Jerusalem Presbyterian Church

His appearance was like a rite of spring.  As soon as the snow melted off the main university mall he showed up, with a wooden box to stand on, and a portable sound system to broadcast his voice into the March wind.  He was there every spring that I was, and legend had it that he had been engaged in this ritual for many years before I even imagined going to college.

Brother Jesse was the campus evangelist.  He didn’t really have a connection to the university that anyone knew of; he wasn’t affiliated with any church that I can remember.  He just showed up, climbed up onto his wooden box, turned on his microphone, and started preaching.

His message was of the fire-and-brimstone variety: repent, change your ways, and avoid the wrath of an angry God.  If not, the flames of hell would lick our very flesh for all eternity, we were told, in a dark foreboding voice.

But we were young, the war was long over, the draft had been cancelled, MTV as brand new, punk rock sang out from cassette players, and the size of my hair was exceeded only by my shoulder pads.  It was 1982, and AIDS was only something that happened to other people.  Or so we thought.  We thought we had reinvented the world, had put the weirdness of the 1970’s behind us.

The Spring breeze in northern Indiana carried Brother Jesse’s words right into the classrooms through open windows.  But I mostly heard him out on the mall, as I walked from class to class.  The campus was smaller then, with more green space, and as a liberal arts major, studying psychology and theatre, most of my classes were in those old buildings, which ringed the original campus mall.  So across the new spring grass I walked day after day from classes to my job as a carpenter in the scenery shop of the theatre department.

“You’ve got to repent and change your ways!  God is coming back, and God is not mocked!”   Brother Jesse certainly was consistent.  “You must be born again!”  Brother Jesse had a fan club, of sorts.  On the really nice days there would be a cluster of students standing around his makeshift podium talking back to him as he preached.  Hecklers and catcallers, mostly, they tried to engage him in conversations about drinking and smoking pot, and other unsavory campus activities.  But Brother Jesse invited them instead to pray the sinner’s prayer with him.  They offered him a beer down at Harry’s.  He offered back to make them fit for heaven.  Neither side caved.

I had kept my church history mostly a secret from my college friends.  I wasn’t sure how to tell them about what it was like to grow up Pentecostal.  They all seemed to be from “normal” churches---Catholics, Methodists, Lutherans.  I had even met this boy who was a Presbyterian.   I didn’t know anybody who grew up quite like I did.  The language of salvation that Brother Jesse used was of the same cadence and rhythm, and tone that I had grown up listening to three times a week for years.  Three times a week I had heard that there was another way to live, that God had sent the Son into the world in order that the world might be saved, that God wanted me to be set free from sin.  I heard that I must be born again.

While others mocked and heckled him, I had the tiniest soft spot in my heart for Brother Jesse.  I couldn’t tell anyone about it, but it was there just the same.   Something in the way he preached reminded me of home, and so when I would walk past his makeshift pulpit on spring afternoons, and would hear a familiar Bible verse, it seemed as of he was talking to me.  Hidden in those fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone “Come to Jesus” sermons,  something that I was trying very hard to deny was stirred inside me.

I wonder if Nicodemus felt that way about Jesus.   I wonder if, as this morning’s drama suggests, Nicodemus heard something in Jesus that reminded him of his true home.  Nicodemus’ encounter with Jesus reminds us that we must leave the darkness of our disbelief to enter the light that Christ came to bring.

When I was a young adult, on the cusp of becoming my own true self, I didn’t yet have the courage to affirm—to proclaim to my friends—what Christ had done for me.  I walked right past Brother Jesse as if I didn’t hear him.   It was later that I approached God in a spirit of openness to allow the true depth of my relationship with my God to mature.  But God had never forgotten me.  The God who sent the Son for the salvation of the world—the God who transformed Nicodemus, waits also for each of us to acknowledge the gift of grace, to accept salvation, to come to God in a spirit of openness.

And, so we tell the story over and over.  It is our story.  We dramatize it and we enact it and we live it, each in our own way.  And in the telling and the living, we proclaim that Christ is transformed from just another raving fanatic to the Son of God, the Savior of the world.

Thanks be to God!