2020.03.08 | All In
My cousin Ann will be 50 years old next month. I don’t know how that happened so fast. She was a precocious child. She was born seven years after my twin-sister Marlene and I arrived on the scene, and somehow she became solidly middle aged overnight, like we did. Because of our age difference, when we were all kids my sister and I were often assigned the job of watching her.
We were generally happy to accept this challenge, because we always wanted younger siblings, and because we were eager to build our resumes as childcare workers. So we honed our big sister and baby-sitting skills on Ann.
I still remember the first time that Ann’s mother dropped her off at our grandparents’ farm where we were staying. Shortly after she arrived, Grandma said, “You girls take Ann outdoors and wear her out, so that she will take a nap this afternoon.” We agreed. After all, how hard could that be? There were two of us, and one of her, and we were bigger and stronger. Right?
We were blissfully naive. We soon discovered that Ann was quite a project, and that childcare was not for the faint of heart. We thought that Ann would like to make a snowman or go visit the new baby kitties in the haymow. But no, Ann wanted to know, “How far was up?” “Why is the sky blue?” And, “Why are the colors in a rainbow red, yellow, green, blue, and violet?” The kid was four. We were eleven.
Marlene and I had some questions of our own. We wanted to know where was the “owner’s manual” for this kid, and how soon her mother was coming back. I looked at my watch, and figured that the answer was, “Not soon enough.” So I countered Ann’s questions with, “Define up,” and I said, “The sky is blue and the colors in a rainbow are the way they are, because that’s the way God made them.”
Ann, in turn, asked “How old is God?”
I said, “Older than you and me, and everything else around us.”
II
Even though Ann’s questions were wearing on me, I realized as an adult that they were important for her intellectual and spiritual growth. Afterall, to be curious, to ask questions, and to want to know more—are examples of how we can love God with all our hearts, souls, and minds [1].
The biblical character Nicodemus was curious like my cousin Ann. According to John, Nicodemus asked a lot of questions that were on other people’s minds, but that only a few people asked, at least in public. Added to that, John depicts Nicodemus as a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin, a first-century kind of religious Mensa Club member.
That said, if you scour the gospels, you’ll discover that Nicodemus only appears in one gospel, John’s, and that he only appears twice in John: once in chapter 3, where John is giving Jesus “the third degree,” and later, in chapter 19, where Nicodemus is listed one of Jesus’ followers who prepared his body for burial.
For these reasons, biblical scholars generally agree that Nicodemus was less likely to have been a historical figure and more likely to have been a literary figure, who symbolized the curious people who followed Jesus, but who weren’t “all in” when it came to confessing the faith or joining the rank and file as disciples.
Yet, over time, Nicodemus somehow went from being a fence-sitter to a deeply committed follower, who was there at the cross and who helped prepare Jesus’ body for burial at the bitter end. So what do we make of this character, and what can we learn from him?
III
In my view, Nicodemus was a kind of proto-United Church of Christ (UCC) member. I say “proto-type,” because the UCC as a denomination is only about 63 years old. But we do trace our heritage back to the Congregationalists, and to their forebears, the Puritans and Pilgrims, who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620.
The Congregationalists valued education, intellectual inquiry, and the learned clergy, so they founded public schools and colleges and universities, like Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, Grinnell, the University of Chicago, UC-Berkeley, Mills, and several African American colleges in the Deep South. They also founded several seminaries across the United States.
Andover Newton Theological School was one of those, and that’s where Pastor Marvin and I received our M.Div. degrees. Andover Newton is dually aligned with the UCC and the American Baptist Churches. It also boasts a large percentage of students who are aligned with the Unitarian Universalist Association.
It wasn’t lost on most of us students that although all three denominations had similar polity structures, we tended to differ quite a bit in terms of our piety and how we showed up in the world. Most Baptists, for example, carried floppy Bibles with gold edging on the pages, and they had a lot of ribbons sticking out of the pages to mark their favorite passages. The Baptist students could quote a lot of scripture. They had the books of the Bible memorized forwards and backwards, and they were usually eager to share their personal testimonies with anyone who would listen.
UCC students, by contrast, usually took our Oxford Annotated RSVs to Old and New Testament classes, but we rarely remembered to bring our Bibles to chapel. We were way behind on memory work, compared with the Baptists, and we rarely used the word “testimony” in a sentence, and some of us weren’t sure we had one.
The UUAs, by comparison, didn’t carry Bibles. Some didn’t think that they should be required to take Bible classes in seminary. And many were more likely able to recite the Declaration of Independence or to quote Emerson or Thoreau than recite a passage from the Bible or quote a Christian theologian.
As a consequence of all of this, back in the day, when some uninitiated person showed up on campus and asked what was the difference between the UCC and the UUAs, some UCC students would say that “UCC” stood for “Unitarians Considering Christ,” and went on to explain that the only difference between the UCC and the UUA denominations was that UCC congregations have crosses on their altars and the UUAs have question marks.
I’ve never thought of myself as a Unitarian Considering Christ, but it’s a fair description of many individuals and congregations in our tradition, and several in this congregation. If you are sitting there thinking this morning, “Yes, that’s me!” know that you are in good company, and that you’re welcome here.
My friend Ron Bufford, who now serves as a pastor in Campbell, and who was for many years the face of the UCC’s “God is Still Speaking campaign,” has a way of further describing this kind of cagy, hedgy, fence-sitting faith that is often found among our rank and file as “Hokey Pokey Christianity.”
So, just for fun today...let’s celebrate our propensity for theological inquiry and our ability to question all of the answers that orthodox Christianity has shelled out by singing “the Hokey Pokey,” as printed on your bulletin insert.
You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out,
You put your right foot in, and you shake it all about.
You to do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around.
That’s what it’s all about.
You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out,
You put your left foot in, and you shake it all about.
You to do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around.
That’s what it’s all about.
It’s good to laugh at ourselves from time to time, especially in these days when everything in the news is so serious.
It’s also good that we come from a tradition that is not afraid to buck tradition, and to ask hard questions.
However, there are times when something more than inquiry is needed, times when we need to commit--to be all in--rather than half-way in and half-way out. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus was challenging Nicodemus to be more than half-way in. He was challenging him to be all in.
IV
I wonder, what would it look like for UCC people to be “all in”? Is that even possible for us? Could that be part of our theological DNA too?
Surprisingly for some, I believe that the answer to these questions is “yes.”
There is a great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us were “all in,” particularly in some of the most trying contexts that the modern world has ever known, Naxi Germany. These forebears were part of the UCC’s German Evangelical roots and part of a sub-group called the Confessing Church. They were the authors of what is called “The Barmen Declaration.” In this document, members of the Confessing Church protested the domestication of Christianity in Nazi Germany and, in particular, challenged Hitler’s racist and anti-Semitic ideology and practices.
The Confessing Church was led by Karl Bart, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and later Martin Niemöller, and others who participated in the German Resistance Movement. While you may not recognize the Niemöller name, you likely may have heard his most famous words, which are etched in the wall of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin Niemöller started off as a conservative Christian pastor who found affinity with some of Hitler’s ideas and followers and who went along for a while with many of Hitler’s ideas. But through biblical and theological inquiry and the unfolding of Hitler’s leadership, Niemöller went from questioning to detesting Hitler’s ideals and leadership.
He, like many, realized that decisions had to be made, and he needed to repent and resist Hitler with words and deeds that were aligned with the life and teachings of Jesus.
V
Those who lived through WWII and other trying times know the necessity of making a choice, taking a stand, speaking up, and doing the right thing—especially when doing so is unpopular.
One may have hoped that the lessons learned during WWII would have permanently changed the world--particularly the Christian West. But the nonsense that we see unfolding in the world today serves a painful reminder of how easily even educated people can just go-with-the-flow, forget the past, and/or slip into individual or group apathy.
So today, more than ever, we need to bring back the inquiry that Nocodemus demonstrated, question the authority of those in charge, ask the tough questions, and also commit our whole selves to the teachings and example of Jesus. In that spirit, let’s do the Hokey Pokey one more time, and let’s exchange the words “right foot” and “left foot'' for “whole self.”
You put your whole self in, you put your whole self out,
You put your whole self, and you shake it all about.
You to do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around.
That’s what it’s all about.
You put your whole self in, you put your whole self out,
You put your whole self in, and you shake it all about.
You to do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around.
That’s what it’s all about.
Amen.
Footnotes:
[1} Luke 10:27