Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's June 11, 2006 Sunday worship service.

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Recent weeks have seen Christian symbolism make quite a splash in American popular culture. Just this past Tuesday, pregnant moms did their best to avoid giving birth on that day, fearing the stigma attached to a child who would have to go through life giving his or her birth day as June 6, 2006, 06/06/06, or more simply, 6-6-6, a number that, of course, refers to the mark of the beast mentioned in the Book of Revelation, and its various associations with the antichrist and the awful things that some think are even yet about to happen.

Not too long ago, the Left Behind series of novels and their depictions of the rise of the antichrist and conspiracy at the United Nations sat atop the New York Times Bestseller list. These grossly fictionalized accounts of Christian understandings of the end times sold millions of copies, no doubt being bought by some, if not many, who believed the authors provided a correct view of biblical prophecy and dispensational theology and truthful scenarios about how true Christians would be raptured out of a world tettering on the brink of utter chaos and self-destruction.

But neither 6-6-6 nor Left Behind have measured up to the hype created by the recent release of the movie, based on Don Brown’s best selling novel by the same name, The DaVinci Code. There are articles, web sites, and books a plenty on the Davinci Code, going by such titles as Discussing DaVinci, De-ciphering DaVinci, Deconstructing DaVinci, and the DaVinci Deception – the only prerequisite, it seems, for writing about this novel and movie is that your title must include a descriptive word starting with the letter “D”!

It’s an intriguing movie, I can report, having gone to see it several weeks ago – Hollywood at its finest in yet another box office smash success in the thriller-mystery-conspiracy category. Like any good movie or novel, The DaVinci Code does different things for different people – but of course most of the news it has generated has focused on the debate within religious and Christian circles about whether or not there are grains of truth within the pages of its fictitious script.

Without giving the plot away for those who haven’t seen it, The DaVinci Code’s central premise is that for centuries, authorities within the Catholic Church have covered up evidence that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child, and that they have descendents living today. In the movie, the possibility that this could be true sends Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist, and Sophie Neveau, a cryptologist, on a kind of treasure hunt across France and England looking for the clues that will lead them to, what the viewer soon learns, is a new version of the holy grail. I hope I haven’t spoiled it for you! There’s a little taste of the movie to whet your appetite!

This movie, it seems fair to say, represents a highly marketable blend of historic fact and pure fiction. Critics, particularly those within the Catholic Church, have been quick to point out many errors: Don Brown’s book and the movie, for instance, suggest that there are references to the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in the gospels, which is simply not true; the idea that there exists an ancient Priory of Sion, a secret society that has been guarding this knowledge that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children, has been exposed as a 20^th century hoax; one of the central clues furthering the plot is Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Last Supper mural (which probably everybody has seen), which seems to depict John, the beloved disciple, as a woman. Actually, Renaissance art conventions called for John to be depicted with long hair. There are other ideas presented as fact that are just too ludicrous to think credible – like, assassin monks, conniving bishops who have murderers for hire, secret Jewish sexual initiation rituals, and church conspiracies to hide authentic texts about Jesus from the light of day.

On the advice of church historians, art experts, and Biblical scholars, we could easily dismiss this movie as Hollywood gone amuck yet once again.

But the benefit of The DaVinci Code, in my estimation, is that it has initiated and fed the spiritual seeking, pondering, and questing of folks both inside and outside the church. People have begun to wonder: What if there were a movement in the early church to suppress the role and leadership of women? Is there any truth to the legends surrounding the Holy Grail? Why do we assume Jesus had to be single? What if Jesus was married and had children – if that were true, should that really rock the foundations of the church? Admittedly, Protestants and Catholics may have different answers to that last question since our ecclesiologies and Christology hinge on the identity and celibacy of Jesus in quite different ways.

That being said, it is true that fiction can offer an entrée into conversation about matters that matter, especially in an age and time when many people of faith are quite eclectic, sometimes unorthodox, in the way that their belief systems get shaped and sustained.

If I am right, that faith and fiction should be allowed to dance together, that truth-seeking is fundamental to the soul’s health and vitality, then perhaps the patron saint of our 21^st century should be the man we encountered in the reading from John 3. Nicodemus. A curious man with an inquiring mind who sought Jesus under the cover of darkness. His conversation with Jesus is laced with both questions and a sense of bewilderment:

• He wonders what is the true meaning of the signs Jesus has done – is he truly divine or just another run-of-the-mill miracle-worker?

• He questions what Jesus means when he talks about being born again or “being born from above,” taking the literal interpretation that Jesus must mean reentering his mother’s womb

• He finds incredible all of Jesus’s talk about the improvisational work of the spirit as the author of new life

It was a teaching moment, this opportunity Nicodemus had, that night, to learn from Jesus. What he heard was puzzling, even enigmatic, since the Jesus of John’s gospel often resorted to word plays and fanciful images and figurative language to get his point across, to entice the listener in closer, to learn more.

The central idea in this encounter, the one that no doubt sticks with us the most, is this strange notion of being “born from above,” or in an alternate translation “born again.” What Jesus meant by that, it’s hard to know for sure, but it surely had something to do with the persuasive power of the Spirit to enable people to start over again in their lives, to look with new eyes at the old self and to be challenged to experience new truths. In other words, one of the messages of Jesus’s encounter with Nicodemus seems to be that we don’t have to satisfied with the way we are, that we can be born anew and we can gravitate towards a different place in our lives. And, if fiction can help us with that new birth, then so let it be.

Whether or not we think the distortions of historic facts by Don Brown is worthy of our attention, his book and this movie may generate important talk about “how it really was,” and perhaps having been exposed to all the hype about the movie you have come to the realization that you don’t understand as well as you should early church councils and decisions made about the divinity of Jesus or the inner workings of the Catholic Church’s power structure or how we came to have the canon of scripture that we have today. Like Nicodemus who came to learn from rabbi Jesus, so the Davinci Code offers opportunities to learn, new reasons to attend Sunday School or Bible study, new reasons to enter what the theologian Karl Barth called the sometimes “strange world” of the Bible.

Nicodemus was not only a learner, an inquirer after truth, but as a member of the Pharisees, he took something of a risk coming to Jesus with his questions. The text says that Nicodemus “came to Jesus by night,” that is, without anyone knowing about the meeting. Jesus, in John’s chronology has just, in chapter two, overturned the tables of the money-changers in the temple and has, in general, evoked the ire of the religious establishment. A secret meeting, under cover of darkness, was necessary, it seems, for Nicodemus to avoid suspicion and innuendo for hanging out with the wrong kind of people.

Often, context is everything – knowing the big picture can help us understand the motivation for why a certain character is portrayed in a particular fashion. Perhaps one reason that The DaVinci Code has gained traction in our society is that we live in a time when our sensitivity has been greatly heightened to all kinds of secrets: secret enemies, their secret plans, even our own government’s secret programs to help us deal with all the other secrets that are out there. In a world in which it is harder than ever to know whom or what to trust, who can blame us for rising in our seats just as bit when things are being said by the media about the One in whom we place our ultimate trust.

If you peruse the thousands of reviews of the DaVinci Code that readers have logged at Barnes and Noble or Amazon.Com, you will see that a good number of them have been written by angry Christians, particularly Catholics, who, on the one hand, are mad that this novel and movie question traditional orthodox views of who Jesus was and what he did, but on the other hand, there are those who think DaVinci is wonderful because they believe the hierarchy in Rome has “always been lying to us.” (CC, 5/16/06, 22). They point to the problem of the pedophilia scandals as proof of the danger of keeping secrets and the Vatican’s dogged persistence in protecting the idea of clergy made up exclusively of celibate males.

Jesus, who did meet Nicodemus in secret, is, on the whole, however, quite public in John’s Gospel with who he is as the divine, pre-existent One – more so for John, I think, than for the other synoptic gospel writers – Matthew, Mark or Luke.

The message of the gospel is, of course, that like Nicodemus, Jesus finds us where we are, even if it is under the cover of darkness, responds to our questions, and essentially challenges us to become better human beings by experiencing the new birth from the Spirit.

The most alarming aspect of the movie, to me, anyway, is that it seems to question the very nature of the Trinitarian God and reduces the person of Jesus to a mere foil to the “sacred feminine” which is embodied in Mary Magdalene and her descendents. To worship at the tomb of Mary Magdalene is the central goal of the plot – a goal really contradictory to what we believe, by faith, is the soul’s true quest.

Now, I, for one, do not want to give up a latter day recovery of the feminine aspects of who God is and what God does, but neither do I want to reject traditional Trinitarian notions about the reality of who God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

As Jesus reminds Nicodemus, being born from above by water and the spirit entails trusting that God, through God’s sovereign spirit, will blow where it wills. John’s message is that the wind has blown, bringing Jesus, the one who shows the path to salvation.

Salvation, like the Trinity, is a deep mystery, but it is not a mystery to be solved by following the clues, hidden for centuries, that will lead the worthy to the Holy Grail. Rather, salvation, Jesus teaches, is a mystery to be lived and learned and received as we trust that even yet God can cause us to be reborn and to achieve new states of spiritual enlightenment.

This encounter Jesus had with Nicodemus is among the most enigmatic in all of scripture. We don’t see Nicodemus again until the very end of John’s gospel when he assists Joseph of Arimathea in taking care of the body of Jesus, placing the spices and wrapping the corpse with the linen shroud before taking the body for its garden burial. Yet, Nicodemus, at the end, has gone public with his friendship with Jesus, daring to approach Pilate with a request to help provide a proper Jewish burial for his friend who once told him to be born again.

And maybe his action of honoring the dead body of Jesus is meant by the gospel writer to signal that Nicodemus himself is being born anew in his relationship with Jesus and in his understanding of what God is about in the world.

Perhaps the spirit has blown in the life of Nicodemus, and he sees Jesus differently than he did before.

And maybe, that’s the way our own pilgrimage should be – to look at Jesus again, as if for the first time, to be born anew, and, thus, to be able to see God in faith . . . and in fiction.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.