As We Yet Shall Be -Isaiah 43: 14-21; John 3: 1-10 - March 20, 2011- Cicero United Methodist
Church - Everett J. Bassett

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            In the last months of 1914, spontaneous combustion touched some old film in a factory in
West Orange, New York, owned by the great inventor Thomas Edison. It was, by all
appearances, a terrible disaster. Before the fire was brought under control, thirteen buildings
had been destroyed. The damages would be over a million dollars, back when that was real
money, and irreplaceable experiments and inventions had been destroyed. Edison was 67
years old, which was considered a lot older in those days than today. It should have been a
terrible event in his life; a back-breaker. His son later wrote, "When I couldn't find Father, I
became concerned. Was he safe? With all his assets going up in smoke, would his spirit be
broken? He was ... no age to begin anew. Then I saw him in the plant yard, running toward me."
He wrote that his father had a look of fascination, and cried excitedly to go get mother; tell her
to bring her friends; it would be a long time before they would see a fire like this one again. At
5:30 the next morning, with the fire still burning, he had gathered his workers and announced
the plans for rebuilding, bigger and better than before. He had already figured out some things
that he wanted to do differently, based on his observation of the fire. He is reported to have
said, "All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God, now we can start anew."

            Granted, that is coming by a second chance the hard way; but isn't it a vivid indication of
Edison's greatness that he would see in that disaster the chance for a new start? And don't we
sometimes long for a second chance? An opportunity to get rid of the mistakes of our past, and
rebuild something better? I resonate some days with the mechanic in the cartoon I saw once,
who looks at the sad vehicle in front of him, and turns to the lady and says, "Instead of
changing the oil, I would recommend saving the oil, and changing the car." And even when we
are not at the point of wanting to totally scrap the old car of our lives and start over, we can still
long for something to come along and revitalize us. Change our direction. Move past the
mistakes of the past, and be reborn into an exciting new possibility. We wish that for our own
lives sometimes, and we wish it for the world as well. Isn't there some way to get off this spiral
of violence and economic despair and prejudice that the world has known for so long?

            Good news! That chance for rebirth is exactly what our Lord promises us; and God has been fulfilling that promise in millions of lives for thousands of years. In fact, we can turn to God for the possibility of rebirth at any time; it is a central teaching of Jesus. And the person whose questioning opened the door for Jesus to give this great hope was a man named Nicodemus.

            On the one hand, we only know a few things about Nicodemus. He was a Pharisee - a
member of a party that was dedicated to understanding and preserving the Jewish law. In fact,
he was a teacher, which implies that his ideas were considered important. At another place in
John, Nicodemus was identified as a member of the Sanhedrin, which means that he was in the top 70 Jewish leaders. Furthermore, after the Crucifixion of Jesus, Nicodemus showed up with
100 lbs of expensive spices to anoint the Lord's body for burial! This lets us know that he had
considerable wealth. And it's funny how often it seems that the most prominent people are
also the most vulnerable and frightened. Because even with all that influence, Nicodemus
came to speak to Jesus under cover of darkness - fearfully.

            Those are the few things we know about him. And yet, one of the reasons Nicodemus has
always been an intriguing figure is this feeling we have that we know him very well. Rightly or
wrongly, people have always felt this intuitive connection with him, because we imagine that
there were some powerful spiritual stirrings taking place in Nicodemus. Other religious leaders
saw Jesus' rising popularity and his miraculous powers and were annoyed or dismayed. But
Nicodemus risked. his reputation because he was drawn to Jesus. Maybe he couldn't even
explain it to himself. And people throughout centuries have been able to identify with that
spiritual unrest that motivates an unexplainable search toward something new.

            We also might feel we can understand Nicodemus' frustration with Jesus' answers to his
questions. Jesus talked in riddles it seems. Be born again? The wind blows where it will?
Nicodemus can't keep up. Do you mean climb back into my mother's womb? Be born a second
time as an old man? How can these things be? And like Nicodemus, we're worldly people. We
take care of business, we reason things out, we are planted in the reality of the physical, the
logical. Why doesn't Jesus express himself in tangible terms - something we can see or touch?

            And scholars have argued for a couple thousand years over whether Nicodemus ever really got it. In John 7, he seems to try to slow down the protests against Jesus, and risks taking some heat for it. And then, as I said, he did show up to anoint Jesus' crucified body. So some have said he became a devoted follower of Jesus. Others have pointed out that nothing really
indicates that he stood up boldly for Jesus, and risked his position to try to save him.

            Either way, for this we can be grateful: thanks to Nicodemus' questioning of Jesus, we have one of the most empowering and hopeful teachings Jesus gave to us - the possibility of being born again. The possibility of new life, and not like Edison's, because of a disaster - but
because of God's amazing grace. To believe in the possibility of rebirth -- when life can seem so
stuck, and the world can seem so hopeless - takes an act of great faith. Yet that is exactly what
Jesus calls us to. And it's imperative - you must be born again. The old life will not do. But
praise God, new life is possible. But we need to know that this was not some behavioral
tinkering around the edges. It was rebirth - Jesus offered something totally new.

            In fact, Jesus' teachings were so contrary to the world as we experience it -love our
enemies? Forgive seventy times seven? Good news for the poor? - that we might very well put
them in the category of beautiful fantasies. It's lovely to think those high thoughts, but we live

in the real world. We live with the political and economic and military realities. Now, I happen
to believe that there is something to that. We have to see the world as it is, and realize the
political and economic and military realities. For example, there are terrorists in this world, and
we need to take measures to protect ourselves and to protect the innocent and vulnerable
ones. (When I wrote that statement, it was before the United Nations began military
operations in Libya, motivated by just that desire to protect the vulnerable; and we pray for all
those involved, and for a just and peaceful outcome. The real world demands some hard
decisions). But I also believe that the deepest problems of this world are beyond political and
economic and military solutions. Ultimately, if we believe the Bible, we know that the political
and economic and military solutions are the fantasy. We call them the realities by which we
have to live; the Bible calls them false idols, and says that nations will rise and fall; that riches
will rust and decay; and that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. And I contend
to you that we can prove the Bible every single day simply by picking up the newspaper and
reading about the endless struggles of the human family.

            What is real, says the Bible, is what God is doing by the power of love as it flows with the Holy Spirit in this world. Behold, I make all things new, says the Lord. And it takes an act of
faith to declare that today -- Easter faith that believes that even what we call the ultimate
reality, death, falls before the power of God. We say that there are only two inevitable things is
life. Well, I don't what God can do about taxes, but I know He conquered death through the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And that should be our wake-up call that this is not a God who
tinkers around the edges and settles for the same-old, same-old. This is a God who is doing
new things in this world - and whose very heart's desire is to bring new possibilities to birth.

            This is not a hopeless world - and if we look closely we will see the seeds of rebirth here and there. Nicodemus heard the words of Jesus and asked, "How can this be?" And Jesus said,
"The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it
comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." In other words,
we can't control this new birth; we can't hold it or predict it. It is God's work, and God will work
when God chooses. But we can look back and say, Look what God has done! Surely that was
God's Spirit. Something new was born there. You might, for example, look back at the birth of
democratic America and say, Something new happened there. Nobody predicted that. Or
nobody predicted that the Iron Curtain would fall, but something new was born there. Nobody
predicted what the end of Apartheid in South Africa would look like - that it would foster so
much reconciliation and hope - wasn't that the wind of God's Spirit making something new?

            And most recently, people in Washington and other places are scratching their heads and
pointing their fingers and saying, Why couldn't you see what was about to happen in Egypt and

Bahrain and Libya?  But the wind blows where it chooses - you do not know where it comes
from, or where it goes. Could it be God is making something new?

            Consider this: this past December a bomb exploded outside a Coptic Christian church in
Alexandria, Egypt. 23 people were killed, and 90 seriously injured. We have seen this too many
times: the bombers intended that their act of terrorism would heighten the hatred between
Muslims and Christians, and usually that works. But this time the opposite happened.
Throughout Egypt, Muslims stepped forward to denounce the act. Over a million Egyptian
Muslims added a cross to their Facebook page as a way of expressing their solidarity with their
Christian brothers and sisters. And thousands of Muslims showed up for Christmas Eve services
and formed human chains around the churches so that Christians could celebrate the birth of
Jesus is safety. And then maybe you saw some of these pictures as well: hundreds of Muslim
men kneeling in prayer in Egypt, with rings of Christians encircling them to protect and respect
them. That's not the direction things have been going. That's not the real world as we've
known it. Could it be the wind of God's Spirit giving birth to something new?

            I believe it may well be. Because I believe in the life-giving power of God. I believe in the "new heaven and new earth" promised in the Bible. I believe in Easter, and the triumph of
Christ over evil and death. I believe God is doing something powerful and new in this world -
something far surpassing the old ways we've known, and wants us to be a part of it. God is
doing something powerful in this church; we see the signs of it every day - we don't know what
it will look like as God midwifes it along, but we know that the Spirit is blowing, and we're not
the same today as we were yesterday, and we'll be different tomorrow. At our confirmation
sleepover yesterday, we talked about all the revivals and reformations that took place in the
history of the church. Hang on tight; God is not finished. We are not as we yet shall be.

            And I believe in the possibility of rebirth and new life for each of you. I believe that God
looks at each one of us this morning and sees a work of art in progress. We see just the daily
struggles of valleys and mountains, and one step forward and two steps back, and of self-help
teachers offering us new disciplines and fads to improve this or that area of our lives. God sees
a reborn you, living in the love of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit - and it is a beautiful
thing what God's Spirit can bring to birth in a willing heart. I read an interview once of Leonard
Bernstein's father, and he was asked why he hadn't been more encouraging of his son's music.
And he said, "How was I to know that he would grow up to be Leonard Bernstein?" Of course
he couldn't. But we have a heavenly Father who knows exactly what we could become, each
one of us. And God invites us to embrace that wonderful grace that sees what we could be, that
burns away all our past mistakes, that restores us to our rightful place through the gift of Jesus
on the cross, and gives us the rebirth that not only fulfills this life, but promises eternal life in
Christ. Maybe this is your moment to become part of it.