March 1, 2026

Sermon Transcript

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.  He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do the signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  (John 3:1-2) 

Not long ago, on a Sunday evening I was standing at the door of the chantry, greeting departing worshippers after the 6 o’clock Eucharist.  If you don’t know what the chantry is, it’s the small chapel on the south side of the church.  It was built in 1879 as a gift from Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, and immediately called the chantry, not the chapel.  In those days, if you referred to the chapel, everyone here would have thought you meant Grace Chapel, a mission of Grace Church on 14^th St., between 3^rd and 4^th Avenues.  So they chose the word chantry to avoid confusion.

“Chantry” is an old English word denoting a place where priests would offer Mass for the souls of the departed.  But praying for the dead was never the specific purpose of our chantry.  It was meant to be a smaller alternative to the church.  The church is 150-feet long, the chantry is 65 feet.  The church seats one-thousand people, the chantry one-hundred.  The chantry is a separate building with its own entrance.  It is a small church hooked up to a big church.  The intended purpose of the chantry would be for small weddings, small funerals, and Sunday School classes filled with small people.  The key word here is small.  Still today we use the chantry for all these reasons and more, including the Sunday evening Eucharist, which averages about 50 people.

So there I was at the door of the chantry, after a Sunday service.  Just before the last person was about to leave, a young couple wanted to enter.  When I told them that we were about to close up for the night, the man asked if they could take a quick peek.  “I’ve always wanted to see the inside of this church,” he said.  I stepped aside, and invited them to have a look.  They stood for a moment and stared, with visible question marks furrowed on the broughs.  Then they thanked me and made for the door.  As they passed by, I heard the man say to the woman, “From the outside, it sure looks like it’s going to be bigger.”  For them, the inner and the outer realities of what they thought was Grace Church simply did not match.

I wonder if a similar disconnect between the inner and the outer is what brought Nicodemus to Jesus by night.  I wonder if Nicodemus was troubled that the inner and outer natures of his soul did not match.  Nicodemus was a Pharisee, which meant that he was a big man around the Jerusalem temple.  As a Pharisee, Nicodemus was a member of an order within first-century Judaism that concentrated on following the Law of Moses to the last letter.  Not only did the Pharisees follow the Commandments themselves, they worked laboriously to interpret the Law so that all Jews, in every conceivable circumstance, would know exactly what to do.  Outwardly, Nicodemus would be admired and respected.  Inwardly, most likely he thought rather highly of himself.  We can imagine his participating in today’s Penitential Order, with the recitation of the Commandments.  In Rite Two services, instead of responding, “Amen.  Lord, have mercy,” he would have sung: “Amen.  Lord, I got this.”  The Rite One language would be too difficult to amend on the spot, so he might simply have sung, on our behalf: “Lord, have mercy upon them, and incline their hearts to keep this law.”  The point is, what you saw in Nicodemus was what you were supposed to get: someone with the Commandments not only on his lips, but also in his heart.

Nevertheless, something wasn’t right.  Something wasn’t adding up.  John reports that Nicodemus came to Jesus under cover of night.  He’d recognized that Jesus brought something to the faith and practice of Israel that he lacked.  What did Nicodemus lack?  We can only speculate, but perhaps we can find a clue in his opening remark to Jesus: “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.”  What Nicodemus lacked was an awareness of the presence of God.  He saw in Jesus something that all of his studying and following of the Commandments had failed to produce in himself: a lively awareness of God’s living presence, a largeness of soul that made his own inner self feel small.

So in despair, perhaps in disarray, Nicodemus came to Jesus seeking direction.  There he was, a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews, occupying one of the most prominent seats among his people.  Now for the first time he dared consider a frightening possibility: He was a religious cleric whose outer appearance and inner nature did not match.  He was a hypocrite.  He was merely an actor on stage.  The conversation that followed is among the most familiar in all of the Bible.  In short, Jesus told Nicodemus that he needed to be born again, or born anew, or born from above.  Biblical commentators tell us that the best translation of the Greek here should go something like this: born from above, again.  No one enters the kingdom of God without being born from above, again.

What does it mean to be born again?  It means different things to different people, I suspect.  It’s one of those phrases about which many people have already formed their opinions.  Many shy away from the whole idea because it’s been politically hijacked, or used by pushy evangelists to judge who is a true believer and who isn’t.  We should do our best to recover the phrase, because with it, Jesus holds out to Nicodemus and to us the gift of experiencing and enjoying God.  To be born again is to fall in love with God.  It is to trust that God loves the world so much that he sent Jesus not to condemn it, but to save it.  It is to enter the kingdom of heaven.  It is to know, as St. Paul would later say, that nothing in all of creation can separate you from the love of God.  It is to be given what John calls eternal life, which says as much about quality of life as it does about quantity.  How does it happen?  How can anyone be born after having grown old?  Nicodemus wanted to know, and so do we.  Must it be a sudden, dramatic outpouring of the Spirit, or might coming to faith be a gradual awakening?  Either way, we’d like to know, because until we taste of such an experience, even if it’s just a sample, our fear is that our inner nature doesn’t live up to the outward show.

Consider Lauren Chapin, who died this past week at the age of 80, and whose moving obituary ran in The New York Times.  Who was Lauren Chapin?  Back in the 1950s, for six years she was one of the five principal characters in the television sitcom, Father Knows Best.  Chapin played the role of Kathy Anderson, the cute, exuberant, youngest child of Jim and Margaret.  With her older TV siblings Bud and Betty, the Andersons were idolized as the perfect, wholesome American suburban family.  The problem for Chapin, who was only 9-years old when the show first aired, was that her real life was a small and cramped version of her TV life.  At home she lived with an abusive father and alcoholic mother.  When Father Knows Best came to an end, Chapin lost not only her idyllic TV family, but her acting career as well.  She descended into a twenty-year odyssey of drug addiction, check forgery, prostitution, and prison.  Lauren Chapin lived a life that simply did not match what the public saw in Kathy Anderson.  The inner reality bore no resemblance to the outward show.

How about you?  If such a thing as an hypocrisy meter existed, what would it read if someone pointed it at you?  When it comes to the life of faith, many people experience the disconnect between outward piety and inward conviction.  The suspicion is that we sing the hymns and say the prayers as imposters.  We are hypocrites, say the cynics and skeptics.  We are play-acting a part that has nothing to do with who we really are.  Are they right?  Do you want authentic faith?  Do you want to be born anew into a genuine awareness of God’s presence?

The conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus is dense and has many levels of meaning, but I believe we can learn much from it.  It could be that what Nicodemus hoped to gain from the conversation was a list of instructions he could follow to conjure up the presence of God.  What Jesus had to say probably disappointed him.  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, you cannot control the presence of God, so stop pressing.

In today’s reading from Romans (4:1-17), Paul the Apostle, himself a convert to faith in Jesus, implies that such pressing for God’s presence and favor is an attempt at justification by works, which is a fool’s errand.  It is not by our own efforts that we are saved, or made aware of God’s presence.  Salvation is a free gift.  It depends on faith in order that the promise may rest on grace.  It comes from above and is beyond our control, so stop pressing.  St. Paul seems to be saying, Relax.  God loves you.  God loves the world.

Something else we can glean from the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus derives from all the imagery about birth.  In order to receive the new life that Jesus has to give, it will be necessary to let go of the old life.  For any baby to be born it must leave the only world it has ever known, the snug little confines of its mother’s womb.  To be sure, the womb is good, and it prepares the baby for the dazzling world of light and sound it is about to enter.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.  We can see a birth process at work in Nicodemus, hard as it was for him.  No doubt he’d been steeped in the faith and traditions of Israel since before he could remember.  It was the only world he understood.  Embracing the new reality he perceived in Jesus wasn’t easy.  Birth is hard work.  Conversion is a process.

Nicodemus was a work in progress.  Whatever became of him?  Was his conversion ever complete?  Of course it wasn’t, because God is never finished with any of us.  We only hear two more brief references to Nicodemus in the New Testament, both in the Gospel of John.  In John 7 we read how Nicodemus argued with some chief priests of the Temple who wanted to condemn Jesus.  He urged them to go see for themselves the work that he was doing.  Then in John 19 we read that it was Nicodemus who at the death of Jesus, brought myrrh and aloes that were necessary for the burial.  After this he fades into history.  Was he all in with Jesus, or only partially so?  We’ll never know, but at least on three occasions he stepped out in faith, genuinely and authentically seeking to know God’s presence.

How can anyone be born after having grown old?  Nicodemus lived long ago and far away.  What is more, the language of being born again may not be the easiest on our Episcopal ears.  Nevertheless, it’s important for us to take note of and point out where the power of God to bring new life is at work in our day.  The fact is, Lauren Chapin, like Nicodemus, was a work in progress.  She had hit rock-bottom in prison, when a visiting priest began telling her about the love of God and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.  The message was a revelation to her.  “I had always felt that God was out to get me,” she once described.  This was new.  God was for her, not against her.  She decided to trust in the love of God.  She committed her life to Jesus, and spent the next forty years helping other addicts.  She died secure in the faith that she was a beloved child of God.  She died as a person whose inner and outer natures were whole, and healed.  What is more, she confessed that playing the role of Kathy Anderson participated in her salvation.  It gave her a sense of the larger, loving life that God wants us all to have.

How can anyone be born after having grown old?  Lauren Chapin was born anew.  She was born from above, again.  For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son to her, and to Nicodemus, and to Paul the Apostle, and to you and me today, even at this most sacred banquet of bread and wine.

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