The Nicodemus Dialogue

Preached January 23 at St. Paul's Lutheran Churchm Rye Brook, N.Y.

“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

My own encounter with Nicodemus goes back a long ways. I think it was about 1966 when I was 19 years old. 

I was an airman with two stripes stationed in England, a member of a group of Americans who called ourselves the “Christian Vocation Group.” On Sunday evenings we brought worship services to vicarless Anglican churches. We took turns leading the hymns, reading the scriptures, leading the litanies, and preaching the message. One night in November it was my turn to preach.

I have to cringe a little at my teen-age presumption that I had something to say to a tiny congregation of mostly elderly women. But lack of experience didn’t stop me. Back then most of my sermons were Billy Graham imitations consisting of hoisting my bible and shouting, “The BIBLE says …”

That night I was preaching on Nicodemus’ encounter with Jesus as it is told in the King James Version.

“Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”

Whatever that means.

My exegetical insights were limited at 19, but I knew enough to cover my ignorance by shouting.

Our group members were mostly Southern Baptists so we concluded each worship service in evangelical style: we extended an invitation to the elderly congregants to come forward and be “born again.” Most nights the ladies stared at us in polite silence and remained in their pews.

On this night however, a young man – possibly the son of one of the women – walked toward me with tears in his eyes and collapsed at my feet.

“You said just what was in my heart tonight,” he said.

I was dumbfounded. Something I had said had led someone to Christ? And, if so, what did I say? And how would I know to say it again?

I stood aside as the older members of our group surrounded the young man to tell him about Jesus. That was just as well because I really had nothing more to say to him.

But I confess all this because it is so typical of evangelical interpretations of what Jesus meant when he said, “You must be born again.”

In my brief flirtation with Southern Baptists I understood that being born again was my own responsibility. Jesus wasn’t going to do it for me. If I was going to spend eternity with Jesus I had to decide that on my own. If I didn’t profess my faith in Jesus I was lost for all time, and God would cast me into the eternal darkness.

That seems harsh but I have known many evangelicals who grieved that their spouses or siblings or children were not “born again” and would not be joining them in Heaven.

The thought of eternal darkness was also a terror for me. I sat through many an invitation at evangelical services, swells of “Just As I Am” in my ears, frozen in my pew, unable to rise to my feet to accept Jesus as my personal Savior. I couldn’t wrap my brain on what it would feel like to be saved. I saw others going forward, smiling through their tears, to profess their certainty they had been saved. But how did they really know? And would they feel the same way when the euphoria passed?

I wonder if Nicodemus felt the same confusion, the same uncertainty about what it would mean to follow Jesus?

Nicodemus is a prominent figure in John’s Gospel, but that is the only Gospel in which he appears. We know he is a Pharisee, an influential religious leader in the turbulent times in which he and Jesus lived.

Beyond that we don’t know very much about him. But one thing is clear whenever he makes an appearance: he loves Jesus very much. He has perceived that this charismatic teacher has much to say about the mysteries of God. He approaches Jesus with apparent shyness, perhaps even awe. We know that his love for Jesus continued to the end when he took custody of Jesus’ body after the Crucifixion.

In today’s reading Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night to have a secret dialogue with him. 

In my drawing above I have pictured him as perplexed and confused by what Jesus is saying: “You must be born again.” 

But Nicodemus may not have been confused at all. Theologian Charles Ellicott writes that “after the method of Rabbinic dialogue, [Nicodemus] presses the impossible meaning of the words in order to exclude it, and to draw forth the true meaning. ‘You cannot mean that a man is to enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born. What is it, then, that you do mean?’” 

Jesus may have feigned surprise, perhaps ironically, that “a teacher of Israel” does not understand the concept of spiritual rebirth: “Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen; and ye receive not our witness,” (KJV John 3:10–11.)

As we read about Nicodemus’ struggle to receive Jesus’ witness, it’s easy enough for us to conclude that it is Nicodemus’ responsibility to “get it.” Jesus is not going to do it for him. This is the interpretation of many evangelicals over the centuries: You must be born again. Your choice.

But look again at Jesus own interpretation:

“Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”

Yes, we must be born again. But we are not in control of how or when that happens. Just as we cannot control where the wind blows, we are not in charge of when and how the Holy Spirit moves in our lives. It is the Spirit – grace, as we Lutherans say – that brings us to faith. It’s not up to us. 

One of the instructors in the Diakonia classes I attended said she has a simple Lutheran answer when evangelicals ask her, “Have you found Jesus?” 

“No,” she says, “Jesus has found me.”

This is most certainly true.

It is this powerful insight – salvation not by our own decision but through the Grace of the Holy Spirit – that I find most attractive about our Lutheran faith. 

Carolyn Winfrey Gillette is a Presbyterian theologian know for writing new verses for well-known hymns to highlight different themes. She has written powerful hymns expressing God’s presence amid natural disasters such as the Haitian earthquake, in times of national grief, in times of national celebration, and throughout many holidays and highlights of the church year. Her hymns are available free of charge, with appropriate accreditation, to any congregation that is a member of a denomination that is a member of the National Council of Churches. Her website is https://www.carolynshymns.com/

Carolyn has written a wonderful hymn, “Nicodemus Sought Out Jesus,” that can be sung to the tune of “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.”

I won’t attempt to sing it, but I will recite her beautiful lyrics that hold so much spiritual truth:

Nicodemus sought out Jesus at a lonely quite hour.

He said, “Teacher, God is with you! For in you we  see God’s power.”

Jesus turned and gave an answer filled with challenge and with love,

“You can never see God’s kingdom till you’re born from heav’n above.”

“Born again!” said Nicodemus. “Is that something one can do?”

Jesus said, “Don’t be surprised now that you must be born anew.

And it’s not by your own doing: wind and spirit will blow free!

They are not for your controlling; trust in God for what will be.”

God, your spirit still surprises like an ever-changing wind,

Bringing life and love and justice where despair and death have been.

May we see your Spirit working as a gift from heav’n above.

Blest, may we then be a blessing to this world that you so love.

Selah.

Savior on the Edge

Note: This sermon was prepared for delivery - on Zoom, because of the sub-freezing temperatures and the Omicron virus that kept us safe in our homes - at,  Saint Paul's Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y., on January 16, 2022. 

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ John 2:13-16

Turn the other cheek? Please.

Jesus is so incensed when he sees entrepreneurs in the temple that he starts smacking them upside their heads.

Interestingly, the dealers turn tail and run. It makes you wonder if Jesus was bigger and meaner than he is generally portrayed, or perhaps the vendors simply knew better than to get in the way of a messiah on the edge.

The cleansing of the temple is told in all four Gospels and it is the sole instance of Jesus using physical violence to make a point. In John’s account, Jesus barks out orders to clarify the point: “Get out. Stop making my Father’s house a market place.”

Obviously Jesus felt strongly enough about the issue to start flailing at miscreant traders with stinging ropes. That in itself would place the tenet among Jesus’ Big Three: love your neighbor, forgive your enemy, and don’t you dare make my Father’s house a market place.

For me, the third tenet is hardest to accept. I was a church bureaucrat for 40 years. My bread and butter was mined in the market place of God’s house. I’ve sold bibles and books, begged money for special offerings, and designed ecclesiastical tchotchkes to sell at church meetings.  I was a money changer in the temple.

What was it the money changers were doing that was so bad? They were simply changing Greek and Roman coins to the currency required in the Temple gift shop. Others were selling doves to people who couldn’t afford the more expensive sacrifices of sheep and goats. All of these transactions earned a slight profit for the retailers, which enabled them to return day after day to provide a necessary and holy service to the faithful. We call it the cost of doing business.

But these bygone Temple hawkers were pikers compared to the genius of Christian marketers. Sales kiosks identical to the stalls that annoyed Jesus lined the paths to medieval churches and cathedrals. Priests and popes added to church coffers by selling indulgences required for the cleansing of souls, essentially high-priced tickets to heaven. Long after church reforms and the Protestant Reformation put an end to such practices, vendors were still charging the faithful for spiritual thrills, such as touching the wood of the True Cross or caressing the spear alleged to have pierced the Savior’s side. 

These dubious practices survive in modern times, as anyone knows who watches television evangelists. Over the centuries, the most useful Latin phrase uttered in the church has been caveat emptor: let the buyer beware.

Jesus clearly felt the hawking of wares and high-profit currency exchanges were demeaning to God’s house. And if we know Jesus as well as we think we do, we might also guess that he was angered by the exploitation of poor people, and especially women and widows, who were forced to pay dearly to carry out their religious duties.

This, I think, may be a central message of Jesus’ Temple rage. It was an anger aimed at the patrons of privilege, the rich, the priests, the scribes who lived off the sweat and deprivation of the poor. Jesus entered the temple in the name of the 99 percent who had so little and swung ropes at the agents of the 1 percent who had so much.

Jesus had a weak spot for the poor and so, usually, does the church. But, truth be told, the church also has a weak spot for the rich. For many congregations, the tithes of a humble membership are not sufficient to keep the pastor in comfortable accommodations. For many denominations, for which the Great Recession of 2008 never stopped, congregational mission giving falls short of supporting missionaries, staff and important ministries. Budgets and staff have been slashed to the bone, and some church bodies are in danger of fading away completely.

That’s why the churches love rich donors, who we prefer to call “high net worth friends” because “rich” sounds so tacky. 

Unfortunately, there are few biblical anecdotes to suggest God ordained the rich as the savior of the church. Jesus said – with apparent humor and gentleness – that it will be easier for a camel to slide through the eye of a needle than for the rich to get into heaven. Dorothy Parker said it less charitably: “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” Parker also spoke for most of us when she said, “I don’t know much about being a millionaire, but I’ll bet I’d be darling at it.”

Most of us don’t know much about being millionaires and, I suspect, most millionaires don’t know what it’s like to live one job or health crisis away from poverty. I have interviewed a billionaire heiress, for example, who complains that people don’t understand the heavy burdens of privilege or appreciate how very rich women are not admired for their talent or intellect. Most people listen politely to her grievance (people are often polite to the very rich), but when the woman steps out of the room they shake their heads and say, “Boy, I wish I had her problem.” 

None of this is to say, of course, that rich people can’t be good souls or faithful Christians. Much of American Protestantism owes much to the largesse of the Rockefellers (I daren’t suggest that the Robber Baron John D. Senior might have been buying himself a few indulgences) and there are scores of philanthropic enterprises that put even the dirtiest of fortunes to good use. 

Perhaps one of the things that enraged Jesus when he entered the Temple was a system that established barriers between the rich and the poor and deprived both groups of the fundamental humanity that made them one people.

Barriers in the temple between the rich and poor, and barriers anywhere in society, are godless devices that prevent us from acknowledging that we are all the same, that there are no “others,” that God has called us to love all our neighbors as we love ourselves. It’s the barriers that prevent us from suspending judgment about other people until we can imagine what it might be like to walk in another’s shoes or live another’s life.

When Jesus entered the Temple in Jerusalem, he expected to see a system that welcomed all the faithful to blessed encounters with the loving God.

Instead, he found the money changers standing in the way of the people God loved the most, the poor, the women, the widows.

The situation deprived everyone, money changers and widows alike, of their common humanity, and Jesus reaction was swift, righteous, godly and quintessentially human.

He picked up a whip and flailed away.

Selah.

 

A Magnus in Morrisville

 

I’ve told this story many times and I can't resist telling it again. It helps me understand the awe that must have been generated by the three magi when they traversed rural Palestine to stand so ostentatiously before the ragged occupants of a stinking stable.

Yes, awe. Awe in the purest sense. That must have been how the residents of the hamlet of Morrisville, N.Y. my hometown, reacted to a brief manifestation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1930.

Morrisville is not completely isolated.  Its location on U.S. route 20, which connects Albany with Utica, Syracuse, and points west, places it directly in the flow of intellectual and cultural currents. In 1930, Governor Roosevelt motored up route 20 to pay his respects to I.M. Charleton (standing right in the photograph below), the director of the Morrisville Institute (now Morrisville State College).

This little known event suggests Morrisville was not the least among the hamlets of Upstate New York. A future world leader discerned the importance of cultivating village intellectuals like I.M. (who, if not a Republican, was one of the few persons in the village who wasn’t.) History does not say whether Morrisville was at the top of FDR’s itinerary, or why he appears to have left the engine running as he sat in his car and charmed the local gentry. The important thing is, he came.

The family of Julie FitzSimmons Bookhout, one of my classmates at Morrisville-Eaton Central School in the early 1960s, had a special involvement in FDR’s visit. “Since my grandfather, George FitzSimmons, was a car dealer in town, he had the best car with which to fetch FDR at the train station in Utica and bring him back to Morrisville,” Julie told me last year. “My Aunt Anne FitzSimmons Kelley, who must have been 9 at the time, and is now 94, got to ride along in the car with FDR himself!”

In 1930, no one knew what Franklin Roosevelt’s future held. Still, he was important enough that I.M. Charleton thought it good to stand on the curb and chat with the Gov as he sat in the luxurious car. We know now, of course, that FDR’s paralyzed legs made it necessary for him to sit while I.M. stood, but in 1930 no one thought it was odd. The governor had perfected the art of charismatic sitting.

FDR’s visit may have been the most historic thing that happened in Morrisville during the Depression and possibly for all time.  My mother said the whole town turned out to watch South Pole explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd role special ice breaking equipment up Main street (and, as Central New Yorkers know, the harsh winters of Morrisville make it a good place to test out arctic gear). Some say they glimpsed Lieutenant Governor Malcolm Wilson at Sautter’s Diner in 1964, but Wilson is virtually unknown except to those who crossed the erstwhile  Tappanzee Bridge which was named for Wilson until it was torn down this year. The new and improved bridge is named for Governor Mario Cuomo. 

I surmise that FDR’s visit was unequaled by anything else that happened in Morrisville and someday a plaque may be placed in the pavement where his oil pan leaked 92 years ago.

I surmise all this for two reasons. One, FDR’s visit was as memorable to Morrisvillians as if exotic kings from the east had dropped by for coffee and pie. It gives chronic bible readers an emotional point of reference for what it must have been like to wake up in a barn in Bethlehem and see three kings stepping delicately over sheep poo.

And, two, I like to make it clear that my home town was not intellectually or culturally isolated, despite our Central New York accents that make us sound like lethargic North Dakotans. This stems from my frequent discomfort, decades after leaving Morrisville, to discover no one else pronounces words the way I was taught. One teacher pronounced the name of the ancient queen of Egypt as Klayo-PAY-tra, and also said the name of the Communist leader of China was pronounced his name the way it was spelled: Mayo Tissie Tongue. 

Also in the seventh grade, when we were introduced to the short stories of William Sydney Porter, who wrote under the name of O. Henry, I was entranced by a story I thought was entitled, “The Gift of the Magee.”

In my defense (and on behalf of Morrisvillians), I assert that it is very difficult to see the word m-a-g-i and quickly grasp that it is pronounced with a long a and a long i. The dictionary pronouncing hint is even less clear and looks like a logo for a foreign car: mæda. Moreover, the word magi was never used in the United Church of Morrisville. We knew about the itinerant kings, of course, because each year we built a manger scene on the front lawn of the church. But I was 10 before I realized they weren’t from a place called Orientar. And I was 15 before I realized they were magi, not magees.

Ideally, my digression should end here, but I’m still transfixed by the unexpected visit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to my home town. Like FDR’s visit to the Morrisville Ag and Tech institute, the visit of three kings to Bethlehem was calculated to make everyone feel important. If something was happening that warranted the appearance of the future president or the ancient kings, it had to be taken seriously.

On January 6, Christians around the world celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas that, along with twelve drummers drumming, marks the arrival of the Magi at the manger where Jesus was born. In our household, we observe the traditional Latino celebration of El Día de los Reyes and exchange small gifts in honor of their kingly largesse. But this is not a practice I grew up with in Morrisville, and it is not a universal observance.

Views as to who the kings were, in fact, are as varied as the Christian church itself. Some sects, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, excise references to the Kings because they were regarded as sorcerers of Satan. That’s a minority viewpoint, but it does tempt you to look a little closer at these guys.

A handful of scholars believe los tres reyes were precocious astronomers who mapped the stars and studied the passage of planets, but that would have placed them several hundred years ahead of their time. Most observers are convinced the kings were garden variety astrologers, a possibility supported by the fact that they not only looked at stars but believed that celestial bodies had something to tell them – and, more than that, they  followed one star for hundreds of miles to find out what it wanted them to know. 

Of course, the moving star of Bethlehem was more likely a migrating planet than a fixed star, but who knew about such realities of astrophysics back then? One thing seems certain: the first thing the kings would have checked in Entertainment Weekly was their horoscope.

The term magi, from magus, is a reference to the priests of Zoroastrianism, who studied the stars and planets and made elaborate charts to work out what their movements portended in the currents of human life below. The three magicians from the east didn’t become “wise men” until the 16th and 17th century, when scholars who wrote the King James Version of the bible decided to call the magi “Wise Men.” Elsewhere, the drafters of the bible used the same word to denote “sorcerer” or “sorcery,” notably in reference to Elymas in Acts 13:6-11, or Simon Magus in Acts 8:9-13.

Matthew does not identify the three kings, or magicians, or wise men, but thanks to long standing church tradition, we call them by name: Melchior a Babylonian scholar; Caspar (also Gaspar, Jaspar, Jaspas, Gathaspa, and other variations), a Persian scholar; and Balthazar (also Balthasar, Balthassar, and Bithisarea), an Arab scholar.

Everything else we know about the kings is circumstantial. One reason we know they were important is that when they dropped by the palace to pay their respects to King Herod, the King took time to meet with them. This was either a professional courtesy to his fellow kings, or – as Matthew tells it – Herod had heard the rumors that a king of the Jews was about to the born and he invited the three sorcerers in to find out what they knew. The wily Herod asked the three to let him know when they found the lad, “so that I may go and pay him homage.” 

Matthew states explicitly that when the triumvirate found the baby Jesus laying in the manger, they gave him three symbolic gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. But the kings were smart enough to know Herod was setting a trap for the baby – Matthew says they were warned in a dream – and they “left for their own country by another road,” evading Herod and his agents. Herod realized he had been duped by the kings and, according to Matthew, ordered the death of every new born male child in Bethlehem.

No one knows what happened to the kings after they returned home, although there are many interesting legends. Some believe one of the magi was baptized by St. Thomas, the “doubting Thomas” of Scripture, while he was en route to his missionary tasks in India. Both the Mar Thoma Church and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church of India trace their origins to the first century visit of St. Thomas to South Asia.

But it was Saint Gregory the Great, who reigned as pope from 590 to 604 A.D., who placed the traveling wise men in their proper historic perspective. In one of those rare sermons that is remembered for 1,500 years, Gregory stressed the fact that the wise men, having searched for and discovered the Christ, took a different road and never retraced their route.  “Having come to know Jesus,” he said, “we are forbidden to return by the way we came.”

Despite all the mystery and speculation about whom they really were, the three magi continue to preach a powerful message across the millennia. They were three non-Jews whose minds and spirits were open to powerful spiritual currents, including cryptic indications that a powerful monarch was about to be born to the Jews, a group they might have dismissed as a relatively minor sect in the Roman and eastern worlds.

When the three sorcerers perceived a unique sign in the heavens, a bright object that appeared to move ahead of them, they followed it out of intellectual and metaphysical curiosity.

As they pondered the heavenly sign that moved before them, they consulted their charts and concluded it was leading them to a rendezvous with a infant whose power and significance exceeded all they ever knew.

En route to Bethlehem, they decided to mark the occasion with significant gifts to the baby king: gold as a symbol of kingship on earth, frankincense as a reminder of God’s presence, and myrrh, an embalming oil, as a symbol of the death that would be required to bring the prophecy to fruition.

When they arrived at the end of their journey, these wise men born to riches did not hesitate to enter a rude, odiferous barn, because they knew the power and glory that resided in the human baby resting in an old feeding troth.

They came from afar and they knew who they were seeking and when they arrived, they worshipped the baby in the troth.

When they had met Jesus, they knew their lives must be changed forever. And they chose a new road for passage, having decided that they must never again retrace the steps that had brought them to this radical encounter with the son of a God they were only just beginning to know.

The very presence of these three splendid strangers must have amazed the parents of Jesus and astonished other witnesses in area. The visit of the obviously important Magi would have been regarded as a sign that something big was happening – just as Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930 appearance in Morrisville was a sign of something big.

But the glistening kings knew something that may have temporarily eluded others: they knew the magi were not the most important presence in the tiny barn.

That honor belonged to the smallest person in the room, the feeble infant still struggling to find the strength to lift his head.

It was the baby that the wise men came to see, and once they had seen him, their lives were changed forever.

And as we watch them in our minds eye, three kings stepping out on history’s stage, choosing a new route of enlightenment and understanding, may we all be eager to follow them and the star that brought them to God’s salvation,

westward leading,
still proceeding,
guide us to thy perfect light.