“Saturday morning cartoons. Growing up, I looked forward to Saturday morning cartoons the same way the Archbishop of Canterbury anticipates participating in the Easter liturgy. My grandmother’s house did not smell of incense nor did it resemble a cathedral. Instead, it smelled like cinnamon rolls, bacon grease, and Folgers Coffee. The kitchen had a linoleum floor that kept the score and my Granddad’s pipe smoke wafting in from the sunroom is forever in my mind. It was the coziest I’ve been in my life. My brother and I would lay on our bellies in our pajamas with our chins propped up on the palms of our hands like bowls of oranges and we would watch Merrie Melodie’s Looney Tunes.
I remember the episode in which the neighborhood black cat squeezed under a freshly painted white fence picking up a stripe down her back and the never-ending confusion it caused the lovesick Pepe le Pew. I remember Foghorn Leghorn sneaking up on the sleeping Barnyard Dawg, grabbing him by the tail, beating his backside with a piece of scrap wood, and running off only to have Barnyard’s chain synch down on him at the last second. I remember the Road Runner painting a mural on the side of a stone wall out in the desert deceiving Wile E. Coyote as he slams face-first into it. As Wile E. peeled himself from the wall, the Road Runner would blaze past and you’d hear his only words – “Meep! Meep!” And of course, there’s Bugs Bunny jamming a carrot into Elmer Fudd’s rifle causing it to blow up in his face, and as the dust, gunpowder, and soot settles, Bugs is leaning on a tree with a smug look on his face and asks the famous question “Ehhhhh... What’s up, Doc?”
What’s up, Doc? When we think of this year, 2020 and more specifically, our own lives, we all stop laughing because the joke is on us. We are the confused skunks, banged up coyotes, Farmdogs on short leashes, and hunters getting picked on by pesky rabbits. In the blink of an eye, everything changed. Kids are now online all day for school. The service industry, sports, concerts, and large gatherings all disappeared. We can’t even see each other‘s faces most of the time. There is ongoing injustice across our land, businesses remain boarded up, fear is everywhere, and America entertained herself to death with the likes of Joe Exotic. (I’ve been told that Tiger King was just as offensive as Jerry Falwell Jr.).
We laugh at the little cartoon characters because the animals that they were chasing remain barely of reach. In fact, the thing that they want more than anything is actually playing a joke on them. At various points throughout this year and certainly throughout our lives, we pause and ask questions like, “Why did this happen?” “Is God good?” “Is this some kind of joke?”
As I think through the stories in the Bible there are countless confused skunks and banged up coyotes. Abraham takes matters into his own hands and lives in regret. Noah is survived by the entire world but the depression still got to him. Moses in his frustration and anger is somewhere out in the desert beating a rock with a stick and doesn’t get to enter the Promised Land. David ignores his father’s wisdom and falls into the same vices resulting in the same broken heart his father had. Of all the exhausted men and women in the Bible, the one that kept coming to mind this week for me was the ruler of the Pharisees known as Nicodemus. You see, nobody is more exhausted than a 40-year-old religious man who thinks he should have all the answers to the questions of his own life as well as the very mysteries of God.
Nicodemus was an educated man who held incredible power in his religious community. His knowledge of the Scriptures surpassed everyone around him and he would’ve been considered a model citizen in every way. Yet, there was Somebody Else on the scene. Somebody Else was turning heads because he was turning water to wine. The Apostle John tells us Nicodemus “came to Jesus at night.“ We don’t know why he preferred to talk with Jesus in the dark any more than we recognize the face of the man in the moon. But that’s just what he did. Perhaps he didn’t want his religious friends catching him talking to the odd Rabbi from a backwater town? Or maybe Nicodemus wanted an uninterrupted conversation and so he had to wait his turn like everybody else. Or maybe he felt like he could only be his real self and ask real questions of Jesus when nobody else was looking. Have you, like Nicodemus, ever gone to Jesus in the middle of the night and asked your question?
Not to church...
Not a book study...
Not a conference...
Not a worship song...
Have you ever gone straight to Jesus in the middle of the night?
Though Nicodemus was steeped in the history of Israel he was still keenly aware of the fact that he could no more comprehend the mysteries of God then you are I could contain the Pacific ocean in a Dixie Cup. So in his curiosity, he pulled himself out of bed and went to Jesus.
John writes,
This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” - John 3:2
I imagine if you or I had an audience with Jesus that night we would’ve said something along these lines, too. “It’s clear that the signs you are doing must be accompanied by God himself!” But Jesus who knows Nicodemus’s whole life story and your life story, abruptly responds piercing through to the question behind the question. Jesus knew that what Nicodemus was really asking was “Will I get to see the kingdom of Heaven, too?”
Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” - John 3:3
”Ye must be born again.” Those two words; born again. The either mean everything or they mean nothing to someone. We see them on a homemade sign in the end zone of a football game. Sometimes they’re slapped up on an overpass amidst all the graffiti. Sometimes they’re on the moniker of a Missionary Baptist Church out in the countryside somewhere. Born again. When Jesus said the words “born again” he wasn’t coming up with another way to say “evangelical.” He was putting a carrot in the hunting rifle.
Nicodemus doesn’t get it and asks how a person can be born twice. Do you ever have those moments when you’re talking and as you’re saying the words, you wish you could reach out and grab them and take them back? I imagine that must’ve been what Nicodemus was thinking in this moment. “I just asked how to be born two times!” There they are, the words are out there, naked, half-baked, standing there like a scarecrow. Jesus explains that there is the kind of birth that every mother does. And that there is another birth that is brought about purely by the work of God alone.
You see, in saying “you must be born again”, Jesus was taking all of the worry, the power, and the striving out of Nicodemus’ hands, saying “You don’t have what it takes to be born again in and of yourself.” Just as your mother labored to bring you into the world at zero cost to you and incredible cost to her, so it is with God. You are the passive recipient of Divine Grace. God is the One who brings about your birth from above. One moment you were not and the next you simply were. Why? Because God reached out, and reached within, and gave you a new heart, a new mind, a new life, a new purpose… a new you. What motivated God to do something so extravagant, so over the top, so undeserved for Nicodemus or you or me or anyone else in this world? Jesus said, “God so loved the world that gave his only begotten son that whosoever would believe in him would not perish but have eternal life.” It was out of the blazing furnace of the love of God’s heart that you have been born again and once you are born, you cannot be unborn. This is what the Apostle Paul stressed more than anything to his Ephesian brothers and sisters – the incomprehensible love of Christ. You belong to the Father, through the purchase of the Son, and the filling of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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