Encounters with God

We meet two very different men in today’s readings. They both encounter God. They both do their best to follow God’s will. But their reactions couldn’t be more different. I want to talk about both of them.

But first let me ask you a question.

Do you put up a Christmas tree each year? If you do, what goes at the very top of it? When I was a child, we used a handmade cardboard star that was covered with aluminum foil. Later, I bought a fancy Moravian star, but it fell apart after just a couple of years. Maybe you have a star. But maybe you have an angel at the top of your tree. If you do, try to picture it. I’d be willing to bet that it’s gold and white, a mostly-human, feminine figure, with a happy expression on its face, and two wings folded neatly behind its back.

I don’t really need any new Christmas decorations, but I discovered one last year that tempted me. It turns out that you can buy an angel tree topper that’s advertised as “biblically accurate.” The prophet Isaiah described one such type of angel: “each had six wings; with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.” No wonder angels always start out by saying, “be not afraid.” Would you put a figure like that on top of your tree?

Isaiah’s vision is the first encounter with God that we hear about today. It’s a remarkable scene. God sits on a throne and wears a robe large enough to fill the temple. Those frightening six-winged angels hover in the air, surrounded by smoke, calling out to one another in voices that shook stone. Isaiah realizes that he is seeing God, but he can’t bear the sight. “Woe is me!” he cries. “I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”

One of the angels takes a glowing coal from the altar fire and touches it to Isaiah’s mouth. Then the prophet hears the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”

And he replies at once: “Here am I; send me!”

Awe, mystical vision, repentance, purification. Immediate willingness to answer God’s call without even knowing what he’ll be asked to do or where he’ll be sent. No doubt. No questions. That’s Isaiah.

Isaiah is one model for faith and for discipleship.

But Isaiah’s vision isn’t the only encounter with God that we heard about today.

We also have the story of Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a pharisee, a leader of his community. He’s intrigued by Jesus, but doesn’t quite know what to make of him. Nicodemus isn’t much like Isaiah. He doesn’t go in for metaphor, symbolism, and mysterious visions. He’s cautious, respectable, polite. I like to think of him as a faithful skeptic.

In today’s passage, Nicodemus visits Jesus secretly by night. He seems afraid to be seen in his company. He wants to take things slowly. And when he arrives, he completely fails to understand what Jesus is telling him.

“How can anyone be born again after having grown old?” Nicodemus asks. “Can you enter a second time into your mother’s womb and be born?” He’s seeking truth, but he just doesn’t understand. He’s very literal-minded. No glowing coals and six-winged seraphim for him.

It’s easy to judge Nicodemus as a bit obtuse, and much too hesitant. The Gospel passage we heard today doesn’t really do Nicodemus justice, though. He appears two more times in scripture. Later in the Gospel of John, he defends Jesus before a council of other Pharisees. His point is lawyerly, procedural. Give the guy a hearing, he says. We shouldn’t condemn anyone without a trial. And then, after Jesus’s death, Nicodemus arrives with a hundred pounds of myrrh to help Joseph of Arimathea bury him. A hundred pounds of myrrh is really an awful lot of myrrh.

Nicodemus experiences no visions. He makes no clear statement of faith. You can call him a skeptic, a cautious politician, extravagant only in a largely useless gesture that came too late.

But yet. But yet Nicodemus’s cautious brand of faith is faith nonetheless. He visits Jesus in secret. But he speaks up to demand a trial. He shows up to bury Jesus’s body, when the “official” disciples were nowhere to be found. Who can tell how much courage those actions required?

Isaiah. Nicodemus. Two very different personalities. Two very different responses to an encounter with the divine.

Which is right?

Maybe we can find some hints in Jesus’s response to Nicodemus. How does he answer Nicodemus’s simple, literal question about the practicality of being born again?

Well, he doesn’t really. “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,” who is born from above, who is born anew.

Isaiah shows us that profound vision and clear commitment to God’s work can happen in an instant. Nicodemus shows us that it can take time.

The wind blows.

The Isaiahs of the world are welcome in the kingdom of God, but so it seems are the Nicodemuses, questioning, wondering, tentative and cautious. Even a grasping, uncertain faith can hold, and perhaps hold more securely than a sometimes brittle certainty.

Because the wind still blows.

Which is right? Isaiah or Nicodemus? Maybe they both are. “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.” Maybe God is more than any one of us can understand.

But the wind still blows.