2024-05-28
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
May 26, 2024 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
John 3:1-17 The Federated Church, UCC
Here’s my question for us this morning: have you and I been born again? And if so, when? And How? Jesus could not possibly be clearer about how crucial such rebirth is. And much of the culture in which we live makes it abundantly clear that being born again is vital—indeed, for many, a requirement—for Christian faith. So how about it: what’s our born-again experience?
My guess is that, for a number of us here this morning, the question grates on us. We’re aware of the way that phrase, that image of being born again, has been used as a kind of weapon in a culture war. To be born again is seen, in many quarters, as a litmus test of faith: if you’ve been born again, you pass; if you haven’t, your faith is suspect. And it’s this that we’re going to explore, and frankly to question, this morning.
Let’s start with Jesus. Here we are near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry as the gospel of John tells it. A man named Nicodemus, a religious leader, comes to Jesus “by night.” And Jesus tells him that, unless a person is “born again,” they will not see God. Nicodemus is utterly perplexed by Jesus’ odd image, and wonders aloud how in the world a person can enter again into their mother’s womb and be born a second time. Nicodemus is a literalist of the first order, maybe the original fundamentalist. He would have failed a high school poetry course, perplexed about how fog could come in “on little cat feet” (“Fog,” Carl Sandburg) or how hope could be “the thing with feathers” (“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson). Where’s the cat in the sky? Nicodemus would wonder; how nonsensical to talk about feathers as the way hope shows itself. He would entirely miss the significance of image and metaphor.
Jesus, though, is a poet. He knows that life’s most important matters can hardly be talked about literally. How do you talk about faith or hope or beauty or grace if not by metaphor? In this very conversation, Jesus shows the need for metaphor in ultimate matters by using the image of wind for the way the Spirit works in our lives. Comparing the Spirit to wind is Jesus’ way of saying that that Spirit is not something we control. The wind—that Spirit—“blows where it chooses” (3:8). It’s a startlingly evocative way of talking about the ineffable, mysterious movement of God in our lives. The Greek word, in fact, “pneuma,” means both “wind” and “spirit.” The same is true in Hebrew, the word “ruach” also meaning both “wind” and “spirit.” Jesus knows that images such as these conjure ultimate mysteries. The Spirit, he says, is like the wind.
Knowing that the inexpressible can only be approached indirectly, and that there really is no way to talk about God literally, Jesus suggests that life with God can be supremely enriched by our being born again. Which is a fine and stimulating image for the spiritual life. Nicodemus, though, entirely misses Jesus’ point. And this is in large measure because the word Jesus uses about being born is not just being born “again.” It is that. But it’s also more than that. The word Jesus uses that’s so often translated “again” also means “from above.” Anothen is the Greek word, and we have no comparable word in English. Jesus is saying that Nicodemus will find his faith deepened if he is born both “again” and “from above.”
Nicodemus, though, the president of the literalists’ club, lights on just one part of the meaning of that word. How can a person “enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” he asks (3:4). What Jesus means at least as much as being born “again,” though, is that the idea is for Nicodemus to be born “from above”—to find life, in other words, in the trust that we are always in the embrace of God. To be born “from above” is to find fullness in the arms, and by the mercy, of God. If we’re born “from above,” we trust that we are always accompanied by God; that, no matter what happens, “all shall be well” (Julian of Norwich); that in life and in death, we are held in holy arms; and that, as followers of Christ, we have a scintillating mission of compassion and forgiveness and justice-making that conquers all worldly agendas. That is something of what it means to be born “from above.”
The funny thing about the conversation that happens in this culture about being born again is that it’s almost invariably presented as some sort of accomplishment that we’re expected to achieve if we’re to have real standing with God. You need to be born again is what’s conveyed to us from certain quarters. Jesus, though, could not possibly be clearer that that’s not at all what he means when he uses that image. Just as you and I have absolutely no control in our first birth—it’s something that happens entirely to us—so we have equally little control in our second birth, or the birth from above. I’m going to say this as clearly as I possibly can: spiritual birth is solely the gift of God. It is not a superior feat. It is not an achievement that earns a person some sort of spiritual medal. It is exclusively a present from the Holy One, as if God is saying to us, ‘Here, this is my gift to you. Receive it or not—that’s your choice. But my deepest joy,’ we can hear God saying, ‘is to give it to you.’ Jesus knows that to be born “from above” is to receive the gift of all gifts.
If echoes of a stern, punitive, demanding theology still lead you to suspect that being born again is something we are required to do, remember how Jesus phrases it. He doesn’t say you have to be born again to achieve a certain status with God. He doesn’t say that only if you are born again are you saved. He doesn’t say that being born again is the A+ you need to win God over to your side. Jesus says only that, if you’re born again from above, you will now “see” God with a renewed clarity. The key word is “see.” Not “achieve,” not “meet the standard,” not “pass the test.” If we’re born again from above, we simply see differently. And that seeing with fresh eyes makes all the difference. In a word, it’s what saves us. And it saves us not as some sort of status we’ve achieved, but simply as an eye-opening, heart-changing, utterly transformative rejuvenation of our entire being. To be born from above is like unexpectedly coming across a spiritual diamond ring offered to us gratis.
Probably like you, I have been born again from above many times. And when it happens, it is always a gift over which I have no control. I want to share some of my own divine rebirths with you as a way of perhaps evoking in all of us some of the wonder of God’s continual rebirthing of us. These are random rebirth-from-above snapshots from my life that invite us to see the events of all our lives in a new light.
In the first church I served, in Vermont, I received a performance review every year. These reviews catalogued my strengths and itemized my weaknesses. And, as they have for my whole ministry, including all the years since, these reviews were similar each year. And every year, I was grateful for the affirmation; and every year, I also fretted about my weaknesses and wondered, largely unsuccessfully, how I might eliminate those perceived shortcomings. It was a frankly less-than-satisfying process.
Then one year, a man named Brian Vachon led the review team. And in his summation of my performance, he said this: “We could take away Hamilton’s weaknesses, but then we would lose his strengths.” That simple line hit me with the force of a freight train. It may be the single most helpful observation I ever received in a performance review. I finally began to get it (though not without needing it repeated many times since): I am simply built the way I’m built. And the gifts I bring to ministry are indivisibly linked to qualities that, in other contexts, may not be particularly productive. The fact is that I would never be a great groundskeeper or music minister or director of operations. There’s a wholeness to this self of mine, in other words, and the strengths I’ve been given bring with them a corresponding set of weaknesses or limits. To hear that and take it in was a kind of being born again from above. It was a freeing gift. And in some palpable way, it made me new.
The man who wrote that performance review, Brian, died a number of years ago. And when he died, I knew how important it was for me to let his widow, Nancy, know what he had meant to me. So I vowed, when I had some uninterrupted time, that I would write her and let her know. And the weeks went by and the months went by and the years went by, and I never wrote her. And it gnawed at me.
Then last fall, some of you will remember that I had the chance to return to that church and to preach at the celebration of their 200th anniversary. And after the service as I stood on the lawn greeting people, I turned, and there was Nancy standing in front of me. And I hugged her. And I told her what a sweet and wonderful gift Brian had been to me. I told her the story of that long-ago performance review. And I said to her how deeply sorry I was that I had never written to her to tell her that. And when I finished. she stood back and looked at me with a sweet smile, and said, “This was better than any note could have been.” And in her understanding and forgiveness, and in our shared recognition of the gift of connecting, I was born again from above. And in some palpable way, it made me new.
When I was growing up, as is true for almost all of us, I conceived of God as male. It was simply the way apparently everyone pictured the Deity. And then in my teens and twenties, something of that picture began to crack. It wasn’t that God wasn’t male. It’s simply that God was and is so much more than male. Because we are now in a different era, it may be difficult for some here to take in the effect of what it was like to hear about this depth and breadth and fullness of God for the first time. For some, seeing God as more than male was deeply threatening and unnerving. For me, it was thrillingly freeing. One moment in that awareness stands out for me with special force. I will always remember standing for the benediction at the end of a worship service in the church in which I grew up, and hearing the minister speak the lilting words of the Irish blessing. This is what he said: “May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, the rain fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you always in the palm of her hand.” And a bolt of lightning went through me. And the wonders of God became scintillating in a way they hadn’t been before. And in my hearing of that simple and fresh and deep truth, I was born again from above. And in some palpable way, it made me new.
Something not unlike that wonder at the extravagant richness and freshness of God and God’s world has accompanied my realization that gender identity, too, is far more pliable than I had ever imagined. As have most of us, I grew up with the notion that there were two genders, male and female. You’re one or the other. Simple. Or so it seemed. It was then quite a jolt to realize that I and we had oversimplified things, that, as with so much of human sexuality, we had forced an either/or rather than see the gradations and nuances of people’s own experiences of gender and sexuality. How startling and eye-opening it has been to realize that a noticeable percentage of people experience themselves as having been born into a body that doesn’t match their sense of themselves, and that others experience themselves as somewhere on a spectrum of gender identity—as neither exclusively male nor exclusively female, as literally “non-binary.”
The retort comes regularly from some who are resistant to this notion of spectrum that, as it says in the biblical book of Genesis, God created them “male and female” (1:27), and that therefore people are one or the other. And it has been enormously helpful to me to be reminded instead that those words from Genesis are not limiting words, as though those two genders are all that’s allowed. In that same biblical creation story (Genesis 1:1-2:4a), after all, God also created night and day but we all know that’s not all there is. In between there’s also dusk and dawn. And in that same story, God created land and water, but in between there are also bogs and marshes. The biblical creation story, in other words, is not in any way intended to restrict the world to a series of straitjacketed binaries. That story is simply intended to convey the depth and variety of what God created. Day and night, yes, and also dusk and dawn. Land and water, yes, and also bogs and marshes. Male and female, yes, and also other experiences of gender on a rich and grace-filled palette, a spectrum that, truth be told, belongs to God and that is not for you and me to codify. And in coming to see this infinitely beautiful variety, I have been born again from above. And in some palpable way, it has made me new.
To be born again from above is certainly not something to be restricted to once in a lifetime. To be born again from above can happen today and tomorrow and every day going forward. It’s what happens when old ways of conceiving things are upended, and we see crucial matters in new ways. It’s what happens when we see the splendid beauty and wonder of God with fresh eyes. It’s what happens when we see again the astonishing grandeur of this precious world in which we live. Born again from above, to see the world with God’s eyes and commit to its flourishing? What could be better?! May it always be so.