Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 2 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 these signs that you do unless God is with that person.” 3 Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” 4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” 5 Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 8 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.” 9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 10 Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?
John 3:1-17
11 “Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. 12 If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.
My sermon from the Second Sunday in Lent (March 1, 2026) on John 3:1-17.
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There’s an organization in New York City [You Gotta Believe] that finds permanent families for the type of foster kids who are often ignored. When it comes to adoption, it’s relatively not too difficult to find folks who want a baby since there’s so much potential for who that kid might be. But when it comes to teenagers and budding young adults who have their own personality, likes, wants, and history – finding them a family is much harder. These kids often carry with them the emotional, spiritual, mental, and even physical trauma made worse by an underfunded and overwhelmed system. This group, then, holds classes for those wondering what it might be like to open their lives to someone who has already begun there. And one of the interesting things this group repeats over and over again is how our expectations for what it looks like when a teenager is starting to feel comfortable in our home is often wrong. We assume that if this connection was going well then love, joy, patience, and good manners would grow. The kids should start off standoffish but soon reflect back the kindness we show them. The love we share is the love we get back. But what usually happens, though, is that when that love starts to break through, behaviors break down. These kids, to survive, built all kinds of emotional, physical, and mental walls to hold them together as they were shuffled from place to place. But when someone truly sees them, gets to know them, and won’t let them go when a minor inconvenience comes their way, the walls begin to crack. Those who have either been a teenager or raised them know how challenging those years can be. And when you add trauma and misery into the mix, everything explodes. These misdeeds are not a sign the connection we’re building together isn’t working. Rather, it reveals how replacing walls with compassion, care, love, and trust is what new life actually looks like.
Now today’s reading from the gospel according to John contains the most well known verse in our entire New Testament. When we want to tell others what our faith is all about, John 3:16 says a lot. In fact, it’s so potent that when we wave posterboards at football games, tattoo our biceps, or place small signs on thin metal spikes in our lawn – we don’t even always feel the need to write the entire verse out. To us, John 3:16 is how we take a public stand announcing what we believe while, hopefully, inviting others to know how Jesus can be for them too. That ease of use – and the fact it’s everywhere – is also why, I think, our use of John 3:16, can be problematic. When we read it, we tend to zero in on the very squishy, important, and yet unquantifiable word “believe.” We assume that having the right amount of belief is how we get to be part of God’s forever story but what that might look like is always up for debate. We then use this verse as a way to separate those who we think are real Christians from those who we trust are merely pretend. Over time, the line becomes a wall where our act of belief – either through words or actions or church attendance or our financial giving or even our cultural values and who we vote for – becomes what John 3:16 means for us. This book and three digits in our culture functions less as a declaration of faith and more a hope that what we mean when we say “I believe” is enough to make sure our story doesn’t end. And as we lean into that understanding of 3:16, our walls grow as we put ourselves and others in buckets where we decide who is faithful and who isn’t. We might try to pretty up those walls with all kinds of biblical words but when you scratch their surface, what holds it all together is trusting the choices we make will be what carry us through.
But when we step back and put this verse back into scripture, the emphasis we place on the last half of the sentences isn’t, I think, what Jesus was really up to. We are, at this point in John’s version of Jesus’ life, near the beginning of his ministry. The only thing he’s done is call a few disciples, turn water into wine, and tossed over a few tables in Jerusalem. A bunch of his story is still to come and yet Nicodemus, a member of the council overseeing the Holy Temple and life within the city, came to see who this Jesus might be. Now Nicodemus, like I said in my children’s message, knew what it was like to live across the lines we try to divide each other with. He was a Jewish leader with a Greek name connected to the Greek goddess Nike. The buckets folks put him into didn’t always fit and so that might be why he wanted to meet the One who doesn’t seem to fit into any of our buckets too. As they talked, it’s kind of interesting what Jesus didn’t say. He never told Nicodemus to repent, change his life, or believe in the good news. Jesus doesn’t promise Nicodemus that if uttered the right prayers or stood strong on his beliefs, that prosperity would be on its way. Jesus doesn’t promise the kind of comfort, peace, and security we want if only we believe in the one right thing. Jesus, instead, emphasized what God was up to instead. None of us pick the moment we are born and the divine swirls throughout the world like an evening breeze rattling the branches of the trees. We have no control over what the divine does and it’s a mistake to assume any of our choices are infallible to sin. And while we would love to be able to give ourselves a sense of wholeness through the right kind of effort and hard work, Jesus pointed to a story from Exodus where healing only came from God. And just like those who basked in the presence of a carved wooden serpent, the open arms of Jesus on the Cross shows just how far – and for whom – God’s love will go. What Jesus leaned into wasn’t us trying to get up to heaven. Rather, it was the reminder that our God always chooses to come down. The walls between heaven and earth; the walls between who is loved and who isn’t; and the walls we build to hoard life will always be shattered by the One who simply loves.
And when this love shows up in our relationships, in our families, in our faith, and in our world, being fragile and vulnerable isn’t a sin we need to repent from. It is, rather, the cost of being human and how we discover what love can do. It’s usually at this point, while our walls break down, that we do everything we can to keep them up. We get angry. We get mean. We say things we don’t really mean. We tell those who try to stick with us that they need to leave us alone. Now this isn’t meant to be an excuse for that behavior nor permission to act this way with those we love as a way of getting out of doing the hard work of learning how to faithfully love others too. It is, rather, an invitation to let yourself be as loved as God declares you are. When the walls come down, they create space for our real life to finally begin. Now we never hear Nicodemus’ initial response to Jesus’ words. He doesn’t, at that moment, come and say “I believe.” But he does return two more times in Jesus’ story. Later, in chapter 7, he defends Jesus before the council. And then he’s there with Joseph of Arimetha to take Jesus’ body and place it in the tomb. John never shows us the nitty gritty details of what God’s love did for Nicodemus. Yet we know it kept working in his life and pushed him towards so much more. Love doesn’t exist to merely help us get loved back. Love breaks down walls so that a different kind of life can be lived. And if our God has chosen, in baptism and through faith, to wrap you in a love that never ends, maybe we can push through the walls we build to see where God’s mercy, compassion, and hope might take us and the world.
Amen.