More Contrasts

The university-type of person, an Oxford professor who was able to discuss many things quite intelligently, but the Christian faith was for him historical nonsense.

He wasn't searching for anything special in his life.

The way Lewis tells it, he was being sought out until that time when, as he put it, “God closed in on me,” and he exclaimed with surprise, “So, it was you all along!”

Lewis didn't search for God; God's Holy Spirit was chasing after him and working on him.

Then all of a sudden, on one occasion in 1931, he wrote to a friend that he had passed from vaguely considering a general sort of god, to believing specifically in Christ Jesus.

It was the result of God's surprise which hit him one day when he rode in a motorcycle sidecar to a zoo.

It was as ridiculous as that;

it was not the result of intellectual inquiry, something he chose, or a blinding light.

It just happened to him. Like wind, like tongues of fire, like life itself.

In his book Surprised by Joy, he writes:

Picture me alone ... feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a moment from my work, the unrelenting approach of Him whom I earnestly desired not to meet.

That which I greatly feared came upon me...I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps ... the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

...a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape.

This is the divine mercy.

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and his compulsion is our liberation.

Lewis recognized that his new-found faith was not his intellectual achievement, but 100% a gift to him. (our church-word for that is grace.

This story of the conversion of C.S. Lewis is a jolt to us, because we are used to making things happen by ourselves, through our choices, our efforts.

Lewis' story is on the Biblical model; salvation is the surprising gift of the creative God who sends wind.

It reminds us of the story of Nicodemus in our Gospel today.

He comes to Jesus by night, John says.

As usual, there are two possible meanings:

it could mean literally at night,

or in could mean “in the dark” i.e., without a clue...or maybe both meanings at the same time.

He has intellectual questions for Jesus, but Jesus gives answers that do not fit in his neat little categories.

He wants to know what steps to take, how to manage things so that he gets whatever it is that Jesus is pushing.

Planning, setting goals, striving ...these are the things that Nicodemus knows and expects to hear.

And Jesus talks about being born “from above” and about wind, two things about which Nicodemus can do no planning, goal-setting, or striving.

Jesus is not pushing some new self-help program, but rather is offering a gift from God.

Salvation is what God does, which we can either receive with joy, or turn away sorrowful that it can't be earned.

Nicodemus slips away from Jesus in the night, but the Spirit is not done with him.

We meet him twice more in the gospel of John.

When the religious authorities are trying to decide what to do about Jesus, Nicodemus counsels them to hold back and see how it turns out with Jesus, to give him a fair hearing.

And at some undefined point, things changed for Nicodemus, because from the mystified person we meet in chapter 3 and the thinking person we hear in chapter 7, things are very different in our third meeting with him in chapter 19.

After Jesus' death, Nicodemus was one who came to help Joseph of Aramathea with the burial of Jesus.

We do not know how that came about, but somehow the Spirit surprised him.

It was a bold and daring action, not something lightly undertaken by a casual observer, but by one whom the Spirit stirred to action and faith.

The Spirit had been there all along, preparing the way and finally changing his life.

If we had his thoughts, Nicodemus might well have said about the Spirit:

“So, it was you working in me all along!”

Thanks be to God that we have this example!

So the Spirit was active in Bible-times, and the Spirit was strangely active in the life of C.S. Lewis a generation ago, but what of today?

Where can we point to the work of the Spirit in this time and place?

A man came into the church this week and asked to have some quiet time in the nave.

After awhile, I passed through and greeted him as he was preparing to leave.

I offered to give him the window tour, telling him the story of the worship service on the south side and five parts of the Christian life in the windows on the north side.

As we talked further, I discovered that he works in one of the construction projects nearby, and was curious about our building.

I thought there was more to the story than that, and so I prolonged the conversation until he was comfortable to tell me more about his other reason for coming in.

He said that he had wasted a lot of years going through the motions, but in the past couple of years that he finally started hearing something that had been there all along, but at the right time it reached out and grabbed him.

It sounds like the Holy Spirit's work to me!

He, too, can say of the Spirit: “So, it was you working in me all along!”

As a result of this intrusion, this transformation by the Spirit, he feels differently about his spouse, his family, his work, his life.

He is discerning that in whatever job he has, there are things that he can and should be doing that are part of the ministry of the gospel in this time and place.

He has a part in it, and so in his time of prayer in our chapel this week, he was praying that he might clearly see what that might be leading him to do next.

And we prayed together, and he went back across the street to his work.

Yes, the Spirit seems to be busy in his life, tugging him in a different direction, helping him to see his activities, his companions and his very existence in a new way.

Thanks be to God for this example, too.

What about the rest of us?

We can go through life, stumbling from one thing to another,

or we can recognize the times and ways in which the Spirit is ready to surprise us, to grab hold of us, to redirect us, to give us his gifts.

We still have some folks who think that the work of the Spirit was only a long time ago and far away,

and that showing up now and again on Sunday morning is the full measure of what it means to be a follower of Christ Jesus.

Watch out!

You don't know when the Spirit may reach out and surprise you!

It may be directly through the reading of Scripture,

through a hymn, prayers, or other part of the liturgy,

through the Holy Communion or remembrance of Holy Baptism,

through the sermon ( I do hope!),

through the mutual conversation after worship,

through the requests and questions posed by another congregational leader,

through reading and prayer at home,

in the midst of a million other situations and times,

the Spirit is ready to grab us by the ears and say,

“I need you to be an active follower of Jesus, now, and to tackle these specific things:...”

So take note, when the wind begins to blow, or you feel a new self emerging from the old,

in those surprising moments when we have been proceeding down our accustomed ruts, just minding our own business,

and there it is, as if out of nowhere, a summons...and we know that we have been cornered by the Spirit.

At that point we can join C.S. Lewis, our workman neighbor, and Nicodemus in astonishment,

“So it was you chasing me all along!”

Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.