2018-05-29
Brooke Strong
Scripture: John 3:1-17
Somewhere today, on this Memorial Day weekend, there is a parent who has lost a child in a war, perhaps in Afghanistan or Iraq. The grief hangs on. It is never far from the surface. And in trying to find some light in the tunnel, maybe some words of the Bible come to him. And this is what lingers: “You must be born again” (John 3:3). And the parent plays with that phrase and wonders how to do that.
Somewhere today, another parent, a parent of a teenager, has lost that child. The fifteen-year-old drinks and has fallen victim to opioids. The parent is overwhelmed and petrified, and cannot imagine how to deal with this. And maybe some words of the Bible come to her: “You must be born again.” And the parent ponders what that could mean.
Somewhere today, likely right in the midst of Blossom, a teenage couple have fallen for each other as they wander around the rides and crowds and carnival foods. And they have never felt so elated, so fully alive. Every word, every gesture fills them with excitement and wonder. And while a Bible verse may not be the most prominent thing on their minds in this moment, maybe at some point they will hear that phrase—“You must be born again”—and wonder what those words have to do with this fledgling love.
“You must be born again.” Familiar words in this culture. Prominent words in many church circles. And thought to be the answer to all of life’s problems. If you’re born again, everything will be made right—so goes this way of thinking. If you are born again—and really, there is no “if” about it; the assumption is you must be born again—then the lines will fall in pleasant places and life will be what you hope it will be. You’re taking one for the team this weekend, and doing something with family that you’d rather not be doing? You’re waiting on test results, nervous as a cat about what they portend? You’re bored out of your mind because you have no one with whom to share your life? Be born again. That’s the answer to life’s problems. That’s all you need to do.
And maybe it’s true. Maybe that is all you and I need to do. Just be born again and watch life fall into place. But for some of us, it’s not as easy as that. The whole notion of being “born again” just leaves us cold, a tad squeamish. It conjures up images of litmus tests, and onerous requirements, and a judgmental world in which some people are in and most others are out.
“Born again” is something of a loaded phrase in contemporary America. You may have been buttonholed by a friend or relative who’s experienced a sudden conversion and has grilled you about your born again experience: when were you saved, what was the date, what was the setting? Such a palpable conversion has become, in some quarters, a necessary condition of faith: without such a moment, your faith doesn’t really count. Without such a clear demarcation between past and present, your faith isn’t really real. It’s a sham, a thin veneer. So some quarters of the church believe.
The trouble, for many of us, is that we’ve never experienced that sort of earth-shaking moment. If you have had such a conversion, I imagine it’s a remarkable and life-changing event. There is certainly nothing at all wrong with a one-time born-again experience. In fact, I imagine it to be a beautiful and incredibly reassuring centerpiece to your life. I’d love to hear your account of it.
But what I want to say to the legions of people for whom this sort of experience is a kind of admission ticket to what they define as true faith—what I want to say to them is: please, don’t stand outside and judge the experience I have had. Don’t presume that that is the only way to come to faith. Don’t dismiss the sort of faith that has sustained me and so many others for eons.
Because this insistence on a single “born-again” experience has too often been used as a kind of battering ram, it’s crucial that we look again at the story of Nicodemus as John tells it. Several of the story’s details stand out, and point us in a more nourishing direction.
When Nicodemus shows up on Jesus’ doorstep—at night, it should be noted, suggesting, not so subtly, that Nicodemus himself may be in the dark—he’s trying to get a fuller sense of who Jesus is. He thinks that because he and others have seen Jesus do some fantastic things, then these mind-blowing signs are the centerpiece of who Jesus is.
Jesus, though, says what makes him unique has nothing really to do with those admittedly spectacular signs. Like many of us at one time or another, Nicodemus seems to think that the core of Jesus’ identity lies in these dramatic acts of his. When Jesus turns water into wine, as he does earlier in John’s gospel, that’s the sort of thing, in Nicodemus’ eyes, that makes Jesus special. Signs and miracles are what Jesus is all about, so goes this way of thinking.
Jesus, though, turns this perspective on its head. The heart of Jesus’ identity is not about earthly signs and miracles. His ministry is not first of all about stupefying theatrics. It’s about presence. It’s about love. It’s about hope. It’s about death and resurrection. It’s not about magic, in other words. It’s about the faithfulness of God in life and in death. The truth is you may not get a dramatic sign. Your cancer may continue unabated; your divorce may run you over like a freight train; you may fail miserably at work, with no one there to bail you out and make it all right. And even so, something mysterious and gorgeous and life-giving may give you a peace that surpasses all understanding. You may come to see that, no matter how things turn out, all shall be well. Despair becomes hope. Death becomes life. Whether you had words for it or not, you have been born again. As an unearned gift. This, I think, is something like what Jesus is trying to tell Nicodemus.
The thing about Jesus’ notion of being born again is first of all that it is not a one-time thing. Jesus doesn’t say to Nicodemus, ‘You need to have this singular experience whose date and time you will always remember.’ In no way does the story indicate that such an experience should happen only once. I think Jesus meant this as a repeatable experience, that this sort of birth is something that could well happen again and again—born again today, tomorrow, the next day.
Furthermore, when Jesus says, “You must be born again,” he doesn’t mean it as a requirement, like needing to buy a ticket in order to get into a movie. He means it instead simply to indicate what a stupendous gift this will be—like saying, “It’s our 50th wedding anniversary! We must have a big party!” He doesn’t say, “This is the test you need to pass.” No, what he says is simply that being born in this way is part of what it is to see God.
What’s key to this whole thing is that whatever sort of birth Jesus is talking about, he’s not talking about something that we ourselves make happen. What’s the most obvious thing you can say about birth? It’s that we ourselves don’t do anything to bring it about. You talk about something in which you and I have absolutely no control, it’s birth. You may remember from English-grammar classes the difference between the active voice and the passive voice. The active voice is “Chris went to the store.” The passive voice is “Chris was taken to the store.” In the case of new birth, it couldn’t possibly be more passive: birth is something that happens to us, not something we make happen.
So it’s a betrayal of Jesus’s words to contort them as if to say we should engineer our own births. No! When new birth happens, it happens from outside of us. And there’s a facet of the story as it’s told in Greek that makes this clear. In Greek, the word we so often hear translated as “again”—as in being born “again”—that same word has a second meaning in Greek that is not at all obvious in English. When Jesus lifts up the wonders of being born in this spiritual way, the word has a second meaning. Jesus also means that a person is to be born “from above.” Born “again,” yes. But also born “from above.”
Meaning, of course, that this birth is given by God. Nicodemus hears only that single meaning of “again,” and doesn’t hear the equally important meaning “from above.” So the very mistake that he makes is duplicated over and over again in our day and age. When people insist you need to be born “again,” they miss out on the richness of a word that also means “from above.” They have flattened out that word and made exactly the same mistake that Nicodemus is making. No! If we’re going to hear the fullness of Jesus’ meaning, we need to hear the richness of that word.
I realize you may not have come to church today to hear a theological treatise. Sometimes, though, it’s important to clear up misunderstandings and try to point to something richer than the misconceptions that dog popular culture, religious or otherwise. And one of our most pervasive misconceptions is that the Bible is somehow to be taken literally.
In Friday’s comic strip “Garfield,” Jon’s girlfriend Liz says to Jon, “They say love makes the world go ’round.” Jon looks absolutely horrified and says, “So without it, the world would stop and we would fly off and be killed?!” “Not literally,” says Liz, and that’s precisely the issue here.
What is so easy to forget, when we listen to the Bible, is that it is not first of all a rule book or a history book or a science book. More than anything, the Bible is poetry. It’s language that attempts to evoke something beyond literal words. Theologian Richard Rohr says, “Before 500 BCE, religion and poetry were largely the same thing. People did not presume to be able to define the Mystery. They looked for words that could describe the Mystery. Poetry doesn’t claim to be a perfect description as dogma foolishly does. It’s a ‘hint half guessed,’ to use T.S. Eliot’s phrase. . . .
“Poetry does this by speaking in metaphors,” says Rohr. And then he says, “All religious language is metaphor by necessity . . . Religion points toward a Mystery that you don’t know—can’t know—until you have experienced it” (Daily Meditation, May 22, 2018). God is mystery that can only be evoked by poetry and metaphor.
Nothing is a better illustration of that than the notion of God as Trinity. You can’t explain what the Trinity is. You can’t come up with a rational description of what it means to say God is three-in-one. It’s three or it’s one, our rational minds object—it can’t be both! But it is. As I said to someone the other day, the Trinity is like three different windows into the same room. Each window reveals a different dimension of that room. But you can’t say, “This is precisely what each window reveals.” No. The image evokes something, and this is what matters.
Think of a bit of familiar poetry. Carl Sandburg says, “The fog comes/ on little cat feet./ It sits looking/ over harbor and city/ on silent haunches/ and then moves on.” And on one level those words are nonsense: fog doesn’t have feet; it’s not a cat. But the image evokes something and conveys something true, even though it’s not literally true.
That’s what the language of Jesus so often does. Nicodemus wants to reduce Jesus’ words to their literal level. “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Nicodemus has totally missed the metaphor, as have so many of Jesus’ followers in our day and age. Jesus isn’t telling us to return to our mothers’ wombs, as if we could.
No. Jesus is telling us instead something much richer and truer and more profound. He’s telling us that by the hand of God, you and I can know and experience something life-changing. We can be filled with grace. We can be transformed by love. We can find peace and hope and fullness of life where we didn’t think it was possible. Not by means of anything we did, but only by the hand of the God whose sheer joy it is to fill you and me with goodness and wonder and love.
And our role in this born-again-from-above process? It’s not to do anything to make it happen. It’s only to receive it. It’s to open our eyes and hearts to see it and take it in. And then it’s to say, “Yes. Thank you.”
Remember the people we called to mind at the beginning? A father has lost his child in war. A mother has lost her teenager to alcohol and drugs. A young couple has fallen head over heels-in-love. What can it possibly mean to any of them to be born again? Well, of course, it helps immensely to remember that what Jesus is talking about most profoundly is being born from above. When life is at its fullest, it has been graced by Someone beyond us. It has discovered its very foundation. It has taken flight. And not because of anything we’ve done, but only by virtue of the gift of all gifts.
A couple of days ago, a Federated member sent me some words of the Dalai Lama: “I believe the purpose of all the major religious traditions is not to construct big temples on the outside, but to create temples of compassion and goodness on the inside, in our hearts” (https://appreciativeinquiry.champlain.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Dalai_Lama_Jerusalem_interview_guide.pdf). This is what rebirth is. It’s making room for God’s compassion and goodness to flower on the inside.
Never let it be said that you and I haven’t had the experience of rebirth. If you should ever wonder, or if someone should ever ask you, “Have you been born again?” I suspect you can answer truthfully that you have. You have perhaps seen the heroism of soldiers who have died for the sake of something larger than themselves, and as you see that, you are born again from above. You have shared in the magic of contributing to love and justice, and as you have done so, you are born again from above. You have seen a lost child recover and find new direction, and as you do, you are born again from above. You have shared abundant life here at Federated, and as you do, you are born again from above. You have been reminded by this amazing religious tradition of ours that no human being is an animal, that every person is a beloved child of God, that arms and hearts wide open is the only real way to be, and as you do, you are born again from above. In countless venues, you and I have known or witnessed amazing, sacrificial, self-giving love, and as we do, we are born again and again and again, from above. And in such marvels, we are filled to the brim with blessings beyond compare! Thanks be to God!