“Faith Beyond
Experience”
Ezekiel 36:22-28
John 3:1-17
At what point does faith become saving faith? At what point do we move from a faith from
experience to a faith beyond experience?
So much of how we think and feel is based on experience, the reception
and interaction of our senses to the world around us. The old adage that if it
walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it must be a duck still rings
true. We gather evidence about
what we experience and draw from those experiences our logical conclusions
about them. If I can see a tree and feel
a tree and hear a tree, then it must be a tree.
But at what point do we move beyond simple experiential belief to a
belief in what we cannot see, in what we cannot feel, in what we cannot know
through the gathering of data by our senses?
There is no doubt that faith can be
experiential. When I look at the stars
of the night sky, I don’t conclude that they are just simply the result of a
big bang billions of years ago and have come into
being through the evolutionary process.
When I look at the stars of the night sky, I experience the proclamation
of the Creator’s handiwork. When I see a
person recover from a near death illness, my first thought is not on the
marvels of modern medicine, I experience the miracle of divine healing and
restoration. In the same way, if that
same person should die, I don’t reason to myself that he or she is just the
product of fate resigning myself to the notion that what will be will be, I
experience the sovereignty and providence of a God who has at work to bring
life from death in a different way that what I can sometimes understand or even
want.
And yet, to stop there with my faith is to miss the
bigger picture and the deeper understanding of what it means to have
faith. A faith that just looks only at
the blessings and curses of life and from there concludes God’s presence or
absence is not a faith that saves, it is a faith based only on my experiences
and dependant upon them. This is what
became of the understanding of faith for God’s people in the Old
Testament. They based their faith solely
on their experience. They concluded that
as long as they stayed obedient to the law and remained faithful to their
rituals and dependent upon themselves, they would secure God’s favor and
therefore be deemed righteous.
But what happened when their experiences did not
bare this out? What happened when they
discovered that their experiences were not as blessed as they hoped them to be,
when they found themselves in the midst of the wilderness without water or
food, when they found themselves in the midst of captivity, when they found
themselves taken over and in exile? They
quickly cried foul, turned against God, and went their own way. Faith based solely on experience can become
as precarious as me on a ladder. One
strong gust of wind quickly can become the tempest that threatens to knock me
off my high place. My reaction is to
immediately doubt the security of my footing and to question the reasoning of
my trust in the ladder in the first place.
Faith that is based solely on our experience can have the same
effect. One strong push to one side or
the other can send us reeling. We can
easily doubt the security of our footing and begin to question the reasoning
for our trust in God in the first place.
Faith must move beyond our experiences if it is to become saving faith,
and the saving faith comes only from God.
In our story for this morning, we
delve into one of the most well-known and significant passages of the
Bible. It is a story of having faith,
not a faith based on experience, but a saving faith that comes from God in
Jesus Christ. Our story gives us two
characters on different sides of the aisle.
One is Nicodemus, the leader of the Pharisees, and the other is
Jesus. The character of Nicodemus has
always been the topic of much conversation among the Christian community. For many, Nicodemus represents the epitome of
faithfulness. He comes to Jesus at
night, seeking additional insight from the teacher. He will later in the John’s gospel make an
attempt to try to defend Jesus when some of the Pharisees wanted to arrest
him. And he will join Joseph in Arimathea in preparing Jesus’ body for burial. But Nicodemus is anything but the epitome of
faithfulness here in this story.
As the leader of the Pharisees,
Nicodemus has had occasions to not only hear about Jesus’ miracles, but see
them as well. But his religious mindset
is firmly grounded in the idea of blessings and curses, a religion based on the
rituals and practices that earn God’s favor and keep one righteous before
God. Nicodemus knows enough about Jesus
to conclude from his experience that Jesus is someone significant. The signs that Jesus has done is Nicodemus’
empirical evidence, proof that God’s presence is with Jesus. But Nicodemus comes in the night, still in
the dark about who Jesus really is.
Nicodemus has a faith based on signs, on the experiences he has seen and
heard. He is impressed with what Jesus
has done, but that is all. Nicodemus has
weighed the evidence and drawn his logical conclusion that Jesus is important,
but he is unable to go any further with his faith.
Jesus of course knows that a faith
based on experience alone is not sufficient, and his answer to Nicodemus proves
to be the wind that knocks Nicodemus off his high ladder. “No one can see the
Nicodemus’ answer shows that he has a
one-dimensional world view of faith, a faith based only on what one determines
it to be, organized according the norms and standards, the blessings and curses
that seem reasonable. He cannot think
beyond what he believes to be true, beyond his own experiences. He cannot fathom a reality in which the
divine Spirit of the renewing power of God is at work to bring about a new
creation. Of course, Nicodemus does not
get it. He cannot be born again. It is impossible for him to go through that
worldly, fleshly experience of being born a second time from his mother’s
womb. The dynamic of the Spirit
completely eludes him.
Jesus’ response brings home the
reality of Nicodemus’ spiritual darkness.
“No one can enter the
Jesus is left incredulous at
Nicodemus’ lack of saving faith. How can
Nicodemus possibly grasp any talk about heavenly things, when we cannot grasp
the earthly word plays of re-birth and blowing wind that point to the
re-creating, re-newing power of the Spirit of
God? And so Jesus leaves Nicodemus with
words about what it means to have saving faith, saving faith in the God who has
done for the world what the world cannot do for itself, by sending the son – by
sending him – so that those who believe may have eternal life, and the world
might be saved through him. This is what
Nicodemus must come to believe. He must
believe not in signs and wonders and miracles.
He must believe not in what Jesus has done, but in who Jesus is, the one
who came as light to a darkened world, the one who came not simply as a man
approved by God, but as the one who, having been in God’s presence, has now
descended into human life, where he will be raised up on the cross, and in that
act raise us to God and save us.
Unlike Nicodemus, who was unable to
perceive and understand heavenly things, we must move beyond a faith based on
our experience, and come to embrace the fact that saving faith is not of
ourselves, but a gracious gift from God.
We must move beyond a faith that just gathers evidence and decides yes
or no, and come to a faith that is committed and willing to risk all for the
sake of the Gospel. We must move beyond
a one-dimensional perception of the world and begin to live in the truly
multi-dimensional reality of God’s direct intervention in our lives and in the
life of human history. We must move
beyond how we come to know Christ and the power of his death and resurrection,
and be ready and open to the uncontrollable wind of God, the divine wind that
brings new birth from above, life from death, and the mysterious newness of the
abundant and eternal life through the grace of the God who loves and saves the
world. Amen.