A Sermon by Tsitsi Jaji

Tsitsi Jaji:
Nicodemus Long After Dark
A sermon preached at
St. Mary’s Church, Hamilton Village
The Episcopal Church at Penn
March 20, 2011

Texts: Genesis 12: 1-4a; Psalm 121: 1-8; Romans 4:1-5 & 13-17; John 3:1-17

One of the things I learned from the readings this week was that just because one is late does not mean one is too late. Abram and Sarai in their seventies were not too old to be immigrants and parents. Nicodemus long after dark was not too late to have a conversation with Jesus that night. And as the beautiful poem, Psalm 121, says so eloquently it is never too late for God, “he who watches over you will not fall asleep”.

I’ve often thought of Lent as a period of penitence, and self-denial, but at this year’s Ash Wednesday service something shifted as Father Jim talked about washing the ashes off as part of completing this sacrament. I started to saw this as a period of being drawn closer and closer, a process of forgiveness and welcome, getting free, rather than self-indulgent mourning. Today’s texts have me thinking about grace, about getting another chance. The figure in our readings that I most identify with is Nicodemus so I’m going to talk most about him, but first a few things about Abram.

The Genesis account about the calling of Abram is fundamentally an origin story and, as a literature professor, I’m interested in it as a narrative that a people told to make sense of their beginnings, and as the pretext for later writings reflecting back on it. It is an origin story we share with our Jewish and Muslim cousins, and in the version passed down to us, Abram receives this incredible proposal: leave your country, your kindred, your father’s house, in effect all that would provide security and the conditions for a rewarding life…and travel to some unspecified land where “in you and the families of the earth shall be blessed. Paul parses this story, counting on it being as familiar as family lore. […did you hear the one about how great-great-great grandpa Abram the wanderer dragged poor ole grandma Sarai and young nephew Lot out of their hometown, Ur…?] As a former legal scholar (Pharisee) like Nicodemus, Paul loves getting into the nitty gritty of the logic in his argument. He insists on the fact that if something is “reckoned” it is different from what is owed, and that the righteousness of faith is a gift graciously extended, rather than earned.

Abram did an incredibly hard thing, he gave up all that was comfortable, familiar, reasonable, and accepted a call to wander around on the promise of fertile land and family life. Ten years later he would still be (at 85 years of age, as the story goes) a childless man. And he had to wander around without a map or a concrete sense of what was coming. The story paints a vivid picture of a terrifying adventure, and the wonder of Abram’s patience and courage in its midst. I think of the lesson of Abram and Sarai as an invitation to leave what we know and go towards God, to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. What comforts might we be called to let go of, as we turn, repent, to enter the kingdom of God, and to cultivate the habits of living that are a blessing to all?

Nicodemus is a character I immediately identified with. As a professor, I understand his devotion to study, attention to details, intention to stay up to date on the most reputable and influential schools of thought. This is a guy who is still working at the end of the day, haunted by the imposter’s syndrome that many of us suffer, the fear that he doesn’t know quite enough. The fact that Nicodemus comes at night seems less to indicate shame or secretiveness, than diligence. He’s interested enough in what Jesus has to say that he comes to seek him out at the end of the day. If Nicodemus is anything like Penn faculty, he thinks of himself as affable, approachable, the exception to the stereotype of pretentious snobby Ivy League types. He earns a very comfortable living and he is aware of the cachet of his prominent position. Nicodemus expects, perhaps, that Jesus will respond warmly and generously when he discovers that such a prestigious interlocutor recognizes his authority. Instead, Jesus cuts abruptly to a rather cryptic formulation: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

It was so easy for me to identify with Nicodemus frustrated reaction here. For a scholar of the humanitie this is a hard saying indeed. It’s often translated as “be born again” and I can tell you that in my field of work there are few better ways to cast doubt on your reasoning capacities than to admit to being anything that remotely resembles a “born again Christian.” Nicodemus objects because it is also not logical. You don’t have to be a Greek poet like Heraclitus to know that water does not flow past twice, and time does not flow backward. How can an old man be born again? What Jesus has thrown at Nicodemus, and at us, is a metaphor. A metaphor is simply a way of conveying an idea by means of another idea, image, comparison. It literally means to carry over, and I think here we see Jesus carrying over the understanding of the call of Abram, no longer physical aliyah or immigration into (someone else’s) territory, but instead a kingdom of God with a fundamentally new ethic of human and spiritual relations, an ethic of sacrificial love.

What I love about this metaphor is that it evokes the womb, women’s bodies and the incredible sacrifice of pain that a mother makes to give birth to a child. Nicodemus gets that part of the image very viscerally; he asks “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” However he doesn’t quite grasp (at least not yet) the significance that being born is a passive activity. If physical birth is an event that occurs through the agonizing contractions of a mother’s uterus, this other kind of birth, in the spirit, is one that also comes through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Jesus seems to break it down for him, “Don’t be astonished that I say to you, you must be born from above. The wind blows where it chooses…it’s always in motion, you don’t know its origins or its destination…and that is how it is with those born in the Spirit.” It seems to me that this Spirit-birthing is also an act of sacrifice, the passion that we celebrate in communion, but one that is always ongoing. The wind, the ruach, the spirit of God is always blowing, always birthing us from above. Certainly we cannot birth ourselves. This is one time the passive voice is absolutely essential. We must be birthed. We must be born. From above.

Jesus spells this out for Nicodemus and it runs so counter to Nicodemus’s commitments at this moment in his life that he finds Jesus unintelligible. Jesus seems to scold him, almost to shame him. How can one of the most educated and respected scholars of Jewish thought in his day be stumped by this country teacher’s metaphors? Metaphors are funny things. They are prisms that allow us to see things differently, to shift our sight and our insight in new directions, new angles of incidence and encounter. As someone who loves poetry, music, stained glass, I’m so thankful for the ways that God speaks to us through these indirections. In an academic environment suspicious of religious conviction, I am often full of doubt, and ashamed of the harm done in the name of the gospel. It is in fact often the testimony of metaphors, parables, and beauty that allow me to “believe” (if by belief we mean inspiration, a breath that gives the courage to move into new and unmapped territory like Abram, Sarai and Lot).

The last two verses of the gospel are familiar to the point of cliché. Reading this week, I particularly notice the word “world”. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

The story of Nicodemus is a story about shifting perspective. God is not after due diligence, per se. We aren’t called to stay up ‘til 3am working on a paper about “Repetitive Birth as a Mechanism of Salvation.” We are invited to set aside the questions of who’s good and who’s bad, who’s good enough, and who’s slacking and instead, to join the Abrahamic tradition, the tradition in which Abraham’s faith was reckoned to him as righteousness. And to live inspired, continually birthed by the Spirit. Inspired to do what?

Well I want to dip into a reading that isn’t part of our lectionary for today. One of my favorite sayings is from Deuteronomy 26, and it is an example of something God asked the Israelites to do multiple times…remember their identity by telling their story. They are told to institute the festival of first fruits, which will include presenting the tithes of their harvest by announcing to the priest, “My Father was a wandering Aramean and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous.” In other words, God commanded them to learn to tell a good story. What really struck me as I looked at this moment grounded in the story of Abram the wandering Aramean was that the tithed produce was to be given to “the Levite, the alien, the fatherless and the widow.” The Levites, of course are the lineage of priests, and as such are people of privilege and prestige. And here they are put on the same footing as the alien, the orphaned, the widowed. Regardless of how or why, these are people who are not in a position to earn their living on the land or to build up security, and God calls for his offering to be redistributed to them. When I remember that Paul wrote in his epistle to the Hebrews that we have a high Priest in Jesus, this passage begins to resonate for me with Jesus’s teaching that whatever we do for the least among us we do for him.

So who are the least among us? Much has happened in the last week since we were here together, and there are many spectacularly vulnerable people in the news…the people of Japan…of Libya…of Bahrain. And there are the people whose suffering is ghostly in its absence from our news. The people of the Ivory Coast... of Haiti…the one in six Americans unemployed or working part-time while they seek full-time employment. Hydro-fracking recently approved here in Pennsylvania is threatening the clean water supply of millions, and funding for our public universities was just eviscerated this week. We live in Philadelphia, which, according to a 2008 Pew Research Study has the highest rate of incarceration in the country that has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Nationwide, 1 in 9 African American men in my age range (20-34) is behind bars, compared to 1 in 106 white men. We live at the epicenter of the crisis of racially unjust mass incarceration. It’s hard to know where to begin…beyond prayer. **One book I’d recommend for more information on this is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

I’d like to use a graphic that showed up on several of my friends’ facebook pages these past couple weeks as an icon for such prayer (and prayerful action). When I went to hunt down it’s source I was amazed to discover that it apparently originated with a group called the “Christian Left” (http://i.imgur.com/tlG0Y.jpg.) I won’t read the whole chart, but I think a few lines will capture the ethos of this statement. One column listed the cost of various government programs at risk, and the other column listed the value amount of specific tax breaks for the wealthy.
$11.2 b (Early childhood programs)
$11.5 b (per year cost of recent tax-cuts for millionaires’ estates)

$8.9 b (Low income housing programs)
$8.9 b (cost of allowing mortgage interest deduction for vacation homes est. 10-yr cost)

$2.5 b (Low income Home Energy Assistance LIHEAP grants to poor families)
$2.5 b (Tax breaks for oil companies (write offs for drilling and oil well costs FY 2012))

The chart ends by comparing the $44 billion cost of all programs at risk combined with the $42 billion lost by extending one year of Bush tax cuts top tax brackets in FY 2012.

It is not my place to prescribe any particular political position, although it’s clear where my own leanings lie. That notwithstanding, I do think this chart poses a question that we as people of the Abrahamic tradition, justified by grace, cannot afford to ignore. If we live in a society that has abandoned its most vulnerable members to poor schools, poor nutrition, poor legal defense, and poor health care, our experience of God’s grace demands that we act decisively and adventurously for justice.

Nicodemus makes two more appearances in the gospel of John. When Jesus is brought before the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus speaks up reminding his colleagues that their laws demand a fair hearing for anyone charged with a crime. He is shouted down and heckled as one of “those Galileans.” While his efforts to speak up for justice before the judicial structures of his time was ignored, Nicodemus took civic action impelled by his encounter with Jesus. His were halting steps in a similar direction to twentieth century believers like Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, and Daniel Berrigan.

By the time Jesus was crucified Nicodemus had understood what it meant to be birthed from above. Witnessing the death pains of Jesus our brother he saw what I imagine Julian of Norwich would call the birth pains of Jesus our mother. And he understood that he had an opportunity to draw near to Jesus by joining with Joseph of Arimathea to take Jesus’s body and bury him in a tomb Nicodemus had purchased. What other acts of mercy Nicodemus was born into we don’t know. What we can and must discover, however, are the acts of justice and mercy that Christ has inspired us, who are continuously born anew into his body, and through his spirit, to begin. It is never too late to start figuring out what part of the project of justice we are called to, one halting step at a time. There is always time to begin to be with Jesus, the Word incarnate. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

Tsitsi Jaji earned her Ph.D. (2009) in Comparative Literature from Cornell University with concentrations in African, Caribbean and African-American literature in English, French and Spanish. Her dissertation was entitled Africa in Stereo: Comparative Black Acoustic Imaginaries In Poetry And Film From Ghana, Senegal And South Africa, and she is currently building on this material towards her first book. She has published articles and/or book chapters on Nafissatou Diallo, Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, and most recently Keorapetse (Willie) Kgositsile (Comparative Literature Studies 46:2), as well as a handful of poems in obscure but treasured small press journals.

Originally from Zimbabwe, Dr. Jaji has conducted fieldwork throughout Southern and West Africa, with generous support from the TIAA-CREF Ruth Sims Hamilton Fellowship, and has been a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a Society for the Humanities (Cornell) Mellon Graduate Fellow, and a member of the Telluride Association.

Tsitsi considers teaching and mentoring important ways to return the tremendous support she has received along the way.

Her primary research interests continue to be transnational black cultural relations and exchanges, the relationship between music and literature, theorizations of listening, and Africana expressions of feminism. On occasion she revisits a former self as an Oberlin-trained pianist, and she helped herself through university as a church organist and musician and as a jazz pianist and singer; however her primary commitment is to literary studies, which she believes can be transformative by training the imagination and powers of observation and empathy.