February 17, 2008 – Second Sunday of Lent
John 3:1-17
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Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus. Amen.
Toward the beginning of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Driving Miss Daisy, Daisy Werthan intends to drive her brand new 1948 Packard down the driveway and into her garage, but instead plows into her neighbor’s backyard. It’s an event that persuades Daisy’s son that it’s finally time for mom to turn in her car keys and quit driving. He decides to hire a chauffeur, an African American named Hoke. But Miss Daisy doesn’t much like this change. In fact, she’s defiant. Just because her son has gone and hired Hoke, that doesn’t mean she has to use him.
So, whenever Miss Daisy wants to go to the store or to the hairdresser or to synagogue to worship, she takes the streetcar. Meanwhile, Hoke, perpetually dressed in his uniform and ready for the call to action, simply waits.
Until one day. Miss Daisy decides she needs a few things at the store, and walks out to the sidewalk to head down to the streetcar stop. Hoke decides to force a change. He slides behind the wheel of Daisy’s new car and, as she walks down the sidewalk, he pulls up alongside her. “Where you goin’?” she barks over at Hoke. “I’m taking you to the store,” he yells back. And it works! She finally gets into the car. Miss Daisy’s conversion has begun.
It was a very uneasy pairing, these two. But from that day, whenever Daisy wanted to go anywhere, whether to run errands around town or to go over to Mobile to visit relatives, she and Hoke went together. As the time passed, the relationship between chauffeur and passenger grew. And one day, very late in life, Miss Daisy looked over at Hoke and, with a mixture of surprise and gratitude, said, “Hoke, you’re my best friend.”
Driving Miss Daisy is more than the story of the relationship between an African American chauffeur and an elderly Jewish widow; it’s the story of an invitation to personal conversion. Lent is that season of the church year when we’re invited to focus on God’s invitation to us to our own ongoing personal conversion, a deepening of our life of faith.
Typically, when we think of faithfulness and people of faith, we tend to not think of people like Nicodemus. We tend instead to think of people like Abraham. We saw in our first lesson that God came to Abraham and said, “Abraham, pack up the household and hit the road. Leave the GPS behind; I’ll show you where you’re supposed to go after you’ve started out.” To which Abraham said, “Oh, OK,” and went. No questions, no objections, no requests for clarification; just obedient action.
It’s that kind of faithful response that we celebrate; in fact, in his letter to the Romans, St. Paul would point to Abraham and say, “Ah, Abraham; now, there was a man of faith!” And we put Abraham and his faith on a pedestal and admire him. But we don’t live on pedestals; we live much closer to the ground. In fact, we live in the same neighborhood as Nicodemus.
Nicodemus was a church official, educated and knowledgeable about affairs of religion. He comes to Jesus with an interesting mixture of certainty and curiosity. We see from the way he starts the conversation that he is self-assured, confident. “Rabbi,” he says, “we know that you’re a teacher sent from God.” He doesn’t start out with a question, like “Jesus, who are you?” or “What are you all about?” No, he begins with “We know.”
He represents the religious establishment. They already know about Jesus; they know where he comes from, they have his ministry pretty much figured out. They know about God, about what God can and can’t do in the world. And they know about people, that we are born, we grow old and we die. They’re familiar with limitations and boundaries; their world is fixed, finite, everything bolted down and secure, no surprises. “We know.”
And that’s when Jesus rocks Nicodemus’ theological world. “No, Nicodemus; you don’t know. In fact, no one can even begin to perceive the realm of God without being born of that place, from above, a second time; born of the Spirit. You must be born of that Spirit, Nicodemus, that Spirit that blows where it will. And it will take you far beyond what is familiar to you.”
Jesus is inviting Nicodemus out, into unfamiliar territory, territory that can’t be measured and quantified. He’s inviting Nicodemus into an experience that he can’t control.
What Nicodemus is bumping into is the reality that the God we worship is uncontrollable; totally, absolutely free. We’re drawn to images of Jesus the Good Shepherd, Jesus the bringer of peace in the midst of turmoil, Jesus the bringer of comfort in the midst of anguish. “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” We love passages like that, from Matthew’s Gospel, because when life blindsides us with something that knocks us back on our heels, or worse yet lays us out flat, we need something to hang onto, something to help us get back on our feet. And these images of Jesus are absolutely true and faithful and reliable. But those images don’t exhaust the reality of God.
There is another image of God, one that we tend to steer clear of, an image we don’t like to talk about, because we don’t like it. It’s the wildness of God, the image of God as totally unrestrained, free, unpredictable, beyond our ability to manage. The Spirit blows when, and where, and if, and how it alone chooses And so we pray, and sometimes we receive what we pray for, and sometimes we don’t. We hear Jesus tell us in John’s Gospel, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” So we ask for something in Jesus’ name, and sometimes we receive the thing for which we ask, but sometimes, and maybe most of the time, we don’t, and we can’t explain why. There is a dissonance between our experience and God’s promises, and we can’t understand it.
So we retreat from the mystery of God, backing off into what we can manage, control, arrange; into formulas that we think will get us what we want. That explains the popularity of books like The Purpose Drive Life. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to that book:
“This is more than a book; it is a guide to a 40-day spiritual journey that will enable you to discover the answer to life’s most important question: What on earth am I here for? By the end of this journey you will know God’s purpose for your life and will understand the big picture – how all the pieces of your life fit together. Having this perspective will reduce your stress, simplify your decisions, increase your satisfaction, and, most important, prepare you for eternity.”
Well, there you have it. It’s certainly easier than worshiping the living God, and far more manageable.
No, despite what the religious self-help books and the popular televangelists claim, we worship a God who will not be reduced to a set of helpful hints for happy living, won’t be shrunken to fit on a bumper sticker, won’t be domesticated for use by any political party.
Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson says that the difference between the living, true God and a dead, false god is the living God still has the ability to shock you. Nicodemus was shocked, or “astonished,” to use Jesus’ word. Actually, he was suffering from a condition characterized by confusion, questions and uncertainty. “Nicodemusitis,” we might call it. And as uncomfortable as it is to have this condition, it is also a healthy condition to have because it often leads to a deeper, more useful, more enduring faith. Fifty years ago theologian Paul Tillich reminded the Church that doubt is not the opposite of faith, nor the enemy of faith; instead, doubt often is the indispensable partner to a growing faith. The New Testament letter of James is great reassurance to all of us, and particularly to those of us who doubt and question, when it says, “If you draw near to God, God will draw near to you.” Because Scripture shows us that what God desires most of all for us and from us is a deeper relationship with God.
Jesus told Nicodemus that “if I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” That word “believe” can mean a couple of different things. On one level it means to give your intellectual assent to something, usually on the basis of some kind of evidence. A friend of yours is a rock climber; she shows you pictures of her climbing up the rock face of a mountain and says, “There, you see, it can be done.” And you say, “I see that. I believe you.” You give your intellectual assent to what she’s saying, but it doesn’t change the way you live your life because it’s all in your head.
But there is another kind of belief, a kind that is deeper, more thorough. Instead of showing you pictures, your friend invites you to go rock climbing with her. As she checks the knots on the harness on your chest and runs your safety line through the equipment around her waist, she assures you that everything will be all right. You’ve gone way beyond intellectual assent at this point; now, the response is not “I believe you,” but “I believe in you.” Because now, you have placed your life in her hands, and there is no more-intimate relationship than that.
That’s the kind of relationship that Jesus wants with Nicodemus. But the last we hear from Nicodemus in this episode is his question that hangs in the air: “How can these things be?” He is dumbfounded, unable to define this Jesus or the God he reveals.
If you’ve ever been confused by God, ever wrestled with the Spirit, ever been unable to figure out Jesus, I invite you to take heart; in fact, take Nicodemus as your patron saint. Take your doubts, your confusion, your anger, your unanswered prayer and don’t set them aside, don’t try to minimize them; but use them, pursue them – because they just might be the tools that God is using to draw you closer.
You see, Nicodemus does reappear, near the end of the Gospel. This time he says nothing; he simply shows up in silence to care for the crucified body of Jesus. In some ways the most compelling part of the story of Nicodemus is the part we don’t get to see: what happened to him between that late-night meeting with Jesus and the crucifixion. And maybe it’s best that we don’t serve as the audience for such an intimate conversion.
But somehow, somehow, Nicodemus was able to hear in a new way the words that Jesus spoke to him that night: For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” For God so loved the world, and you, Nicodemus. And you, people of God.
Amen.
