Born Again

Propers: The Second Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Things change. That much should be obvious.

And the way we understand change, the way that we experience it, is that there are many potentialities in any given situation but only one actuality. In other words, many things could happen; there are many possibilities. But only one thing does happen. In life we start out as pure potentiality. Many things could happen at any given step. The wide world is open before us. And as we age, as we change, we make choices—or sometimes choices are made for us. From many possible paths, we take one.

And of course for the one possibility to happen, the many other possibilities must die. This is the cost of living. In order to live out an actual life we must give up all those possibilities in exchange for becoming someone real. At the beginning, we are all potential. At the end, we are all actual. And yeah, it hurts to give up those wide-open horizons. It’s a sacrifice. But if we didn’t, we would grow old having never really grown up. And that’s a life sadly wasted.

In our Gospel reading this morning, we have this wonderful little conversation by night, in which a prominent, educated man, a well-established leader in his community, comes seeking to speak secretly with Jesus, whom he is convinced is the real deal. “Rabbi,” he says, “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.” Yet he comes by night, for he knows that this is scandal, that Jesus is a controversial figure. And Nicodemus does have his reputation to uphold.

Even that name is interesting—Nicodemus. It’s not a Hebrew name; it’s Greek. It means “victory of the people.” And he comes to Jesus speaking Greek, the language of the educated, the language of the elite. We know that they’re speaking Greek because that’s the only way the wordplay works. If they conversed in Hebrew or Aramaic there wouldn’t be the same playful banter, the same eliding of meanings between “born again” and “born from above.” We’ve seen how Jesus can speak to the people. Now we get to see Him go toe-to-toe with the sympathetic elite. And it’s fun. It’s a veritable verbal fencing match.

“Very truly, I tell you,” says Jesus, in the dark, “no-one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above.” Thrust.

“How can anyone be born after having grown old?” replies Nicodemus. “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Parry.

“Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus responds, “no-one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. You must be born from above.” Riposte.

How can anyone be born after having grown old? That indeed is the question. Nicodemus has lived an accomplished and respectable life. He has sacrificed, studied, and risked in order to achieve his position today. And Jesus tells him that he must be, born anew? Born again? How could that possibly work? Can I crawl back in my mother’s womb? Let us give Nicodemus the benefit of the doubt and say that he’s being sarcastic rather than literalistic.

He’s not talking about biology. He’s talking about life. I was born, I aged, I lived, I did things. I sacrificed many possibilities for one concrete path. I can’t go back to the beginning. I can’t undo what I have done, what I’ve become. Why would I even want to? People who say they’d want to live their life over again probably didn’t pay close enough attention the first time around. We all think we want to be born again, but being born is hard. Ask your mother.

But Jesus isn’t talking about living this life over, being “born again.” He means that we must be “born from above”—which rather sounds the same in the Greek. No-one has ascended up into Heaven, but here has One come down. The Kingdom of God is a kingdom of mercy and life and grace, poured out superabundantly from Heaven, which is to say from God. For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that all who believe in Him may not perish but have eternal life.

In Christ has God come down. In Christ has God poured out His own eternal life for the cosmos. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness—an act of healing and grace in the midst of calamity—so too must the Son of Man be lifted up for all the world to see. For only then, only when we have poured out all of our hatred and violence and death-dealing rage into this Crucified Christ, this God made flesh, will we begin to understand the depths of God’s self-sacrificial love for all that He has made.

For He will respond to our hatred with mercy. He will forgive all the wounds we have rent. He will take all of our violence and rage in Himself and there drown them in the ocean of His love, a depthless life which fills up hell to bursting, turns back the arrow of time, and brings new life to every crack and corner of this world. Thus will all things be made new—not in the sense of replaced, not in the sense of starting over so that all that went before was moot. But new in the sense of the old made new, the fallen redeemed, the broken forgiven. Thus are we all born from above: born of God’s mercy, born of God’s Blood.

Jesus has not come to burn the world and start it over. He has come to save it, to rescue me and you and all of us from the wreck we have made of ourselves. And death will be no more, and tears will be no more, and God at the last will be all in all. For God, mind you, is pure actuality. There is no unfulfilled potential lost in Him. All that is good and true and beautiful, all the paths we did not, could not, would not take, will be opened unto us and never again closed off. This indeed is resurrection. This is new birth from above.

I am 40 years old. In college I decided there were two things that I wanted: I wanted a family; and I wanted a life in which faith could take first place—for even as a young scientist I believed then, as I believe now, that the most important questions in life can only be answered in philosophy, spirituality, and religion. I have achieved what I wanted back then. Not perfectly, of course. I am often a poor husband, a grouchy father, and a lackluster cleric. And I had to sacrifice to get here: time, money, effort, yes, but also home, family, friends.

There is a price we all pay to live out our lives. And yeah, it’s worth it. But it is still hard. And now that I’ve passed the statistical halfway mark of my time on this earth, and find myself weary and set in my ways, I too must come to Jesus by night, and ask, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” And the answer is the same as ever.

True life, true faith, lies in gratitude and generosity: in humbly accepting that all good things in this life are born from above, poured into us undeservingly, so that we might then share them with everyone and everything in our lives. We are called to feed the hungry, house the homeless, educate the ignorant, rebuke the wicked, forgive the sinner, and speak truth to power. We are called to give without thought of reward and to turn the other cheek when we are wronged.

In short, we are called to a religion of internal transformation, indeed of new birth, so that in grounding our souls in the mercy of Christ His own righteousness might shine out, through us, in our words, in our deeds, in our lives. And when we fail to live up to our calling as Christians—as I assure you I fail each and every day—then must we return to the Font of our Baptism, to the waters of new birth, that we may be born every day of water and of Spirit.

There in Christ is forgiveness. There in Christ is rebirth. There in Christ is newness of life inexhaustible. For indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the whole world might be saved through Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.