Night Vision

The Second Sunday in Lent (Year A, RCL)
February 17, 2008

The Reverend Paul R. Abernathy, Rector

“Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews,”^[1] a Pharisee, a consummate religious and political insider, stealthily “comes to Jesus by night.”

Why?

Perhaps Nicodemus, having heard about Jesus – one who teaches with authority and performs miracles only possible, according to the prescriptions of the tradition, for one who comes from God – wants to see, to assess for himself the truth of what he has heard. Is Jesus the “real deal” or a charlatan or demagogue who, with word and magical sign, seeks to deceive? If Jesus is a fraud, then, concealed by nightfall, Nicodemus, as a leader, whose public actions and perceived associations have immense power to persuade, will not have led anyone astray.

But perhaps he goes to see Jesus, this teacher come from God, for his own sake. Nicodemus has questions that keep him awake at night that all of his knowledge of the law and the prophets cannot answer. He goes in the secrecy of night also for his own sake, for if he is wrong about Jesus, then no one will know that he had been duped.

Perhaps. Perhaps. Point is that Nicodemus – committed to life’s quest for meaning, caught in the tension between upholding the defining and organizing principles of the community and reaching out to embrace new revelation – comes to Jesus.

And what does he find? A conversation, which, like wind, blows his mind. Jesus speaks of Spirit. In the Hebrew, ruach. In the Greek, pneuma. Wind. A perfect symbol for Spirit. The animating force of life, which, like wind, cannot be seen, but whose effects, like the bending of treetops when the wind blows, can be known. Spirit. Wind. The agent of one’s rebirth so to become who one in spirit, essentially as spirit already is.

Nicodemus, in the darkness of the night of his confusion, is without vision. He cannot see. Thinking only in terms of physicality, not spirituality, he can’t conceive how he can reenter his mother’s womb. Yet, even in his bewilderment, he discerns that Jesus is true. He may not understand, but he knows with an ancient wisdom deeper than words that what Jesus teaches – a radical, spiritual rebirth so to bear in flesh God’s nature – is the meaning of life that the law embodied and the prophets had long declared.

Nicodemus, for me, is a faithful leader in the nighttime of our confusion in our Anglican Communion. A confusion that characterizes historical moments when tradition and modernity clash. Moments when the defining, organizing principles that long have made sense out of existence and new claims of what constitutes truth collide. Moments, which, in their complexity, defy the explanations that, when voiced in their simplicity, sound like truth or perhaps what we’d like to believe is true.

If we listen long to the competing voices – of liberal, largely Western Christianity claiming that the burgeoning church of the so-called Global South is too narrow, too doctrinaire in its profession of a strict biblical authority, and exclusivistic in its creedal confession or of conservative, largely African and Latin American Christianity claiming that European and North American religiosity has been overwhelmed by a nihilistic secularism so to have lost its center and its missiological zeal to proclaim the gospel – either proclamation seems to have a ring of truth. No surprise, for each contains an element of truth.

However, what is lost in our disputes is our capacity to see ourselves and others. A capacity rooted in our humble acknowledgement that no one has all wisdom, that even contrary positions harbor elements of grace, and that as soon as we arrive at clarity, even of God and nature, we are tempted to end our quest for truth, which is always larger than our definitions. A capacity to see and, in seeing, to stay not in discussion, but dialogue. Diá, through, logos, word. The art of ongoing conversation, rather than that act whose aim is to achieve definitive conclusion. A friend^[2] once remarked to me that discussion has the same suffix as percussion and concussion, for all involve beating or banging. We have enough discussion. What we need is dialogue – the kind that Nicodemus was willing to risk.

Even more, in our disputes, we Anglicans seem to have lost sight of three fundamental principles that have served well for generations. One, we are the community of the via media, the middle way – during the 16th century Reformation, between Roman Catholicism and European Protestantism and, now, five hundred years later, between repressive doctrinarism and a relativistic libertinism. Two, we are guided by the dictum: in essentials, unity, in nonessentials, liberty, in all things, charity.^[3] Three, we, as a confederation of national churches bound by mutual ties, symbolized by common worship, and not a universal, authoritarian center, encourage the freedom to interpret theology and ethics in relation to local context.

Much of this is lost in the call for unity, which I hear as a cry for unanimity, uniformity in all things.

Still more, we seem to have lost our awareness that unity in its purest form is, at best, an ideal and a fiction. The genius of Anglicanism has been our ability to tolerate, if not always celebrate our differences of opinion, even our oppositions regarding belief and practice.

We are in a period of upheaval like that of the Reformation. Competing, conflicting forces are at war. No one can know the outcome, save that our church will be different. Yet, above, beneath, around, and through the hot wind of our disputes, God’s Spirit still blows where it chooses. If only more of us were more like Nicodemus – willing to see, even at night.

A final word… My advocacy for toleration, even celebration of difference does not mean that at the end, yea, also at the beginning and through the day that I will not stand where I stand. Verily, for me to acknowledge difference means that I know where I stand: on the side of the universality of equality, especially for all of our sisters and brothers who – marginalized by race, class, gender, sexual orientation, poverty, or soul-stealing tyranny of any kind – in the words of Thoreau, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”^[4]

Yes, I will dialogue – walk and talk – with anyone. Yet, in the fight for equality, I will yield to no one.

[1] John 3.1. The gospel passage appointed for the day is John 3.1-17.

[2] The Reverend James M. Donald, retired Rector of St. Columba’s Episcopal Church, Washington, DC.

[3] Attributed to a various sources.

[4] Henry David Thoreau, from the essay, Economy, found in his book, Walden (1854).