Prospect Congregational United Church of Christ

          Nicodemus waits until his wife falls asleep.  She got up early, as usual, and worked hard all day, so she went to bed as soon as the kitchen was put in order after the evening meal.  The sound of her snuffly snore was the cue Nicodemus has waited for.  He slips out into the cool night air, closing the door oh so quietly behind him.  He looks up and down the street to see if there’s anyone out and about at this hour before hanging a left and walking as swiftly and quietly as he can down the street.  Even though he hasn’t seen anyone else roaming around, he keeps glancing over his shoulder behind him as if someone might be following him.  He doesn’t think he’s given anyone a reason to be suspicious of him, but he was a member of the Council, and he knows it would look really bad if anyone else in the leadership found out where he was going.   Jesus had already stirred up plenty of controversy in Jerusalem, overturning the tables of the money changers and sellers of sacrificial animals at the temple and driving the merchants and animals alike out of the temple courtyard with a homemade whip.  His colleagues already thought Jesus was Trouble with a Capital T (Trouble right here in Holy City!). What would happen to Nicodemus if he was seen by the temple leaders and the local governors as being associated with a rebel?  His armpits sting with sweat as he lopes along, wondering if seeking out this Jesus is going to be worth the risk he was taking, fascinating as the holy man might be.

          I’m reading a lot into an early detail in this story of the meeting of Nicodemus and Jesus: “He came to Jesus by night.”  The symbolism of light and darkness is rich and complex in John’s gospel, worth exploring.  But I’m connecting with Nicodemus right now as a man who was afraid, so afraid of being seen that he waited until the dead of night to carry out his inquiry.  Remember, he was living in a turbulent time under an oppressive Empire that used crucifixion as a method of frightening people too much to consider rebellion.  Biblical scholars Crossan and Borg say “crucifixion was a form of Roman imperial terrorism.”  It was a type of capital punishment for those “such as runaway slaves or rebel insurgents who subverted Roman law and order and thereby disturbed the Pax Romana (the Roman peace).” The uprights of the oft-used crosses were left permanently in place outside the city gates in prominent places.[1] That was so you could never forget what might await rebels. It was a calculated social deterrent, very public. 

          In John’s version of Jesus’s story, Jesus stirs up trouble early on, giving an added reason why Nicodemus might be afraid of being seen with him in this authoritarian context.  Fear was not just a personal feeling; it was a societal force.  Anthropologist Sarah Kendzior studies authoritarianism, and she has observed that in authoritarian settings, fear generates a transpersonal psychological energy.  “Just as musicians master the mechanical energy of sound and doctors master the biological energy of healing, authoritarians are masters at manipulating the energy of fear and resentment.”  Among people who haven’t learned to control their own fear and resentment, powerful people manipulate others for selfish and destructive ends.  Kendzior describes the personal effects of this kind of manipulation: “Authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control, it is something that eats away at who you are.  It makes you afraid, and fear can make you cruel.  It compels you to conform and to comply and accept things you would never accept, to do things you never thought you would do.  You do it because everyone else is doing it, because the institutions you trust are doing it and telling you to do it, because you are afraid of what will happen if you do not do it, and because the voice in your head crying out that something is wrong grows fainter and fainter until it dies.”[2]

          Nicodemus came to Jesus by night—a multidimensional darkness that describes not just the time of day but the time of history in which he was living.  I’ve read this story in John’s gospel many times, and this time I am relating to it at the point of a common experience of humans—the shared experience of a fear of powerful people who manipulate others for destructive ends.  Authoritarianism appears to be trying to get a foothold here in these United States.  Authoritarians “compel you to conform and to comply and accept things you would never accept,” as Sarah Kendzior puts it, manipulating people by making them afraid.

          Are we, like Nicodemus, also coming to Jesus by night?  Perhaps, although we don’t have the uprights of crosses planted at the foot of the Washington Memorial. We do have an administration that’s quick to accuse those who are peacefully protesting against ICE’s dragnet of mostly non-white immigrants of “domestic terrorism;” that descriptor was used by Administration officials as an accusation against both Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both fatally shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis.  There have been 33 people shot by ICE agents since the beginning of 2025, resulting in many injuries and nine known deaths.[3] Masked agents have been telling people that film them that they are collecting a data base of domestic terrorists as they take photos of protestors and their vehicles. What is that if not an effort to intimidate people trying to protect their neighbors? 

          Besides the domestic scenes of a terrifying secret police, we are now, as a nation, enmeshed in a rapidly-expanding war in the Middle East, undertaken by leaders who have been gleefully crowing in recent months about renaming the “Department of Defense” as the “Department of War.”  Nothing to help you rest comfortably like an escalation of conflict in the Middle East, right?  According to Axios, there are now (as of Thursday) sixteen countries that have been sucked in, responding to missiles flying every which-way.[4]  I’m too nervous to count how many of those sixteen have nuclear bombs in their arsenals; our own country’s nuclear arsenal is terrifying enough, especially when some in the upper echelons of our military are eager to frame this as a Holy War.  Did you hear about this? [Quote:] “‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,’ one military commander told his combat unit, which could be deployed to fight in Iran ‘at any moment,’ according to a complaint reportedly filed by one of the unit’s officers to a military watchdog group.”[5]  The Prince of Peace has been dragooned by people with fingers on triggers.

  So, speaking for myself, on this Sunday morning I am coming to Jesus by night as Nicodemus did--afraid, looking for grounding in the presence of God, in God’s kin-dom.  I’m looking for the God who is, as Psalm 121 says, awake day and night, to keep my life. 

          What does it mean to affirm that the Lord is our keeper?  It doesn’t mean safety, necessarily.  It doesn’t mean we’ll get through life unscathed.  But it does mean there’s some essence of you, of your life, that is in the Creator’s safekeeping. Part of our deep spiritual development is learning to trust the God of love who keeps our lives even through trial and tribulation.

There’s a story about Nelson Mandela’s survival during his twenty-seven yearlong imprisonment that inspires me:  Mandela wrote, “Prison and the authorities conspire to rob each man of his dignity.  In and of itself, that assured that I would survive, for any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose because I will not part with it at any price or under any pressure.”  I was struck by the ironclad strength of that conviction--that nothing, not nobody, not nohow, would rob him of his dignity.  Mandela had his dignity secured, put away for safekeeping, beyond the reach of anyone who would try to take it.  Sarah Kendzior’s research on authoritarianism led her to urge others to similarly discover the core of their identity that no one can take away unless you let them. “They can take everything away from you in material terms—your house, your job, your ability to speak and move freely.  They cannot take away who you truly are.  They can never truly know you, and that is your power. But to protect and wield this power, you need to know yourself—right now, before their methods permeate, before you accept the obscene and unthinkable as normal.”[6]

          Nicodemus probably risked something to seek out Jesus because he could sense that Jesus’s power was rooted in the presence of God to such a degree that God’s powerful love was being manifested in his words and deeds.  Nicodemus mentions “signs” in his inquiry. There have been two “signs” so far elucidated in John’s gospel. First, he turned water into an enormous amount of wine at a wedding celebration.  Second, he stood up to temple authorities to boldly drive those he believed were exploiting the poor out of the temple grounds, and by so doing called attention to himself as a potential troublemaker. Nicodemus wants to know about the source of such confidence and mysterious strength.

Jesus answers his curiosity with a discourse on being “born from above.” As I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ rather esoteric words about being born of flesh or spirit in the section of John’s gospel that we heard today, they are speaking to me of securing the essence of our lives in some other location than our vulnerable and perishing flesh.  The gospel here is grasping for the right metaphor to express the mystery of spirit being transformed by a force above and beyond us, transformed in such a way that it’s like a new birth.  This new life, unlike the old flesh-bound life, doesn’t have an expiration date; it rolls over into eternal life as the earthly husk drops away and is re-planted in the earth. 

          The process Jesus is struggling to make Nicodemus understand involves, weirdly, contemplating the Son of Man lifted up on the cross.  Interesting, isn’t it, that being born of the spirit so that one might have eternal life involves staring right into the gruesome face of death that was brought about by a cruel empire?  But it’s not just dead-end-death; for the Christian, it’s always death-and-resurrection. Contemplating Jesus Christ on the cross is an invitation to see through the cross to resurrection on the other side.  We may be perishing in our mother-born flesh, but there is something more durable about us than these bodies.  Just as Mandela asserted that nobody could rob him of his dignity, Jesus says in John’s gospel that nobody could take his life from him.  He was giving his bodily life away, because he was sure that ultimately his life was in safekeeping, safely preserved by God.  We see through Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection, like peering through a keyhole at a bright realm beyond.  Contemplating Christ on the cross, knowing this was not the end, assures us that life is stronger than death and love is stronger than hate.  The gospel says that God wants the world to be saved “through” Christ—couldn’t we conceive of “through” as more of a window than a gateway?  In Christ we see through the threat of death to the inextinguishable life on the other side. 

God our helper, as the psalm asserts, “will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.” And that means coming into our bodies in our mother-born flesh and going out of these same bodies in our Spirit-born spirit.  God will keep our lives. Even if the world does its worst to us, as it did to Jesus, what is most precious about my existence or any human existence is out of reach of thieves and killers.  The divine life in which I participate, the imperishable love that I enjoy and share through the holy vessel that is me, is ultimately in the formidable safekeeping of God, regardless of the fate of my mother-born flesh. 

          If we feel secure about being in God’s safekeeping, we can live the kind of transformed life that Jesus was trying to tell Nicodemus about, including freedom from some of our fleshier fears.  I appreciate the insight of Walter Russell Bowie on this: “There are people today who dread death, though sometimes I think there are more who dread life.  These two things are tied together.  If [someone] dreads death, [they] dread it because [they] fear the unknown, since [they] have no clear sense of the reality of an existence which is independent of the flesh in which, and for which, [they have] mainly lived.  The same [people] may come to dread life, for life’s outward accidents have made it bitter to [their] taste, and [they] have no inner spiritual resources to give [them] strength and joy whatever the weather of this world may be.  But for the Christian there is no dread of death, for it is simply the entrance into a larger room of that life which finds its security in God, in the same God from whom has come all that is sweet and sound in our living here.  And for the same reason the Christian cannot despair of life.  However its music may seem to be, [Christians are] sure that …all its notes will fit someday into a harmony that shall make its meaning great.”[7]  Freedom from fear, trusting in God to keep us and make something beautiful of our lives, releases all kinds of creative energy into the world as joyful people who dread neither life nor death sally forth.

           You don’t have to wait for your death to begin your eternal life when you perceive that your spirit is in God’s safekeeping.  As theologian Marjorie Suchoki puts it, God’s eternal love flows into us unhindered, bringing God’s future into the present.  This affects us not just on a personal level, but effects a positive change in our environment as we live with a freedom and joy that is not otherwise possible.  “John 3:16 claims that the very essence of God--infinite eternal love--can enter into us now such that we LIVE God's love in all our being, in all our doing, in all our days. This is the eternal life that defies the many forms of perishing.”

          It’s not easy amidst a rising tide of fear—being generated and manipulated by people who want to use fear for destructive ends—to stay tuned into that trust in God’s safekeeping.  It’s not effortless even for long practitioners of faith to remain grounded in the eternal life that defies the many forms of perishing with which we are daily confronted.  It takes some kind of concentrated effort to recollect God’s safekeeping in turbulent times.  As unique individuals, we’ll have different ways of recollecting, of re-collecting ourselves when we’re shattered by fear or fury. 

I was at an Interfaith Council meeting on Bainbridge Island once when the Bahai hosts shared a prayer of Baha’u’llah that intrigues me.  It goes like this: “Blessed is the spot, and the house, and the place, and the city, and the heart, and the mountain, and the refuge, and the cave, and the valley, and the land, and the sea, and the island, and the meadow where mention of God hath been made, and His praise glorified.” The point of the prayer is that any place where God is glorified will be blessed—God’s blessing is not in a specific place but everywhere God is mentioned.  Blessed is the spot.  That means that wherever and whenever we seek the presence of God—lifting our eyes to the hills as the psalmist did, or being transported to praise by music or color or poetry or the light shining in a baby’s eyes—we can re-connect with the Holy One who keeps our life.  Find your spot, friends--every day, at least once a day.  Be still. Settle into that spot, even for a fleeting moment.  Collect yourself, manage your fear and fury, and remember: God is our keeper.  God will keep us from all evil, keeping our lives, keeping us from this spot, this time, and forevermore.