Loading...In May 1868, General John A. Logan, the commander-in-chief of the Union Veterans’ Group known as the Grand Army of the Republic, issued a decree that May 30 be a nationwide day of commemoration for the more than 620,000 soldiers who were killed in battle or died as a result of wounds incurred in battle in the recently ended Civil War.
He called it Decocration Day and asked Americans to lay flowers and decorate the graves of the war dead.
reference: [https://www.history.com/news/8-things-you-may-not-know-about-memorial-day]
Some of you have spent the weekend decorating the cemetery or the waterfront with flags or flowers. I managed to carefully mine my storage closet and unearth the American flag and hang it from my balcony. Decorating my home helps me remember.
It’s the same reason that every year on January 1st I take out Patsy’s ‘pink.’
Patsy’s pink is this leftover yarn from the skein I first learned to knit a lace pattern. Patsy was my knitting instructor and the 68-year-old partner of my friend Starla who owned the Crafty Hands Yarn Shop in Bowling Green Kentucky.
Every Tuesday I would take my beginner’s knitting to class and Patsy would help me learn not only how to cope with unraveling mistakes but also how to manage my temper through some very frustrating knots. I was always attracted to complicated advanced level patterns. When I would ask Patsy, “Can I try this pattern next?” she would honestly look me in the eye and say, “Let’s build.”
Four months before she was going on an Alaskan cruise she had surgery from which she never recovered and died of complications on New Years Day. So on New Years Day I decorate a special corner in my home with her yarn. I light a candle and remember her patience, wisdom, and honesty — and that she died too young and too soon and too suddenly for my liking.
Patsy gave me the gift of her friendship, a friendship I gratefully pay for with grief over her death.
The year Patsy died happened to be the same year I needed her most. It was the year of what is often described as a midlife crisis. I certainly experienced a series of rapid fire crises. But I also experienced a Nicodemus-kind-of-night.
A Nicodemus kind of night is a night when a person is up in the dark morning hours asking, “How is it possible for life to go on?”
“How is there even such a thing as life left to live now?”
“How do I go on?”
I don’t know if Nicodemus was having a midlife crisis, but he was up in the middle of the night to ask Jesus the same exact questions.
Why would a trained expert ask a carpenter about serious religious matters which require years of study?
Has Jesus even read the Bible?
Jesus is not only an expert in God’s word, he also has an expertise in darkness and in being there for those who are stumbling through it and who grope blindly for God’s answers. And Jesus gives stumbling blind Nicodemus a gift Nicodemus then gives to all of us. Jesus entrusts Nicodemus with the summary of salvation.
You know it by heart because it’s on a coffee mug or a refrigerator magnet, or you see a sign held by someone behind the goal posts at televised football games: “John 3:16”.
Say it with me: For God so Loved the world that he gave his only Son so that all who believe in him may not perish but have everlasting life.
Sneaky Nicodemus is that friend for Jesus. It’s Nicodemus we have to thank for the answer when we are sneaking around in the dark with questions we are afraid for others to hear us asking God.
Jesus gives Nicodemus the one terrible wonderful answer: that there is a God, with a team, who has a plan. The plan includes one teammate sacrificing everything on behalf of the captain. And because of his sacrifice everyone is eligible to be drafted into the team, regardless of expertise, or even fidelity.
Jesus gives Nicodemus the gift of friendship. A friendship Nicodemus will pay for on Good Friday when he and Joseph of Arimathea haul the dead body of their friend, along with 100 pounds of aloe and spices to anoint Jesus’ dead body to Joseph’s tomb and bury him there.
Good Friday comes in chapter nineteen. Scripture doesn’t say if Nicodemus told Joseph what Jesus had said to him in chapter 3 about new birth. In chapter 19 it would appear that everything has been fulfilled and come all unraveled all on the same day.
Can a person endure two midlife crisis? Researcher Brene Brown describes midlife best when she blogs this:
To call what happens at midlife “a crisis” is bullshit. A crisis is an intense, short-lived, acute, easily identifiable, and defining event that can be controlled and managed.
Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling.
Midlife is not about the fear of death. Midlife is death. Tearing down the walls that we spent our entire life building is death. Like it or not, at some point during midlife, you’re going down, and after that there are only two choices: staying down or enduring rebirth.
reference: [The Midlife Unraveling: Blog by Brene Brown May 24, 2018: ]
Nicodemus chooses rebirth. And because he lived into the mystery of life-after-unraveling we have the gift of “John 3:16” to hold in our hands like a skein of soft yarn during the dark hours of the night.
“John 3:16” may decorate our coffee mugs, magnets, football games but the summary of salvation also decorates our treatment of other people with this testimony: God Loves the World. Jesus died as a result of wounds incurred in battle, a battle we remember when we decorate our lives with Love. AMEN.
