The Rev. Anne Michele Turner March 16, 2014 Lent 2 A (John 3:1-17) St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Arlington, VA The first thing I notice is the sound of the refrigerator humming. During the day, there is too much other noise in my house to hear it. But when I come downstairs in the night, the sound reveals itself. I hear the creaks in the floorboards, too, the ones that will wake my children if I walk too close to their rooms. Some nights, I can hear the wind outside. Some nights, if I am patient enough, I realize that I can hear my own breathing. I never used to wake in the night. Then I had children, and I learned what it was like to get up at 1:00, or 2:00, or 3:00, into the foreign house of darkness. My children sleep through the night now, but I don’t any more, a lot of the time. I have come to this strange new country. Night. I am usually alone now. No one else is awake with me. And yet there is so much to hear. And not just from without. From within, too. Whatever thoughts have been smothered by the business of the day come to the surface for air. Sometimes, they are insights. Sometimes, they are fears. Everything is magnified in the shadow. Perception looms larger than reality. I have learned to write down my thoughts, in these hours when my mind and my heart are so unguarded. But I have also learned never to share them, at least not without some editing. E-mails sent at 3:00 a.m. are never wise. The Jewish rabbis taught that the true Torah scholar studied only by night. Their logic, presumably, was that the night was the one time free from distractions. The Torah is so important that it deserves such full, perfect attention. But I wonder if those rabbis also knew something of the vulnerability, the danger, the possibility of night. The person who picks up the Torah by night reads it with a heart unguarded. Nicodemus came to Jesus by night. Perhaps he was embarrassed and wanted to come in secret. Or perhaps he was, in some way, following the rabbis’ advice, good Pharisee that he was. John was intentional in his setting of the scene, I’m sure. John’s gospel is highly allegorical, and in that allegory night usually represents danger. Outer darkness means inner darkness. Night is a time when people are confused, or lost. Night is a time when they are vulnerable. This story of Nicodemus, this story of a man in the night, is a strange one to find at the beginning of Lent. Most of us are still fresh with resolve to do good. We are still keep tracking of Lenten disciplines; we have ambitions of virtue, hopes of becoming better people during this time. But our gospels during this season don’t really correlate with those ambitions. For the next four weeks, we get stories from John’s gospel about individuals who don’t really do good or, in fact, do anything except encounter Jesus. After Nicodemus we’ll get the Samaritan woman, and then the man born blind, and then Mary and Martha at the tomb of Lazarus. And, really, none of these people is presented to us as a paragon of virtue. They are not exemplars of good acts; they’re not necessarily success stories. They are, instead, people challenged to open their minds. It seems that our lectionary, this season, doesn’t want to explore virtue as much as it wants to explore faith. And evidently faith isnt only about the choices we make but about our willingness to expand our minds, to bust past the limits of our assumptions and our imaginations. Are we able to admit that our understanding of the world is incomplete? Just how are we going to limit, or open, our hearts? You see, we, too, are scheduled for a meeting with Jesus. What questions will we ask? What will be the challenge for each of us? What’s especially interesting about starting us off with Nicodemus is that he is, perhaps, the least successful of all the characters we’re going to meet. He makes no grand declaration of faith. Indeed, it’s not clear that he even gets who Jesus is at all in this long, erratic conversation. The story peters off; it has no real ending. After Jesus wraps up talking about the world and judgment, that’s it. We don’t get to hear about Nicodemus’s response, or how he leaves, or what he thinks about the whole thing in the clear light of the morning. In fact, we don’t see Nicodemus again until the very end of the gospel. He shows up when it’s maybe too late, when Jesus has already died on the cross. As far as we are told, he never takes the risk of talking with Jesus again, but something about their one conversation must have stuck with him, because he brings a hundred pounds of myrrh to entomb Jesus’s body. It sounds to me like a man who is overcompensating out of regret. So why do we hear about him at all? Why start off this whole season with what could be read, in many ways, as a story of failed discipleship? I think it’s the night. Because Nicodemus is the patron saint of insomniacs everywhere, and he takes us right to that place where none of us ever wants to go. The 3:00 a.m. place. Awake, when everyone else is asleep. Wondering, when everyone else seems certain. Confused, when everyone else seems clear. Haunted, when everyone else seems at peace. He is caught in that strange place between fear and hope, listening, not knowing what he’s going to hear, not knowing what he wants to hear, not knowing what he’s able to hear and even less what he’ll be able to do about it. Lent is indeed a call to change. But any real change does not begin with clarity. It begins with the vulnerability and uncertainty of our hearts. We cannot become new people if we are so satisfied with who we are that we sleep right through the stirrings for something new. Nothing about us is ever going to be different if we assume we already know all there is to know about ourselves and about Jesus and about the church, to boot. Certainty is not our help in this time. Doubt may be. Because it makes us let go of the pretense that we are finished and complete and competent. It makes us wonder. It makes us ask the questions that need asking. It makes us take the risks that need taking. It opens our hearts. Nicodemus invites us, in this season, to be awake to the night. He gives us permission to be open our eyes in the dark house and let all those unwelcome thoughts speak. He reminds us that if we are to come to Jesus we may come imperfectly but we must come honestly. Jesus talks to Nicodemus about this strange idea of being born again. Nowadays, with inductions and C-sections, babies are mostly born in the day. But the old wives’ wisdom tells us that babies come at night. All the labor, all the pain—it is in those small, dark hours that new life usually emerges. You and I are invited to new life, too. I don’t necessarily mean being born again in the evangelical sense of the word. But we have the chance at encountering Jesus and thus encountering ourselves anew, of seeing beyond the limits of the selves we have gotten used to being. But we can’t respond to that invitation unless we are willing to begin in darkness. So, this Lent, don’t assume that you know what you are doing. Instead, I invite you—as I think Nicodemus invites you and me both—to not know. Instead, ask. Wonder. Don’t be afraid to be up in the middle of the night. For it is in only that true darkness that we begin to seek true light.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 18:46:47 +0000
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