Encountering God: Nicodemus

 

Last week’s sermon,

where we moved from encountering Temptation to encountering God,
was a sort of preview of the coming sermon series
—spread out over, potentially, 15 weeks; we’ll be paying close attention to God encountering
—meeting, confronting, comforting
—everyone, from Adam to Thomas to the vast crowd on Pentecost. Stories of encountering God.

            Stories just like today’s story.
How do you meet God, how do you encounter him?
After all, “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven.”
We can’t climb up to see God, we can only meet
the one who abides with the Father,
the one who comes down for us.
And that’s who Nicodemus encounters, the Son of Man—Jesus the Christ, and in encountering him, he encounters God.
God reaches across the barrier between the Infinite and the finite,
to be there with Nicodemus.
Nicodemus’ conversation with Jesus tells us what it can be like to encounter God
—it is like night!
It is like being born!
It is like Water & Spirit,
my Lord, it is Life!

Let us pray

 

            Nicodemus arrives at night,
and he starts off with the right words, a good assessment of who he is speaking to:
he calls him Rabbi and Teacher,
he even insists that Jesus is from God,
and that God is present with him
—that in some way Nicodemus does not yet understand,
he is encountering God in this teacher from Galilee.

            And Jesus’ words, which can be read as a trap, a back-and-forth conflict between two people,
can also be read as an invitation:
“You’ve seen correctly,
you have noticed the nature of my relationship with God
—come and experience it!”

 

Here, in the night,
name both the known and the unknown,
that you too might be drawn into the heart of God.

            The night where Nicodemus can embrace his vulnerability,
where he can walk by faith and not by sight,
where he must lean into trust.
Encountering God always means encountering the unknown
—we’re creature, God is Creator
—God has a freedom and strangeness that is always surprising to us.
Holy literally means: different/strange/set apart
—apart from the ordinary experience of life.
In the night we walk with God,
trusting that he’ll lead us and guide us even if every other helper, even the good ones, fail.
We admit our limits and follow after the one who is beyond limits.

 

            “Be born again.”
That’s how you see God’s relationship with the world… Or is it?
That word that our Evangelical and Pentecostal siblings get all worked up about
—means a little more than expressed by a surface reading.
Born—Again/Anew/from Above.

            Born again, sure.
This is the time of year when I re-watch the Rock Opera Jesus Christ Super Star, and there is a poignant song the Disciples sing to Jesus when the enormity of Jesus’ last few days strikes them, “Could we start again, Please?”
This doesn’t seem right,
we’ve gone off track somehow,
could we return to the point before things became fearful or dangerous or painful or beyond the pale? Before the breaking point.
There is something of Lent in that, isn’t there? Being born again.
Repentance, returning to the font, recommitment to a right path.

            Born Anew.
I don’t just want to go back! Transform me!
That’s what encountering God does
—makes you something new.
Think of Adam, a man out of dust, there was lifeless, then breathed into, there was life!
Or the universe—there was chaos, and then there was Creation.
Something new born, something that could only come from outside
—Holiness coming into the ordinary
—Jesus’ invitation into eternal life!

            Born from Above.
Nothing short of an intervention of God will reveal the Kingdom.
Only God can cross that bridge, all attempts on our part are hubris and destined to fail.
Thanks be to God, Christ comes down to lift us up.

 

            Nicodemus doesn’t quite get it, at first.
He gives a sort of “Benjamin Button” example
—the old grow young.
Then he offers the awkward image of re-entering a mother’s womb
—like the in utero-prenatal combat between Jacob and Esau that the Women’s Group studied a few weeks back.

            No Nick!
—when you encounter God
you are born from above, anew, again.

           

            You are born of Water
—yes, your Baptism!
Also the living water that quenches
and comes from the source.
Your sustenance and nurture.

            You are born of Spirit
—the peace Christ leaves with us.
The breath that awakened that Earth-Man Adam.
A new creation, a rebirth
—both astonishingly uncontrollable and like rescue breathing, CPR
—you were dead, but you shall live!

 

            Live! Have eternal life! The Life of the Ages—life aware of God.
Are you living, Nick?
Are you living, siblings in Christ?
A life aware of God, God with us, both in the here and in the hereafter! That’s Kingdom, that’s Salvation
—this ongoing connection through Christ with God.

            A life of trusting confidence, that is salvation.
Life where we really believe that God desires our salvation,
not a crisis of alienation or despair,
but walking in the dark,
held by a loving parent,
a return,
an utterly unique spark of something new,
an intervention on our behalf,
sustenance and rescue.
I wish that for all of us, desperately so!

 

            And for Nicodemus—this encounter is a slow one, probably even a little painful.
-He begins with these questions for Jesus—the awkward fumbling we read today.
-Then he turns around and insists to his fellow religious leaders—hey, give Jesus a fair shake. Don’t dismiss this message out of hand—wrestle with it, like I am.
-Then, finally, on the other side of the cross, he joins the followers of Jesus in anointing the body of Jesus—the body that will rise—lifting us up to eternal life.

Encountering God
—it is night and birth and water and spirit and life! Amen.