Facebook.com/TedCarnahan
LinkedIn.com/in/TedCarnahan
Twitter.com/TedCarnahan
Born Again
Occasion: Pentecost 1, Holy Trinity Sunday, Year B
Text: John 3.1-17
This sermon was preached at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Manchester, MO on 7 June 2009.
About a year and a half ago, I had the opportunity of a lifetime – I got to travel with a group of students from Wartburg Seminary on a trip to the Holy Land. We spent about a week in Bethlehem and stayed at Christmas Lutheran Church just up the street from where Jesus was born. Then we went up to the Galilee for a few days to see some important ruins, and finally we went back down to Jerusalem for a week. Jerusalem was fantastic. Not only did we get to visit old churches and holy sites in the Old City, but we also got to learn more about issues of justice and peace in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians. We also got to roam around the city a bit and shop for souvenirs.
One afternoon, a fairly large group of students decided to go out and look for souvenir T-shirts in the crowded marketplace, and I tagged along. Soon, a few of the more intrepid students among us picked out a fairly large shop filled with all kinds of T-shirt designs covering the walls floor to ceiling. This is the kind of market where you need to do a lot of haggling to not get charged the “tourist rate” (at least three times what you should pay) and so my classmates who were buying shirts set to work negotiating “bulk discounts.” I’m sure they – pardon the pun – lost their shirts over the deal anyway. But while they were in the back negotiating, I hung out in the front of the store and struck up a conversation with a young Palestinian man who was tending the store.
At one point in our conversation, he wanted to know what kind of group I was traveling with, so he asked what I thought was an innocuous question in his tentative English: “Are you a Born Again?” And, being the naïve seminary student I am, I thought he was asking if I was a Christian, and I said, “Yes, yes I am.” Just then, two of my fellow students came flying out of the back shouting, “No no no no! Not Born Again!” And it dawned on me: “Born Again” was the label he knew for a particular brand of Christianity that was not very popular in this part of the world, and they were worried that we were going to be associated with that.
“Born again” was a pretty loaded term in Jesus’ day too. Nicodemus enters our story today described as a leader of the Jews. Pretty high praise. But when he comes to Jesus, it isn’t openly as a representative of the people – no, Nicodemus comes to Jesus “by night.” We’re meant to see the shadowy, hidden actions of a man with a lot of power and prestige – and a lot to lose by being seen with someone as controversial and unpopular with the authorities as Jesus of Nazareth. Nicodemus is firmly aligned with the leaders who say that Jesus is a good teacher and miracle worker who has come from God, as opposed to the other side, who are convinced that he is possesed by demons. He’s confident enough to say “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God,” but not courageous enough to say so during daylight. Jesus sees right through him, and answers with an astonishing statement: “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
Nicodemus, in his famous confusion, doesn’t understand that to be “born again” or to be “born from above” doesn’t mean to come out of the womb again, but to be born both physically – “of the flesh” – and spiritually – by the gift of God through the Holy Spirit. This spiritual birth is a second birth – so that we are all born again. This kind of being born again is not identified with a particular form of worship, a particular set of social or political agendas, or a particular region of the country. Born again is not a red state thing or a blue state thing. It shouldn’t be the kind of thing that might get you in trouble with a young T-shirt vendor in Jerusalem. To be born again is, in Jesus’ simple words, to have new life through the Holy Spirit.
A lot is at stake here. This isn’t trying to decide between the chicken and veal – this is life and death. Jesus compares himself to Moses, when the Israelites were being overrun with snakes in the wilderness. Thousands were dying of snakebite, and the people cried out to God, and God commanded Moses to make an image of a snake that people could turn to look at and live. Jesus is saying that our lives are overrun with problems as spiritually and physically dangerous as venomous snakes. And he says, in broad strokes, that his being “lifted up” – that is, his death on the cross and his rising from the dead – is that to which we must look for life in our own snake-bitten lives.
Every single one of us is, after a fashion, dying of snakebite. Sometimes it’s little things – life isn’t going your way, you have a fight with your spouse, you hear co-workers or classmates whispering behind your back. More often, it seems like it’s big things, though, with heavy, loathsome like Cancer, the Economy, War, or Death. Personally, my biggest snakebite right now is that my grandmother died on Wednesday. We were going to be in Missouri all this week because I had already been invited to preach here today and in Columbia next weekend, but now we’re attending a funeral on Tuesday. For you, it might not be one of the things I mentioned, but there are plenty more ways that venom gets injected into our lives.
Our problem, though, is not that we don’t realize what the problems are in our lives, where we or others fall short, where life is unfair or cruel. Our problem is more, what one professor of mine at the seminary has called “practical atheism.” We are all, at one time or another, Nicodemus in this story – we know that Jesus is a great rabbi sent from God, that he can only do his miracles because he has the presence of God with him, but we regard Jesus as an engineer regards a bungee cord. An engineer looks a bungee cord and says: Yes, it’s the right length so you won’t go too far and hit the ground, it’s spongy enough not to jerk you around, it’s attached firmly at the top of the platform so it won’t let you go, it’s strong enough not to break and drop you on your head. Now, which of you will be going first? It’s not that we don’t know who Jesus is, it’s that it can be hard to trust.
That’s why it is so important that it’s not up to you or me. It’s not up to you whether you believe in Jesus. Jesus says, “You must be born from above,” not “you must birth yourself from above.” Just like you don’t get to decide who your parents are or when you’re born, you don’t decide when you’re born from above. You don’t decide when God’s Spirit comes into your life. It’s a good thing, too – I don’t know about you, but I’m enough of a sinner that I might not otherwise get around asking for God’s Spirit if it’s up to me.
It’s a confusing thing, knowing when God’s Spirit is working in your heart. I take it on faith that everyone present in this room today is here because the Holy Spirit is doing something. That’s what Martin Luther said the Holy Spirit does, the Spirit “calls, gathers, enlightens, and makes holy the whole Christian Church on earth.” Every Sunday, whether you’ve been coming to church for 35 years or 35 minutes, you’ve been called and gathered here by the Spirit.
Somehow, our Synod Assembly always gets scheduled for Trinity Sunday, and I think this is the third year in a row that I’ve been asked by pastors to preach on Trinity Sunday. There are probably more mundane reasons for it, but I like to joke that they’re trying to duck out on having to explain the inexplicable, amazing, confusing, mysterious, Holy Trinity. But John 3.16, perhaps the most famous verse in the Bible, probably captures the essence of the Trinity as well as any other: “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.” God the Father, the almighty maker of heaven and earth, sent his only Son, Jesus, into the world so that we can look on him and be cured of the venom in our lives. But where is the Spirit in that? The Holy Spirit is in the word “believe” – the Spirit is the one who makes it possible for us to believe at all.
This is a free gift from God. There are no strings attached, you don’t have to earn it, you can never do enough to deserve it. It is from God, for you. As we celebrate Holy Communion this morning, pay close attention to the Words of Institution. Luther taught that the essence of faith in Communion is believing those two little words, for you. “This is my body, given for you. This is my blood, shed for you.” The Holy Spirit makes believing that possible. Trust that God’s love is for you.
You might also enjoy:
Copyright 2006-2010 Ted Carnahan. Except where noted, the content of this site is licensed under CC-SA-BY.