John 3:1-17

The other night, I was driving back home from Apple River by way of Stagecoach Trail. As I got closer to Galena, I passed the old Tippett farm. That got me thinking about Les Tippett, who used to live there. I remember the first time I talked to him.

He called up the church out of the blue to offer us a beautifully-illustrated set of children’s Bible books. When he came to the church a few days later, he proved to be a tall, lanky gentleman with white hair. He gave me the books and we chatted for a few minutes, then he went home. I never saw him again. He died not incredibly long after that, but I never forgot him.

That, in turn, caused me to think of other people associated with this church who have since died, but haven’t left my memory. Like Betty Hudson, who was so incredibly kind and who was a one-person lending library, constantly passing around her thousands of paperbacks because she knew others would enjoy them.

Or Helen Wieters, who was so unfailingly sweet and deeply appreciative of anything anyone ever did for her. Or her husband George who had that huge smile and booming laugh. Or LeRoy Linton, who had a deep passion and tremendous problem-solving skills that he used to try to find ways to help our congregation to grow.

I even thought of people whose deaths occurred before I ever had the chance to know them. People like John Hodgson, who faithfully served this congregation as its pastor for some 37 years and who was renowned as an excellent preacher.

Or Aratus Kent, who left behind everything he knew to serve as a missionary on the western frontier of the country in “a place so tough no one else would take it,” even though he had no way to know — outside of his faith — that his efforts would lead to the founding of this and more than 100 other congregations, most or all of who are still serving God some 178 years later.

Or Horatio Newhall, who was the first doctor in this area during those frontier days and who served as an elder for our congregation for many years. And Cephas Foster, who had been a Congregational minister, but ended up serving as an elder in this church for 46 years. The list goes on and on.

Their voices have long since ceased echoing in these hills, but they have each left their mark on our congregation, helping to make it into the church it is today. And we remain connected to them by more than mere memory, but also by the power of the Holy Spirit.

To a different degree, the same thing is true of people from other times and places we have never met. The apostles Peter and Paul, the gospel writers, missionaries to our country and others, various theologians and pastors and faithful members around the globe have all helped to shape our understanding of what it means to follow Christ in our own time and place. We are connected with them through the same Holy Spirit.

But those connections don’t only extend across time and within the church. Our TVs and computer screens have been filled during the past week and a half with heartbreaking images of the destruction caused by the earthquake in Japan and the subsequent tsunami and nuclear plant breakdowns.

We don’t speak their language nor do we understand the nuances of their culture, but we can certainly understand the mind-numbing grief experienced by survivors when thousands upon thousands of people are killed in mere minutes — and entire towns are leveled. It’s not just a major disaster. Rather it is three separate — but related — major disasters.

Surely we are connected to the Japanese in their suffering through more than just our common humanity. We are united through the Holy Spirit who helps us to see that the needs of our neighbor don’t stop at the edge of our language and our culture or even on the boundaries of our own country or our own faith.

The Holy Spirit moves in and through our lives on a constant basis, but few of us really understand the Spirit’s activity or even acknowledge its presence. For most Christian denominations, the Holy Spirit seems to be the forgotten member of the Trinity, largely because people aren’t quite sure what it is and what it does.

More Sundays than not, we recite the Apostles’ Creed during our worship services. Those of you who read along may have noticed that that Creed consists of three paragraphs. The first, a short one, is focused around the person and work of God as Creator.

The second and longest one is focused on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as our redeemer. The third paragraph seems to break the pattern when it starts by affirming the Holy Spirit and then moves on to other things — the church, forgiveness, life after death and so on.

On the face of it, it seems as if the authors of the Apostles’ Creed didn’t know what to do with the Holy Spirit either, so they changed the subject and moved on to other religious topics. But the truth is that if you look carefully at those seemingly-unrelated religious topics in that last paragraph, you’ll discover that each of them is actually a creation of the Holy Spirit. That includes the communion of saints — our interconnections with others — that I have been talking about.

All of this is significant to us today because that same amorphous lack of understanding about the Holy Spirit is the point of our gospel lesson today. Nicodemus, a major Jewish mover and shaker, comes to see Jesus at night.

Presumably he came to investigate for himself whether Jesus had truly been sent by God or was yet another pretender to the Messianic throne. The fact that he waited until dark may indicate that he really didn’t want to be seen talking with Jesus.

However, their conversation didn’t prove to be much of a dialogue. From the beginning, Jesus soars into flights of metaphorical fancy and Nicodemus is almost instantly left behind on the ground, struggling to catch up. I’ve heard sermons in the past in which the preacher put down Nicodemus for his lack of imagination. But to be honest, I really don’t think any of us would have done any better.

On the other hand, I read a sermon from a more charitable preacher [Fred Kane] who thought Nicodemus was going through a midlife crisis. This pastor felt that Nicodemus’ question about being born again when you are old was sincere. In that preacher’s words, Nicodemus “sees his life slipping away now and he wonders about its significance. Maybe he’s successful, but his success has left him empty. Maybe he hasn’t come close to achieving his dreams and he feels his life is wasted.

“[…] How can you get another chance when you’re pushing the half century mark? What he doesn’t understand is that it often happens then. It often happens when you are old. When you are old enough and you have lived long enough to know that there must be more to life than what you have been able to create on your own.” Whether that was Nicodemus’ meaning or not, Jesus’ answer to him is the same. Jesus tells him that he must be “born from above.”

There’s hardly a more loaded phrase in all Christian literature, because of the ambiguity of the phrase Jesus uses. John wrote his gospel in Greek and he uses a word that could mean “born again” or it could mean “born from above.” Entire forests have been sacrificed on the altar of homiletical pomposity to discuss the differences between those two possibilities.

But the truth is that if you follow each through its many twists and turns and rabbits holes, you’ll find that at the end, each has roughly the same ultimate meaning. In plain words, Jesus is saying that we need to learn to live the life of the Spirit here in this world. That is, we need to live in this world as if we were already in heaven.

But how do we do that? Jesus states that the Spirit is always moving and always leading us into new insights designed to help us see our world through new and better lenses — helping us to see the world through God’s eyes.

That’s why one author writes, “Jesus invites Nicodemus to go on a God hunt with him, to open his eyes to the possibility that God might show himself in new ways, ways Nicodemus doesn’t know about — yet! We are also invited to go on a God hunt, to look for God in the places in our lives where we hadn’t thought to find him. I wonder where that might be for you.

“[…] think of a person, or place or circumstance in your life which you tend to think of as being the most unlikely place to find God — perhaps someone you don’t get along with, or some place you think of as ‘God-forsaken’ or some circumstance you think is hopeless. We’ll ask God to open our eyes to see his kingdom even in those places, to help us on our own God hunt.”

And that’s why Nicodemus’ story is so important for us today — not so that someone in a rainbow-colored wig has a sign to wave at various televised sporting events, but because Nicodemus stands in for us.

He is the faithful person. He is the religious insider. He is the one who has been raised in the faith and knows all the do’s and don’ts like the back of his hand. He has a good heart and truly wants to do what is right. He would be the perfect session member or trustee or even pastor.

And yet, he still gets it all wrong, because he trips up on the seven last words of the church, “We’ve never done it that way before.” He’s so convinced that he knows what God wants that he’s confused when God ends up standing right in front of him and calls him to a new way of seeing and doing things. However, the good news for Nicodemus is that later gospel stories show that he eventually did figure it out and became a friend and follower of Jesus.

I think this congregation is at a Nicodemus moment right now. Through the work of the Holy Spirit, we have created an open and loving and generous community that cares for one another, that readily accepts new people and that offers a great deal of assistance to the community and the world. All of that is well and good.

But those memories I had of all those deceased members who left their mark on our congregation also serves to remind us that demographics are no longer on our side. We have an aging congregation. And it seems that all the steps we have taken in the past to attract new members have had only mixed results at best.

Can an old institution like the First Presbyterian Church be born again into an entirely new life after having grown old? According to Jesus, the answer is yes. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, everything can be made new again. It may not be easy and it may not always be fun, but God’s hope is always available for us.

So I invite you to join me in the coming weeks to pray specifically for God’s guidance into the new life he is creating for our congregation. Join me on this God hunt and I’m convinced that we will ultimately discover — just as Nicodemus did — that God was already there, searching for us. Amen.

(Comments to Jim at jmccrea@galenalink.com.)