March 12, 2017
John 3:1-16
Now there was a Pharisee, named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 2 He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” 3 Jesus answered him, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” 4 Nicodemus said to him “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” 5 Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 8 The wind blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” 9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 10 Jesus answered him, “Are you are a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? 11 Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and testify to what we’ve have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. 12 If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe; how then can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven—the Son of Man. 14 Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” 16 For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
That reading gives us two of the most treasured passages in scripture, for Christians:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” That is the New Testament in one sentence. God has broken into history in Jesus, sending us the Son — coming to us in flesh, in order to save. “God so loved…” The gift comes in love, with love, out of love. And so, in Christ, the heart of God is exposed.
Each word in that sentence is a ‘loaded word’. “God”, “loved”, “the world”, “only Son”, “everyone”, “believes”, “eternal life”. These are the words of our faith we use whenever we gather for worship. The emphasis might change week to week—it might be one or another, or a combination of more than one, but there they are: God, loved, the world, only Son, everyone, believes, eternal life.
And the other remembered, and perhaps treasured, passage is, “You must be born from above.” Now at this point, we have to comment and try to explain this phrase. Nicodemus was confused by the language, and we join him in the confusion. What did Jesus mean?
Some like to translate the phrase, “You must be born again.” This is the way that Nicodemus understood it, and he was certainly puzzled by that. After all, we had nothing to do with being born the first time, how can we be born a second time? Does it just happen? Is there an agent of that birth? Who’s in control of the birth? And how long is the gestation period?
There are parts of this country where, “born again” is the daily conversation between believers. And if you say, “Yes, I’ve been born again,” you will be asked specific questions about how, where, when, and in which church did that take place?
The phrase means, literally, “born from above”, or it could mean, “born anew”… that’s an adequate translation. It means a spiritual birth. We come into the world as members of a human family with names, and faces and identities. But the Lord is saying that God acts on our lives in order to give birth to faith. Faith isn’t something that comes with the territory when we’re born into this world. Faith is that which comes from God as a gift, and it is like a second birth. This time with our knowledge and with our acceptance. Sometimes that spiritual birth is quite simple—it seems as though we were hardly aware that it happened. There wasn’t much pain, there were very few struggles. We emerged with faith that Christ has come to save us — but how exactly and when and where, perhaps we couldn’t say.
For others it is dramatic, with a definite date and place and occasion. Like Paul on the road to Damascus – he recounts a blinding light and a voice from heaven. But we need to ask, was that a spiritual birth or a call to ministry? It was years after the blinding light that Paul began his work. Sometimes the call of God comes to us and we put it off for a long time.
To be “born from above” means to enter the community of Christ; engage in some form of service to others; and live a life in Christ. The community of Christ is the central part of the birth process. We are not born from above, separate from congregations of believers.
When our Lord says, “You must be born from above,” in the sentence, the you is plural—it isn’t singular. Our Lord is speaking to us, not just to Nicodemus. He is referring to communities, congregations, where the spiritual life is experienced and lived out.
We live in a time when people are happy to speak about spiritual matters and faith as long as nobody else is involved. Well, that’s not what our Lord is referring to. The church itself came into being through the Holy Spirit. It’s made up of people in the process of being ‘made new’. I think we have to be ‘born from above’ almost every day of our lives—with advances and retreats, maturity and regression, decision and unsettlement.
God is at work on us. God is giving birth to a life in Christ in community. We are not the prime movers. We’re not in control of the process. We don’t give birth to ourselves.
So our task is to glorify God, and enjoy what God is doing in our lives. Accept the fact that birth is taking place. Notice how it’s happening. See others in the same process of rebirth — and rejoice together.
Our Lord spoke to Nicodemus about ‘wind’ and ‘spirit’, and in Greek they are the very same word—and in Hebrew they are the very same word, ‘wind’ and ‘spirit’. Forces that are at work on our lives and in us. They just show up on their own. They go to work. They move us along. They bring us together. They keep us together. And they resist control, but they are here. The Holy Spirit is here even if you can’t see it. And even if you can’t see God—God is here. Even if you can’t see Christ—Christ is here. The Spirit is here. All these things.
To be ‘born from above’ is to begin to see. (That’s what our Lord said to Nicodemus – “no one can see the Kingdom of God without being ‘born from above.’)
It’s just one of those things, friends. I think we really do come to a place in our lives where we really wish we had a chance to do it all over again, to begin again. I think that our Lord is giving us language for what is involved in that. Yes, that opportunity is there. It’s ‘wind’ and ‘spirit’ operating in our lives.
A witness to being ‘born from above’ and ‘seeing with new eyes’ is the contemporary writer and poet, Kathleen Norris. She had come back to the church after twenty years of having absolutely nothing to do with the church. She moved with her husband from New York City to South Dakota—to the town and even the house in which her mother had lived. And when she moved back, her faith was nurtured in some Benedictine Monasteries that are there in North Dakota (who knew?) where she would go on retreat, and in the small Presbyterian Church in town. And in her book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith – a view of the church and life in Christ through new eyes, she writes:
Not long ago, after I had presented a portion of this book at a Catholic college, a woman in the audience asked a question. The discussion period was coming to an end and I was getting ready to call it a night, but the faculty member who had introduced me spotted her hand in the air. I’ll always be grateful to him for so carefully scanning the darkened auditorium, and to her for allowing curiosity and frustration to overcome discretion. “I don’t mean to be offensive,” she said, “but I just don’t understand how you can get so much comfort from a religion whose language does so much harm.’”
Norris writes: I had spent too many years outside the Christian religion to be offended by her comment. I know very well that faith can seem strange, and even impenetrable, to those who do not share it. I understood all to well where that question was coming from. But how to respond, there and then, to this woman’s evident bafflement and even anguish?
I took a deep breath, and blessed clarity came. I realized that what troubled me most was her use of the word, “comfort,” and so in my reply I addressed that first. I said that I didn’t think it was comfort I was seeking or comfort that I’d found. Look, I said to her, as a rush of words came to me. As far as I’m concerned, this religion has saved my life, my husband’s life, and our marriage. So it’s not comfort that I’m talking about but salvation.
The woman nodded her head vigorously as if to ward off any more undeniable and incomprehensible things I might say. As for myself, I was startled by the words that had come flying out of my mouth; as so often happens when I am put on the spot, I had said things I hadn’t fully realized were true until I’d said them. All in all, it felt good to drop for a moment the polite fiction of religious tolerance and get down to the real questions people have about faith in the modern era: How can you believe this stuff? How can you find good, where I see only prejudice, sexism and evil? I don’t understand.
She goes on: Faith of course is not readily understandable, which makes it suspect among people who have been educated to value ideas, insofar as they are comprehensible, quantifiable, consistent. Like a poem… faith does not conform itself to ideology but to experience. And for the Christian this means the experience of the person of Jesus Christ, not as someone who once lived in Galilee but who lives now in all believers. It is this faith in Christ as a living person that is most inexplicable outside of the experience of faith, and also most fragile… As a faith in a living person, it retains the freedom to continually renew itself in ancient words and rituals that the sophisticated, secular mentality considers exhausted—all but dead.
Kathleen Norris is describing, in her own way, a birth of faith. Conceived out of the love of God, rooted in Christ the Only Son, reliant on the Spirit at work among us, directing us to salvation, directing us to eternal life. And it’s like being “born from above.” There is no other phrase for it.
Thanks and Praise be to God. Amen.
