I.
Have you ever had a problem you couldn’t solve?
Meet Nicodemus.
Have you ever had a situation you wanted to get out of?
Meet Abraham.
Nicodemus wants to know why most of his fellow Jews cannot see what he sees (but is afraid to say), that Jesus is the Messiah:
“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
Abraham is eager to continue on the journey his father began, out from Ur of the Chaldees to Canaan, the Promised Land.
Why?
Presumably because Abraham, and his father before him, had decided that Ur was just no longer a place for good, God-fearing people to live.
Sure, like every city, it had culture and the arts and economic opportunities. It was said that if you could make it in Ur, you could make it anywhere.
But lately crime has been up, city services are breaking down, and a new religion is taking over.
Abraham and his father remembered Old Ur, when people knew God by name,1 and so they decided to strike out on their own, to see if they couldn't build a city on a hill in the wilderness.
It certainly helped Abraham to keep going, once his father died, that God Himself promised to make him a great nation.
Many generations later, Nicodemus, one of those children of Abraham, was wondering why all his fellow children of Abraham had forgotten the name of God — forgotten even how to pronounce it — and was longing for the friendship Abraham had with God.
For Abraham, God was truly a fellow traveler, a friend.
Nicodemus wanted to be God’s friend too.
II.
Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, hoping against hope that He might be the one, the long-awaited Messiah, the Christ.
“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.”
Perhaps Nicodemus does not speak for the whole college of Pharisees, but he’s not yet ready to stand by himself.
Jesus reassures him, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
In other words, “Relax, Nicodemus, the very fact you even want to speak to me, let alone seek me out, means you are already God’s friend.”
“How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asks. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”
“Nicodemus, you are taking Me literally. Everyone knows you can’t take the Word of God literally.”
Jesus is having fun with Nicodemus’ penchant for scientific rationalism.
What Jesus means is that Nicodemus has to make some fundamental changes, changes that will change who he is, changes not unlike those God asked Abraham to make.
In fact, the changes will be so deep that it will seem as if Nicodemus is a wholly different person, as if Nicodemus has been born again, into another family, in a different country, and with a new Father.
III.
How many of you grew up in a place very different from where you were born?
I was born in New Jersey and grew up in Southern California. My wife was born in Moscow and grew up in New York City.
I arrived in Los Angeles in the fall of 1981 and started school. (I was in third grade.) An Asian classmate of mine asked me if they spoke English in New Jersey. A white classmate asked me if I was a fan of USC or UCLA.
I didn’t understand his question and wondered where exactly people thought I had come from!
God asks Abraham to break with his former life, to leave his native country, to abandon the customs of his people, and to forsake his blood relations.
Why?
So that God can do something new.
Specifically, so that God can redefine what it means to belong, not in the carnal way that Adam and Eve established, where race and tribe and kin are everything, but in a spiritual way, where relationship is everything.
“Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”2
God wants to beget a spiritual family, made up of spiritual children, who are related to each other by faith, which is a gift that comes from God.
This does not mean God wants a family of ghosts or specters, or that some disembodied, immaterial reality is to be preferred to flesh and blood.
What God wants is children who are, in principle, immortal, who live by the life God breathes into them, and not just by what they can kill and eat.
IV.
All of us are born to die, which is not how it was meant to be. We can blame Adam and Eve for our misfortune, as I preached last week.
Death is not natural, it is penal. Death is the penalty for sin.
If we romanticize death by saying it is part of the cycle of life, then we gravely misjudge the peril we face.
If we think that death is automatically a peaceful transition to a better life, or to a greater plane of existence, or that we are recycled into the elements, then we are sorely mistaken.
When we die, at that very moment, we will know ourselves to be either in heaven or in hell.
We will know once and for all whether we were, in this life, God’s friend or God’s enemy, whether we blessed Abraham and his children or cursed them.
Hell can be described as a conscious death. We will be dead and fully aware that we are dead.
Heaven can be described as eternal life. We will be alive and fully aware that we will live forever.
Jesus comes to give us this eternal life:
“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up:
“That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”3
V.
Abraham and Nicodemus are examples for us to follow. They show us what it means to believe in God.
Abraham is willing to endure the physical separation and the psychological collapse it takes to follow God.
Many of us have been there. The drunk who hits bottom. The forced move. The parents who lost their son. The daughter who lost her father. The marriage that fails. The spouse who dies.
What got us through was faith. Faith that we didn’t know we had. Faith that came as a gift from God.
Others of us are like Nicodemus. We have our doubts. We need convincing. But we’ve learned to be content with Jesus’ answer:
“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”4
Nicodemus learned to be content with the mystery of his faith. That is why he defends Jesus at His trial and helps another disciple-in-secret, Joseph of Arimathea, to bury Jesus.5
The Church needs both.
Men and women who will preach God boldly and upend their whole lives to seek the Promised Land and men and women like Nicodemus, who move as with the wind. You don’t see them, but the Church would not grow without them.
Make up your mind by dint of your temperament or character which one you are, but do not die in unbelief. Believe in Jesus. Become a different person.
The gist of the stories of these two men is that living a life of faith sets them apart.
Living a life of faith in God will set you apart as well. There are things you simply can no longer do. There are things you simply can no longer say. Your friends, family, and coworkers will ask you what has changed. You will face rejection and may find you have to stand alone.
The Church, throughout her history, is forever backsliding, falling back into the ways of the world, losing that precious apartness that makes her holy.
In every generation the Church is tempted to believe the lie that if she will just compromise a bit, if she will just make accommodation for this or that sin, then she will be a welcome and accepted member of the human community.
But that that is not her calling. It is not her calling to be relevant or even contemporary.
The Church is timeless because she is the bride of eternal life.
And so, in every generation, there must be men and women like Abraham who go to great lengths to proclaim the truth that there is only one God and that failure to obey Him and keep His commandments brings certain death.
There must also be men and women like Jesus who are not afraid to bring division to the Church, so that the sheep may be saved, and the wolves unmasked and driven out.
There must also be men and women like Nicodemus, who use their power and privilege to defend these prophets when they are arrested and face trial, and who will see to it they get a proper burial when they become martyrs.
Have you seen the kingdom of God? Then you are blessed, for you would not see it if you were not already part of it.
But seeing it you must act. Decide today that you will no longer be a bystander. Decide today that you are all in. Pray God to show you the role He has ordained for you to fulfill.
Pick up stakes and move. Separate yourself from evil people. Work quietly and in secret to defend God’s kingdom. Or stay right where you are and say something.
If you are hesitant then I leave you with two things to think about.
First, Jesus says, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
The world already stands condemned to death and destruction, yet you have been given the message that can save it.
You think climate change is bad, wait until Judgment Day.
You recycle your tin cans, you buy electric cars, all in an effort to save the world through your good works, so of course you cannot keep the message of salvation to yourself.
Second, Paul writes that God, “gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.”
It gives me courage to know that I serve a God who can call things back to life that have died or even that had no prior existence.6
Whatever I lose in this ministry, even if it is my own life, my wife, my children, or my pulpit, I know that God will restore one hundredfold.7
In fact, He already has begun to do just that.
That is the promise my faith rests on, and it is guaranteed by Jesus Christ.
Abraham put his faith in this promise. Nicodemus did too. It is my daily prayer for each of you that you have as well. Amen.
Preached on March 5, 2023 at St. Peter’s Lithgow, Millbrook, New York.
Lent 2, Year A
Genesis 12:1-4a; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17
See: Matt. 19:29.