Born From Above
John 3.1-17
Lent 2A
March 8, 2020
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
Baptist Church of the Covenant

It’s an ancient scene with dusty roads, shadowed streets, and nothing but open flames to light the path. The sun has almost set as he leans against the door; peering through the window every few minutes to watch the neighbors finish their evening chores. One by one, he waits until the last street lantern goes dark then starts to get that nervous flutter in his stomach. How long has it been since he felt that intoxicating mix of nervousness and excitement? What was he doing? What was he thinking? This was foolish and reckless. How would he explain this to his colleagues and his students if someone found him in that part of town? He had practiced the route and knew now was the time to move. With no one left outside and the depth of darkness to hide him, he throws on a cloak, grabs a bag, and steps into the night that changes everything.

“Perhaps,” writes Ginger Barfield, “there is no story in the gospels that spells out the conundrum of belief as does the account of Nicodemus.” He is rooted in the ways of establishment. By our modern accounts of success, he has made it. He’s a member of the Jewish ruling council. He has some level of power, respect, and authority. In a period when Judaism was robustly debating its essence and future, Nicodemus was a central part of the action. Something happens as he watches Jesus’ work and life that makes him question everything. Something about the Way Jesus is laying out makes his life seem awfully safe and routine and something like a pair of shoes that are suddenly a size-too-small.

John doesn’t tell us much about pleasantries or introductions or who is listening in on the exchange. Given the depth of their discourse, I suspect this isn’t the first time Nicodemus and Jesus have broached some heavy questions about what the life of faith is all about. In fact, maybe Nicodemus already knows the acceptable answers to the common questions and Jesus is actually teaching him to ask better ones. Nicodemus is there that night because he trusts Jesus. He has seen the work Jesus does and heard the way he speaks before a crowd. He knows Jesus is talking about life and Spirit and faith in a way that resonates with a truth that Nicodemus has privately felt but never publicly taught. And he’s trying to figure out how you go from sensing the rightness of a thing to living it out, particularly when you can’t prove the rightness. And especially when making that leap in faith and of faith comes at the cost of letting go of so many old ways of being and doing and living.

Maybe Nicodemus is listening to everything Jesus says for the third and fourth time and still asking, “Yeah, but how do you do it? Tell me your secret!” Nicodemus understands that something of God is wrapped up in the actions of Jesus, and he wants in. Something about “the Spirit vocabulary of the Jesus people [was] incomprehensible,” Gerard Sloyan observes. These people are living and moving in a way that carries light with it. They’re challenging power with a contagious bravery. They’re sharing things in common in a way that fosters abundance, not scarcity. Are they doing something Nicodemus can’t easily see? Are they studying something Nicodemus doesn’t yet know? He misses that this thing he is feeling and witnessing is about Jesus’ very essence. Jesus’ BEING is the love of God. And Nicodemus cannot yet fathom that his own being is the love of God, too.

Jesus never likes to answer the question straight on, though, even though he hears the tremble in Nicodemus’ voice and knows what they’re talking about really is a matter of life and death. Eugene Peterson plays around with the words a bit and quotes Jesus as saying, “You’re not listening. Let me say it again. Unless a person submits to this original creation—the ‘wind-hovering-over-the-water’ creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into a new life—it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom. When you look at a baby, it’s just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can’t see and touch—the Spirit—and becomes a living spirit. 

So don’t be so surprised when I tell you that you have to be ‘born from above’—out of this world, so to speak. You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it’s headed next. That’s the way it is with everyone ‘born from above’ by the wind of God, the Spirit of God.’”

As we eavesdrop on this scene, we may be as confused as Nic is. We find comfort lurking in shadows and sitting in darkness. Something about following Jesus in the light of day is awkward. Maybe even frightening. We teach our children to follow the ways of kindness and love, empathy and compassion but have a pretty hard time consistently believing we should do the same. We show up here and in each other’s lives, we pray, we study, but we often fail to make the connections between those routinized actions and our whole selves. If that’s already hard enough to grasp, what about this whole life rebirth that Jesus seems to require?

Jesus is asking Nicodemus (and, by extension, us) to LIVE the metaphors and stop trying so hard to comprehend them. His ability to welcome a birth of Spirit from above will be the thing that frees him to live out this transforming way through tonight’s darkness and into tomorrow’s sunshine. We want that, too. It’s not just enough to want it, of course, we have to practice and cultivate the ways of the Spirit. We have to welcome that light into our darkness. No wonder Nicodemus isn’t ready to commit to all of this just yet!

We can’t judge Nicodemus for lurking in shadows as he chases after Jesus because we do the same thing. I think it’s fairly safe to say that most of us are sitting alongside him as Jesus challenges us ALL to walk this faith out into the light of day. It’s easy for us to caricature Nicodemus and see him as part of some establishment that isn’t ours. Jesus: good. Religious establishment: bad. But surprise! We are the establishment now! We are him. We’re in a point in the time of our religious tradition that we must actively choose if we are going to focus on preserving at all costs what has been or if we are willing to be born anew and try something else? Something to be embodied. Something of whirling Spirit. Something that can’t be fully comprehended because it has to be lived. What’s outside of our tradition as we’ve taught it but quietly Truth within us we already know? What comes next? What happens when we follow our hunch in the middle of the night? Like Nicodemus, do we already know before we knock on the door that what stands on the other side is truer than anything we’ve ever known? That’s exhilarating and terrifying! 

I’m every bit as curious and as anxious as Nicodemus. The structures and system that have trained and shaped me are fading out and shuttering their doors. I recently spoke with a former newspaper editor, with the now defunct Times-Picayune and most famously with the Chicago Tribune, about the similarities between our professional fields. The same generations that don’t care much for reaching a print newspaper are the same generations that don’t care much for getting up early to go to a church service or serve on a finance committee. But people still want news and truth and storytelling, they just have different (and more immediate) ways to access that now. In the same way, people still want spirituality and mystery and community, but often there are different (and more immediate) ways to access those, too. What are we to do?

Even with dynamic innovation, more than a dash of entrepreneurial spirit, and stubborn determination, I have a hard time imagining what my career is like in a decade or two. But I don’t have a hard time imagining what my life will be like if I continue to follow the love of God as fully revealed in Jesus the Christ. I can admit I’m afraid of letting the old thing go because I don’t know what happens next. And if fear is what is driving me or what is driving you, Jesus assures us that his message comes not from fear but directly from God’s tremendous love for the whole world. Do not be afraid. 

Frederick Buechner puts it this way:

Jesus said, "I'm telling you God's so in love with this world that he's sent me down, so if you don't believe your own eyes, then maybe you'll believe mine, maybe you'll believe me, maybe you won't come sneaking around scared half to death in the dark anymore, but will come to, come clean, come to life!”

This is the part where Jesus tells Nicodemus that God loves the world so much that God sent Jesus into the world, not to condemn it but to save it. And that language makes some of us really nervous. This is painted chests at football game territory, even though we know Jesus must surely be talking about something more than a narrow teaching on an elitist afterlife. So what’s happening?

David Lose explains, “The Greek word ‘krisis’ translated here as ‘judgment’ refers less to the rendering of a sentence than it does a separating and revealing. ‘Verdict’ or ‘decisive moment’ might be closer, even ‘uncover’ or ‘disclose.' That emphasis might help us hear the verses after 3:16 as more descriptive than accusatory. Those who believe that God is love are saved; they look to the One lifted up for healing. Those who cannot imagine that God comes bringing love rather than punishment are lost, lost to their despair, sin, and confusion. The verdict, conclusion, revelation is indeed that we love darkness more than light…That there is something in us that fears being exposed and, perhaps we assume, rejected or, for that matter, transformed.”

Jesus is uncovering our connection with the Source of all things. And if we are afraid of what Jesus’ life and teaching disclose, he promises there is the great love of God to guide us, the Spirit to move like wind within us, and the steps of his Way to follow. What does it mean to be born anew, born of the Spirit, bathed in light? The answer is about Nicodemus’ capacity to no longer TRY TO understand but simply to embrace the reality that already is. The love of God already is around him and before him and behind him and, perhaps hardest for any of us to believe, within him. The love of God is not out there to be won over by perfection and striving but already within him, within you, within us, like light shining in darkness, and the darkness cannot comprehend it.

The Spirit of God creating and calling forth in Genesis 1, the movement of fire and language and baptism at Pentecost, the radical love of those who follow Christ, this is what Jesus offers to Nicodemus. There is a way that God moves in the world that can move in you, too, and God moves in these ways because God loves. God’s love creates, God’s love grows, God’s love restores and repairs, invites and implores. God’s love is active and powerful. God’s love transcends and transforms. The call to each of us and all of us is not to chase after God’s love but to embody God’s love. Start your entire life over again and over again and over again and this time BE LOVE. May you be born from above today.

Amen.