Labor Pains
Good morning. Both political conventions are over. Both presidential candidates have selected their running mates and I don’t have to tell you what that means… For the next two months, our televisions will not be our own. Advertisements for all the candidates- every race, every proposition, and every special interest group will clog the airways with strategic confusion. I’m already tired of the political ads and its going to get worse. Are you with me?
The stakes are high for this election so all the parties will be trying to get us to the voting polls. To do that they will spend enormous amounts of money; money they could save if they listened to lesbian comic and activist Kate Clinton. Kate believes she could get a 100 percent turnout at the polls…
Her idea is this. Until and unless you vote, your TV will never stop running political ads. Only when you vote, will your television return to normal programming. I think that would work.
No matter where you stand on the issues or the candidates, this race is making history. People are showing up in record numbers to check out the candidates, to see if there is a person they can believe in, a candidate who is the embodiment of our next president, our next senator and so forth. That means that the job then before every American is the careful examination of the candidates and the truth about where they stand on the issues of our time. That’s precisely what Nicodemus did. His story is a perfect one for a political season. I hope that by the end of this sermon, you’ll see Nicodemus and Jesus through new eyes.
Nicodemus was a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin. He was a judge in the legislative system of ancient Israel. He was a man of privilege and influence; part of the political power structure of his time. He lived in the good neighborhood, got the best table at in the better restaurants. He had the respect and wisdom that comes with money and education. Nicodemus lived at a time when first century Palestine was the ground zero of the political universe. And who was the “candidate” of the hour. The candidate of the hour was Jesus.
Jesus was changing the conversation in his time. The streets were buzzing with talk about the young man from Nazareth, this man who was certain to bring change. But who really was this young, uneducated, son of Joseph; this nobody named Jesus? Why was he being followed everywhere he went. He seemed to burst onto the national scene out of nowhere.
What is remarkable about Nicodemus is that he was willing to find out about Jesus for himself; this despite Jesus being largely dismissed by Nicodemus’ learned colleagues. Thankfully Nicodemus wasn’t going to take anyone’s word for it. He wanted to know firsthand if Jesus, his Jewish colleague was the embodiment of God-the messiah as it were. He was about to learn that seeking is not only the beginning, it is also the point.
Given his religious, political and legal standing, it wasn’t safe for Nicodemus to publicly go where Jesus was speaking. And there wasn’t an internet, so he couldn’t log onto Jesus.com. All he knew was that this Jesus was being “represented” as the change needed in the world, the change agent who would shake up the power structures of the time.
So late at night, under cover of darkness, Nicodemus took the greatest risk of his lifetime. He showed up seeking answers and a face to face meeting but Jesus didn’t make it easy. Jesus told Nicodemus that all the answers in the world won’t help if the answers come from your head and not your heart. Not much of what Jesus was trying to tell him was making any sense. Be born again? Believe without empiracal proof?
What Nicodemus needed was a moment of experience--a moment of new birth. You can’t have birth without some labor.
Rev. Barbara Bradford Taylor says the reason Nicodemus didn’t get what Jesus was trying to tell him was because what Jesus meant when he said "believe" and what Nicodemus meant by the same word, were completely different.
“On one level, to believe someone means simply to accept what that person says as true, usually on the basis of some evidence. Someone shows you a picture of himself climbing the rock face of a mountain, tells you it can be done, and you say, ‘I believe you.’ You accept the proposition. You give your intellectual assent, but it does not interfere with or affect the way you live your life, because it is all in your head”.
But if you were to climb the mountain yourself, then you believe with all your senses employed-head, heart, muscle and limb. Jesus wanted Nicodemus to go deeper, really think about what it means to be born again. Nicodemus didn’t get that being born again is a “do over”, a new start. If you can be born again, then you can do your life differently. Think about your life, Nicodemus. What would you change if you could do it over? How would you re-edit the narrative of your life?
As readers of the story, Jesus is also inviting us to be born again and, like Nicodemus, to rethink all the assumptions of our faith with an altered perspective; to ask the hard questions face to face with God.
That is an amazing invitation. Just how entrenched was Nicodemus in what he was taught to believe? How entrenched were or are you in what you’ve been taught to believe? How much of what you believe about faith and God is history and how much is mythology? Are you ready to accept an invitation to go deeper, fly higher, seek God through your questions and see your life, your faith with new eyes?
Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago Kathy and I went to the State Fair. We wanted to see the fairgrounds from above so we boarded the sky gliders. We got into the glider, the safety bar snapped down over our laps and off we went! Off we went and up went my anxiety. It was going higher than I expected and heights make me very uncomfortable. I was plunged into a journey I wasn’t quite ready for, a journey I hated UNTIL I began to see the ground from this new viewpoint. We had no idea the fairgrounds were so expansive. We found a new appreciation for a landscape we thought we knew. We had new eyes.
That’s what happened to Nicodemus. Jesus was pushing him into a faith glider, lap bar down and up he went, taking a birds eye view of what he thought he knew. Jesus was saying to him, “Nicodemus, you’ve risked coming this far. Are you ready to go the distance with your faith? Then came the dare.
Believe in me. That was Jesus' dare to Nicodemus. Turn your mind inside out. Step into the air. Ride the wind. Be born anew, alive. Did you hear Nicodemus’s response? "How can this be?" Yup. Those are Nicodemus's last words in this passage. His final words are not only a question but a probing, wrestle with it kind of question. How can this be?
I’d like to come clean with you about why Nicodemus is one of my heroes. Especially for those of us who are LGBT, step one in our faith was to shine enough of God’s grace on one question, the question of our sexuality. By asking that question we’ve come to see that God created us and loves us exactly as we are.
But in order for Nicodemus or any of us to be born again, there are many more questions to ask about the Christian tradition. We have to believe that its possible to do it over, to start again, to see our faith with new eyes. That takes some work. And it is so worth it. The more I have studied what is historical in the Bible and what is myth, the more I question our tradition to see what’s behind how we came to believe the things we do, the deeper my faith grows. In his time Nicodemus accepted the invitation to challenge what he held to be true and grow his faith.
So what happened to Nicodemus after he asks “How can this be?” We know he must have done the work because several chapters later in John’s Gospel he stands up for Jesus by posing another question, a question about due process and then in chapter 19, we find him aligning himself publicly with Jesus by joining Joseph of Arimathea in removing Jesus' body from the cross and laying him in the tomb. Yes, Nicodemus was the one who brought 75 pounds of spices. John’s gospel reminds us that this now public disciple is the same Nicodemus who first came to Jesus "by night".
We watched him cautiously but openly question the candidate Jesus before coming to vote with his heart and his head and ultimately his whole being--all the way to the foot of the cross at the crossroads of history.
Brothers and sisters, may we never be too afraid to submit our faith to scrutiny. Real truth can take it. I pray that all of us will have moments of real experience with God, authentic head, heart and whole body experience. Believe. Question. I dare you. My name is Robyn Provis and I approved this message. Amen.