This is the only Sunday that is named after a doctrine – all the others deal with Biblical events.

Maybe that is a good thing?

Trying to explain the Trinity is like trying to explain marital love to a child ...  or the mathematics of  E=MC to a non-mathematical illiterate.

So let me start with something I do know something about. At least I have read the Biblical account of Nicodemus.

His names means  (Victor over the People)!

We are told that he was a Pharisee – the Pharisees in the Gospel of John are the mean guys, they are out to get Jesus. We are told the he belongs to the Sanhedrin – the Sanhedrin was the equivalent to the College of Cardinals in the Vatican or the Senate in DC – He was a big wig. 

The story is worth repeating because, like all characters in the Bible they just don’t happen on the scene 2,000 years ago. They still speak to us today because they are we. Or to use imagery from debt psychology – they represent Arch Types in our own spiritual journey.

That is an important thing to remember when we come to the Bible!

Also this lesson contains one of the most quoted texts in the Bible Jn. 3.16

From the story I get the impression that Nichodemus was the kind of guy that wanted to know first hand …

He was a hands on guy.

In 1970 Vietnam was dividing the Nation. Homeland Security had not been invented to justify American military involment in far away places.

Back then it was the Domino Theory, the idea if one small Asian country fell to the communists all the rest would fall too was used by the industrial military complex to justify wars.

I had my reservations, meaning that I did not think that Vietnam was the place for us to be. As it turned out later

I was right.

But in the mean time there where those in my flock who felt otherwise. 

So one crisp fall day in 1970 Pastor Don Rieder, (whom some of you met last Sunday, who back then was Pastor of First Luthean Church in Nashville),

 and I drove to DC to participate in the Religious Convocation on the War in SE Asia, which included a conference with the Senator from Tennessee – then the late

Al Gore, Sr.

He agreed with us  - he was considered a Dove.  He did not get reelected. . .

Like Nicodemus – I waned to know first hand.

Unlike Nicodemus I did not go on my fact-finding tour under the cover of night.

I suspect that Nichodemus had more to loose if it were found out that he had been talking to Jesus.

I was not a VIP – I was a parish pastor in a small congregation in the suburbs of Nashville who still was in their first unit after 15 years. They weren’t growing.

Neither they nor I had a lot to loose.

Nichodemus was a smart man; or at least he was politically smart.  

He was a conservative – the Liberal Party of his day where the Sadducees.

Like most conservatives, for Nicodemus there was no gray. Life was back and white, right and wrong, good and bad. His motto would have been “the Bible said it, I believe it and that settles it.”

His was a world of certitude. So he comes to Jesus at night to ask a few questions... and his world of Certitude is suddenly shattered by the man from the world of faith..

“Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand?”

Ah, there is a put down for the Bible thumpers and scholars of the Word…

If it weren’t for two other references in this Gospel we would have no idea what happened to the man of certitude. When they heard these words, some in the crowd said. “This is really a prophet” Others said,  “This is the Messiah.”   So there was a division in the crowd because of him.

In other words people where divided as to who Jesus was… 7.45-52 (read)!

But this crowd which does not know the Bible – the “hell with them!”

So, as the Pharisees debated Nick steps up and reminds them of their Constitution with these words Our law does not judge anyone without giving them first a hearing to find out what they are doing, does it?

Don’t tell Dick Caney that…

We hear of Nichodemus one more time in Jn. 19.39

More on that later.

Like in Robert Frost’s poem, “The road less traveled”, Nichodemus is at a crossroads. Which should he take?

The well-worn path of Certitude and legalism or the road of Faith, which requires commitment to a relationship with Jesus.

The first road is the familiar road of TORA of quoting Bible Verses, or predictability and conformity, the other is to be born again and requires a 180.

To be born again is a death (that is what baptism symbolizes) and resurrection with Jesus!

The born again is to live by faith not by certitude or works… The two are mutually exclusive!

In faith we live not with fear but in the “blessed assurance” of Jesus …

In recent years the scientific community has spent millions on such things as the Human Genome project-

The Hubble telescope

Particle Accelerators – the largest, which is in Lascern Switzerland

In the genre of fiction there are such books as the Left Behind series and Now Norman Brown’s Angels and Demons.

These are the Nichodemus of our world – wanting to find out who we are and where we are going.

The world famous philosopher Albert Camus, for a while attended the American Church in Paris. He and the pastor became friends. He told the pastor that in worship he had found something that he had not found anywhere else. Fascinated by the story of Nichodemus, Camus asked what it meant to be born again. After some thought the pastor said “I think what you are seeking is the presence of God.” With tears in his eyes Camus said “Howard, I am ready. I want this. This is what I want to commit my life to.”

Xian Century, June 7. 644ff.

On Sunday April 26, while you where here, the Bacons, Pr. Rider and his son Jonas, Ted, Paul, Mary Jo and I broke bread on the Caribbean Spirit. In his brief homily Pastor Rieder quoted the scientist who was head of human genome project who said as grand as science is, ultimately it will not satisfy our deepest longings because science is neuter… you can take it our leave it. It is interesting, even challenging, but it does not ask us of a commitment.

Like Nichodemus all of us want to believe in something bigger than our selves.

In the end, Albert Camus never joined that church. He decided to wait and think about it. He was killed in a car accident a few years later.

 We hear of Nichodemus one more time in this Gospel. It is recorded in 19.39

It is at the burial of Jesus.. A man by the name of Joseph of Arimathaea, asked Pilate to let him take the body of Jesus for burial. He received permission. “Nicodemus, who had first come to Jesus by night, also came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a 100lb ... And because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was near by, they laid Jesus there.”

100lb. is enough aloes and myrrh to bury a King. Amen