This morning’s text from Genesis contains one of my favorite lines in Scripture: “Go to the place that I will show you.” What a ludicrous statement! What self-respecting, modern-day person who understands her time and talent to be worth something would head out with such a loose description of the destination?

The call of Abram happens when he is 75 years old the text tells us. He is an old man. He has lived his whole life, acquired family, possessions, and a very important position of respect there in the land of his birth, Ur of the Chaldeans. Then along comes God out of a dim but developing notion that there is one God of all things rather than a myriad of nature and fertility gods. This God calls him to leave his settled place and his settled existence to go to a new place. 

Shocking as this might have been, we could imagine Abram saying to God, “Well maybe, okay, this could be exciting. Sell the idea, make your pitch. Describe it, induce me, entice me!” And God says, “Go to the place that I will show you.” How lame! 

How different that is from how we function? We need to have everything planned in detail with driving instructions from Mapquest and computer generated drawings. To go a new way, we need to have the destination clearly described with measurable objectives and charts so that we know when we have arrived. 

We move, if at all, by mission statements and strategic plans. Of course it is true that we need these things in our human endeavors. If we do not have a plan we don’t know where we are going. But I wonder if we get so tied up in our ways of doing things, nailing it all down, that we can’t respond to God, where nothing is nailed down (except the Christ!) 

I am talking on the spiritual, faith, religious level about listening and responding to the movement of God’s Spirit. God’s Mission Statement to Abram is, “Go to the place that I will show you.” Abram does just that.

I had in mind how settled Abram was, at his 75 years of age and how difficult it would be for him to just up and go, when I asked the Wednesday morning Bible study group a question. This group is mostly retirement-aged people. (Not early retirement either!) I asked them, “Why do you suppose it is important for the text to point out Abram’s age of 75 years? Immediately one of them answered, “He was old enough to have gotten wisdom.” 

Well, I am ashamed to admit it, but that possibility never crossed my mind. I think, however, that it is right. I am reminded of Paul’s line about the foolishness of God being wiser than the wisdom of humans. Maybe Abram had grown wise enough to trust the wisdom in God’s seeming folly. Maybe he had grown wise enough to listen, to act, and to recognize God’s beckoning. Maybe he had come to realize the futility of his own world-building, wise enough to risk being born…of God. That is, delivered into a world governed by the unpredictable and unable-to-be-manipulated ways of God’s Spirit—a place one can only see when one feels the power of that Spirit buffeting one about. 

I wonder if Nicodemus had begun to grow wiser. Yes, he comes to Jesus under cover of darkness, a person not of the light. But he comes! We do him a disservice by denigrating him. I think that his journey was, in its own way, as difficult as Abrams. He came. Was it that he finally began to realize that the womb of his totally predictable world was constricting? Was he growing out of it? Did he have an inkling that his exercise of religion was not the extent of God? It was a huge risk, but I think he was getting ready for delivery. 

Who was this Nicodemus? Why did he come at night? He was likely of the Aristocracy. They were the high ranking well-to-do families of Jerusalem, the DeVos, Pew, Meijer or Van Andels. We know that he was a member of the Sanhedrin—the all-powerful governing council of Jewish law and life. 

Most importantly, perhaps, he was a Pharisee. The Pharisees were the most righteous, devout people in the country. There were never very many of them as their discipline was so rigorous. They were a brotherhood that swore an oath to spend all their lives observing every detail of the scribal law. Remember that the Law of Moses is the first five books of the Bible. This is known as the Pentateuch. Everything needed to live righteously under the law was contained therein. If a situation was not explicit in the law, it could be implied. The scribes took up the task of making everything in the law explicit. This is the Scribal Law, known as the Misnah. 

The Scribes spent their lives working all this out. As an example, the Law of Moses prohibits one to work on the Sabbath. But what is work? The Misnah, to which Nicodemus would have been totally dedicated, had 24 chapters on the Sabbath alone! Was it work to tie a knot? Well, it depended on the knot and the purpose. One could not carry a burden on the Sabbath, but what constituted a burden? One could not travel, but did that include moving about inside the house, or how far outside? Could one walk as far as the well? Could you tie a rope onto a bucket and lower it for water, and how much could you lift up without it being a burden! 

In other words, there was nothing in Nicodemus life left to chance, or grace. This may all seem ridiculous to us, but it was an evolutionary process. It was a track that they were unwilling to step off and thereby arrived at this place, of ridiculously detailed law which they treated as god. If, however, we looked afresh at many of the places religion has evolved to today, is it any less ridiculous? Is it any less opposed to God’s radical, uncontrollable love? Look at our modern proliferation of denominations, or at who can come to the Communion table and who cannot, the various doctrinal disputes over which people have killed each other such as what exactly happens to the bread and wine in communion. Is the legalism of some parts of the Church, the Church’s exclusivity, or the way it treats religious language as magical incantation any less distant from God’s intention? I think not! 

Through this hardened concrete encasement of Nicodemus’ life, the laser-light of God in Jesus began to penetrate. Nicodemus, risking all, comes to Jesus. So what that it is night. He comes. 

It is clear from the conversation that Nicodemus does not find what he expects, at least not in the way he hopes. He wanted intellectual answers. He wanted new interpretations of the same old law, a new plan that he could work on the same old system. He was not looking for a new reality, just better tools for the old one. It is a little like when we reinterpret those three texts in the New Testament purporting to deal with homosexuality. On one level that can be important, but truthfully, those texts are of a system that gets God to sanction human discrimination, the whole system needs to be thrown out. 

In short, Nicodemus comes to Jesus expecting prose, a debate on dogmatics. What Jesus gives him is poetry, imagery, and metaphor. Nicodemus, the consummate literalist can’t begin to follow Jesus’ language about birth and rebirth. Jesus had a whole new concept: religion not as that which contains and controls our base human urges, but rather that which releases our human longing for God and God’s peaceable realm. 

Nicodemus whose whole life’s work, whose whole tradition said that religious thought and human behavior had to be tightly controlled and minutely managed is beckoned by Jesus into a world of light. He is beckoned into a world of gift and grace where God is not the score keeper, but the coach, where God is the powerful, wild wind of the new creation. 

Friends, we cannot think ourselves into this new creation. Neither can literalists enter the domain of the Spirit. 

W. H. Auden once observed that it is hard to be a Christian if one is not a poet. He did not mean just the poets reverence for the power of language, but also of imagination, or to use a modern expression, “to think outside the box.” Outside the box in which we contain God and thus ourselves. 

I leave you, then, not with more sermonic prose, but with the poetry of a prayer by Ted Loder whom I believe is the best religious poet of our day, that you might become wise enough to be born.  

(The poem is Ache and Awe in the Human-Divine Struggle from "Wrestling the Light" by Ted Loder, LuraMedia: San Diego, CA)