NOTE: Tim Sessions will lead Morning Prayer Sunday, March 12 at 10am at Christ Episcopal, Saint Joseph
Hello darkness, my old friend…
Christ Episcopal Church, St.
Joseph
Year B, Lent 2
Genesis 12:1-4a; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17
Hello
darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
I hope you can hear the
music of Simon & Garfunckel in your head as I read those words. I certainly
can, but… be grateful I’m not singing!
Today’s Gospel story puts
me in mind of that song. Nicodemus has heard about Jesus and the things he is
doing. Perhaps he has even seen Jesus in action, doing what the Gospel
according to John calls “the signs”: converting water into wine, healing people,
even raising them from the dead.
These signs of Jesus have
planted the seeds of a vision in Nicodemus’ brain. He is compelled to go talk
to the source, but he goes at night—under cover of his friend, darkness.
Why is darkness
Nicodemus’ friend? He was a prominent Pharisee who saw something in Jesus, and
his response—wanting to talk with Jesus—was very different from that of his
colleagues—who throughout John’s Gospel become angrier and angrier, and more
and more threatening, and soon plot to kill Jesus.
But there’s more darkness
in this story than the physical darkness that hides Nicodemus’ visit to Jesus.
Nicodemus lives in spiritual darkness. His feet are mired, his body entangled
in things of the earth, specifically religious law. It’s all he knows. He is a
teacher of the law!
And religious law, like
civil law, is all about control and order and social identity and politics.
It’s about who’s “in” and who’s “out,” who is an acceptable dinner companion
and who not, whom your child is allowed to love and who not, who is “saved” and
who not.
Nicodemus was about the
letter of the law. Jesus was about the spirit of the law. And so it is not too
surprising that when Jesus attempts to engage Nicodemus on the spiritual plane,
it seems to fall on deaf ears. Jesus speaks of being “born” of the spirit;
Nicodemus can’t get past physical birth.
They are like ships
passing in the night. Or, better yet given my theme song today, like people who
show up in verse 3 of Simon & Garfinckel’s song:
People talking without
speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
Nothing is more deadly to
the process of learning than thinking you already know. I’ll never forget the
young man who came into the mass communication major at ULM a number of years ago. He had already
worked in television. His father had a sportsman’s show—a fishing show, I
believe—and this kid had grown up helping him produce his show.
He came to ULM to get his ticket
punched. Not to learn, but to get a degree so he could climb those ladders of
success that require degrees. In his first or second semester, he failed a
class because of missed deadlines. He was always certain his excuse—helping my
dad on his show—would get him extensions and endless grace. It didn’t. He
failed. Furious, he disappeared.
Several years later he
returned, a different person. He came back a person who had discovered how much
he didn’t know. And he became a model student. Today he runs his own successful
media production business.
Jesus calls us to walk
out of the darkness of knowing into the light of unknowing, of giving up our
religious rules for the sake of love and compassion that knows no rules, that
follows no rules.
And why is it so hard for
us to do that? I must go back to Simon & Garfunckel one more time. Remember
the final verse? It goes like this.
And the people bowed and
prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway
walls
In tenement halls"
And whispered in the sounds of silence
You see, we make idols of
what we know, and the rules that worked for us, that helped us organize and
manage our lives, that give us our identities and helped us be successful in
earthly terms. And we should not forget those things and I am certainly not
saying we should reject them or despise them.
But we make idols of them
and that is when they become darkness that enshrouds us, and blinds us to
seeing God in our neighbor and in all of God’s creation.
Nicodemus clung to human
religious knowing and theological certitudes, devoid of the wind of the Spirit.
He was blind to the new thing God was doing before his very eyes: Jesus, the
Son of Man who came to preach love as the fulfilment of the spirit of the law.
We do know that later on,
Nicodemus stood up for Jesus a little bit when Jesus was being interrogated by
the Sanhedrin. Later still, Nicodemus helps Joseph of Arimathea take Jesus down
from the cross and lay him in a tomb. That gives me hope that eventually
Nicodemus was able to experience himself as a beloved child of God.
How about us? Are we
stuck in the dark of thinking our particular religious beliefs and practices
are all there is to know about God? Our Holy Scripture and our interpretations
of it the one and only truth? That our social and cultural ways are morally
superior to everyone else’s? Have we made an idolatry of a political party?
The Bishop actually
addressed that last thing very specifically in his address at Diocesan
Convention. He said, If a political party is your primary identity, stop it!
Just stop it. That is not who you are.
To follow Jesus is to
relinquish knowing and certitude. It is to be open to the movement of the
spirit. In the words of early 20th Century poet Jessica Powers, The
soul that walks where the wind of the Spirit blows turns like a weather-vane
toward love. …To live with the Spirit of God is to be a lover.
In the name of God, Father, Son and
Holy Spirit. AMEN.