John 3:9-15

11/16/08
John 3:9-15
Hudson UMC

If you look in the bulletin, you will notice that the title given for the sermon is “How can these things be? What I had wanted to be the title for this morning was, “If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” As you might imagine, that would be a bit long to put into the bulletin. However, I think that Nicodemus’ exasperated question is good for us to consider as I believe that it puts words into our mouths that reflect the questions, perhaps even better than we would like to admit, that we often have for Jesus.

Jesus has just told Nicodemus that he needed to be born again, born from above to see the kingdom of God. He asks Jesus how this could be; he could not understand the change that needs to take place. Jesus, though, instead of giving him a straight answer, almost chastises him, saying, “If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” In a sense, Jesus is saying, “You are so far from understanding the heavenly things that I have to tell you, that I am simply not going to say anything to you.” Perhaps, if Jesus told Nicodemus the heavenly secrets that He would eventually reveal to His disciples, Nicodemus would, in his misunderstanding, twist the words of Christ and undo the work that has already been done. We can never know for sure. However, I want to talk about what Jesus said and why we need to pay attention to it.

Jesus criticizes the inability, or perhaps, the unwillingness, to believe the earthly things that Jesus has said and claims that this disbelief of earthly things actually inhibits one’s ability to believe the heavenly things of God. Did you know that not everything Jesus said was “heavenly”? Everything He said was rooted in God and the kingdom of heaven that was at once present on earth and also coming in its fullness, but some of it was basically the teaching of “earthly things.”

The most significant of the “earthly things” that Jesus said and the easiest for us to get or heads wrapped around, is His teachings on morality. You know, though we do not always live completely in line with the moral teachings of Christ, they are not really all that hard for us to understand or even believe in. Jesus has a pretty good system of morality. He says things to us like, “Hey, you shouldn’t get drunk.” All of us either have experienced the problems of alcohol ourselves, been directly impacted by someone else who has, or at least heard enough stories of alcohol abuse that we can all agree with this. He also says, “Don’t cheat on your spouse”. No problem there. “Don’t kill people.” Once again, we can’t argue with His advice. “Don’t steal things.” Though we do not always agree on what we should call “stealing”, we can’t hardly find fault in this view of life and morality.

Even when Jesus pushes moral teaching to the next level; even when He amplifies His moral teaching above and beyond Islam, other religions, and our secular culture, it is still not difficult for us to see the wisdom in His words. He does not just say, “Don’t steal,” but also, “Don’t even want what you cannot have.” This makes sense if we think about it because if we want something we cannot have, we will either steal it, which we’ve already talked about, or we will be less satisfied with life because of our unfulfilled desires. He not only says, “Don’t cheat on your spouse,” but “Don’t even be looking around at other people.” Again, because if we allow lust into our lives, it will either lead to adultery, which is bad, or we will tend to lessen in our affection for husbands or wives. He does not only say, “Don’t kill people,” but “Don’t even hate people.” Who among us can deny that to live without hate is the better way to live?

The point is that, though in one sense we believe these earthly things that Jesus has told us, there is another sense that we don’t believe it at all, because it does not usually find expression in our lives to quite that same degree. We have problems living the way we all know we should, so we start saying things like, “What harm is there to want nice things for myself and for my family,” even if we cannot afford it. “It isn’t so bad to look at other people with a bit of lust and it isn’t really all that destructive to bear a grudge or spread a little gossip, true or not.” The problem is that, once we do this, we have rationalized our sin away and we have stopped really believing what Jesus has told us, even though it is an easily understood, quite “earthly” thing.

There has been a strand of thought in the Western world over the past few hundred years which still exists today, that the fundamental problem with humanity is not that we are tragically flawed and in need of grace and transformation, but rather our lack of knowledge. If we could simply educate everyone and teach them this simple morality, all of our personal and social problems would go away. This view likes to think of Jesus as a great and wise moral teacher but not as a substitutionary sacrifice for our sins and the means by which we can be reunited to God. This is a way of thinking that a whole lot of people like because it exemplifies the “can do” attitude of the modern era that so characterizes American culture. However, the idea that we can do anything we want to so long as we put our minds to it and work really hard simply is not true. There are many things that we can do when we put our minds to it, but there are many things that we cannot do, and living a truly moral life is one of those things that we cannot do.

I will give you one example for all. Benjamin Franklin is in so many ways the patron saint of America and the patron saint of Capitalism. He was the epitome of the American dream: he grew up in a lower class family and became one of the most powerful of the founding fathers, he was largely self-educated and made something of himself, he was an entrepreneur, first by giving swimming lessons, then by starting his own printing company; he was an inventor and a scientist. However, Benjamin Franklin was not a Christian, he was a deist. In fact, he felt the only thing that Christianity should do is help people to become good citizens, not to have an encounter with the living God. He attended a Presbyterian church for years before he decided that there was too much preaching of “doctrine” and not enough preaching of “morals” for his taste.

The reason I bring Benjamin Franklin up is because he represents all that is good in humanity without God. If anyone in the history of the world was good either by nature or by hard work, it was him. However, we find that there were limits even to his abilities. You see, he set out one day to become morally perfect. He reasoned that, in any given situation, he would be able to choose the right and avoid the wrong response. Once he started trying, though, he started realizing that our subconscious desires and habits have far more control over what we do than we would like to admit and he was not able to do it. He was not going to let that stop his trying, though. He decided that what he needed was just a bit more discipline. He organized all of morality under thirteen virtues, like temperance, not eating or drinking too much, silence, to make sure he didn’t say anything unnecessary and waste time or cause offence, and other things like that. He decided that he shouldn’t try to tackle all thirteen virtues at once, but should focus on them one at a time. This way, as he conquered the vices in his life one by one, things should get easier.

Now that he had a structure, he set to work, focusing on one of the virtues at a time for a week. If he did this, he would concentrate on each virtue once in a quarter. If he repeated the cycle four times a year, it would not be long until he was completely morally perfect. He found out, however, that, though he could fulfill a particular virtue if he was concentrating on it, as soon as he was focusing on another one, the other ones would creep back into his life. As it turned out, it was not simply a matter of eradicating moral vice from his life, vice had a far greater grip on his life than he would ever like to admit. He soon realized that, no matter how hard he tried, no matter how good his system and discipline was, he would not be able to become perfect simply by hard work and willpower. Do you know what he did then? He gave up trying, saying, “Nobody really likes someone who is perfect, anyway.”

This is the human condition without God. We hear the moral teachings of Christ and we respond, saying, “Yeah, that sounds great, we should all live that way,” but when we are being honest with ourselves, we find that we don’t live like we should. The point of all this is that the core of Christianity, the real reason we get together on Sunday mornings and participate in the life of the church, read our Bibles, pray and all those other things, is not morality. There are many people who think that Christianity is nothing more than morality and there are many people who want Christianity to be nothing more than morality. However, though true Christianity includes morality, it is much, much more. The difference between morality and true Christianity is as big as the difference between earthly things and heavenly things.

The big point of all this is that, as long as we are going at it on our own strength, we are unable to believe even in the earthly things of God. Now, you might be wondering why I keep saying that we cannot believe in the earthly things and the morality of God but all my evidence is that we cannot live according to it on our own. The reason is because the New Testament speaks of living and believing as intimately connected. When the Bible talks about believing in Jesus, it is not talking about making a statement with our lips or intellectually agreeing with something. It means to submit our entire lives to the ways of God with no reservation. In our not being able to live according to Jesus’ earthly teaching, we show that, in the sense that really matters, we do not believe Him.

However, though this is indeed what is being said, we must not lose sight of what Jesus is really getting at. He does not say this to make Nicodemus feel bad or to make him feel unworthy. Jesus already knows that Nicodemus is unworthy, the point is that He wants to drive an issue home so Nicodemus can see the world differently. It is as if He is saying, “Nicodemus, you and the other Pharisees trust in your good deeds to save you; you hope that if you just do more good than bad or at least more good than your neighbors, God will accept you. I am telling you that you can’t do it. Your understanding of morality is not the same as God’s and, so long as you insist on seeing things your way, you can never understand what I am getting at. You need to change the way you see the world; you need to change your entire mental process; you need to change your life.”

The thing is that Nicodemus cannot do this by sheer force of will; indeed, nobody can. But Jesus does not criticize the man, He does not criticize us when we are unable to do the things we are asked to do. What Jesus does at this point is explain that the secret to eternal life, the secret to being united to God, lies only in the one who has descended from heaven, that is, they are in Jesus Himself. He then comments, indeed, He even promises, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.”

You see, we don’t like to think about this, but the problem of immorality is far greater problem than we really want to admit. How do we often try to get rid of immorality in our world? Well, sometimes we chastise those who are immoral, sometimes we try to give education to them, sometimes we take them by the hand and help them on their way. Unfortunately, a recent push has been to try and legislate morality, as if people will stop being immoral simply because there is a law against immorality. How do we try to believe in God? We go to church, we read the Bible, we pray, we do all kinds of things, good things, and they often work, but, when we get down to the nitty gritty, these things only work because of something else that has happened. Jesus tells us that the price to pay for sin and acquire faith is very high indeed, so high that we cannot pay it, despite our hard work and our best intentions. He says that the Son of Man needs to be lifted up in order that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life. Brothers and sisters, what does it say about the problem of sin, immorality and faithlessness in our world if the only thing that can wrench the grip of evil off of the lives of human beings like you and me is the second person of the ever-blessed Trinity becoming a human being, engaging in the broken human condition and dying an unjust death on the cross? I think that it means that it requires more than simple determination to make people moral.

Jesus is building up to a very serious explanation. It is at once the most famous of all Bible verses and yet the most ignored. We love verse sixteen, that God so loved the world, but when we forget what comes before it and what comes after it, we miss the big picture and we do not notice the magnitude of what is being said, nor the power of grace that is being spoken of. Jesus declares in no uncertain terms that human beings, as they are by nature, cannot understand the ways of God. He states that we must be born again, born from above, born of water and the Spirit. He says that, when we show by our actions that we do not really believe the earthly things He says, that we should come to Him for mercy, that we should not only seek instruction from the Son of God, but radical and complete transformation of both heart and life. We should not ask to be moral, nor rejoice because we already seem to be moral, but say to God, “You know, I cannot understand your ways if you do not work a miracle in my life,” and really believe that He will work a miracle. I think that God yearns far more to share His life with us than we do to receive it.

We will see Nicodemus in the Gospel of John two more times. Both times he will be doing good for Jesus when nobody else would do it. This man, who could not see the kingdom of God, who could not even believe the earthly things of Jesus, was able to stand when Christ’s own disciples deserted Him. Though Jesus speaks some somewhat difficult words, let us not forget the fruit that it bore. Nicodemus did not leave depressed, but in awe of the love and mercy of God and this understanding of love and mercy absolutely transformed his life forever. Let us learn the same lessons. Let us openly confess our shortcomings and our nothingness without Christ so that we might be made fully who we are and were meant to be in Christ. Let us seek the assistance of God, not only to believe the earthly things of Christ, but also the heavenly things. Let us pray.

AMEN