John 3:1-17
Jesus and New Coke
James Sledge May
27, 2018 - Trinity Sunday
When
you make a decision, what sort of process to you follow? The decision could be
about what kind of car to buy, what movie to watch, where to go to school, whether
to make a career change, or how to vote. Obviously some decisions require more
careful deliberation, and others we can make on a whim. But what steps do you
follow if the decision is important? How do you know you’ve made the right one?
People
in this area and in this congregation are often highly educated. Presumably
that makes more resources available to us in decision making. We’re educated to
be rational, to use reason, to employ science, and so on. You would expect such
things to give us some advantages in making good decisions.
Nicodemus
is a well educated man, trained in Torah and in the ways of God. People would
have gone to him to get expert advice on matters of scripture and the Law. His
opinions would have carried some weight for those wrestling with a religious
decision.
Nicodemus
is intrigued with Jesus. As a religious expert, it’s obvious to him that Jesus
has a connection to God, and he so he goes to see Jesus in order to learn more.
Presumably he wants to make a decision about Jesus. Yes, the power of God is
clearly with him, but what exactly does that mean. But when Nick goes to talk
with Jesus, he goes at night.
In
John’s gospel, light and darkness are terms loaded with theological symbolism.
Jesus is the light that shines in the darkness, the light no darkness can
overcome. For some reason, Nicodemus visits at night, in the darkness. Not a
good sign.
Sure
enough, Nicodemus struggles to understand Jesus. Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you, no one
can see the kingdom of God without being born from above/again.” There’s not a comparable English word
that carries both these meanings so it’s hard for us to join in Nick’s
confusion, to hear something different from what Jesus intends. We have to
translate it one way or the other, either “from above,” or “again.”
Still, it should not have been that hard
for Nick to get it. “From above,” is the more typical meaning, and even if Nick
mistakenly went with the more literal meaning initially, the correct meaning
should have become clear when Jesus tries to clarify things, speaking of being
born of the Spirit. But Nicodemus remains stupefied.
I
was at a preaching conference last week, and Dr. David Lose told a story some
of you may be familiar with about the disastrous rollout of “New Coke” back in
the 1980s. In the 70s and 80s, Coca-Cola, which had once controlled 60% or the
soft drink market, had seen its market share drop to around 25%. Pepsi was the
biggest challenger, and a wealth of research from blind taste tests showed that
a large majority of people thought Pepsi tasted better. Clearly Coke needed an
improved taste.
And
so Coke began developing a new formula, one that was a little bit sweeter, a
little bit smoother. When they had perfected it, they performed numerous taste
tests in all parts of the country with all sorts of people. Repeatedly, New
Coke outperformed both the old Coke and Pepsi. By a wide margin, people liked
the new Coke better. And so New Coke was rolled out with one of the largest
advertising blitzes in history. But within three months, it had been pulled
from store shelves. Even though there was empirical proof that people liked the
taste of New Coke better, they still hated New Coke.
We
humans like to think that we are rational creatures. Maybe not those other
folks who, unlike us, embrace irrational political slogans and outright
untruths. But we are smart, sophisticated folks, not prone to such foolishness.
We’re swayed by reason, facts, data. Or so we think.
Turns out that we humans are less rational
creatures than we are creatures of story. We’re shaped by narratives that frame
our understanding of the world, of how things work and of what’s true, stories that
shape and move us at a subconscious level. New Coke tasted better, but it also
ran afoul of a narrative shaped by decades of advertising, jingles, iconic
bottles and images. To quote David Lose, “It tasted better, but it was still
sucked.”
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When
he visits Jesus, Nicodemus carries with him the narratives and stories that
shaped who he was and formed his religious sensibilities. These narratives
provided a framework that allowed him to order and make sense of the world. Jesus
did miracles, and that clearly put him on the side of God. But then Jesus
starts talking about being reborn by the Spirit, about the wind/Spirit blowing
where it chooses, and Nicodemus is confounded.
For
Nicodemus, Jesus is like New Coke. Jesus may actually taste better, but it
doesn’t matter. He can’t be right. He doesn’t fit into the picture painted by
Nicodemus’ narrative. And so Jesus has to be wrong.
I
suspect that a lot of the “hypocrisy” that people regularly point out about the
church is a New Coke sort of phenomenon. Church people have all lived stories
and narratives that have come to define church and faith for them. These
stories are not empirical data, they are the warmth from certain music or hymns,
the expectation of a certain sort of architecture, worship style, liturgy, or
way of talking. And our narratives let us know, in a non-rational way, what
fits and what doesn’t, what’s right and what’s wrong.
There’s a reason that congregations rarely
fight about what Jesus tells us to do, but have knock down drag out fights over
carpet color, replacing pews with chairs, or whether to put a screen and
projector in the sanctuary. It’s rarely about facts or data. It’s about what
fits easily into our story, about preferring old Coke over New, regardless of
which actually tastes better.
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Today
is Trinity Sunday, and so the lectionary chooses a passage from John with talk
about God, Spirit, Son. Most of us who’ve spent much time in the church have
picked up a bit of trinitarian language. We know Doxologies that speak of
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We sing, “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.”
But most church members I talk to are happy to leave Trinity to the
theologians. Many openly reject it because they can’t understand it or they
think it nonsensical. People give some good, rational reasons for their
suspicions about Trinity, but I wonder if it’s more a New Coke sort of thing. It
doesn’t fit easily in our Enlightenment, scientific narrative, and so we’re
suspicious. It feels wrong.
In
a sermon she gave on the Trinity, Barbara Brown Taylor said this. “God is many,
which is at least one of the mysteries behind the doctrine of the Trinity. That
faith statement is our confession that God comes to us in all kinds of ways, as
different from one another as they can be. The other mystery is that God is
one. There cannot be a fierce God and a loving one, A God of the Old Testament
and another of the New. When we experience God in contradictory ways, that is
our problem, not God’s. We cannot solve it by driving wedges into the divine
self. All we can do is decide whether or not to open ourselves to a God whose
freedom and imagination boggle our minds.”[1]
Or
put another way, all we can do is decide whether or not to open ourselves to a
different story, a better narrative, one that challenges much we are sure about,
but that opens us to true life in all its abundance.
All
praise and glory to the triune God, who seeks us out in Jesus, that we might be
transformed and reborn by the wind of the Holy Spirit and live new and better
stories as children of God.
[1]
Barbara Brown Taylor, “Three Hands Clapping” in Home by Another Way, (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1999) p. 154
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