Hello darkness, my old friend...

Lent 2, Christ Episcopal Church, St. Joseph, La.

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 whom 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 fulfillment 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 20^th 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.