May 26, 2024, You Must Be Born Again, John 3:1-21 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ May 26, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to the sermon, click the link above. The text is below.

Today Jesus uses the metaphor of birth, which is something I am pretty familiar with. You know we have had ten children, and every single one of our children’s births was completely different. Some of my labors were very, very long – and one baby came so quickly that she was entering the world even as our doctor came running up the stairs to our bedroom. Some births were harder or easier, some were more or less risky than others, but the one common thing is that every birth is a process: it’s a journey, it’s messy, it hurts, it’s really hard work, but in the end there is the incredible joy of a brand new life.

We read from John’s gospel this morning about a man named Nicodemus, who came to visit Jesus secretly. He came under cover of night, because he was a Pharisee and visiting Jesus wasn’t a popular or even a safe thing for him to do. Nicodemus was afraid, but he was also drawn to Jesus, almost against his will it seems, because he was an honest man, and he couldn’t deny that he saw the hand of God in what Jesus was doing. We know from John’s gospel that Nicodemus continued to believe in Jesus because later he spoke up for Jesus when the Jewish leaders were trying to have him arrested, and at the very last, after the crucifixion, Nicodemus himself brought a great quantity of spices and oils and helped Joseph of Arimathea prepare Jesus’s body for burial.

But in this first meeting that we read about today, Jesus completely confused Nicodemus by telling him that the only way to God was to start life all over again, from the very beginning, to be born again just like a newborn baby. Nicodemus was dumbfounded; it was such a ridiculous image – and besides, he was an old man, too old to start all over again. “What do you mean, be born again? You think an old man like me can go back into his mother’s womb and be born a second time?”

Nicodemus seems to be making a joke out of what Jesus was saying to him, but I think he did that to hide his real reaction – which was not only confusion, but also fear. He was drawn to Jesus, he wanted to learn from him, he saw God in him, but what Jesus was saying made no sense to him. To be told you have to start all over again, when you are already old, when you feel you are already “there”, wherever “there” is – that’s pretty terrifying. Nicodemus was an old man, he was a learned and successful man, and in the eyes of his fellow Pharisees he had “arrived”. He was a highly respected teacher and follower of the law of Moses, which had taken him a lifetime of study and hard work. And here was Jesus, telling him he had to start over, let go of everything and follow God’s Spirit, which, just for the record, wasn’t something you could write down and study and memorize and become an expert in, but which blew around at will, so that you never knew where it was coming from or where it was going.

For Nicodemus, what Jesus was saying might have felt a lot like standing on the edge of a cliff with everything he ever knew solid and safe and sure behind him, and being told that following God just means taking one little step – into thin air. It’s a bit like many people feel when they retire from a job they’ve been working at for 40 or 50 years, and they try to imagine what they are going to do and who they are going to be in the days and weeks and months and years stretching ahead of him, when they’re no longer the electrician or secretary or teacher they’ve been for as long as they can remember. It’s like many parents feel when their last child goes off to college and they stand looking around at an empty house, and empty beds, and silent, empty hours stretching ahead of them. Entering into an entirely new life can be one of the scariest things we have to do, especially when we already feel old and tired, but Jesus told Nicodemus that was exactly what he was going to have to do.

I think when we hear the term “born again” many of us have it associated with a certain kind of fundamentalist Christianity. “Born again” isn’t a very Episcopalian term. It seems to be mostly identified with people who don’t drink or smoke, who take the Bible literally and go to church several times a week and sing only worship choruses – they are “born again” because of the things they do and believe, and the way they choose to live. But actually the term “born again” doesn’t belong to a certain branch of Christianity, it belongs to Jesus. Jesus is the one who talked about being born again, because birth is a really good picture of what it means to follow him.

And to begin with, birth is not something we do – it is something that happens to us. Think about it: is there any time you were less in control of your life than when you were on your way through the birth canal and into this world you knew nothing about? But that’s a great image of what it’s like to follow God; because following him means, first of all, relinquishing control, handing the reins of our life over to God. Jesus said the same thing in lots of other ways, too, when he told us to deny ourselves, and take up our cross daily, when he told us that the way to life is to die to ourselves, when he called his disciples to leave everything behind, when he invited the rich young man to sell everything he had and come, follow him.

He asks us to let go of our accomplishments and our big plans, our well-crafted identities and a lot of the things we’re absolutely sure of – which is a hard thing to do. Sometimes it’s a very painful thing to do. But when we trust Jesus enough to let those things go, then we are born again. Then we enter the process of rebirth and renewal that is our life of faith in Christ. Then we are delivered from the bondage of the world’s expectations and rules and traditions. Then we are moved and empowered by the entirely unpredictable breath of the Spirit, who fills the lungs of our spirits as we emerge, gasping and wide-eyed, into the fresh mercies of God’s new day.

The image of being reborn is – at least in part – Jesus’s way of warning us that following him is never going to be as neat and tidy and controllable as just getting baptized, and following the Ten Commandments and going to church, as good as those things might be. If birth is a good symbol of the life of faith – and Jesus seemed to think so –  it is at least in part a good symbol because like being born, following Jesus is messy, and sometimes it’s scary; it’s sometimes exhausting, it’s often painful. Birth is not an easy journey for a baby to make. But it is the only journey that leads us into life.

I think it’s important for us to understand that when Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born again if he wanted to enter the kingdom of God, he was not telling him that he had to do and believe the right things so that he could go to heaven when he died. And I think that’s very often the way people understand what Jesus is saying here. The kingdom of God that Jesus is speaking of is not life-after-death; it’s abundant life beginning now. It’s living and being reborn every day, day by day, being transformed from glory to glory, like Paul wrote: “…we are all being transformed into the image of Jesus, from one degree of glory to another.” Day by day we are being reborn, no matter how old we are.

It is absolutely true that we look forward to the time when all the birth pangs are finally at an end and the whole Creation is brought forth at last in wholeness and joy and peace and health. No more war. No more abuse. No more grief. No more poverty. We long for the time when all that has been lost through the brokenness of the world, all the things that have been destroyed, all the beloved people we have lost, will be restored to us. But right now, as we travel the journey of death and re-birth with Christ day after day, we can already see the kingdom of God which has broken through the darkness. (sisters in Malawi – caring for orphans, dancing and singing with joy in one of the poorest countries in the world – a thousand little acts of love in our daily lives) We can already hear the voice of the Spirit whose breath fills our lungs.

We are on a journey. It’s a hard journey, and it’s a long journey, and sometimes it’s a sad and tiring one. But it is the only journey that leads to joy and light and life. And we are never too old…and it is not too late…and God’s Spirit will never fail to deliver us into the light of abundant life.