Born Again, Again.

 Read! John 3:1-17

 By the time I was in the ninth month of pregnancy with both of my boys, I was ready. I couldn’t sleep. I had to take short breaths and frequent bathroom breaks. My feet were swollen and I had to waddle, not walk, down the street. As terrifying as the thought of labor was, as difficult as this transition would be for both of us, baby and mom, the darkness of the womb had done its job, the baby had outgrown its cozy home, and it was time. Time for birth. 

Now birth, as many of you know, is messy work. I was so grateful to the discrete nurses who would wipe and sweep, wrap and cover, never making a big deal of the blood and slough as nature took its course. Birth is hard work. It’s difficult. It’s painful. It’s long. It’s labor. 

And it’s hard on a baby, too. The baby has to transition from the dark coziness of the womb to the harsh light and cold of the world. To go from darkness to light, from ease to pain, desire, need and want, warmth to cold, the baby all tucked in to suddenly having these limbs that flail, this stomach that hungers, a body that has to regulate its own temperature and a throat that has to swallow its own food. 

Birth is this hard, messy, miraculous thing. And although I wish I could protect my kids from all the struggles that life will bring, although I wish I could protect them from making mistakes, from being hurt, from taking missteps, they needed to come out from the safety of the womb, both for their own good and for mine. 

It’s like that, Jesus says. 

It’s like being born from above. 

You have to be born of the Spirit, just like you were born of the flesh. We are being birthed by God. It’s a labor. It’s hard and it’s messy and the transition from the womb to the world is difficult, cold, harsh, bright. 

The Spirit is the mother who births us. We, right now, are being birthed by God. 

And poor Nicodemus. Poor Nicodemus, who has read all the books, has studied all the texts, is an expert in the Jewish faith and has examined all the metaphors, has trouble with this one. He can’t wrap his mind around a God who labors for our spiritual births. 

I think we can relate. What does it mean to be “born again” or “born from above?” We don’t exactly know, and so, we simplify things, we harden things, we make things literal. We narrow our faith down to one chewable bite of a verse so that we don’t have to deal with the complexity of the entire narrative, the complicated metaphor.

We’ve taken John 3:16 and turned it into a kind of code language to determine if others are “in” or “out.” Have you been born again? Have you been saved like us? Are you one of us or one of them? 

Nicodemus, as a Pharisee, has spent his whole life learning about what it takes to be “in”. He has studied and read and taught and is an expert. He’s mastered this material. He’s taken the graduate level courses and written the dissertation and even applied for a couple of post-docs. And yet. And still. There is something missing. He’s not yet ready to give up all that he knows, all that he has, all that he has achieved to start over, so, he thinks, if he just takes what he has and adds a little Jesus to it, he’ll have it, he’ll be whole, he have it right, he will have graduated magna cum laude from “Perfect Faith in God University.” But this is a big risk. I mean, he could be wrong. Someone could find out that he has doubts about his faith. Folks might begin to question his authority. So he doesn’t take the chance; he visits Jesus at night. No one else will know. No one else will see that he hasn’t gotten it all figured out. He can just secretly add this one little idea to his library of knowledge, and then he’ll be complete. He’ll find the missing puzzle piece. He’ll have this God stuff all figured out.

So of course that’s not how it works with Jesus. Jesus has to turn our worlds upside down and inside out and challenge us from every angle. So when Nicodemus comes to him with a statement of faith of sorts, Jesus drags him out onto the high dive and pushes him in. 

Nicodemus is ready to accept that Jesus is a great teacher who has come from God. Isn’t that enough?

Nope. It’s not enough. And it is also too much. It’s simple really. You just have to go back to the beginning. You just have to go back to when you were brand new, when you knew nothing, when you were all potential and promise and hope and possibility. You have to be born again. You have to go back to that shocking rush of cold air on your skin, back to the light that’s too bright, back to that moment the flood of air filled your lungs and you could do nothing but let out a bold cry. You have to go back, to be born into something completely new. You have to come to this naked and vulnerable. You’re going to get a little squished, maybe come out a little purple, maybe with a dislocated shoulder or a cone head, covered in all that cheesy birth. 

And Nicodemus can’t seem to fathom how this is possible. How is it possible to start over? To start anew? How do we let go of all the things we have done, all the accomplishments we’ve made, all the degrees on our walls and the hard earned wisdom of our experiences? How do we let all that go and start over? And even harder, how do we let go of all of the regrets, all the mistakes and hurt and pain that we carry with us like trophies or scars or triumphs of our survival? How do we let go of what others have done to us? How can these things be?, Nicodemus asks. 

How do we let it go?

All that we’ve “earned.” All that we’ve accomplished. All that we’ve gathered and accumulated and all that makes us, us. How do we let it go? We can’t go back and undo the past. We can’t pretend that all this hasn’t happened, we can’t unknow what we know or unring the bell. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. I mean, can you?

What’s done is done. We’ve already been born. There are no do-overs.

Except, when there is. Every moment can be a do-over. Every moment can be a new start, a new birth, simply because the Son is lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. Simply because Jesus was torn from everything he knew, and then he was raised again, we can be, too.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

Jesus was born in flesh and blood, and Jesus was born again, through his flesh and his blood. Jesus was stripped of everything he knew and everything he had while he was lifted up on the cross. He had nothing. He was no longer anything. His clothing was stripped from his body, his miracles were stripped from his story, everything he had accomplished and taught and believed were gone. He was broken and beaten and naked. But in that crucifixion is the resurrection. Jesus, with nothing but the same self that came in to this world, was being born again. He was naked and bruised and carried the marks of his rebirth with him even after the resurrection. 

For God so loved the world that God gives us all a chance to be reborn, just like Jesus was, because Jesus was. This is eternal life, I think, I hope. It’s not necessarily some place of perfection where all of our problems go away and we never have to feel pain again, but rather it is this continual re-birth, this continue restarting, this continual renewing and wiping the slate clean. It’s a difficult, laborious process. We’re going to come out of it a little bit bruised. It’s a startling process. We’re going to experience sensations that we’ve never experienced before. 

But what it takes is a letting go. We have to let go of the place where we’ve been so cozy, so comfortable, where we’ve got it all figured out. I mean, think about it. You’re all snug in the womb. You don’t have to regulate your own temperature, chew your own food, pay any taxes or scrub the bathtub. And then comes a time when you’ve outgrown your comfortable spot. It’s time to come out. It’s time to expand. But to do that, you have to let go of the amniotic fluid that has been supporting you all this time. You have to let go of that immediate and comforting thrum of your mother’s heartbeat. You have to let go of climate control and weightlessness and this comfortable way of life that you’ve figured out for yourself. We have to let go of the answers and start asking the questions all over again. You have to leave all of that behind. And enter in to something entirely, completely, shockingly new. And enter in to something you are entirely, completely, and shockingly unequipped and unprepared for. We come into this new world with nothing for certain, except our need, our vulnerability, our absolute dependence upon the one who has just birthed us. 

So here we are in this cozy womb. In this cozy church. In this cozy neighborhood. We’ve worked so hard and learned so much and gotten used to the rhythms of life all around us. We’ve repaired the cracks in the walls and maintained the landscaping and joined the Bible studies and the women’s groups. We have communion once a month and we tithe to important charities and these are all really, really, good things. But we know that we are still missing something. We are still coming to Jesus in the middle of the night and asking, “What more do we need? What can we add?” And Jesus responds, “Well, you need nothing more than to start all over, to be reborn, to go through the difficult, painful process of becoming something new. You need to start again. You need to let go of all that you have so that you can see all that you are. So that you can see the one who has labored and cared for you all this time.”

My mom tells this funny story of when I was born. This was before they had precise due dates and detailed ultrasound measurements and somewhat accurate weight estimates. I was due just after Christmas in 1978. My Dad was hoping to squeeze me on as another tax write off. But I refused to budge. A few days passed, 1979 came along, and my mom waited. I can almost imagine how uncomfortable she must have been, how anxious she was to see what I looked like, to discover my personality, to meet me in a new way. But it wasn’t until January 15, three weeks after my due date, that I decided to make my appearance, and then they had to use some Pitocin to drag me out. I like to think that I was making a smart choice. It was safe and warm and comfortable, even if just a little cramped, nothing was required of me, nothing was asked of me, I could simply stay where I was, as I was. 

Except we can’t stay where we are, as we are. We have to be born. We have to come out of the comfortable, but confining spaces that we have grown out of so that we can come to be in new and wild and different ways. We can learn language and laughter and pain and heartbreak and the feel of the sun on our skin in deeper, more profound ways. But first, we have to let go of what we think we have. We have to let go of who we think we are. We have to let go of all of the things that we’ve achieved and learned and earned and accumulated, and we have to step out into something new. We need to embrace that beginner’s mind - that place in ourselves when we experience things for the first time. Where we have an openness, a willingness to receive, a need, and a kind of astonishment at encountering these new thoughts and feelings and experiences for the very first time. When we are born again, we have a chance to rediscover who we are, to have an innocence and emptiness of mind that is ready and anxious and open to be filled. We don’t have habits or preconceived notions or prescribed beliefs; we are simply open to the miracle of possibility. Of potential. Of what could be coming to life right in front of us. Like a child mesmerized by the feel of grass between her toes, or obsessed with stacking the blocks and then knocking them back down again, over and over, we can come to this life with our full attention, not trying to accomplish or “know” or “understand,” but simply to experience with our fullest, most attentive selves, moment after moment, again and again.

This is far from easy. This letting go is the hardest work we will ever do.

But God is birthing us into something new. We are being born again. Over and over.

We can resist that. Or we can embrace it.
Jesus shows us what can happen when we let go of all the things we thought we were and all the things we thought we knew and release ourselves to this painful process of being born again. We are continually becoming, we are continually being born again, and it is a rough and painful and messy process, both for us and for the One who births us. But it is an entrance into new possibilities, new experiences, and most importantly, new depths of relationship with our Mother who labors and gives and offers herself to us, over and over, life after life, revealed to us through the birth, life, and rebirth of Jesus Christ. 

Come, be born of water. Be born of Spirit. And then do it all over again. This is the kingdom of God. We have a loving laborer who will wrap us up and nurse us and protect us and also send us on our way to be human, send us on our way to make mistakes be vulnerable and to need Christ, and to start all over again. 

Thanks be to God.