Lent II - 3.1.2026

Lent II – John 3:1-17

March 1, 2026

Church of the Atonement

The Rev’d Charles Everson

This morning's sermon is a little different than those I normally preach. I want to invite you to sit with me inside the mind of Nicodemus, one of the characters in this morning's gospel, and explore how he might have experienced this encounter with Jesus.

------------------------------

My name is Nicodemus. I am a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin – the council that governs the religious life of our people. I have spent my entire adult life studying the Torah, observing the commandments, teaching others to do the same. I know the Law and the prophets. I know the traditions of the elders. If you had asked anyone in Jerusalem to name a man who understood the things of God, my name would have been on that list.

I came to him at night, and I am not ashamed of that. I have heard preachers over the years use my nocturnal visit as evidence of cowardice – as though I crept through the dark streets of Jerusalem because I was too scared to be seen in the daylight. I came at night because the night was the only time I could think clearly. During the day, I was always Nicodemus the Pharisee, Nicodemus the teacher, Nicodemus the member of the council. At night, I was just someone with questions. Years later, I came to see that the darkness I walked through that night was not only in the streets but in my own heart.

And I had questions.

I had watched him. I had seen the signs he performed – not tricks, not theater, but miracles that don’t make any sense to me. Signs that pressed against the categories I had spent a lifetime constructing. I could not explain him, and I am someone who has built his entire life on the ability to explain things. So I went to him at night, and I said what I genuinely believed: "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God."

I thought that was a perfectly reasonable opening. I was paying him a compliment. I was being collegial, even generous. He did not even respond to it.

Instead, he looked at me with those eyes – the eyes of a man who sees directly through whatever you are saying to him – and he said, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above."

I had no idea what he meant. I told him so. I asked the obvious question about re-entering the mother's womb, which I know sounds ridiculous. But I was a literal man trained in a very literal tradition, and I was doing my best.

Then he said it again, differently: "No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit." Water and Spirit. I did not know then what that meant. I know now. He was not speaking of a change of mind or a reformed life. He was speaking of a new creation – something done to you, not by you. A death and a rebirth in water, the Spirit hovering over the deep as at the very beginning of time. What he was describing was not self-improvement. It was something closer to drowning and being pulled out alive.

What I did not say, but what I felt in that moment, was this: I am too old for this. Not in terms of years, though I was not young. I mean that my categories were set. I had spent decades building the architecture of my worldview, and what he was describing – this birth from above, this wind that blows where it will – sounded like an invitation to demolish everything I had constructed and start again from nothing.

"How can these things be?" I asked him. It is the most honest thing I have ever said.

He then proceeded to ask me how it was that I was a teacher of Israel and did not understand these things. And the answer – though I could not have articulated it then – is that I understood everything I had been taught, and almost nothing that could not be taught. I knew the tradition. I did not know the wind. And what terrified me was not that I couldn't understand it, but that I couldn't control it.

He told me that just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. I did not understand what he meant. Not then. But after I watched them nail him to that tree, I understood. The very thing I could not look at became the thing that saved me.

And then he said this: that God so loved the world – not the righteous, not the learned, not the observant – the world, this whole impossible world, that he gave his only Son. Not to condemn it. To save it.

I kept returning to that. Even after everything that happened – after the trial, after the cross, after the morning they found the tomb empty – I kept returning to that.

I think that is still the question. I think it is the question sitting in this room right now, in every person who has come this morning with good intentions and genuine faith and carefully constructed categories of your own.

"How can these things be?"

I don't know. But I have come to believe that not knowing is not the end of the conversation. It is, in fact, where the conversation begins.

-----------------------

St. John mentions Nicodemus twice more in his gospel. In chapter seven, Nicodemus speaks up quietly before the council in defense of the man they are trying to condemn. In chapter nineteen, after the crucifixion, he comes – again, in some sense, out of the darkness – bringing a lavish quantity of spices to anoint the body. Nicodemus never delivers a speech of conversion. He never makes a public declaration of faith. He simply keeps showing up, doing the next faithful thing, the wind slowly working in him what he could never have worked in himself.

Dear friends, the season of Lent is for Nicodemuses. It is for people who come to God in the night, who still have more questions than answers, and who are learning, slowly, to let the wind blow where it will. In today's collect, we ask God to "bring us again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son." Not an argument. Not a system of belief. A person. The same person who sat with Nicodemus in the dark and did not send him away.

Lent is long, and the night is real. But the one who sat with Nicodemus in the dark is here, at this altar, waiting for you. Amen.