Knowing and Unknowing

A Sermon for March 5, 2023
The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
Text: John 3:1-17

[Audio begins with a short children’s sermon. The sermon text begins at 4:43 minutes at the noted * below.]

I’ve been listening to an audiobook called A World on the Wing1 about the science of bird migration—as one does when one is married to an enthusiastic birder and one is trying to understand this specialized area of interest, which I would never dare to call a mere hobby. In a passage that is really something of an aside, the author talks about an exchange he had with his mother. She said, “The thing I hate about science is that scientists are always saying, ‘We used to think X, but now we know Y.’ Shouldn’t it be more like, ‘We used to think X, and now we think Y’?” In other words, shouldn’t we be leaving room for future scientists to prove us wrong?

To me, this sums up one of the more thoughtful reasons that a lot of people mistrust authority. In a word, the problem is certainty. Certainty in almost any field is a red flag. Now it’s true that if I were going in to have heart surgery I would want my surgeon to be certain that they knew what the problem was and how to fix it. But I would be surprised, and honestly a little worried, if they said they were 100% certain that the outcome would be a complete success and that I’d never have any problems with my health ever again. You see what I mean. There’s certainty, and then there’s certainty.

The latter kind of certainty, the one that is absolute and sweeping and brooks no argument, is not what good science or good theology is all about. When it comes to God, we can be certain of very few things. Great mystics have written works with titles like The Cloud of Unknowing and The Dark Night of the Soul because ultimately that is what so much of theology and indeed spirituality boils down to—darkness, unknowing, uncertainty. Because God is infinite, is eternal, is well, God, it follows that all the things that all the people have ever written or spoken about God over all the centuries and across every form of religion only touch the surface of what there is to know. And so it is that we recognize with a deep “aha” the truth of the axiom, “The opposite of faith isn’t doubt—it’s certainty.”

Today’s Gospel story leaves plenty of room for this kind of wondering and uncertainty. John’s Gospel, which is mostly full of poetic abstraction and doesn’t include a lot of details, does tell us one very specific thing about this incident: Nicodemus comes to see Jesus at night. Why would that be? Some say Nicodemus was using the cover of darkness because he was afraid to be seen talking to Jesus. Maybe, although it is strange then that his first words to Jesus are expressions of praise and communal respect, calling him “rabbi” and confirming that many recognize in him a teacher sent by God.

So maybe the answer has more to do with the content of the story than the context, given that this is after all a story about questions that have no clear and certain answers, and a story about answers that are more puzzling than they are satisfying.

Night, the cover of darkness, can symbolize a different way of knowing, a sort of depth or intuitive knowing that is not what highly intelligent, disciplined thinkers like the Pharisees (or indeed like many of us) would have been most comfortable with. The things we learn in darkness, in searching through the deep recesses of our souls and experience, can’t be captured in a spreadsheet or set down in a book of rules and regulations. Maybe this encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus could only happen at night, because it was going to require a different way of knowing and learning, from Nicodemus and from us.

(*Sermon audio begins here) If I’m really honest with you, there is much about the exchange between these two men that leaves me in the dark, so to speak. Every time I read it I think I am just on the cusp of understanding it, just about to have everything click into place, and then it eludes me again. To give just one example, I get turned around every time I read the verse where Jesus says, “No one can enter the kingdom of heaven without being born of water and the Spirit.” At first I think, “Okay, obviously this is about Baptism, right?” But then my mind starts going in circles: “But didn’t Jesus also say that the kingdom of heaven is within? Is he contradicting himself, or can both of these things be true? Or is he somehow saying we can’t enter some place within our own selves? What would that even mean?” Perhaps my confusion is the point, or part of the point. Perhaps the reader, the listener, the one who is trying to understand, is meant to be thrown into darkness. That would put us in the same place as Nicodemus, and it would also put us in a place of humility, of openness, and of vulnerability—the best place to begin true learning.

Now, saying that God is a mystery and that most of our deepest theological questions have no clear answers, while true, can sound like a copout. But the alternative seems to me dangerous in a religious leader or a church—to paper over the mysteries and the uncertainties by offering cheap and easy answers and insisting that you believe them because I said so, or the Bible said so, or the Pope said so, or whatever. Jesus himself says, “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.” It is almost like an invitation to let go of our need to make everything neat and tidy, to be in control and have all the answers, in order to experience something brand new.

And what is that brand-new thing Jesus wants us to experience? Love, of course. Divine love, all loves excelling. He says it just a few verses later: “For God so loved the world.” I know, we have taken this verse, John 3:16, and turned it into a bumper sticker. We have reduced it to a simple formula that says that God gave his only Son to die for us so we could be saved—as if there is anything at all simple about that! We have made it about heaven and hell and about belief as certainty, as an intellectual ascent to a formula, when all Jesus was trying to talk to us about was love.

What the text says, not what we have made it to mean, is that God gave his Son out of love. Gave his Son not just in the Crucifixion, but in the Incarnation, in the Resurrection, in the Ascension. God gave his Son not just to die—and, after all, all of us die—but to live and teach and heal and bring good news to the poor. God gave his Son because God is love, and love is a gift and a mystery and an offering. And most of all, God sent his Son into the world “in order that the world might be saved.” Saved, not condemned. Saved, as in made whole, healed, restored.

So perhaps there aren’t any easy answers in this text, but there are some statements of truth that we can hold onto. God loves the world. God loves everything God has made. God wants us all to be healed and whole. And if these truths open up more questions, well, maybe that’s a good thing.

Lent is traditionally a time for self-examination. While we often think that means trolling our lives for sins, trying to figure out all the things we’ve done wrong so we can repent of them, it could mean other things, too. It could mean examining our certainties, our most hard-held assumptions, and seeing if there are any that have outgrown their usefulness to us. It could mean softening our hearts, then peering into the darkness, and seeing if we can find that kingdom within. It could mean cultivating curiosity and wonder, so that we find love, maybe even find Jesus, in unexpected places.

That book about birds concludes the section I mentioned earlier this way: “With each ‘we used to think’ we peel back another layer of an impossibly complex onion and develop a better grasp of the big picture. Each time we take the time and effort to understand the full life of the migratory bird, it seems we learn something wondrous.” Every time we take the time and effort to understand, we learn something wondrous.

And sometimes the learning itself, the dive into the unknown and even the ultimately unknowable, is the most wondrous thing of all.

Amen.

1 A World on the Wing: The global Odyssey of Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul. The quotes are my paraphrases of what I heard on the audiobook, so not exact transcription!

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