This past week I had a few minutes to kill while I was waiting for a vehicle to be serviced, and I found myself browsing through the aisles of a local drug store. You need to know that I don’t get much pleasure out of looking at antacids and toothpaste, but I did have a great time in one particular aisle of the store—the one where they sold school supplies. This is the time of year when the younger members of our society head back to school and so the stores are focused on resupplying each little scholar with the necessary tools of education. I was one of those strange kids who actually enjoyed going to school, and the sight of all those cool school supplies the other day took me back to the crowded hallways and freshly-painted classrooms of the various schools I attended as a kid. School supplies themselves still please me immensely: notebooks with nothing yet written in them, boxes of pencils waiting to be sharpened, bottles of white paste with their heavenly smell, and speaking of smell, there is nothing like the look and smell of a brand new box of crayons, is there? I actually went into several stores and looked for one signature item from my school days, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, and all I can assume is that it has fallen prey to our politically correct times. I’m talking about the famous “Big Chief” writing tablets.

Schools are not just about cool implements of writing and coloring and stapling. Schools also require something called teachers. Our middle daughter has now embarked on her teaching career, and I’ve been thinking as well of all my teachers. Some stand out more then others: Mr. Fleming, the cool science teacher; Mrs. Jones, the object of every junior high boy’s romantic crush; and Mrs. Keizer and Mrs. Hollinger, the two smallest teachers in our high school but also the two that nobody dared to mess with. Everyone can remember at least one teacher that they loved and perhaps one that they didn’t love so much. School teachers are some of the fundamentally necessary contributors to our society.

Our scripture lesson today is about two teachers, not school teachers really, but teachers of religion. One is Nicodemus, a respected, established, accomplished leader and member of the exclusive Jewish sect called the Pharisees. When it came to religious faith and practice, Nicodemus was a class act, a black belt, at the top of the heap. There would be very little about the faith and history and belief of his people that Nicodemus did not know. But Nicodemus has become curious, apparently, about a new teacher who has come on the scene in Jerusalem, a teacher not from the respected group of the Pharisees but someone from out on the fringes of the country, the little town of Nazareth. It would be rather unseemly for a man like Nicodemus to be seen in serious conversation with a man like Jesus, especially given Jesus’ controversial reputation in some circles, so Nicodemus comes at night.

These two men who are very serious about their faith in God have a conversation. Nicodemus seems intent on finding out more about Jesus and even finding out what Jesus has to say about this God business. And in the course of conversation Nicodemus finds his faith and knowledge put to the test, as Jesus proclaims the now-famous truth that a relationship with God requires a second birth from out of and back into the realm of the Spirit. Nicodemus is baffled by what Jesus is saying. He is clueless about the spiritual truth of which Jesus speaks. Usually when we look at this scripture we focus on the amazing thing that Jesus was saying about being “born again,” and rightly so, but today, I want us just to look at Nicodemus. Here is a man who knows more than almost everyone about the ways of God. But when he meets Jesus and hears Jesus talk about God, he is out of his league. Nicodemus says, “How can these things be?” And Jesus answers, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” I think there are some important things that you and I can learn from Nicodemus, the clueless teacher of Israel.

The first thing I think we can learn is this: good information is necessary in order to have the good life. Both Nicodemus and Jesus believed that. Nicodemus had devoted his life to learning and using the best information his religion could teach him about how to have a successful spiritual life. You cannot doubt his sincerity, his energy, his devotion and his commitment to the wisdom of the faith of Abraham. More than most people of his time, Nicodemus had given himself to the pursuit of truth about God. As for Jesus, of course we believe he was God, but as a human being, he too had learned about God from the scriptures and traditions of his people. And he was constantly sharing information about God that he clearly believed people needed to know. You could never say of Nicodemus or Jesus that it is okay for a person to believe whatever they want to believe as long as they are sincere about it. No, the content of what a person believes is crucial to their success in a relationship with God. Good information is necessary in order to have a good life.

The second thing we can learn from Nicodemus is this: sometimes there is some old information that we need to unlearn. As a Pharisee, Nicodemus was intimately and exhaustively aware of the story of the faith of his people, but over the centuries, that story had been twisted and shaped in such a way that what the Pharisees currently believed was not what the original story was about. The spiritual information in which Nicodemus was such an expert was flawed and marred by time, by the all-too-human propensity to take something true and good and turn it into something full of deception and dysfunction. Everything that Jesus taught was clearly based in truth that was also revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures, but Nicodemus and the others were blinded to it. They needed to unlearn some of what they knew, because it was wrong.

I’ve been going through a biography of Albert Einstein. Einstein once said, “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.” One of the things that made Einstein great was his ability to question everything that he had been taught, to look at old problems and old answers in totally new ways, to unlearn the received wisdom of his teachers so that he could create new answers, that were, of course, much better than the old ones. I don’t know what you learned in school, but when I was first exposed to physics and chemistry, I was taught that all matter consisted of atoms, and atoms were made of protons and neutrons in a nucleus and electrons circling around that nucleus. That was as small as it got. That old information has been updated many times since I first learned it, and now we know that atoms are much more complex structures, involving things like pions and mesons and quarks and various expressions of energy that we know we don’t fully understand. My mind has had to unlearn some of what it learned in order to make way for new information. Jesus did something like that, always questioning the status quo of his day, always taking the old stories and sayings and recasting them in new light, with more information, better information.

But, and here is the third thing we can learn from Nicodemus, not all old information is bad information. Sometimes there is old information that we need to remember. When Jesus talked with Nicodemus about this business of being born from above and born from the Spirit, he was reminding Nicodemus that the true nature of faith has more to do with the indwelling power of God in our lives than it has to do with fulfilling the demands of a legalistic system of rules and regulations, which is what the Pharisees had come to believe. Everywhere in the Old Testament there is ample evidence of the fact that the people knew of the spiritual dynamics of being in relationship with God, the kind of thing of which Jesus spoke, but these had been forgotten, or at least ignored, by the Pharisees. They had taken something mysterious, something controlled by God and not by us, and turned it into a mechanistic system, at the command of anyone who would care to have the discipline to practice it.

We get in trouble when we forget some of the old lessons, the old truths. When we forget the words of the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights, we forget what makes our nation great. When we forget the fundamental rules of driving, or of good nutrition, or of proper etiquette, we forget how to expertly execute some of the fundamental acts of civilized and successful society and individual human life. The other day when I was having one of our vehicles serviced, I started reading the manual for the first time in years, and I was reminded of some of the things we should do to keep our automobiles in peak operating condition. And of course, it ended up costing me more money, in the short run!

Good information is necessary to the good life. There is often some old information we need to unlearn. And there is old information we need to remember. And finally, there is always new information we need to learn for the first time. Maybe Nicodemus had never really been confronted with the fact that knowing God in your life has to do with being open to his Spirit and looking for what he is doing in the world. Clearly, when people heard Jesus they responded to his teaching as if they had never heard anything about God before. There is always new information to learn, about God and about the world.

One of my favorite series of books is the “For Dummies” series. Do you know the one’s I’m talking about? They have bright yellow covers and titles like, “Fitness for Dummies,” or “Scotland for Dummies.” I am a dummy. So are you. We need new information all the time. I have a friend who has just decided, at the age of 52, to start learning Spanish. Good for her! Just the other day I read an article about how they make pencils. I never knew! I always wondered how they got those round leads into those tiny holes. Now I know. Every new stage of life requires that we learn new things: how to tie our shoelaces, how to not act stupid with members of the opposite sex, how to change a diaper, how to apply for Social Security, even how to die. My new topic: how to be a grandfather! And there’s always new information we need to learn about how God is at work in our world and in our lives and how we can get in on the fun.

I have a confession to make: I never graduated from high school…sort of. You see, two weeks before graduation I came down with a very bad case of mononucleosis. I missed all my finals. I missed graduation itself, at which I was supposed to speak. But bless those folks; they gave me a diploma anyway! And yet, in a way, I never graduated. And that is as it should be. Because, truth be told, none of us ever do. Nicodemus was a learned man of God who still had a lot to learn. And we should not be so proud as to think that we are all that much different from Nicodemus. The most brilliant people I know are the ones who are still students, still learning about this amazing world and the God who made it. Nicodemus called Jesus, “Rabbi, teacher.” That part he got right. There is still so much that you and I have to learn about Jesus. So there’s the challenge: What are you intentionally learning about in your life right now? What is life trying to teach you that you are not paying attention to? What lessons are you teaching to others? Who are your mentors, and who are your students? Do you believe that you already know everything you need to know or do you understand that in this lifetime you can never stop learning about God? I’ve never graduated from school and I don’t want to. God still has so much to teach me, and to teach us all.

Amen.