“Faith Starts in the Darkness”
John 3:1-21
The first Apartment I lived in after college was in a really old building.
It was one room plus a bathroom.
The refrigerator was in a closet.
I slept on my boss’s army cot.
One night, after I had turned out the lights and gotten into bed…
…I remembered that I had forgotten something…
…so, I got back up, turned the lights back on and what I saw—I will never forget.
The walls were literally covered with cockroaches…
I’ve never seen so many cockroaches—you couldn’t even see the paint on the walls—everything was cockroach color…
…and with the lights on, they were quickly scurrying back toward the dark cracks and crevices in the walls from which they had come.
(pause)
Every time I read John 3:19-21, I think of those crazy cockroaches: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.
Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come to the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.”
I think our friend Nicodemus was a man who lived in the light…or wanted to live in the light.
Right before our Scripture passage for this morning, Jesus had gone into the Temple and exhibited some major righteous indignation.
He was so disgusted by the corruption of God’s Temple that He “made a whip out of cords, and drove” all those money changers out.
And I think Nicodemus was in the Temple that day when Jesus did this.
And I think Nicodemus knew that Jesus was right about the corruption.
And I think Nicodemus knew Jesus was one bold and confident man to stand up and do that kind of thing.
Perhaps Nicodemus had wanted to see that done for a long time himself, but never would have had the guts.
In any event, this gets Nicodemus-- this honest--truth seeking, God loving religious leader interested in Jesus.
So, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, “Rabbi,” he says, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.
For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
And to this, Jesus says something that really confuses this religious VIP with a list of credentials as long as my arm.
“How can someone be born when they are old?’ Nicodemus [asks].
‘Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!’”
And so, Jesus starts explaining what He means.
But Nicodemus still doesn’t understand that Jesus is not talking about some kind of physical rebirth—but rather, a spiritual birth
“You are Israel’s teacher and you do not understand these things?” Jesus asks.
So, then Jesus moves to something Nicodemus should understand.
He refers back to the Hebrew Scriptures—what we call the Old Testament to something that happened in Numbers Chapter 21—the image of that bronze serpent Moses lifted over the people as a cure for snakebites.
In that situation, the Israelites were crying out for deliverance from a plague of deadly serpents.
And God tells Moses to make an image of a serpent and lift it up on a pole.
The Israelites had to look at an image of the very thing that was tormenting them in order to be healed.
Jesus riffs on that story to say that He will be lifted up and if you look at His death, your problem with death will be solved.
It’s like a vaccine, isn’t it?
A doctor injects our bodies with a small amount of the disease we want to avoid, then our cells will produce antibodies that will ward off the disease should we later come in contact with the real deal version of it.
So, in the Gospel, Jesus is raised up on a Cross in death.
Well, “the wages of sin is death,” and so death is our problem as sinful people.
And when we look at Jesus’ death, we are injected with the Gospel Vaccine, shall we say?
But what that means is that the way a person is born again, as Jesus has been describing this to Nicodemus, is by being crucified with Christ.
This, then is Jesus’ direct set-up for the infamous John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
That’s a really popular verse.
I mean, we all love the promise of eternal life, we are all drawn to the promise that we will not perish, and we like the apparent simplicity that all we need to do to get these good things is “believe.”
And that is true.
But the word “belief” can sometimes become so bookish, so one-dimensional many of us might take it for granted, and thus, hardly notice it at all.
But belief that leads to eternal life is a risky, courageous trust in Jesus with our whole lives—our entire selves.
That’s one reason Jesus wraps up this teaching with a discussion about light and darkness, saying that the main problem with people in this world is that we love the dark.
“People live the dark because they don’t want their deeds to be exposed in the light,” Jesus says.
They don’t want to change their ways, even though their ways are miserable and are killing them—they are used to them and have even come to love them in some strange perverse way.
But that’s okay, faith always starts in the darkness, just like Nicodemus’s experience with Jesus did.
What do I mean by that?
For an example, let’s look back at the story Jesus used about the snake on the pole.
The Israelites who were dying of snake bites in the wilderness didn’t first understand how a serpent on a pole could save them.
What they did was they first realized that these snakes were gonna kill them, and they didn’t want that—they needed a Savior.
So, they trusted that God would deliver them, and their experience of being healed led to their conviction the effectiveness of God’s surprising mode of deliverance—the lifting up of the serpent.
In the same way, we don’t have to understand the Cross of Christ before we can be saved by it.
All we have to have is a desire to leave the darkness for the light, and then look to Jesus to be saved.
My mother, when she was a young happening chick working for NBC in New York City, went out one night with a bunch of her girlfriends.
When she got home from her night out and was reflecting on what happened that evening, she started to realize that she had spent the entirety of the night talking badly about one of her best friends--who apparently had not been present.
She got feeling so bad about this, that it caused her to realize--for the first time perhaps--that she was a sinner and she needed a Savior.
And so, she started going to church.
And this is where she met Jesus.
And that is the first step in all this, is it not?
It is simply admitting our need for a Savior—our need for Christ and our desire to move out of whatever darkness we find ourselves in.
Or as Jesus puts it to Nicodemus, it is realizing we are sick and going to die unless we find the vaccine.
And God has provided the vaccine, because “God so loved the world…”
Faith and salvation—being born again—don’t depend on understanding everything, that’s not a precondition.
If it was we would all be in big trouble!
What it means is trusting in Jesus and taking that leap of faith before we can see exactly where it is all going to lead.
And as our lives are changed, as we find ourselves born again—transformed—changed from the inside out--that is when we become convinced that God’s mode of deliverance is effective and true!
Seen in this context, those famous words in John 3:16 become pretty startling, chilling—really.
Because the main thing we need to do—what we need to believe to be born again is that Jesus’ death saves us.
We need to forget the idea that we can just help ourselves, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, earn our salvation or in any way get by on our own.
Nicodemus had to believe this too.
But it might not have been easy for a man like that.
I mean, he was a leader of the Jewish ruling council.
He was a big-wig and he knew it.
And Nicodemus had to die to all that.
And that would have been a big decision because Nicodemus’ titles, his status, his pride was his darkness.
And we can come to love our darkness.
But the way to God’s Kingdom leads through death to all this.
That’s scary in a way that the isolated version of John 3:16 seldom conveys.
We must be born again—everything, even our very selves must become new.
And that’s what Jesus is explaining to Nicodemus in John Chapter 3, and now to us in this building at 3800 Dayton Boulevard.
Are you living in the darkness, even as you are sitting in this building?
As you know, this is the season of Lent.
And on Ash Wednesday we started Lent by having ashes spread on our foreheads in the shape of a cross.
The ashes are a reminder that our mortal bodies were created from the dust of the earth and back to the dust they will, one day, return.
That is why, when we receive the ashes we are told to “repent and believe the Gospel.”
“Repent and turn to Christ.”
“Repent and look to the Cross.”
“Repent and be born anew.”
There is a story about a retired minister who lives in a cottage on the side of a mountain.
He can see forty miles to the East.
There is a mountain range to the West, and there are two lakes in the distance to the South.
One Sunday morning, a congregation from a church close by comes to have a worship service there on the mountaintop.
As one woman looks at the view she starts crying.
The minister leans over to her and quietly says, “It is a beautiful view.”
She replies, “No.
You don’t understand.
I have lived within 20 miles of this view all of my life, and I never knew it was here.”
Many of us might be so over-familiar with John 3:16 that we think it’s a simple, straightforward verse of Scripture that we can kind of ignore.
But it’s not.
Think about what it must of sounded like to the first person who ever heard it—Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish Ruling Council who came, in the darkness, to speak with this young, bold teacher named Jesus.
What Jesus says about being born again, salvation, being lifted up, darkness and light totally disorients him.
Well, maybe Lent should be a time of disorientation for all of us.
Let’s allow Lent to knock us sideways to remind us that all our dieting, fitness, and age-defying make-up products will not keep us alive.
We are dust and ashes and to dust and ashes we will return.
Let’s let Lent remind us that for all our self-help, get-rich-quick schemes and for all the ways we congratulate ourselves for being self-made individuals, we are in the end—helpless.
We all need a Savior.
Christian faith always starts in the darkness of our own sin.
Christ invites us to move into the Light.
It’s sort of like a baby being brought out of the darkness of the womb, by a doctor, into the Light of Life where he or she will now live.
(pause)
Are you born again?
Do you live in the light?
Or are you living in darkness?
Do you need a Savior?
If so, will you trust in Jesus?
Will you take the leap of faith before you can see exactly where it is all going to lead?
