2/17/08                                                                                        John 3:1-16

BORN AGAIN

Rev. James Singleton

Nicodemus is a Pharisee, a religious leader of the Jews. Pharisees were convinced that they had God figured out. God had given them laws to obey and those who obeyed the laws received God’s blessings and those who broke them received God’s wrath and punishment. What could be simpler?

All a person had to do to have a good life was to obey the rules. We have the power to make our own life blessed. We don’t need anyone else. It all sounds very American, doesn’t it? It’s a pull yourself up by your own bootstraps sort of religion. If we just display the Ten Commandments in enough places, then everyone will obey them and the world will be a better place.  

But the question remains, if Nicodemus had God all figured out, why did he secretly pay a visit to this Jesus who was driving the Pharisees nuts? Jesus hung around the wrong people according to the Pharisees and he forgave those whom they were certain God would never forgive. Why did Nicodemus visit him that night?
 

Why do you visit Jesus here in the church? We say that we come to praise the Lord, but I don’t think that’s the real reason why most of us show up. I think most of us come because we are searching for something. We feel an emptiness we can’t fill. We feel a burden we can’t put down. We feel that we are called to be more than what we have become.  

And, of course, with this being Lent, we preachers love to tell you what is wrong with your life. What is wrong is that you have sinned and if only you would feel worse toward your sins, if only you would fall down and repent in sackcloth and ashes, then you would earn your way to a better life. And you really love it when the preacher steps on your toes because it makes you feel like you did something.  

So Nicodemus came to Jesus because something wasn’t right. Like Humpty Dumpty, he had fallen off of his religious wall and broke. And all of his religious commandments and all of his religious traditions couldn’t put him together again. So he came looking for answers in Jesus. 

That’s when Jesus said something to him that didn’t compute. He said, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”  We don’t know whether Jesus meant, “born from above” or “born anew” or “born again.” Most likely he meant all of them. In any event, you can feel Nicodemus cringe, just like you and I cringe at those words.

I hate that kind of talk. I hate it when some young, self-righteous religious punk asks me, “Are you born again?” What he usually means is, “Do you believe the way I believe? Do you understand Scripture the way I understand Scripture?” If so, then you are one of the saved and if not then you are one of the damned.  

The way we usually understand the term, “Born again” or Born anew” is that it is something that we have done. It is the result of a right way of believing, like there was a secret way to believe and we have found it and all who haven’t found it are still stumbling around in the dark. I remember a bumper sticker that use to be popular that simply proclaimed, “I found it.” It implied that being born again is something we accomplish.

Nicodemus didn’t want to hear this kind of talk anymore than we do, so he feigned ignorance and thought he had come up with a joke that would end this silly lecture on being born again: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”  

That should do away with this overly spiritual talk and get Jesus back on a practical tract. But it didn’t work. Jesus insisted that we cannot truly experience the new life God has for us unless we are born again.

Nicodemus’ last words are the very words that are ringing in our own minds right now: “How can these things be?” How does this happen? How do I find this thing called, Born again?  

Jesus then says the line that has become the most witnessed to passage of Scripture in all of sports history: John 3:16: “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.”

Many of us have heard this line so often that we no longer really hear it. We don’t understand how radical it is. Take for instance the little word “so.” John could have said, “For God loved the world…” But he said, “For God so loved the world…” Why?

The little word “so” can be used in many ways. I can say, “I hear you are going to the movies. So am I.” In that case it is used as a conjunction.

I can say, “So, that’s how you do it!” That’s an exclamation.

I could say, “I read a page or so in the book.” That’s using it as a pronoun.  

But there is one other way the word “so” is used. I could say, “I am so angry with you.” That would be using it as an adverb, an intensifier that indicates the depth of my inner emotions. I am not just a little angry with you, I am so angry that I can spit nails kind of anger.

And that is how the little word “so” is used in John 3:16. God doesn’t just love the world, God “so” loves the world. He loves the world with an intense, passionate love. He is so in love with the world that he is willing to receive the nails we spit.

And notice the word “world.” It’s not that God so loves only the good people. It’s not that God so loves the religious people. God so loves the world. In the gospel of John, the word “world” is a euphemism for this place of darkness where men and women sin against one another and cause all manner of havoc and hardship.  

In John 1:9 he wrote: “He (Jesus) was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.” The world is the place where Jesus is rejected. The world is the place where God is disobeyed. The world is the place darkened by sin.

This is what God so loves! He so loves us, not because we are perfect, not because we have done everything right, not because we understand it all, not because we are who God wants us to be—God loves us because God created us! God loves us so much, that he is willing to bear us—which brings us full circle back to Jesus’ call that we must be born again.

Let’s look at that phrase, born again, from a different perspective from what we normally see it. Let’s look at that phrase in light of God so loving the world.

 “Born” is the past tense of the verb “to bear.” Surely that is an apt description of childbirth. Someone bears us into this life. Our mother bears the pain, the labor, the weight and responsibility of us. She bears with us and she bears all that comes with us: sickness, kicking, blood, and mess. No one comes into this life without being born by another who undergoes hard labor on our behalf.

If we are honest, we would admit that we are restless with who we are. We know all too well that we are less than perfect. We have our dirty little secrets. We can pretend to obey all the rules and appear to be good Christians on the outside, but underneath we know we are as phony as those we accuse of being hypocrites. And no matter what we do, we can never get it all together. 

Who hasn’t wished to go back, erase, and rework some chapter of life? Who hasn’t held a baby, and thought wistfully of one’s own beginnings, one’s own innocence, before age and years and wrongdoings accumulated? How can we be born again?

Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit pleaded for forgiveness from his family and his constituents on January 30^th in an emotionally televised speech at their family church. Recently revealed text messages contradicted his earlier sworn testimony that he did not have an affair with his aide.  

Turning to his wife he said, “I truly apologize to you” and she, in turn, forgave him. He said that the hardest thing he ever had to do was to look his children in the eye and tell them what he did.

There have been a lot of snickers and cynicism over the incident. Here’s another politician caught in the act and now acting all humble and playing the religion card and crying out for forgiveness. As one person remarked, “He had a moral obligation and he failed.” Yes, he failed. But here’s the thing.  

Whether Mayor Kilpatrick truly does repent is not exactly the point. The point is, if the not-so-good mayor is ever to have a new life, it will not come about by anything that he does on his own. Any new life to come will come to him because his wife, his children and, especially, his God will have to bear great pain and hardship in order to birth him to that new life.

They are the ones who have chosen to put up with him. They are the ones who are willingly taking on his sin and absorbing it into their love. Mayor Kilpatrick has a chance at being born again, but it is others who will have to do the hard labor of bearing him through forgiveness.  

To be born again is not something that we do because we are so righteous, because we are so religious, or because we are so good and holy and pure. To be born again is what our loved ones and our God does for us when we sin, when we betray them, when we fall short of being who we are called to be—and their love does not forsake us.  

Whether we accept that love, whether we allow that love to change us is up to us. But the focus of Lent is not so much our sins as it is the love that bears with us because of our sins. Do you believe you are so loved that God is willing to bear the sickness, pain, blood and mess that you cause in order to give you another chance? Until you finally accept the fact that you are so loved, you will never experience the new life that results from being born again.  

Nicodemus became a new man that night. How do we know? The next time we encounter him, he is defending Jesus before his fellow Pharisees, and when that fails to work, we find him at the cross helping to take down Jesus’ dead body and laying it in a tomb. Nicodemus came to accept that Jesus did what all the religious laws could not do—so love him as to be willing to bear his sins that he, Nicodemus, might be forgiven and come to know what it is like to have another bear him into another chance at life.  

And so Jesus does for you and me. It is upon that cross that we are born (as in to bear with) again and again and again. But it is only when we accept that Jesus is willing to bear the mess and pain we cause because we are so loved do we ever enter into the birth canal that leads to new life.

 
            Now that you are born again as a gift, how will you make your new life different from your old life?

AMEN.