“Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.  This man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, ‘Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with Him.’  Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.’   Nicodemus said to Him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old?  Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?’  Jesus answered, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.  That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.  Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’  The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So, it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’  Nicodemus said to Him, ‘How can these things be?’  Jesus answered him, ‘Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?  Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony.  If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?   No one has ascended into heaven except He who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.  And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.  For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.  For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.’”

  As it relates to Christian belief, faith is a glorious word, one with a fantastic significance.  After healing people, Jesus frequently said “go, your faith has made you well.”  St. Paul will tell us in Ephesians, “for by grace you’ve been saved by faith.”  Again, in Galatians, Paul tells us “…we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.”  All told, the word “faith” appears up to 250 times in your New Testament, not counting derivations like faithful or faithfulness.  So, we know that faith is important…redemptive even.  But what IS it?

  If you were to try to define it, would you say?  Is faith a feeling?  Is faith some commodity which can be bought or sold or transferred between two parties?  Is faith something we can summon up from within us whenever we need it?  Perhaps, if asked to define faith, you’d default to an old standard pastor’s line.  You see, whenever some question is really, really tough, we pastors have a notorious penchant to ambiguously utter “it’s a mystery of God” as though that answers everything.  But while there are some things which remain for God alone to know, faith isn’t one of them.

  To begin with, we must understand that faith is entirely a gift.  It isn’t something we earn nor can we work our way into having it.  However, faith comes to us, be it a granule as small as a mustard seed or in sufficient amount to move a mountain, faith is always the gift of God.  Unfortunately, though, simply recognizing faith as God’s gift to us isn’t really defining it.  I can receive a package on Christmas day and know that it’s been given to me.  I can look on the tag and clearly see the name of the person who gave it to me.  But unless I unwrap it and look inside, it’s remains completely unknown to me.  And so that’s what I’m hopeful my next three sermons will do.  Unwrap the gift of faith God gives us so that we’ll be able to see it more clearly in our lives.  Karl Barth puts forward the idea in his work Church Dogmatics in Outline that faith has three distinct parts.  Barth suggests that faith consists of trust, knowledge and confession.  Today we’re going to talk about faith as trust.

  In our reading from the New Testament, so too do we see trust at work.  In John chapter three, Nicodemus, a Pharisee comes to Jesus Christ under cover of nightfall.  Nicodemus has seen many things, many wonders performed by Jesus Christ.  He knows this is a man of power, most likely, a man of God’s own choosing.  And yet he comes under the cloak of night.  We’re bound to wonder why he tries to hide his arrival.  It makes sense when we consider that Nicodemus is a leader of the Pharisees and they’re not Jesus’ biggest fans.  In fact, Jesus just upset the applecart by upending the money changers table in the Temple Courtyard.  Not exactly the kind of behavior which ingratiates one to the powers-that-be.  In Mark’s Gospel, this is the very point that the leaders of the Jews, both Pharisees and Sadducees alike began plotting to kill Jesus. So, Nicodemus’ colleagues, his friends, the guys he talked with and did business with, they’d made up their minds.  This Jesus needs to GO.  And so people who sympathized with Jesus weren’t too well thought of either.  To the rest of the Pharisees, disciples of Jesus Christ had set their teeth against God.   So if Nicodemus was caught or seen by anyone, anyone at all, things would’ve gotten quite difficult for him.  Perhaps even his livelihood or his life was at stake.

  But he comes nonetheless.  Even though it’s the dark of night, he seeks out Jesus. He’s seen the wonders Jesus is doing.  He’s heard the talk.  He must know more about this strange man from Nazareth.  If but for a moment, he holds enough trust to step forward to talk to Jesus.