Luke uses the word ‘believe’ 9 times,
And the gospel of John uses the word or variations of it – 84 times in 20 chapters. It is only absent in chapters 15 and 18.
So in light of the struggle or the questions in the darkness (whether it is a safe darkness or an oppressive darkness) what does “believe” have to do with it?
And for goodness sake why is belief so difficult sometimes?
Belief in Jesus the Galilean as the Messiah, the anointed King or Saviour of the world, obviously wasn’t easy for the initial recipients of this gospel or the admonition to believe simply wouldn’t be so prevalent. John’s gospel grows out of a minority community of persecuted followers of Jesus who claimed that Jesus the tortured and crucified rebel? had been raised, is alive, and is Son of God and Saviour. Well frankly, many Jews and Gentiles must have viewed this concept in its initial testimony as foolishness. The apostle Paul reminds us of the apparent foolishness of the gospel. Therefore the gospel of John is both Good news and a defense of the hope that is within them. The desire to defend such a foolish notion makes the emphasis on and the importance of a persistent call for belief clearer.
In our time, the trouble with belief may be similar. Christian faith continues to move to a less prominent position in our Western society, as I’ve mentioned before, and though this is not a new place for Mennonite Christians, it becomes more and more important (if it ever stopped being important) to account for the hope that is within us. Be that as it may, I think our struggle with the concept of belief is also linked to something else.
Since the time of the Enlightenment until now we have been schooled in a process of knowing that requires reason, rational thought, logic and careful thinking (all different words for saying the same thing, I suppose). And in some ways, or I should say in many ways, this has been helpful and important. Here at TUMC we’ve just concluded a recent Sunday school series on Science and its relationship to Christianity. Although I wasn’t able to be present for all of these discussions, I have no doubt that Ernie very capably led us through them. We had discussions on Darwin, Galileo and Climate Change. Science has been and continues to be an important way to know and understand the world. But scientists are among the first to say that they can’t know everything. And the way Science is understood and carried out keeps evolving. But I think that where human beings got into trouble during and after The Enlightenment was shifting our faith in God a little too strongly in the direction of faith in Reason. The Enlightenment era continued to inf
luence the education I received as a child in school in the 1970’s and 80’s and 90’s and ….., In those years we were taught primarily – that all we can know is what can be presented to us with verifiable or quantifiable proof. Hence belief in something one can’t prove, like the ways of the wind and the Spirit, becomes foolishness? How do we account for these? In what other ways do we know? What is it that is born anew or born from above?
And God spoke to Abraham and said, “Go from here. Leave your country, your father and your land and go to a land that I will show you (Genesis 12:1) ….. And Abraham believed God and God credited it to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:6 and Romans 4:3)….And Jesus said to Nicodemus, you are a teacher of Israel and you do not know these things? Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?
Jesus’ use of the word “you” in this passage is plural by the way. This is no longer, if it ever was just about Nicodemus. It is about ‘you’ plural –
all of them,
all of ‘you’
all of us.
And here is where Salvation History makes a surprise appearance in the darkness. Salvation history, starting with Abraham is the story of God’s desire to Save the World.
And we know that the world needs saving –its fairly quantifiable and verifiable. Human beings created in the divine image have been trying to save the world. We have been blessed with God-given gifts such as knowledge and power to manipulate our world in remarkable ways. And we use and have used these gifts to build pyramids, skyscrapers, airplanes, rockets, nuclear power and the Internet. We have instruments that help us to determine the thickness of polar ice and we have dreamed of and implemented organizations that build peace not war. Human beings are capable of phenomenal things. I can imagine that just as a parent is proud of a child who learns to walk and speak and ride a bike, so God is proud of our abilities, gifts and talents that have allowed us to dream and imagine and implement so many amazing things. But what we have not always applied to our abilities is wisdom, the kind of wisdom that can only come from God, and we live out our choices, our choices that are born out of tests and temptations in a world where the forces of darkness and evil seek to overwhelm. That’s why so many of our choices (not all, but many) have led to death and destruction – hence the darkness that is always present.
But God, that unpredictable Spirit from above has always loved us like a mother loves the child she is bringing to birth. This love is as persistent as the contractions of labour and the pains that go with that labour – painful for mother and for the child who must be squeezed through such a narrow canal. Once the process of labour has begun as it did at the calling of Abraham it will continue until this new birth takes place. For God so loved the world – the whole world, Japan and its people and creatures and Libya and Mohammar Gadhafi and his supporters and the allied nations, God loves the whole world and every person and creature within it, that he gave his only Son – the non-violent, crucified and raised Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.
Do we have permission to believe? Not in a doctrine, or a rational or a logical argument, but do we have permission to believe in a Son, in God’s incarnate really birthed presence in the world? A human/divine person who both knows the world and loves a world that is literally heaving and full of people and creatures that are hurting? God loves this world and became a human being in this world to save this world so that everyone who believes might not perish but have eternal life.
You might ask as I do, if God and God’s raised Son are doing the loving and the saving and the birthing – what do we get to do?
First we have permission to believe.
Second we can practice believing.
Third because it’s not easy we can practice believing just a little bit more.
After that, as Maureen reminded us with the children’s story today, we can act out our prayers with our hands.
And God longs to reckon it unto the world as Righteousness. Amen.