Sermon preached by The Rev'd Nicholas Lang

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

The Second Sunday of Lent – February 17, 2008

Every Sunday night, this sacred space takes on a completely different look. You will find a very dark church, illuminated only by candles. Shortly after the ringing of the carillon at 9 pm, the choir begins to chant the ancient night prayer of the church called Compline. It is a sharp contrast from Sunday morning worship here: quiet, serene, and so dim that you can hardly identify the person sitting across the aisle from you. There is very little chatter as people arrive or leave.

More than a few of those who have entered the mainstream of our community have come first through the darkness and privacy of that brief Sunday night service. This progression of moving from the Compline service at night to the fuller, livelier, brighter, more public Eucharistic celebration of Sunday morning speaks to me of the story we hear in John’s Gospel today. Like Nicodemus, some of us need to work through our questions and concerns and bring them to God in the shadows rather than in the light of day. Some of us may need a more private encounter with Jesus.

But the night is a metaphor for something beyond its designation of the time of day. It presents an image of confusion and misunderstanding. It is not unusual for someone to be afraid of the night and its piercing darkness even as adults. When we hear the story about Nicodemus, we must remember that there were no street lights to illumine one’s path in first century Palestine. It was very, very dark. This was a secret, private meeting away from the crowds that usually hovered around Jesus. For Nicodemus, the night meant safety. After all, he was a Pharisee and the Pharisees were the enemies of Jesus. If he were seen cavorting with Jesus, he would be disgraced, maybe even thrown out of the Temple.

You and I are able to make some sense out of this world because of our intellect. Everyday we encounter images and stimuli of all kinds and our brain scrambles to reach into the warehouse of past experience and label or categorize them. We spend much of our time figuring out and defining our experiences—even though we may not do that consciously.

We are on I-95 and an object seems to be veering into our lane. We don’t need to pause and think, “Hmm. Now I wonder what that could be? I’ll have to do some research and see what this is and how I should respond.” No, we see the object and we say, “That idiot in the SUV is moving into my lane and is going to hit my car!” We are able to decode the experience because of other experiences we have had through childhood and adulthood. But the young mind in formation needs to ask “Mommy, what is that?” “That is a car, sweetie,” so the next time that little one sees a car, she will have a name for it.

The point is that our thinking process is heavily reliant on past experience. When we encounter an experience or situation that is truly new, we struggle to figure it out and, if it there is no memory bank to help us, we are at a disadvantage. We feel like we are in the dark and we often articulate our feeling in those very words.

I wonder if that is not how Nicodemus felt when he came to see Jesus. Here he was, an educated man, a rabbi, a leader of the Jews, dealing with an experience that was totally new for him. “I’ve heard some amazing things about you, Rabbi,” he tells Jesus. “I have seen your miracles, your signs, and wonders.” But still Nicodemus does not know what to make of all this. It is so new to him. He is struggling to make sense of it. He has many questions for Jesus. But all of these inquiries probably skirt around the most basic one: “Just who the heck are you anyway?”

When all is said and done, isn’t that the fundamental question? Just who is Jesus…for us? Like Nicodemus, we have heard the stories of the amazing things Jesus did—healing the lame and paralyzed, restoring sight to the blind, calming those tortured by evil spirits (what might well have been serious mental illness), multiplying a few loaves of bread into enough food to satisfy more than 5,000 people, changing water into wine, walking on water, even raising the dead. Who is he? Is it possible that this human being is the incarnation of God? Did he really do all these miracles we have heard about?

Some Christians think that they have it all figured out. They have all the answers and probably look suspiciously at poor old Nicodemus. What kind of person would question Jesus? What kind of person would be so confused? Who would slip out in the night to have a private meeting with Jesus—afraid to be caught by his or her peers? Maybe, just maybe, anyone of us.

Oh, there is nothing wrong with meeting Jesus on a bright, sunny day, when everything is going our way and all seems right with the world. But there are times when we find ourselves coming to Jesus in the darkness, groping our way, stumbling, confused, and questioning. St. John of the Cross described this as the “dark night of the soul,” in which we may at any time find ourselves. Yet it was in the dark that Nicodemus found Jesus and where was found by Jesus and welcomed with love and acceptance. Remember that our salvation did not come in the brilliant light on the mount when Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James, and John, but rather on a lonely cross on a hill called “The Place of the Skull,” when the sky turned completely dark for hours.

Have you ever been in a thickly wooded campsite on a moonless night when the fire has burned out and the batteries in your flashlight have died? Could there be any place darker? Well, maybe in a deep cave when the lanterns are extinguished and all that one can sense is the flapping of bat wings. I don’t think that any of us have escaped the density of seemingly impenetrable darkness when we have felt utterly helpless. Perhaps we have known black confusion or stood in the grim shadow of depression or wallowed in some midnight we have allowed to wrap itself around us.

Maybe the sun is shining for you right now, maybe not. Maybe things are going really well. Your family and friends are fine and your work is satisfying. But if, per chance, this Sunday in Lent finds you in the dark, even as the sun breaks through our windows, if you are moving in the direction of twilight to midnight; if, perhaps, you have reason not to be happy because things are not what you want them to be, learn from our friend Nicodemus. We have a savior who keeps evening hours. You can come in out of the dark—ask him whatever it is on your mind. Know that we have the kind of God who wants to be with us, who will speak to us, listen to us, even if we can’t fully understand the whole truth God offers. Even if we don’t really know how to define who Jesus is.

The church has too often been good at just delivering answers rather than encouraging and welcoming the questions. I recall as a youngster memorizing the catechism for a daily drill by my teachers. Pure rote memorization of hundreds of answers. If we missed the correct one, we’d have to write it out twenty or more times. Most of us were scared, not only out of sheer embarrassment from standing in front of our peers and stumbling, but also because of the time away from recreation and play that the punishment involved. I wonder how many of the kids I went to school with have abandoned religion because they wished that the church had asked them about their questions instead of making them memorize all the answers.

Novelist Flannery O’Connor once said: “I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.”

The good news of this Gospel today is that Jesus is always willing to meet us where we are—in the bright light of day or the shadowy dark of night— and still invites us to follow even when we don’t understand him. That’s what Nicodemus did. The next time we hear about him in the Gospel is on Good Friday. When most of the disciples had deserted Jesus out of fear, Nicodemus was one of the few who stayed to the end and lovingly helped to bury Jesus. He didn’t ask any questions then and he risked being seen with Jesus. He had become a disciple, a friend and follower—even though he didn’t have Jesus fully figured out. And that works for us as well. We are all, like old Nicodemus, a work in progress.

Writing about the Jesus in her book, In Search of Belief, Benedictine sister Joan Chittister, says ”Jesus stands before us, the clearest, sharpest, most abundant picture we have of the face of God. And how can we be sure of that? Because Jesus is what we know in our hearts God must surely be: compassionate, just, merciful, loving, and on the other side of every boundary.

When I say, ‘I believe in Jesus,’ says Joan, “I am saying that I believe in a way above and beyond whatever else challenges me to be. Institutions, the best of them, want me in the end for the aggrandizement, the status, the power, the service of themselves. They want me to keep their rules, their laws, their disciplines, their priorities and regulations, all of them, without a doubt, good. But all of them partial. Short of the goal. Only Jesus wants me for more than that. Jesus wants me for the Gospel, for the Good Life, whatever the cost.”

I would imagine that is the same Jesus Nicodemus met that night in the dark and why he decided to follow him.