Broadway Christian Church ·Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship ·February 20, 2005

The Second Sunday of Lent

Prayer of the Day

Lord Jesus, as we worship you this hour in the daylight, we are reminded that you are the Lord of the night as well.  Come to us, we pray, day or night, so that we might hear your voice and be shown your way.  Amen.

Scripture
John 3:1-17

After dark one evening, a Jewish religious leader named Nicodemus, a Pharisee, came to speak with Jesus.  “Teacher,” he said, “we all know that God has sent you to teach us.  Your miraculous signs are proof enough that God is with you.”

Jesus replied, “I assure you, unless you are born again, you can never see the Kingdomof God.”

“What do you mean?” exclaimed Nicodemus.  “How can an old man go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?”

Jesus replied, “The truth is, no one can enter the Kingdomof Godwithout being born of water and the Spirit.  Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives new life from heaven.  So don’t be surprised at my statement that you must be born again.  Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit.”

“What do you mean?” Nicodemus asked.

Jesus replied, “You are a respected Jewish teacher, and yet you don’t understand these things?  I assure you, I am telling you what we know and have seen, and yet you won’t believe us.  But if you don’t even believe me when I tell you about things that happen here on earth, how can you possibly believe if I tell you what is going on in heaven.  For only I, the Son of Man, have come to earth and will return to heaven again.  And as Moses lifted up the serpent on a pole, so it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up so that everyone who believes in me will have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.  God did not send his Son into the world to condemn it, but to save it.”

Message
 Working the Night Shift
Rick Frost

One night a man named Nicodemus came to Jesus. 

Are you a night person or a day person?  OK, let’s find out.  How many are day people?  Let’s see the hands of the day people.  Fine.  You have been up since four o’clock this morning.  Your day is half over.  Now, how many are night people?  Let’s see the hands of the night people.  You are like my 22-year-old daughter.  She just went to bed at four o’clock.  And she is going to have to work at making herself presentable, so she can slide into a seat, hopefully by the 11:00 service today.  We have day people, and we have night people.  I suspect most of us tend to lean in one direction or the other.

Now in the Bible, which is so central to our life as people of Christ, day and night and light and darkness, as most of you know, have tremendous spiritual significance.  In the beginning, according to Genesis, the earth was formless, a void, and darkness covered the face of the deep.  And God said, “Let there be light,” and the darkness was pushed back.

According to Isaiah, some day, “the people who walk in darkness will receive a great light.”  And every Christmas Eve, wherever you might be, my guess is, you join the rest of us, and you light a candle proclaiming that light is Jesus.  That is the light of the world.  And even though humanity, as John said, tends to choose, live in, and even love the darkness, still that light – a spark of which has been given to every single person in this room – still shines.  It shines in the darkness, wherever that darkness might be, and John said, that darkness has not been overcome yet.

Indeed, according to Peter’s letter to the church in the New Testament, we Christians, not only here but all over the world in every time and place, are, as he said, “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.”  Why?  What makes us that is because, as he said, “We have been called out of the darkness and into his marvelous light.”  And every Sunday morning, when one of the adults or one of the children bring that light into the sanctuary, and you see those candles lit, that’s the time we remember, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, it’s the time we remember that into any darkness, anywhere, regardless of how deep, there comes the light of Jesus Christ.

One night, a man named Nicodemus came to Jesus.

Now, my very first recollection of a friend…  Do you remember your first friend, by the way?  Think about the first person you would call a friend.  Can you think back that far?  That first person?  For me that first person was a young African American named Nicodemus.  That really was is name!  Nicodemus.  His father was our gardener.  We lived in Greenville, South Carolina.  He would come on various days and work in our garden.  Nico is what I called him.  Nico and I would play in the back yard.  And while that is my recollection of my very first friend, let me be perfectly clear that when the Bible talks about light and darkness, when it talks about day and night, it is not talking about the pigment of one’s skin.  We all know it does not have anything to do with when one goes to bed or when one gets up.  Too many people in this world have suffered from the misuse of biblical metaphors.

When the Bible talks about “light,” it’s talking about illumination.  It’s talking about being able to see where in the world we are going.  It’s about that energy that creates warmth, and life, and shelter against the cold and the things that are frightful in this life.  For the Bible, light is associated with understanding and enlightenment.  It is sort of like, “Oh, I see!  I get it!”  You have had those moments, those “ah-ha” moments, when the light bulb comes on.  You know what I’m talking about.  Everything is different from that moment on.  That’s what the Bible means when it talks about “light.”  Of course, we tend to choose to worship in the daylight.  We come to church when the sun is out, hopefully, and we turn all the lights on.  We sing preferably bright, upbeat, familiar melodies, and smiling ushers and grinning clergy greet us.  Grinning, grinning clergy!

Everything is so positive, and glorious, and grand.  People work very hard for it to be an hour of praise and celebration, and that’s the way it should be.  I’m not knocking that.  People shake hands.  They hug each other.  They greet old friends and make room for new ones.  I love Sunday morning!  Do you love Sunday morning?  It is energizing.  It builds me up.  It renews my spirit and my mind.  It feeds my soul, because, you see, being here with you, people like you, through the power of music, through the time we spend in prayer, through the time we spend listening to and reflecting on the Word of the Lord as it is given to us in Scripture, as we take our place at the Table of the Lord, as we give back as we have received…  When we do that, folks, we encounter the Spirit of the Living God.  I meet Jesus here.  Not just here, but certainly here.  And I cannot, to this day, imagine my life without it.  Do you know what I am talking about?  Most of us, much of the time, meet Jesus in broad daylight, but here is the point for today: Coming to Jesus in the dark can be just as powerful and sometimes more so.

One night, a man named Nicodemus came to Jesus.

Do you know what the Church means when it talks about the dark night of the soul?  Have you ever heard that before?  What that means simply is this: there are times in everybody’s life – your life, my life.  It has happened before.  For some it is happening right now.  It will happen for us again.  There will be times in this life when things are not going well, when things happen, when foundational things happen.  When the foundation of our life gets shaken, and that solid rock we have built our life on starts to quiver and sometimes crumble.  When that happens, you know what happens.  When the foundations shakes, what happens?  Everything else around it starts to crumble.  You’ve been there.  You know what I’m talking about.

That’s what the Church means when it talks about the dark night of the soul.  It’s when the light goes out in your life, folks.  Something, someone, someone you trusted, something you believed in, something you built your world around is all of a sudden gone, or maybe you have just discovered that it is just an illusion.  You or someone you love, for whatever reason, has taken a wrong path, and it’s not working very well.  Or you’ve lost a job, or you are trying to find employment.  Maybe your children are driving you crazy.  Maybe you have parents who are bickering.  Maybe you’ve gotten sick.  Maybe you are ill.  Maybe you’ve been shipped overseas.  Maybe you’ve been in an accident.  The dark night of the soul.

Someone you love has lost a relationship.  Maybe you have lost a marriage.  Maybe you have lost a friend, or a co-worker, or a spouse, or a family member to death.  (Ann’s testimony today – powerful!  Wasn’t it?  Touching, so real, so real.)  Things that were once very clear and very set are all of a sudden invisible.  Things that were certain are all of a sudden irrepressibly uncertain.

I believe that meeting Jesus on bright, beautiful, well-lighted, exquisite days is wonderful.  People do it all the time.  But there are those of us who come to Jesus by night, sort of groping our way, only to come face to face with the one who loves us and graces us and spiritually, gently, warmly embraces us.  You see, when it is dark, and when we are hurting, we feel bad, and we feel lost and confused.  But the truth of the matter is if you will allow it, the darkness just might be the time and the place where you get found. 

Fred Craddock used to say, “You know, to receive some of the blessings of this life, not all of them, but some of the blessings of this life, you and I have to move closer to Christ, so that we can hear the blessings that are offered.”  It is not bad to come, like Nicodemus, to Jesus in the night.  Millions have before.  Millions are today.  Millions will in the future.

Now, I don’t know if the sun is shining for you right now.  I hope it is, but I don’t know whether it is or not.  I hope that you and your loved ones are happy.  I hope you are in good health.  I hope things are going well for you and the people you love.  But in case, just in case, today that is not the case for you right now, let me suggest on this second Sunday of Lent, to consider rejoicing.  You know what?  I’ll bet I could have used any other word.  You weren’t expecting that one.  Consider rejoicing – rejoicing that you and I have a Savior who keeps evening hours.  Consider rejoicing that you and I have a Lord who works the night shift.  By night, folks, is a great time to come to Jesus.  Just let him talk to you.  You have to be willing to let him sit with you, let him teach you, help you, strengthen you, reveal his will and his way to you.  It can happen, and it does happen.

We heard a wonderful witness to that today.  Perhaps you’d like a Stephen Minister to walk with you.  Maybe walking by yourself is a little much.  You know that you can have one of those?  A person who has been trained and available and supervised to walk with you.  We have them right here at Broadway.  All you have to do is ask.  And if not for yourself, maybe you know someone else – maybe a loved one, maybe a neighbor, maybe a friend.  Someone else who needs someone, a Christian friend, to walk with them.  We can arrange that.  We would be glad to arrange that.

Or perhaps the Creator of all this is has gifted some of you and is calling some of you to learn more about, maybe even to become a Stephen Minister.  There is some training involved.  There is supervision.  And there is a very clear way to do it.  We empower you to become a caring, compassionate Christian friend, a person who is available and willing to walk along side somebody who is navigating through some pretty dark times right now.  It’s not going to be that way forever, but for right now, it is.  We can put an application in your hand today.

One night, a man named Nicodemus came to Jesus.

And we all say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

Illuminating God, you come to us in the cover of night.  You see through to us when we cannot see for ourselves.  Let us learn to trust the quiet darkness as a time for you to enter in and enlighten us.  Let us sleep with our hearts open.  Amen.