Born Again? Why and How? 
2/17/08 
Rev Jon Smoot 
Psalm 121 and John 3: 1-17

 

Now that Tuesday’s voting is past, I believe I can safely hazard a story and a quote from Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope. In his chapter entitled, “Faith,” Obama tells a painful story and then goes on with a point I want to make in my sermon. He tells of a supporter – a small business owner, a mother, and a thoughtful generous person, who was also a lesbian who had lived in a monogamous relationship with her partner for the last decade. She was hurt by Obama’s remarks about opposing same-sex marriage, for political and religious reasons. He was convinced that the heightened focus on gay marriage was a paralyzing distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians in civil, legal, and financial arenas. She felt hurt by his remarks in that radio interview, as he referenced his own religious traditions on the issue of same-sex marriage. Because he had referenced religion, it made her feel that she, and others like her, were bad people.   

 

He felt badly, and told her so, in a return phone call. He says: “As I spoke to her I was reminded that no matter how much Christians who oppose homosexuality may claim that they hate the sin but love the sinner, such a judgment inflicts pain on good people – people who are made in the image of God, and who are often truer to Christ’s message than those who condemn them. And I was reminded that it is my obligation, not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided, just as I cannot claim infallibility in my support of abortion rights. I must admit that I may have been infected with society’s prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God; that Jesus’ call to love one another might demand a different conclusion; and that in years hence I may be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history. I don’t believe such doubts make me a bad Christian. I believe that they make me human, limited in my understandings of God’s purpose and therefore prone to sin. When I read the bible, I do so with the belief that it is not a static text but the Living Word and that I must be continually open to new revelations – whether they come from a lesbian friend or a doctor apposed to abortion.”

 

When I read that potential attribution of his opinion to God, I felt a new appreciation for Obama. I was also reminded of something Karl Barth said: That we religious types have a penchant for down-sizing God because of our deliberate and presumptuous obtuseness toward God and God’s purposes. Barth says that we cannot transcend our own mental categories and the result is that when we say “God,” we are really saying “human” with a very loud voice. Friends; that is idolatry. Such arrogant and ignorant presumptiveness infects just about everything we do and believe in the life of faith – and that’s what can make religion so dangerous.  

 

Sure, the fundamentalists and conservatives do this with their narrow moral package that travels with the command, “you must be born again.” But we liberals and progressives are equally guilty with our own deliberate obtuseness toward God, especially with our cool, armchair theological superiority and refusals to let Jesus get under our skin, because we dissect and diminish what he says by forever low-balling  just who he is.

Which brings us to Nicodemus, the patron saint of most Presbyterians and progressives. Under the cover of darkness, Nicodemus brings his presumptions and his deliberate obtuseness to his encounter with Jesus. Sometimes we want to paint a better picture of Nicodemus as a nervous, but genuine, religious seeker. The gospel writer, however, doesn’t let us take this view. Nicodemus is smug and confident, at least at first, in his opening salvo to Jesus: “Rabbi, we know…” As preacher Thomas Long puts it, “Nicodemus is pretentiously setting the ground rules. Nicodemus is saying, ‘Let’s talk, Jesus, teacher to teacher. All is under control; nothing is loose. We know.’ Nicodemus is speaking for the religious establishment which he represents. ‘We know…’ And what does Nicodemus and his colleagues know? They are confident that they know the source of Jesus’ deeds and have his ministry and message all boxed-up. They know the limits to divine action, and what God can and cannot work in the world. They know the immutable truth about people, that they are born once, do what they’re going to do, grow old and die – that’s it. They know the limit of things and what is possible and impossible – all theological boxes filled in; they know much.”

 

“Oh no, you don’t, fires back Jesus. No one can really know what is possible with God unless one is born from above, born anew, born of the Spirit.” Jesus won’t let Nicodemus, or us, get away with deliberate obtuseness and presumption toward God. He blows up our safe, neat, little mental boxes; challenging us to quit the intellectual faith games we play to protect ourselves from the soul-twisting and world-changing reality of God. Jesus says, “to really get it, you must be born anew, born from above” and Nicodemus whines: “How can this be?” – His lame refrain for the rest of the encounter with Jesus – and also our usual refrain about matters of faith – “How can this be? Let’s do a Bible Study on something so we can talk about it, without having to actually change anything in our lives.”

 

 Nicodemus, and we, come to Jesus to get a few answers, buttressing what we believe we already know about God. And Jesus launches out into wildly dangerous and undefined territory, ruled not by what we think we know, but ruled by the wild, free, and generous spirit of God. But Nicodemus slips away into the night from the encounter, apparently unchanged – his faith still neatly nailed down and oh so predictable and oh so useless. 

 

Of course it’s all about control, or our need for the illusion of control. Jesus knows this. Why do we wonder then, that Jesus with a mischievous smile at our predictability talks about two of the most uncontrollable and uncontainable of human experiences, birth and wind? Jesus says to us Nicodemus types: “Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above and over and over again. Get out of the box, stretch the limits of what is possible for God, for you, for those you love, for this church, and for this world. The breath of God’s Spirit blows wherever it wants to, and it is beyond your vaunted knowing, but it is not beyond your deepest yearning. Get out of your heads, and find your heart.”

 

And that’s a powerful word to us at Bradley Hills as well: Get out of your heads, and find your heart. To be born from above is to have spiritual awakening into expansiveness about what just might be possible for God. We also then can be born from below – awakened from our perspective of comfort and privilege, and better able to see ourselves, our world, others, and God, from the perspective of the poor and the oppressed.

 

Toward the end of my time in my church in Madison, Wisconsin, we were celebrating at a gala dinner our partnership in ministry with a predominantly African-American Community Development Corporation in a struggling part of Madison. Our church was a key player in the tutoring ministry – and we celebrated the wonderful gift our two organizations were to each other, and we celebrated the ministry that touched hundreds of children and families all over the County.

 

But I was feeling distinctly distant that night, burdened with church issues, and frankly, rather smug. People were talking about God and faith, and all I could do was find fault with their theology. Understand that I was one of the most highly educated persons in the room. Understand that I have a PhD in Theology from a premier European University. I know so much about the theology and mechanics of faith; I could go on for hours. But so what? My knowledge about God couldn’t save me that night. You see, I was Nicodemus that night. Stone cold certain about what I know, and my heart stone cold to everything but my own thoughts.

 

But by the grace of God, I was reborn from above – I was brought to my knees through the unlikeliest of voices: a beautiful little 2^nd grade girl named Tayesha who stepped to the microphone and read from Philippians: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” God knows what horror and set-backs she had encountered in her short life. But here she was beaming out the love of God in Christ, who strengthened her. She was the one tasting eternal life, and I was the one licking the dust of my self-absorption.

 

The Spirit wasn’t quite done with me that night. I was further blown away into radical wonder of God’s unbounded love and power by the testimonies of two young women, young mothers, saved by God’s grace from addiction and despair and potential long-term incarceration for crack-dealing. They witnessed to the overwhelming, reclaiming love of God in Christ Jesus. And, by the grace of God – the 18 inches between my head and heart – that most inestimable of distances in the universe – was breached, and I knew that I was born again. My heart was once again strangely warmed, and I quietly wept, rejoicing in the piercing and cleansing love and grace of God, and rejoicing in the work of God in the lives of those around me.

 

Friends, Jesus is busy moving Nicodemus and us, not toward a new theology, but toward a new life – birth even. So let’s get out of our heads, and find our hearts. We are invited to be blown by God onto a life not of our own making. A life lived more freely and fiercely for God and for the sake of God’s world. A life where we are freed from the incarceration of self-concern, and turned outward to others – That is what it means to be born again.

 

And that’s what we were made for, to be breathed and birthed into a new and living hope by God, and for God, and for God’s world. May it be so.