Sermon preached March 5, 2023, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on John 3:1-17. Podcast link below, or check it out on my YouTube channel!
Who was Nicodemus? As far as I know, the only evidence of his existence is the Gospel According to John. His name means “victory of the people.” It’s a Greek name, which is a bit unusual but perhaps indicates that it’s a nickname like Peter or Paul. We learn here that he is a Pharisee and a member of the Jewish ruling council, the Sanhedrin. He shows up in three places in John’s Gospel. First, he comes to Jesus by night, seeking illumination. Remember how I said that humans aren’t moths, right? He doesn’t come to Jesus because he wants to stare at the light, but because he wants the light of Jesus’s words to show him the Truth. The Book of John uses light and darkness motifs extensively, so we should pay attention here that he comes by night. Nicodemus may be ashamed to be seen with Jesus in the daylight, or perhaps we are supposed to recognize the darkness of his ignorance that is illuminated by the Word of God.
Then the next time we encounter him, Nicodemus is trying to get the other Pharisees to just hear Jesus out. He says, essentially, let’s not judge Jesus on the basis of what people are saying about him, but on the basis of what Jesus himself says in his defense. Something that Jesus said in this midnight encounter planted a seed and made Nicodemus wonder if perhaps Jesus is the Messiah. Perhaps.
The last time we hear of Nicodemus, he is helping Joseph of Arimathea prepare Jesus for burial. Nicodemus bought a hundred pounds of spices to prepare the body. Curiously, the other three Gospels don’t mention his role at all. Hmm.
I think Nicodemus is an amalgam. That is, he is a stand-in for several people, Pharisees and members of the Sanhedrin, who were on the fence about Jesus. The other Gospels hold up Peter as the bumbling buffoon that we are supposed to see ourselves in. John does some of that, too, but I think he includes Nicodemus for the sake of Jews who were trying to figure out just where they fit in the history of the world. Jews who were trying to determine whether following Jesus was really the right thing to do.
OK, let me ask, who here was born of the flesh? I hope everybody is raising their hand. We are all born of the flesh. That birth situates us in a certain place and a certain culture. Nicodemus was born of the flesh—a Jew, and so an inheritor of the covenant God made with Abraham, and with Jacob, and with Moses. He grew up to be a Pharisee, which was a relatively progressive sect of Judaism. We often speak unkindly about the Pharisees because of the way they are portrayed in the Gospels, but remember, Paul was a Pharisee, too. The Pharisees were progressive in the sense that they believed in the “oral Torah,” and they believed that God was still revealing the Truth to God’s people. This progressivism enabled the Pharisees to survive the destruction of the Temple, while the Sadducees and Essenes and other minor sects did not. Modern Judaism carries on the legacy of the Pharisees, continuing to grow and change.
We ignore our fleshy birth, and the fleshiness of others, at our peril. I recently listened to Prisoners of Geography, a book about the impact of mountains and plains and rivers and seas on the development of cultures and nations. Why is the Middle East so screwed up? Because Britain and France decided to divvy up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and they drew lines on a map with no regard for the people who lived there. They arbitrarily assembled Iraq from three distinct people groups, arbitrarily split the Kurdish people among three different nations, and smushed together other nations that had no shared history. They thought, “They’re all Arabs and Muslims, right? No problem.” Well, actually, there are Arabs and Turks and Kurds and Syrians, and there are two major branches of Islam, and there are further ethnic and religious divisions that are opaque to outsiders but very clear to the people who live there.
Here in America, we tend to trivialize these inherited relationships. We tend to follow the philosophy of John Locke, who developed social contract theory. The idea of a social contract is that people live together in society in accordance with an agreement that establishes moral and political rules of behavior. The idea is that we each choose to give up certain freedoms in order to have a functioning society. This is clearly false. There are only a few people in our church who chose to live in America. The rest of us were just forced to accept whatever rules our parents, and their parents, and their parents agreed to.
In the same way, Nicodemus was born to the covenant established generations earlier. But Jesus said, being born of the flesh is nothing. The flesh is temporary. Everything we see with our human eyes is temporary. If you think about everything that happened in the twentieth century, you can’t help but recognize the transient nature of human constructs. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the vast majority of travel was by horse-drawn cart or steam-powered train. Electricity and the telephone had been invented but were not universally available in America, let alone around the world. The sun never set on the British Empire, and much of Europe was ruled by a handful of other empires—Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and German. Then came the automobile, airplanes, and space travel. Two world wars and a revolution in Russia redrew all the maps and alliances, and then the end of the Cold War redrew them all again.
Everything is temporary. Now, I don’t mean in the sense that these restrictions caused by the pandemic are temporary and we’ll go back to the way things were. That past was also temporary, and now it’s gone. The present state of the world is temporary like the border between Lebanon and Syria. Everything built by human hands is temporary. This church is just over sixty years old, and its predecessor that served our congregation for ninety years is no longer functioning as a worship space. Those of you who have lived in Rolla for a while can surely drive around town and think, “That’s where such-and-such used to be.” Even in just the fifteen years we have lived here, I’ve seen businesses come and go, new buildings built on campus, a big hole in the ground where the power plant used to be, and so forth.
But Jesus says, what matters is to be born from above. To be born of water and Spirit. How can this be? Like Nicodemus, we wonder how we can be born again. Growing up in the 1980s, I remember “born-again Christian” being a specific belief system, one that didn’t really fit with the beliefs I inherited as a United Methodist. We typically thought of being “born again” as having some sort of profound experience, maybe like Saul had on the road to Damascus. Maybe after a car accident, or someone trying to quit drinking or drugs, or something like that. As someone who was baptized as an infant and grew up in the church, where did that leave me? Is the kin-dom of God only open to those who live a life devoted to sinfulness and then have a dramatic conversion?
No, I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant. I think he meant that God can claim us whether or not we are born under the covenant of Abraham. God can claim us whether or not we choose to follow him. We do not choose to be born of the Spirit any more than we choose to be born of the flesh. In his farewell discourse, Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.” Jesus has claimed us, each one of us, and chosen us to be part of something bigger than ourselves. We have been chosen to be in God’s kin-dom, children of a new covenant.
We do not choose membership in God’s kin-dom, but we can choose how we respond. We can choose to ignore it. We can choose to focus on our birth of the flesh. We can choose to pay the utmost attention to the web of relationships we were born to, the culture and customs we inherited. So often, what we think of as Christian values are actually cultural values with a Christian veneer. The Bible is a thick book, so we can find justification in it for whatever cultural belief we hold. Want to subjugate women? There’s plenty of support in most books of the Old Testament and Paul’s disputed letters. Whatever you believe, you can find a Bible verse to support it.
Or, we can choose instead to embrace our birth of the Spirit. We can choose to see the kingdom of God instead of the kingdom of man. We can choose to see people as Christ sees them. Indeed, we can see Jesus in each person we meet. When we do that, we live out our new birth of the Spirit into the new covenant of love that Jesus instituted.
More than that, we can create a new culture, a new legacy. Instead of perpetuating stereotypes, or the rules that privilege someone because of their birth, or the cultural beliefs that prevent people from seeing God’s love, we can create a new world for the next generation. We can love people because God loves them. Indeed, we can love people as God loves them. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. God gave everything they had. Jesus in turn gave everything he had, laying down his life for the people he loved. He did not condemn the world, but came so that the world could be saved through him.
We have inherited some good things and some bad things. We cannot choose what we receive, but we can choose what we pass down to those who come after us. Let us choose a legacy of love, a legacy of community, of self-sacrifice, of membership in God’s eternal family. Let us choose our birth of the water and Spirit as our highest calling as we enter God’s kin-dom today, right here, right now, and create a place where God’s love can grow. Amen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download