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.

Sand or Stars or Rubik's Cubes

 Read this! Acts 2:1-21

“Hey Mom,” Jonah says, “Did you know that the Rubik’s cube has something like a trillion different combination possibilities?” “What?” I said. “Nu uh.” 

See Jonah loves random facts. He reads these National Geographic “Weird But True” books and they’re full of things like “the world’s termites outweigh the world’s people” and “If you traveled at the speed of light, you’d reach Pluto in just four hours,” and, “you’d never get older.” And “It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.” Sometimes he just pulls random “facts” out of his butt. They aren’t really facts at all, just things he’s made up that he thinks he heard somewhere, so, meh, true enough. He’ll say stuff like, “Hey Mom, did you know that cotton candy is actually a vegetable,” and “Soccer player Lionel Messi can kick a soccer ball at 187 miles per hour,” and “It’s totally reasonable for an eleven year old to have three gaming monitors, a cell phone, and an 11 o’clock bedtime.” So you can see why I might be a little skeptical. But this got us all wondering about big, big numbers. There are almost 8 billion people on earth, and for every one person alive today, there are 1.6 million ants. It takes a human at least 89 days to count to a million. And Jeff Bezos has enough money to spend 11 million dollars a day for the next 50 years - or until he turns 107 - and have a few bucks left over. 

We wondered about how many stars are in the sky, and how many grains of sand are on the earth. And which would be a bigger number, the sand or the stars? Well, we had to look that one up. Turns out that if you assumed a grain of sand has an average size, and then you figured out approximately how many of those grains would fit into a teaspoon, and multiply that by the size of all the beaches and deserts in the world, Earth holds roughly seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains of sand. Pretty impressive. That’s a number we can’t even get close to understanding or fathoming or comprehending, not even Jeff Bezos. But, with the help of a Hubble telescope and a calculator, they’ve figured out that there’s somewhere around 70 thousand million, million, million stars in the observable universe. So that means there are something like 10,000 stars for every grain of sand on Earth. So there you go, some random trivia for your next cocktail party. 

But outside of cocktail parties and eleven year old brains, who really cares about this stuff? Why should we even bother thinking about the bigness of such things? Well, I’m interested, at least, because it makes me think about how very very small we are. And about how God came to us as one of these very very small ones. God limited God’s self in space and time and got particular and individual and up close and intimate. And then whoosh, he’s gone, sucked up to who knows where through the clouds, never to be seen in a corporeal body again. Meanwhile, creation is still happening. Trees are still growing. Babies are being born. Cells are dividing. Stars are exploding. Grains of sand are being carved and smoothed and rolled against the shore. Jesus ascends, but the work keeps going. And just as we get to see a little bit of who Monet was in his “Water Lilies,” and we can hear a bit who Beethoven was in his 5th Symphony, and we understand Shakespeare a little better by reading Twelfth Night, we get the tiniest glimmers of who God is in all this stuff, in these quintillion grains of sand and these thousands of million, million, million stars in the observable universe, and in all those ants and termites and humans and dust bunnies and pine cones and glasses of beer and YouTube cat videos and late credit card payments and specks of afternoon light coming through our kitchen window. Friends, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, this searching for God thing. But somehow, somehow, it’s still so easy for us to miss.

Why is it still so easy for us to miss? Why is it everywhere, all around us, and yet we still can’t seem to see it, to trust it, to know that it’s there? 

I think we get some hints as to why this is so in our passage today. 

See the disciples are all hunkered down, gathered together in one place, and they’re waiting. They’re waiting just like Jesus told them to. God has come to them in a very particular place, at a very specific time, in the unique brown-eyed, olive complexioned, callused footed, five foot something physical mediocrity of Jesus. And so they’re waiting. What are they expecting, I wonder? I mean, Jesus has walked through walls and met them in crowded rooms before, maybe they’re expecting that again? They’ve seen miraculous healings and the defiance of physics and heard strange teachings, so, I wonder, are they expecting more of the same? Sometimes, I wonder, do we miss it because we’re just so used to more of the same? If we’ve seen one grain of sand, we’ve seen them all? The stars have always been there, so why notice tonight? 

Or are they hyper vigilant? Do they hear every creak in the floorboards and watch the sun go behind the clouds and feel a drip of sweat down their necks and wonder “what was that? Was that it? Did we miss it? Did you see it?” Sometimes, I wonder if we miss it because we’ve lost all sense of the sacred and we don’t trust ourselves when it’s there. 

God comes to us in our particularity, but it’s too small, we take it for granted.

God comes to us in our familiarity, but we glance over it, like leftovers in the fridge or the pile of dirty laundry that’s been languishing in the corner.

So this one time, God comes to them in fire and fury. Forget the particularity. Forget the familiarity. God comes in strangeness and astonishment. There’s the sound of the rush of a violent wind, and it fills the whole house. And then their heads catch on fire. Or something. These tongues of flames dance above their heads, and they all start talking in different languages and they’re “filled with the Holy Spirit.” God does not want them to miss this. God is making sure that God’s voice is heard and God’s presence is clearly recognized. God gives them an experience of God’s self that is like shooting fish in a barrel. They can’t miss it. It’s right there. Right in front of them. No doubts. No questions. No wonderings. It’s clearly God. But, you know, just in case it’s still not clear to them, they get witnesses. All these Jews from all over the world are in Jerusalem, and they hear it, too. So they gather around these instant polyglots and hear familiar words, words that they understand, words that they don’t have to process through the translation machines in their brains in order to get some semblance of meaning. These disciples are speaking their language. There’s an understanding going on between them that runs deeper than the marketplace or religious tradition or the exchange of commerce. And these witnesses are totally floored. These “others,” these Galileans, these followers of Jesus - this strange insurrectionist who was rumored to have healed and taught and then was put to death by the state - these nervous, hiding, awkward band of brothers, are speaking in their native languages, in their home tongues, in the words of their parents and their children and their earliest memories of comprehension. Everyone, in their own particularity, in their own specificity, in their own unique language, is hearing the word of God in a way they can understand and intimately connect with. God does not want anyone to miss this, so God pulls out all the stops - the rushing wind, the tongues of fire, the specificity of meeting each individual exactly where they are. 

God in the big and dramatic.

God in the tiny and specific.

All of it.

And of course, there are also still the cynics. “They’re all just drunk,” they say. 

And ready to defend himself and his friends, Peter attempts to make their defense. And in probably one of the greatest non sequiturs ever used, he says, “we’re not drunk, for it’s only nine o’clock in the morning!” As any of us who have had too much fun in college might attest, that really proves nothing. But maybe it’s not the argument that gets the crowd’s attention, but the common language of their holy scriptures. Peter quotes from the prophet Joel - a common language, familiar sounds that can unite them all. 

God is desperate that we don’t miss this. God sends wind. God sends flames. God sends witnesses. God sends the intimacy and particularity of our own languages and God sends the unifying common stories of our traditions. God in the rushing wind, and in the still, small voice. So, like a delicious gumbo, God throws in everything God’s got, right down to the kitchen sink. God cashes it all in. God goes for broke. God pulls out all the stops. Please, oh please, let’s not miss it.

Pentecost comes to us with all the wind raging and the chaos swirling and the languages speaking so that all we have to do is reach out our hands and just like that, we’ve caught it. Or, a little bit of it, at least. And well, that’s enough. It’s as easy and as close as our next breath. It’s as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. As finding a star in the sky. As discovering a grain of sand on the beach. This is the birth of the church.

It’s as particular to each of us as there are combinations on a Rubik’s cube.

See, Jonah was actually wrong. There are over 43 quintillion possible combinations on a standard 3x3 Rubik’s cube. 43 quintillion different ways to see and experience the same thing. See, I think we miss it, I think God comes to us in 43 quintillion different ways and we’re so busy trying to “solve it,” trying to get all the colors together and everything all lined up in the way it’s “supposed” to be, that we don’t realize that it’s all God. It’s all one cube in different languages. Because God came to us in the specificity and particularity and embodiedness and Aramaic of Jesus Christ, we get to experience God in all the specificity and particularity and embodiedness and native languages of our own lives. 

]43 quintillion combinations. One cube. 

Seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains of sand in the world. One earth.

70 thousand million, million, million observable stars in the sky. One universe.

And here’s the biggest littlest mind-blowingest thing of them all: there are the same amount of molecules in ten drops of water as there are stars in the sky. Water that settles in, that fills up, that flows and travels and gets in to even the most tiniest of spaces and can be found everywhere we go, their number is beyond measure. 

See, big or little, vast and expansive or compressed and minuscule, God is in it all. God is coursing through our veins and crossing boundaries of language and rushing in to our lives in all the big expansive mind numbingly impossible ways, and in the smallest nooks and crannies of our lives. God gives us millions and billions and trillions and quintillions of ways to experience some part of who God is, because God is desperate that we don’t miss it. 

God is in the tiniest particularities, everywhere. 

God’s spirit poured out on all flesh. All of us. 

Holy God, give us ears to hear your rushing wind, eyes to see your tongues of fire, and hearts to understand the unique languages with which you speak to us. Let us reach out our hands and know that we’ve touched a bit of you. Maybe, God, may it be enough that we feel a little bit drunk on it all.

God, let’s not miss it.

Thanks be to God.