Nicodemus, Faith in Darkness

John 3:1-17

2^nd Lent

March 16, 2014

My uncle was a pastor,

and we write to one another often when I was in college.

I remember one exchange we had.,

One of my friends adamantly did not believe in God

and I thought that was wrong and I asked my uncle about it.

He asked me if I believed in God.

I wrote him and told him, sure I believe in God why wouldn’t I?

And he wrote back and asked,

“Well, how has that changed your life lately?”

I had to admit to myself,

that my belief in God had not really done anything new

to me in a while. I wasn’t going to church,

it didn’t effect the things I did, the way I thought.

At the time, it was no bother whatsoever frankly.

Nicodemus was a man who believed that Jesus was from God.

It said he believed in Jesus specifically

because of the miracles that Jesus could do.

Since Jesus could perform a lot of signs

Nicodemus believed that he was special.

But still, Nicodemus would only come to Jesus by night.

He would only confess his beliefs to himself and to Jesus,

but not to anyone else.

During the daytime he was a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews.

If he had said he believed in Jesus, his life would be very different.

So, Nicodemus believed in Jesus, but

wanted to keep his life exactly the same.

 

Nicodemus is not seen in a very positive light in this gospel

but we should certainly be able to relate to him.

So much of our faith-life is conducted in the dark.

We don’t do it in the literal dark,

we are usually here when it’s day light,

But we do it in the figurative dark,

the way Nicodemus was using the dark.

Lots of times we show our faith and live our faith

only in the safety and security of our worship services,

and in our discussions with like-minded people.

But when we get around into our day life,

in the public, where there are risks involved, we are silent.

Think about the question:

“How has my faith changed my life?”

In the last 50 years, 10 years, 5 years, in the last 30 days?”

Jesus pushes Nicodemus on just this thing

Jesus tells Nicodemus that belief is great,

but change in our life is what God wants.

He tells Nicodemus that he needs to be

Nicodeums Visiting Jesus by Henry Ossawa Tanner

born from above, from water and the Spirit instead of flesh.

In other words, to be different than before.

Now, I have to interject, this phrase born from above

has been turned into “re-born” or “born again” and has been used

and abused by modern Christians as a threat

a litmus test for salvation. People ask, “are you born again” insinuating that if you’re not you’re bound for hell,

using this scripture as proof.

But Jesus also says here he’s not here to condemn us.

So let’s not even consider heaven and hell,

Let’s consider the here and now

Jesus says we will not see the Kingdom of God if we’re not

born from above. If we don’t see this world with the

new eyes of faith, not just belief, and if that doesn’t change

who we are, then we won’t see the wonder of the Kingdom

that has been right in front of us all the time.

The ways of the world that we live in

are the ways of death and destruction,

for ourselves and for the rest of the world.

Our ways are isolation, fear, greed, war and violence.

We are naturally people who love the darkness.

We will not see the Kingdom of God by following our ways.

The only way we can see the Kingdom is to

die to our own ways and rise into Christ’s.

God doesn’t just want us to confess a belief in Jesus.

God wants us to be “newly born” to be people of the light

and to bring that light out into the day,

out into our jobs, into the streets, into the public

where the whole world can be changed.

And we should hope to be born from above,

not just once, but many, many times over in our lives.

  

There was a man I met who lived in South Carolina,

We went there on a mission trip there in Seminary.

We met him at his shrimp boil.

He owned a fleet of fishing boats

He faithfully went to church his whole life.

And all his life he had been very racist.

It wasn’t only a personal feeling or emotion,

much of his family were in the KKK

it had been part of him since his childhood.

It was kind of a family tradition.

And he lived it, advocated it, and he talked about

non-white people in very unpleasant ways.

Then one day, when he was in his 50’s,

he was sitting listening to his preacher in church

the church where many of his friends and family went

and his preacher read this chapter of John about

about how “God so loved the world”

The man with the fishing boats understood for the first time

God’s love for him, and for the whole world.

He said that he just couldn’t be racist any more.

He felt shame and sadness for the things he had said

and done during his life and he worked to change them.

He started by being involved in a prison ministry,

Then he started to work fixing up houses

for black families on John’s Island,

where a lot of former slaves settled and lived for hundreds of years.

He started a fund-raiser,

he would furnish a whole day’s catch of shrimp

and sell admission to a shrimp boil

at his dock to raise money for building material.

That’s where we met him and heard his story.

He even closed down his business down for a month every year

at a great expense to himself

and he took crews of people down to South America

on the boats to build houses in a poor community in Brazil.

And, along the way, he lost many friends.

He lost much of his family, he changed his church,

he lost his free time, and his expendable cash.

But he doesn’t even consider that,

because he gained a vision of the Kingdom of God.

Now if you asked him how had his faith changed his life,

he wouldn’t even need to think about it.

And maybe our changes won’t be that extreme.

Maybe it’s just how we think of our neighbor,

what we do with our money, our free time,

how we raise our children.

And someone might think well, “I’m too old for change.”

But it is never too late to be born.

It is never too late to hear the Gospel again for the first time.

To understand something different about ourselves

and about God and about God’s love for us.

It’s not too late to bring our faith in Jesus out into the

light in some very real ways.

God wants us to be born from above, of water and the Spirit,

to follow Jesus’s way, to live into our baptism.

God wants us to come out of the darkness and into the light.

God wants us to die to ourselves and rise with Christ.

And God wants that because

God so loves the world.