The Half Written Sermon

The study is eleven feet by nine, and the door has been shut since ten in the morning.

A legal pad on the desk, and the outline on it stops halfway down the page. Three points, and he has the first two. A cold mug of coffee his daughter painted at a birthday party. A window over the parking lot, where the church van sits with a soft rear tire. Somebody two properties over is running a leaf blower.

The sermon is on the new birth. He picked it in June when he built the fall schedule, and it looked like solid ground then.

He has walked hundreds of people to that moment. In hospital rooms at two in the morning with the family out in the hall. At kitchen tables with the supper dishes still stacked. In the back row after the last song, with a seventeen year old crying too hard to finish a sentence and this man's hand on his shoulder saying take your time, son, nobody here is in a rush.

And he cannot remember his own.

He knows the facts. He was six, on a Wednesday night, a folding chair, a woman with a felt board. His mother wrote the date in the front of her Bible and still brings it up at Thanksgiving. But there is nothing in him where the memory should be. No room, no smell, no before and after. He has preached a doorway he has no recollection of walking through, and eleven years in, halfway down a legal pad, the thing sat up in his chest and said so.

And there is nobody. Not the elders, who love him and would take it to the board on Thursday, because that is what good men do with a concern. Not the men in the Tuesday study, who quote him back to himself. He could tell his wife, and she would lie awake with it for a month.

So the door stays shut, the outline stays halfway down the page, and the coffee gets cold.

You know the door. Yours might be an office with your name on it, or a class you have taught for twenty years, or a family that thinks of you as the one who has all of this worked out. And you know the question, standing up in your chest in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, and the exact arithmetic that has kept it behind your teeth.

He kept his seat and he stood up anyway

There is a room in this story that everybody preaches, and a second room that almost nobody does.

The first room is at night. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a member of the ruling council, walks across Jerusalem in the dark and knocks, because he has a question he cannot ask in front of his colleagues. He is no coward for the hour he chose. He is the only man on that council who went at all, and Jesus does not send him home to come back in daylight with witnesses. He answers him.

Now the second room, and this is the one I want on the desk beside your outline. Chapter seven. The officers sent to arrest Jesus have come back empty handed, somebody says the crowd is ignorant and cursed, and a man in that room stands up.

Nicodemus saith unto them, (he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them,) Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he doeth?John 7:50-51

He did not resign his seat, and he made no speech about his own night visit. He asked for one thing, and it was the thing he had been given in the dark: a hearing before a verdict.

You are heard before you are judged, and that is not a favor anybody is doing you; it is the order God set, and it holds on a Tuesday with the door shut. John 7:51 sits in Scripture on purpose, entered by a man who knew what a hearing was worth because he had been given one at midnight, and the same Spirit who moved a nervous ruler to stand up in a hostile room is moving in a study with a half written outline on it.

That is where a man starts. Not with the answer. With the settled fact that the question gets a hearing.

Nobody remembers the day they were born

Here is the plainest thing I know about birth.

Not one person reading this remembers being born. Not the room, not the hands, not the hour. Every last one of us takes the whole event on testimony. Somebody else was there. Somebody wrote it down. And the evidence is not a memory at all. It is a person walking around who did not use to exist.

So when Jesus reaches for a picture of what God does to a man, He does not reach for a courtroom or a contract. He reaches for birth. And when Nicodemus asks how, He reaches for wind.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.John 3:8

Look at what He chose. Two things a man cannot audit, handed to a scholar whose whole training was in tracing things back to their source.

You were never asked to produce a memory as evidence, and the picture Jesus chose is the reason why. He said the wind blows where it wishes and no one can tell where it comes from, and the Spirit He was describing has never once needed a man's recollection in order to have moved through a room.

Peter says it from the other side: born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever. Seed and word. Not a feeling with a date on it.

You have a floor under you while you think this through, and it is not your recollection, it is what is written. 1 Peter 1:23 lays the seed and the word underneath a person instead of the moment, and the Spirit takes that line off a page and makes it weight bearing in a room where a grown man is trying to remember being six.

The hands that do the delivering

John opens his gospel on the same subject and rules three things out by name.

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.John 1:12-13

Not of blood. Your mother's date in the front of her Bible is precious and it is not the mechanism. Not of the will of the flesh. A man's own resolve, sincere at six or at forty, is not the engine. Not of the will of man. Which rules out the woman with the felt board, the man at the front, and you in the hospital room at two in the morning.

You are dealing with a God who does this work with His own hands, and He has never subcontracted it to a preacher, a parent, or a Wednesday night. John 1:13 names three things and rules out all three, and leaves one, and it is His Spirit doing what only He does while men are still working out how to describe it.

It cuts both ways, and the second way is the mercy. If no man's will did it, those hundreds you walked to the door were never yours to produce. And the six year old in the folding chair was not accomplishing anything either. Something was done. He was not the one doing it.

You have been carrying a load that was never assigned to you, and setting it down is not laziness, it is agreement with what is written. The word says the birth is of God, with no clause about the recipient's paperwork, and it is the Spirit, not your competence and not your memory, who has been doing the work in every room you have knelt in.