Ecclesiastes Is Right by Jim Crispin

My mom is 88 years old. Her beloved husband died 35 years ago. It's a long time to be a widow. Before advanced Alzheimer's disease took its toll, Mom was bright, successful in life, a believing Christian, beloved by family and by friends from her church, and a pack rat. My brother lives out-of-state, so addressing Mom's clutter (and other matters) fell to me.

I dislike clutter, yet over time my view of Mom's clutter softened. Many items in Mom's house were worn or obsolete, but Mom didn't see it that way, perhaps partly because she was a child of the Great Depression. Much of the rest was paper in some form, ranging in size from tiny notes-to-self to a 1961 Encyclopedia Britannica. Eventually all of it lost practical value. For Mom those items were reminders of things we all value—family, a meaningful event, a purposeful involvement in life, a success, a humorous or interesting incident. A few items represented her heartfelt dreams.

Life would have seemed stark to Mom if I had removed every bit of clutter, even as the excess of clutter gave rise to problems. I suggested, pleaded, appealed to reason, emotionally manipulated—anything to get stuff to the alley. Sometimes I partly succeeded, only for Mom to replenish purged clutter with new clutter.

In early 2018, Mom's faster-than-expected move to assisted living and prompt home sale required lots of fast work by me, which I accomplished in part by two all-nighters and morale-boosting burritos from a great Mexican hole-in-the-wall in Cicero. I wore out the pavement carrying Mom's stuff to the alley.

Very recently Mom moved to memory care, which required another downsizing. Not counting her bed and several pieces of furniture, I suppose that Mom's belongings now take up less than one percent of the cubic space they did five years ago. Material things are gone. Involvements of the past are gone. Most of Mom's mind is gone, none of these to return. "What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?" (Ecclesiastes 1:3, NIV)

Today other people live in Mom's house. Scavengers took away far more than I'd expected, and I trust that at least some recycle bin contents were indeed usefully recycled. "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:9, NIV)

Prompted by her own experience, in the early 1990s Mom took classes at Northern Baptist Seminary with a goal of becoming a hospital chaplain. Courses included church history, spiritual formation, and deep dives into several Old and New Testament books. Mom being Mom, her grades were excellent, and she got as far as interning. Today it is as if none of that happened. "Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind." (Ecclesiastes 1:17, NIV)

Believe me, I relate to this verse: "A time to search ... and a time to throw away." (Ecclesiastes 3:6, NIV)

Many of you are acquainted with Alzheimer's, which is both dreadful and unpredictable. "Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so people are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them." (Ecclesiastes 9:12, NIV)

As a young adult and young Christian, I thought that Ecclesiastes was a downer. Today I see it as no-nonsense, matter of fact. I had overlooked its encouragement: "I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it." (Ecclesiastes 3:14, NIV). In my view, Ecclesiastes is not without humor: "Do not pay attention to every word people say, or you may hear your servant cursing you." (Ecclesiastes 7:21, NIV)

Parts of Ecclesiastes puzzle me, but that doesn't throw me. Our pastors are glad to take a swing at the hard parts, and there are commentaries. Should the Lord tarry, one day I'll be gone, and other people will wonder about Ecclesiastes. There is nothing new under the sun.

A River Lesson by John Maust

Seated in my little office at the Dunkirk News & Sun in central Indiana, I leaned back in relief and satisfaction. 

I’d met the deadline and completed all the articles for that week’s newspaper, the biggest issue of the year, celebrating the town’s annual “Glass Days Festival.”

This was the mid-1970s--the prehistoric pre-laptop age--and I’d composed every article on an ancient typewriter, not bothering to make carbon copies in the rush to finish. 

That same morning the sleepy-eyed driver from the printing company had picked up the typed articles, plus some valuable old photos depicting the early days of the glass industry in this small town of several thousand. He’d placed everything in his worn, leather bag and driven to the printing company in nearby Portland, where the issue would be designed and printed.

It was no small thing to meet deadline for the weekly newspaper’s biggest and most important issue of the year. Even I, a green 21-year-old editor, knew that, and it felt good.

A telephone call suddenly jarred my thoughts. “John, we’re waiting for your articles and photos,” said an office worker from the printing company.

“But I sent them over with the driver this morning,” I said. “They must be there somewhere.”

“Not here,” the person responded. 

“Well, please check,” I said, my pulse starting to spike.

The office worker called back an hour later. “We discovered what happened,” she said. “The driver stopped for coffee on the way back from Dunkirk, and left his car unlocked. Someone stole the leather pouch with your articles and photos from his car.”

This couldn’t be true. But the caller assured me it was.  “Can’t you write the articles again?” she said.

But that was impossible. This was Monday afternoon, and the 24-page issue needed to be composed and designed on Wednesday for printing on Thursday. Even working nonstop, I could never recreate all those articles, much less replace the valuable photos, by Wednesday.

My mind raced for possible solutions. Maybe I really had made carbon copies and just forgot?  No such luck.

I explained the situation to my two co-workers, Dorothy, who did clerical work, and Barbara, who sold advertising. They looked just as shocked, and offered me their sympathy, or maybe it was pity. But neither could think of a solution.  

“I’ll burn some candles for you tonight at church,” sighed Barbara, a devout Catholic.

“And I’ll pray for you,” added Dorothy, who attended the same church as me.

During these initial months in Dunkirk, God had used that little church and its pastor and members to help me grow as a Christian.  

Totally out of my comfort zone with the huge responsibility of editing the town newspaper right out of college, I had grown in dependence on the Lord, seeking his help more than ever.  

But even in the hardest days during my first weeks on the job, I’d never experienced a problem as big as this one. This was shaping up as a monumental disaster.

Like Barbara and Dorothy, I knew that I needed to pray, and pray in complete helplessness before the Lord. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much that night. 

I did rummage around for the notes I’d used to write the 10-12 articles for the newspaper in case I could try to recreate them. But it was hopeless: I’d never finish in time for the newspaper to release during the Glass Days Festival.

The next morning when Barbara entered the office, she looked hopefully in my direction. She didn’t even have to ask. I just shook my head, no. Dorothy was also sorry to hear that nothing had changed.

None of us could have imagined what was about to happen next.

The telephone rang, and I fully expected my boss at the printing company to ask if I’d rewritten all those articles yet. Instead, the same office worker blurted, “John, we found the articles!”

Once again I couldn’t believe my ears, but this time I dearly wanted to.  

“A fisherman found the leather bag floating in the Salamonie River, saw that it belonged to the printing company, and returned it to us,” she said. “The articles are a little wet, but we can still read them, and most of the photos can be salvaged.”

That same afternoon a different driver brought the soggy articles and photos to the office, and I saw that it was true.

What were the odds?  Even today, I can hardly believe what happened. Those articles being recovered and returned from the river seemed no less a miracle than when Jesus sent Peter to recover a coin from a fish’s mouth to pay the temple tax. (Matthew 17:27)   

God made that river give up those precious articles for the newspaper. But more important, he revealed his love and power to me, a young and growing Christian, in a way that I will never forget.

God Talk by Wil Triggs

Every fall for many years, I have been reading the story of Kury to the incoming Kindergarten class. One chapter a week. We will probably finish around around Thanksgiving. The story starts where Kury’s dad dares to plant his yams with no prayers to the tribal gods. Instead he plants them in the name of Jesus.

Two women missionaries have come to the village to translate the Bible and tell the people about Jesus. Before the story starts, Kury’s Dad already believes, but Kury is not so sure.

Right now I’m at the part of the story where Kury gets a snake bite and he is sure that he’s going to die. He’s losing the feeling in his legs. The missionary ladies come and call for medical help to come by helicopter. Kury doesn’t know what a helicopter is. People are praying. Villagers come to look at him and say that it’s because of his father not planting his yams in the traditions. There is a storm. The sky needs to clear so the helicopter can reach them. Kury falls asleep, not knowing if he will ever wake up, inexplicably glad that his father has planted the yams in the new way. That’s the end of the chapter.

Spoiler alert: Kury doesn’t die, but don’t tell the Kindergarteners; we won’t get to that part of the story until October 2.

This part of the story makes me think back to the boy at our first summer camp in the Kaluga region of Russia. As our team was preparing to leave, the leaders called me and Jimmy into a room where a boy was lying on a bed, sick. They thought his sickness might be related to his aunt, who was a witch. He had never been around Christians. She was likely not happy about this. But it could also just have been a cold or fever or both. Either way, there was no doctor or nurse at the camp or in the churches behind the camp.

So we laid hands on the boy and prayed. We prayed not just for his illness, but for his soul. Then I had to go. I did hear a week or so later that the boy had recovered. In subsequent years, I have heard about several of the other children and camp staff through the years, but I never knew what happened to this particular child. Enough years have passed that this boy is a man now. He could be fighting in the war for all I know, on one side or the other. Or he could be a pastor.

The Kindergarteners will find out what happens to Kury in just a few days. I won’t find out what happened to that Russian boy probably until I get to heaven. But though I do not know, that does not mean that I should stop praying for him, because the One I am praying to knows and cares a lot more than I do.

In the missionary story I read every year, Kury and his family have funny names for Christian things. They call the Bible “God’s Carving.” They call prayer “God Talk," and I like that. It changes the point of view of prayer from me to God and who he is and what he has done and will do on earth as it is in heaven.

So now it is time for God Talk.

Father, maker, creator, orchestrator of all, you make. You know. You breathe; I breathe.
Son, shepherd, I sin; you die. I’m dirty; you wash. I stray; you find. You lift up lambs out of the briars and rocky crags they’ve stumbled upon. You rescue.
Spirit, flickering warming flame, you build the home in which I live. You laugh and love. No matter how far down the path I go, you are ahead of me and behind me.
Everywhere is not too far, always is not too soon, new is now. Too true to be true, yet truth unchanging and forever lives in you, is you, and in you I marvel and live this morning, this Saturday, this always.

Anonymous Sources by Lorraine Triggs

June 17 marked 50 years since Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the Watergate scandal, thanks to their anonymous source, Deep Throat. As a senior in high school, I was not only hooked on watching the Watergate hearings day after day after day, but also hooked on journalism. Bernstein and Woodward became my heroes for not revealing their source and exposing the likes of Haldeman, Hunt, Liddy and Colson.

From 1972 to 2005 Deep Throat remained anonymous, and then he revealed his identity: Mark Felt, the number two official at the FBI in the early 1970s. Felt was then 91, and four years later he died. It seems so quaint nowadays that someone would choose anonymity over fame.

Scripture is full of anonymous sources, unnamed individuals who had a part in a story that was bigger than theirs. In 1 Kings 5, it’s the little girl from the land of Israel who got things going for Naaman when she said to Naaman’s wife, “Would that my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.” (1 Kings 5:3) We teach Bible stories about Naaman and rarely mention the little girl.

The gospel writer Mark liked his anonymous sources: Simon’s mother-in-law, a leper imploring with Jesus to be healed, four friends and one paralytic, whose sins were forgiven. There were tax collectors and sinners around a table, a man with a withered hand in the synagogue, a woman exhausted from her chronic illness and a Gentile woman who didn’t back down.

Except for the leper who wanted his 15 minutes, the rest of these people came and went from Mark’s account, leaving Pharisees and disciples to ponder this Jesus who had the authority to forgive sins and to order around the wind and sea.

These anonymous sources weren't part of a story of high-level corruption in the halls of power. Theirs was a different story, altogether more wonderful than anything Mark Felt had to say. This was the best news ever.

Mark describes anonymous crowds who followed Jesus, and townspeople who begged Jesus to depart after he healed the demon-possessed man. Unlike the man, now in his right mind, who begged to stay with Jesus and was told no. Instead, Jesus said to him, “Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” The man did exactly that, promoting Jesus, not himself. I am fairly certain that he knew he had nothing to boast about, save Christ’s mercy.

We, yes, unlike the man who was formerly demon-possessed, have become decent practitioners of self-promotion. It's an unavoidable fact of modern life. We have platforms, followers, likes and websites. Or we follow, like and quote celebrity Christians, a term that seems a bit oxymoronic to me. Imagine if the Apostle Paul were writing today. Paul, what’s your platform? How many followers do you have on Facebook or Twitter? Do you have a website? "Rubbish" probably would have been his response.

The final verse of the hymn “May the Mind of Christ My Savior” puts self-promotion and Christian celebrity culture in their proper perspective:

May His beauty rest upon me
As I seek the lost to win,
And may they forget the channel,
Seeing only Him.

And it was Paul who first wrote, “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant.” (Philippians 2:5-7)

The Paths We Walk by Wil Triggs

One thing social media has given us is the ability to rediscover people from our past. In other words, you no longer need to go to a reunion to find out what’s happened to an old friend.

You can discover professional and academic accomplishments. You may see spouses or realize that a friend has remained or become single. You get to see children and relatives of friends. But you may also see a person whose face you honestly don’t know.

There have been times when I have absolutely not recognized a person from their posted photos. Of course, the same might be said of me from someone who knew me years ago.

Weight gain or loss and hair loss or change combined with passing years can really affect a person’s appearance to the point where there’s no recognition. Which person at this restaurant is my old friend? Sometimes I have no idea.

This kind of freezing people the way we remember them is still a thing. I tend to freeze kids at their Kindergarten age. A few years later I see one and I sometimes think to myself, “Oh, look. It’s James' older brother. No. Wait a minute. That is James!?”

Time plays tricks on our memories confusing people as they used to be with who they have become. We mainly talk about outward appearances, not necessarily who people are on the inside. Because who but God knows what’s really going on inside?

There are different dimensions to this when it comes to faith. On one hand, through social media I discover that someone I knew who was not a Christian is now a believer—answered prayer. The flip side is one of my good Christian friends who is now describing herself as both lesbian and Buddhist. The reconnections can go in both directions.

Apart from Jesus, it’s all vanity. But we are not left to ourselves. Jesus doesn’t check our social media activity to find out how we’re doing. So why do we focus on the outside person and not enough on the inner? Do we sometimes define ourselves by the way we look to other people?

Honestly, most all of us do in one way or another, and yet, it’s God’s gaze that matters most of all. The eyes of others can lead us astray. But God’s eyes never will. Instead, they point us to where we have gone astray.

Examine me, O God, and know my mind.
Test me, and know my thoughts.
See whether I am on an evil path.
Then lead me on the everlasting path.
(Psalm 139:23-23)

We look back. We bring the past into our present day and think we understand things better if we could only do it over again. But what about the choices we face this very day? And what of the days ahead?

Our inner beings. Are they better today than they were two years ago, five years ago? Ten? Social media seems to be so much about what is happening now or what has already happened. But how might we look forward to what lies ahead? How are we to find the eternal path? I don’t think it’s by looking back.

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.(2 Corinthians 4:16-18)

Lead us on the everlasting path. It’s not where we’ve been, but where we’re going.

One Sunday, many years ago, we got home from church. Mallory, our seven-year-old neighbor at the time, asked us where we had been. We explained that we had been to church, thinking that she would understand that this is something people do on Sunday morning.

Mallory responded with a look of incomprehension and childlike pity. In her religious tradition her mother would rush out Saturday late afternoon for a quick turn at churchgoing to get it out of the way before stay-up-late Saturday nights, and then the family could stay in bed and sleep in almost til the neighbors (us) get back from their Sunday morning church.

The churchgoing choices have broadened since then. With livestream broadcasts, we can watch our own church service from the beds or couches of our homes. I wonder if Mallory rushes in and out of her church Saturday afternoon or goes Sunday morning, livestreams some other church or has chosen another path altogether away from us?

The footsteps on the everlasting path may be unremarkable in the short run. They can be simple, but they are headed somewhere truly remarkable. Last Sunday, I first recounted with five-year-olds the story of the prophet Elijah, wildly popular after the triumph against the prophets of Baal, walking with God, emulated by Elisha and then caught up in the whirlwind to heaven. From the whirlwind of Kids' Harbor, I went to the bookstall and met some people for the first time. I also spoke with Paul and Lynn and Liita and Ken. I listened to the preaching from the Gospel of Mark and considered the warning of religiosity and pharisaism and the miracles of Jesus. The loving arms of the Good Shepherd often are visible in the loving hands of his people, tearing open the rooftop or shaking your hand when you come into service, throwing cloaks down in front of a donkey on the road the Jerusalem or giving you a cup of coffee or a glass of water on Sunday morning.

If we’re sick or infirmed, livestream might be all we have. But I keep thinking about the people tearing apart the mud-dried roof to lower their friend down to Jesus for healing. This was not a remote experience done from the comfort of their own houses.

And a highway shall be there,
and it shall be called the Way of Holiness;
the unclean shall not pass over it.
It shall belong to those who walk on the way;
even if they are fools, they shall not go astray.
No lion shall be there,
nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;
they shall not be found there,
but the redeemed shall walk there.
And the ransomed of the LORD shall return
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain gladness and joy,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.(Isaiah 35:8-10)

It’s Back to Church Sunday tomorrow at College Church. Let’s pray together. Let’s worship together. Let’s hear from God’s Word. Let us find healing and hope and lean on the everlasting arms of the Savior. Together.

God's Faithfulness by Ellen Elwell

From Prayers for Every Occasion by Ellen Elwell

Generous God, at times I’m slow to learn your ways and quick to forget how faithfully you provide—just as Jesus’ disciples were. After witnessing Jesus perform the miracle of feeding five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish, then later feeding a crowd of four thousand from equally meager fare, the disciples were concerned when they forgot to pack food for the next part of the journey. So swiftly they forgot!

Yet my memory can be just as short. I see your hand in my life and delight in the ways you have sustained me, but days later, I toss and turn, worrying about new unresolved problems. I need to hear the echo of the words Jesus said to his disciples: “How many leftovers did you pick up afterward? Don’t you understand yet?”

Lord, help me to remember how many times you have fulfilled my needs. Help me to get it! With you, my mighty God and Creator, there is no shortage of bread, no lack of resources. You have proclaimed to all of us, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry again.” Thank you, Father, for filling me up.

Bookworms by Lorraine Triggs

Thanks to a link my literary husband sent me the other day, I now know that bookworms are actual worms—real live pests. In 1928, librarians at the Huntington Library in southern California noticed that something was feasting on their rare book collection.

Bookworms were the culprits, and as preservationists at the Huntington Library discovered, the bookworm had “an astounding resistance to traditional pesticides, its voracious appetite not just for book pages but for leather covers, for even the starchy glue that holds book bindings together. “

My heart resonated with those librarians in the rare book collection, and not because I am a voracious reader, but because as a college student, I worked part-time at the Newberry Library, an independent research library on Walton Street in Chicago.

It was a plum job for this Moody Bible Institute student, especially after I had quit the first job Miss Robertson of the Institute’s student employment office had secured for me at an exclusive women's athletic club once I found out that, at the time, the club discriminated against Jews and Blacks.

The Newberry did practice a discrimination of sorts when it came to its Rare Book Room. I still recall the first time I went into The Rare Book Room. Even as a staff member, I had to be escorted into the room, but not before a Rare Book Room librarian checked that I was an employee, even though she had just greeted me by name. Next, I had to wash my hands in a designated restroom, and as soon as I was done, pull on a pair of gloves. My escort unlocked the door to the Rare Book Room, and I was in.

My eyes darted everywhere, my gloved hands twitching to open books from the Renaissance or Medieval times. Instead, the librarian ushered me to a specific spot, where she pulled out an original work by . . . Geoffrey Chaucer. (I don’t remember the title, but I’d like to think it was The Canterbury Tales.) I held out my hands—my gloved hands—to take the book. Ha! What was I a lowly part-time employee thinking? I was never allowed to touch or handle any book in the Rare Book Room.

The Institute—one block over and three blocks down from the Newberry Library—had a different expectation of its rare and prized book. It was set in one of the stones of the main hall: the Scripture reference of 2 Timothy 2:15, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.”

From the start, our most treasured book was meant to be handled.

God wrote the law and commandment on tablets of stone and gave them to Moses. In Exodus 32, Moses hurried down the mountain with the two tablets that were, according to verse 16, “the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.” Moses was carrying in his human, ungloved hands the very words and writing of God.

Those two tablets didn’t fare very well, so on the second set of tablets Moses wrote the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments. (Exodus 34:38) This covenantal language was of relationship—not to words etched in stone but to its Author, who is slow to anger, compassionate and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

David probably would have been banned from the Newberry's rare book room, with his talk of honey dripping from honeycombs, but no matter, God's Word was more precious than gold, and would revive his soul, make wise the simple and warn him from presumptuous sins. Long before the author of Hebrews, David knew that the word of God was living and active.

We joke that the answer to every Bible study question or Bible school lesson is Jesus, but maybe it’s not the joke we think it is. The Apostle John didn't think so when he began his first letter with these words, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life." (1 John 1:1). Or consider the way he ended his gospel writing of Jesus and books, "Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." (John 21:25)

The most prized book in history is one that we touch and open and read with unclean hands. Its author is the one who invites us in. We can eat this book and, unlike the bookworms of old, there is no destruction of its pages, but it lives in us and gives us the words of life. The Word became flesh, became living and active, and drips the sweet taste of forgiveness for all who see, listen and live.

Teachers Along the Way by Wil Triggs

With the start of another year of school, my mind goes back to the years when I started school.

New clothes. New classes. New friends and old friends.

Most everyone, though, wondered and worried about the biggest question of all:

What teacher or teachers will I get?

I remember my fourth-grade teacher. Mrs. Boodie. She had an infamous reputation. It was rumored that if you disagreed with her, she would push you down the hallway stairs. Behind her back we dared to call her Mrs. Bootie. While terrified, we were also appalled at the injustice of the kids who lucked out and got the younger, prettier teacher just across the hall.

My fifth-grade teacher was nice as could be, Miss Gaudino. Midway through the year, she was engaged to be married. She showed the students her engagement ring. The class was abuzz. It was like she was becoming royalty. Our moms organized a bridal shower, and they let us give her wedding gifts.

Then the engagement was mysteriously and suddenly broken, and she took a long time off, at least, more than a week. We liked her, so having substitutes wasn't really fun. When she came back, we could all tell it was hard for her. But she said she wanted to be with us, and we believed her.

As long as I was in school, the fascination with teachers never stopped.

My music teachers, Mr. Elmgreen, Miss LaRue, Mr. Sandburg and Mr. Lutke were always challenging me to play better, take breaths at the right place, practice to increase my range and skill. But all four also seemed to believe in me as a person, not just the body at the end of the brass instrument that made music in the band or orchestra.

My communications teacher, Miss Delbridge, took believing in me to a whole new level. She convinced me to do speeches on prostitution, on abortion, on existentialism. She cast me in reader’s theater scripts that didn’t seem to fit me, except they did. She saw it. I didn’t. She was shaking me up to discover something new. And when I failed, that was all right, too.

How can this be? I learned to use my voice, not in singing, but in speaking. It’s amazing the different moods and expressions that just our speaking voices can summon. How can this be, but somehow it was.

Nicodemus asked that same four-word question of Jesus.

It was in response to Jesus saying that a person had to be born again.

We are so used to the term “born again” now that it’s hard to imagine how it must have hit Nicodemus’s ears two thousand or so years ago. Jesus had a way of shaking up peoples’ ideas about this world and the next and what it takes to get new life.

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, what none of us want to be, but at some point or another, it’s pretty hard to resist making rules that help us think we’re getting closer to God without actually yielding ourselves to him. We may not be perfect, but we can do this list of things and contribute well to the social good. That’s just the way we are wired. Let’s put on our Sunday best - shorts or suits, either will do.

How can an old man go back into his mother’s womb? It’s not hard to see that Nicodemus was asking the question for himself, about himself. He’s acknowledged that Jesus comes from God and yet he’s missing it.

In the discussion, Jesus goes to Moses and the lifting up of the snake in the wilderness.

The people were dying, and yet all they had to do was look up and live. It was the same for Nicodemus as he sat there with the Son of Man. It’s in their conversation that the Bible verse we’ve all memorized was first uttered.

“For God so loved . . . “

Jesus, the most incredible teacher, challenges people to something new, shakes us up, sees what’s in us and not in us, throws us down the stairs even—the teacher who is God himself. All for us to do is just look and believe.

Another dear promise from Jesus also involves Nicodemus. Swirling around Nicodemus was debate about Jesus. Some people wanted to arrest him, while others wanted to follow the One who just asserted: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” (John 7:37)

Nicodemus appears in the debate of what to do about Jesus and asks the others “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?” (John 7:51)

He's defending Jesus. And their response is not an answer to his question, but a dismissal and an accusation. Even if the law doesn’t judge, these people of power and influence and leadership consider it their role to do just that. “Are you from Galilee too?”

Scripture doesn’t tell us of any reply from Nicodemus.

Myrrh and aloes. Seventy-five pounds of it. That’s the next time we see him. Surely that was a heavy and costly package of, was it, faith? Had he cast off trusting the suit or shorts or robes of his own righteousness? As he was wrapping the linen cloths with the spices, did he think back to the snake that Moses lifted up and what Jesus said about it? Did he remember the call to be born again? How heavy and heavily scented Jesus’ body must have been when they placed it in the tomb.

I know enough to know that I don’t know enough. I like to think of Nicodemus as a life-long learner. Me too, I hope. What did Nicodemus do after Easter Sunday?

Beyond thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought, beyond our Pharisaic habits or traditions or false ideas of righteousness, beyond earthly life itself we keep running into our own helpless failure. But we’re looking in the wrong place. We must take our eyes off ourselves and look to the cross and tomb. Only then does the white flag of helpless surrender rise, and blood and living water flow down.