Faith underground

John 3: 1-17
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
March 8, 2020

For many folks sporting events have ruined John 3: 16 for them. Behind goal posts, backboards, and home plates are Jesus fans with poster boards or t-shirts that read “John 3: 16”. They assume that there are people who are curious and that they will (1) own a Bible, (2) know how to find the gospel of John, chapter 3, verse 16, and (3) be so convinced of and convicted by what they read that they will fall down on their knees and pray the Sinner’s Prayer or prayer of contrition and conversion: “Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness. I believe You died for my sins and rose from the dead. I turn from my sins and invite You to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow You as my Lord and Savior. In Your Name, Amen.” 

For some of us, John 3: 16 was a verse we memorized in Sunday school. In fact, many of us could probably recite it right now in the King James Version.



“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

What's more, it sounds like a formula or a creed, not something Jesus would’ve said. The gospel of John was written about 70 years after Jesus’ ministry. And yet this verse, like any other, is not suspended in midair or sufficient on its own. The next verse is just as important, if not more so: “For God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” (KJV)

Even with verse 17, it’s still a pretty exclusive claim that the world will be saved through God’s only begotten Son. What if people of other faiths and of no faith don’t want to be saved, have no need to be saved through Jesus? What does it mean to be saved anyway? I thought God wasn’t condemning anyone. It’s exclusionary claims like this that have driven people away from the Bible and out of churches and Christianity altogether. 

Passages like this one can make faith sound like an all-or-nothing proposition. You either believe in God or you don’t. You either believe Jesus died for our sins or you don’t. You either believe that Jesus rose from the dead or you don’t. You either believe this stuff and you’re saved or you don’t and you’re not saved. Oftentimes these verses have been wielded like a bright spotlight shined in our face: are you saved, are you born again? It’s as though there is no room for questions, doubts, or wondering.



And yet that’s precisely why Nicodemus has his “come to Jesus” moment in the first place. He has questions. He’s wondering about what he has seen and heard. Maybe he doubts what he has heard from others about Jesus and so he comes to get first-hand answers. He comes to Jesus not in the bright spotlight of day but by the underground of night.



Having this conversation after the sun went down seems to make for safe space, a way to hold vulnerability, like a confessional space, like closeted dreams and hopes. Is it okay to think what I’m thinking? Is it okay to feel what I’m feeling? Is it okay to have questions, to doubt, to have fears, to not have the answers? How do I know what I do not know? How do I unlearn what I have learned? How can I trust the way that I am going?

And yet Nicodemus, whose name in Greek—“nikos” and “demos”—means ‘victory’ and ‘the people assembled’, is not seeking to be anything other than a faithful Jew. When Jesus says “you (plural) have not received our testimony”, more than likely he is referring to the Pharisees, of which it is believed Jesus was also one. This is two colleagues getting together after hours, away from the noise and pull of the rest of the department, the office, the political party, to talk about what really matters, about the truth, as they’ve each experienced it. Jesus gets a little testy but then who doesn’t when we’re convinced we know what we know.



Physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. in his poem “Our Limitations” wrote:



“We trust and fear, we question and believe,
From life's dark threads a trembling faith to weave,
Frail as the web that misty night has spun,
Whose dew-gemmed awnings glitter in the sun.”


Our faith is not fashioned in certainty but in our questions, not from life’s bright threads but from its dark ones. It is a trembling faith, formed in humility, and like a spider’s web it is strong and yet tenuous. What is made in the misty night glitters like dew in the sun.


“While the calm centuries spell their lessons out,
Each truth we conquer spreads the realm of doubt;
When Sinai's summit was Jehovah's throne,
The chosen Prophet knew his voice alone;
When Pilate's hall that awful question heard,
The Heavenly Captive answered not a word.

“Eternal Truth! beyond our hopes and fears
Sweep the vast orbits of thy myriad spheres!
From age to age, while History carves sublime
On her waste rock the flaming curves of time,
How the wild swayings of our planet show
That worlds unseen surround the world we know.”



Holmes penned these words in 1850—four years after the discovery of Neptune; a decade before Darwin and his theory of evolution; Louis Pasteur and germ theory. 50 years later Albert Einstein would propose his theory of special relativity. Before the end of the 19th century Dmitri Ivanovsky would be the first to identify a virus.



We know so much and yet the more we learn about the world and the universe we live in, the more we realize how much we don’t know. Sometimes we question, we wonder, we doubt who and what we can trust, and in our fear and unknowing, sometimes we lash out and blame and do harm to others.

Nothing can stay in a dark closet for long nor should it. The world needs to be safe enough for new truths to see the light of day but they burst forth anyway, like seeds and bulbs underground. The wisdom of the world has been here long before us and we are slow to catch on. There is enough when no one tries to dominate and control resources but instead shares with all. There is only one human race with beautiful diversity in colors and genders and sexualities and abilities and languages and ethnicities. There are many ways to learn that life is better when we love our neighbor as ourselves, and God and truth have many faces.

When the gospel of John was written, what was known as the world was a whole lot smaller and a lot less diverse. Now we can argue with someone we’ve never met on Twitter, donate money to help another country after a natural disaster, live through what to all appearances could be a global pandemic in a fractious high-stakes election season, on a planet riddled with plastic in the midst of a climate crisis. And it is this world that God so loves, that we’re supposed to love; that somehow, by following Jesus and feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and those who are in prison, clothing and sheltering those who need it, giving justice to the poor, and favoring those whom empire despises and destroys, that the world will be saved, born anew, that we will shed our old life for a new way of being—to trust that we are capable of this.

Faith isn’t about signs or conviction beyond a shadow of a doubt but believing something is true despite all evidence to the contrary. And so I strive to have faith in humanity because that is where my faith is weakest. Which is why I need Church—because it’s people like you that give me courage and restore my faith and save me, help me to be born anew. 

Amen.