Deconstructing Faith & Rebuilding with God
The reading for this week’s sermon can be found at https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=510127269
Study for Nicodemus Visiting Jesus by Henry Ossawa Tanner
Remember when things made sense? When we could rely on certain things to be a certain way? When the earth felt at least somewhat solid underneath your feet? When we knew what we could relatively expect of our day to day? of the world? Of God?
It seems harder and harder to remember what that felt like, if you were ever lucky enough to know that feeling at all.
Maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s another disruptive event in your life, maybe it’s reaching a certain age, maybe it’s the age we’re in, maybe it’s a messy mystery that reaches across the ages.
You are not the first to want to make sense of who God is, how God is, and what that reveals about who you are and how it shapes the way you live. You are not the only one at a loss when the tools you’ve been taught and given for understanding God don’t seem to align with what’s all around you. You are not alone in asking questions of God to try and understand.
Nicodemus is a smart person. He’s a faithful person. And he’s still struggling to grasp how God is unfolding in light of what he’s experiencing and in contrast to what he was expecting.
We’ve been told through the church and even through culture that there’s a right way to understand God, that there’s a certain procedure for how God works, that being faithful means ascribing to the “right” beliefs about God and the world. That doesn’t just happen in evangelical churches, it happens among progressive communities too. Tradition can be illuminating but doctrine and dogma can also be the darkness we cling to even when light is trying to lead us elsewhere. I wonder…what things have you been told about who or how God is that doesn’t seem quite right?
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Even broken faith systems can lead us to God’s doorstep, give us enough to recognize that these signs and wonders can not exist apart from God…and yet we’re also not sure what to make of them.
Nicodemus does a terrifyingly courageous and vulnerable thing, especially for a leader, when he admits he isn’t sure what it all means, that he doesn’t have a tidy explanation for God. I would even call it a faithful thing that demonstrates greater belief than any declaration he could ever make. Nicodemus is actually well within faithful Jewish tradition and models what a healthy deconstruction and rebuilding of faith might look like by asking questions, going back and forth in search of meaning with God. And ultimately, he turns to Jesus above and beyond everything else to understand who God is. Jesus’ response lets Nicodemus know that God is messier and wilder than what easy analogies and straightforward prescriptions can offer.
He doesn’t leave this nighttime wrestling with clear answers or tidy resolution or a personal mantra he can cling to from here on out. And perhaps that has something to teach us about what belief really is. Too often, the word “belief” is used as one more notch in our spiritual belt to measure and secure our own goodness before God. The church can twist belief into something you master with your head rather than a mystery that floods your heart. Nicodemus is both unraveling a kind of belief that feels too small for the God he is experiencing, and leaning into a different kind of belief, one led by God’s own self.
Lately when I sit down to think about what God has given me to preach, I often don’t know what to say. When I look at the strain and heartache of the world, I feel weariness in my soul and I’m not sure how to explain anything about goodness and joy. And yet at the same time…some part of me seems to recognize that goodness and joy still run through this madness and are moving us, even if I can’t put my finger on where or how. There’s so much I don’t know. There’s so much I don’t know what to do with or how to handle and can’t explain, but somehow….I get this sense and I still trust that God hasn’t backed away from me or cursed me, but sits with me through the messiness of birth and rebirth. This text helps me to imagine that maybe that’s enough.
Theologian Marcos Borg describes this as post-critical naivete. It’s not blind ignorance but by both asking profound questions and accepting their limits, we can release our deathgrip on our own understanding and let God lead the way.
It’s a different kind of salvation than what was explained to me in the past and it won’t offer me the satisfaction of wrestling truth to the ground. It feels both shaky in how it removes many pillars I once relied on and deeply true in the way those pillars are replaced with God’s own self - a God that cares about and is committed to our whole-hearted liberation, body and soul. Amen.