Lent 2 - Being Born Anew

Have you ever noticed that it’s far easier to say something, than it is to actually do it?  It’s very easy to state our intentions of something.  It’s something else to actually go ahead, and carry out what we want.  Best example: New Years’ resolutions.  I have a friend who works as a personal trainer; every January 02 he gets a flurry of calls and emails to book his services, people who’ve stated that the new year is their time to ‘get healthy’.  He said that half the people quit in the first two weeks; another half of those remaining in the first month; and by six weeks’ time he’s down to about 12% of those who made the original commitment.

It is, in fact, remarkably easy to say “I am a child of God” or “I am a Christian,” or even something as simple as “I believe in God,” but it’s something else entirely to live into that statement.   When I people new people and they find out what I do, it often becomes a a bit of a two-edged sword: either I get a theological lecture as to my own tradition’ or I have what I call the “I’m-a-good-person-I-haven’t-murdered-anyone" chat.  Truth is, I don’t care. 

But, when we sit back, look at our lives, and say “I’m a good Christian person, look at all the good works I do…God must really be pleased with me”….I call that the snakes-and-ladders approach to Lutheran theology. You are justified – made right with God – entirely by God’s grace and mercy, through Jesus Christ.  It’s not about you, at all.  If say it just comes down to being a good person, or doing good things, then what we’re really saying is that we don’t think God is part of the equation, at all.

If we start applauding ourselves for living our good lives and making God happy by doing good things – then we’re not really trusting God, are we?  We’re putting our trust in our own actions to make us righteous – holy – before God.  And if that is where your faith is – then you’re choosing to raise yourself above the rest of creation.  Then salvation becomes a competition, judged by legal standards to assess your worth.  But there’s some hard news about Christianity, beloved of God: it’s not the Olympics.  It’s not a competition; there are neither winners, nor losers.

You are worth as much to God when you are born – no matter how you are when you are born – as you are on the day you die.  Whether you have ten fingers and ten toes, or twelve, or fourteen, or even none at all, to God, you’re priceless.  Not because of what you’ve done, but solely because God loves you.  In fact, we heard today that God loves the world so much that God was willing to take on human flesh and die for it…

So…here’s Nicodemus.

I mean, he’s not just Nicodemus.  He’s the catalyst, the reason behind what is probably the most memorable line of Scripture in our society.  And in most languages, I suspect.  That’s John 3:16 – for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believed in him would not perish but have eternal life.  

You can’t escape it.  If you go to a hockey game – or in particular, see one televised from the States – you’ll see someone holding up a placard with John 3:16 on it.  At football games, there’s always the unfortunate individual with a belly like a water buffalo, only a few litres of body paint away from an indecent exposure charge.  What’s written on his chest?  John 3:16.

But this man comes to see Jesus, at night.  Again, ‘by night’ is one of those details that John includes for a number of reasons – for John, ‘night’ is a metaphor for spiritual darkness (the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it), but it’s also the time when the Rabbis said it was best to study the Torah, away from the distractions and heat of the day.  And indeed, Nicodemus does come to see Jesus.

That first exchange is interesting, though – Nicodemus doesn’t begin with a question, but instead flatters Jesus – “Rabbi, 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.”  We’ll never know what Nicodemus actually wanted from Jesus, because Jesus cuts him off with one of the most ambiguous lines of Scripture in the entire Bible.

“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”  But that’s only one way of translating it.  You may be more familiar with “born again”, some translations have “born anew” and still others have “reborn” – and all are perfectly fine, and correct, translations of the Greek word.  And it stops poor Nicodemus dead.

And Jesus continues with his teaching, spirit of spirit, and flesh of flesh.  The heart of Jesus teaching is that, like the camel going through the eye of the needle, being born anew or again is not something we can do, but it is something that God can do for us.

But you do realize that Nicodemus still doesn’t get it, don’t you?  “How can these things be?”

For the conquerer of people, it seems, is only interesting in the things that he can do to be righteous before God.  It’s a foreign idea to Nicodemus that God would act out of mercy to reach out to people.  Yet Jesus says that is exactly what will happen – just like the bronze serpent in the wilderness, that when the Israelites looked at it and were healed – so in Jesus’ own death he will draw all people to himself.

Nicodemus knows he’s been born.  He’s a respected elder in his community.  But also realise that in Nicodemus’ culture children were prized possessions, not valued or even necessarily ‘loved’ as we would imagine it.  And Jesus is telling him that must become worthless again, to his society.

But to be worthless to others is to be priceless to God.

And maybe, it’s when we find ourselves worthless that we can understand what it means to be baptized, to be loved by God for the sheer life of it.

Martin Luther said of the Christian life, that it was “nothing less than a daily baptism, begun once and continuing every day after.” [Large Catechism].

Maybe that’s worth considering, beloved.  Baptism is – generally – a one-time event.  Some people are baptized more than once, for various reasons that are between them and God.  But the struggle with sin is so great that there is a need to return to the waters of baptism every day – just so that you remember that you are God’s own.  That it’s not about us, or what we do, that makes us loved.

Baptism signifies that the old person in us – with all its sin and evil desires, is to be drowned and die.  The old person will die through sorrow for sin and through repentance, and then you will discover what it means to be born anew, each and every day: that every day, a new person rises up before God.

We don’t much about what happens to Nicodemus; but he did certainly go and think on those things that Jesus said.  He’s one of the group who asks for Jesus’ body after his crucifixion.  I like to think that Nicodemus found what it was to be born again: to leave sin, and the fear of death, and the fear that he was not ‘doing’ enough, behind; and find what it was like to live in the freedom of the Messiah, when every night all the sins of failures of the day before die, and in the morning you rise again, born again, born anew, born from above, and loved all the more. 

And beloved of God, it’s my prayer that you will find that freedom, and be born again.

Amen.