Feb 17, 2008 - "New Birth"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
The Second Sunday in Lent
February 17, 2008

W. Gregory Pope
NEW BIRTH
Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17

Change. Sometimes we want it. Sometimes we don’t.

On the whole, we humans don’t take to change easily, even when we know we need to. We are creatures of habit, and any change - even change for the better - is experienced as loss and a reason for grief. With the pace of change accelerating as it is, we are even more hesitant to let go of the known.

This is regrettable, because every one of us has some changes we need to make. We all need to be re-formed to some degree. To let go of some bad habits and to take hold of some good ones. Just ask the people closest to you, if you dare. Maybe they’ll be honest with you, or at least send you an anonymous letter.

It could be that your friends wrote in your high school yearbook, “Stay the way you are and you’ll go far.” But when you look at your life now, you really haven’t gone that far, and you realize it’s probably because you stayed the way you are.

We all need to change at least a little. And some of us need to change a lot. There are times in life when a little fine tuning can make all the difference, but there are other moments when we need to change stations completely because we’ve been dancing to the wrong music. You’ve been listening to Billy Joel who tells you “don’t go changing because he loves you just the way you are” when actually your soul needs to be hearing Sheryl Crow tell you that a change will do you good.

Sometimes we need a complete overhaul, a 180 change of direction, a total makeover, a new beginning, a fresh start.

It may be that lately you’ve found yourself deep down really wanting to change, but finding it almost impossible. Maybe the change you desire is in your character or your job or some relationship or your home.

Perhaps the story we read from Genesis sounds good to you. You wish God would come to you as he did to Abraham and say, “Pack your bags. I’m about to give you a new start in a new place. And through you I’m going to bless many people. You’re gonna know your life matters.”

Are you looking for a change? A new start?

Sometimes we are forced into a new beginning. I think of those who are gathering on Sunday evenings these days for the Divorce Recovery Workshop. Their new beginning may have been beyond their control, the choice of their partner. Or they may have reached a place where they had to leave what they knew behind and start over.

New beginnings often come with an attraction and a threat. The attraction of starting new and fresh. As well as the threat of uncertainty. Sometimes clinging to what we know can fell more comfortable than what we don’t know.

It’s like leaving for college - (said with joy) You’re finally on your own! There’s no one to tell you what to do! But then again - (said with fear) You’re on your own. Yes, there were some restrictions at home, but there was also security.

It’s like starting a new career. It’s exciting, but the old place was safe and known.

It’s like a child getting a fresh sheet of drawing paper. She gets to start all over again, but she has to decide where to begin.

Or, as is the case with our scripture lessons, you’re looking a new way of seeing, living, and understanding faith. There is the attraction of a faith beyond black and white that helps you live with the gray ambiguities of your life. But there is also the threat of losing the false peace of certainty and easy answers: “Just somebody tell me what to believe.”

New beginnings are almost always both an attraction and a threat.

I think Nicodemus understood both the attraction and the threat of change. Nicodemus was a man highly respected but seemed to be looking for something more. Perhaps his faith and spiritual life has dried up and he’s searching for new insight into God.

He comes to Jesus, the story tells us, at night. Why? Does he want to keep his interest in Jesus a secret? Is he afraid of what people would think of a learned scholar of scripture asking questions of an untrained carpenter from Galilee?

Or could it be that Nick has come to Jesus at night because night is when we finally get still long enough to hear the rats gnawing behind the walls of our faith? Is it because in the darkness when we’re alone with our thoughts is when it is hardest to deny something isn’t right about our lives and something has got to change?

Whatever’s going on in the life of Nicodemus, he has seen and heard enough about Jesus to know that he is a prophet and a teacher sent from God. He tells Jesus as much.

But Jesus is suspicious of a faith based on seeing and hearing and then weighing the evidence, drawing logical conclusions with very little commitment or risk or willingness to change. So he gets to the heart of the matter and hits him right between the eyes with the truth: “Nicodemus, unless one is born from above one cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Now what does that mean? There is confusion here. The word Jesus uses for “above” as in “born from above” can also mean “again”or “anew.”

Nicodemus thought Jesus told him he must be born “again.” For he says to Jesus, “How can someone be born again when they are old? Can you reenter your mother’s womb?”

But Jesus didn’t say he had to be born “again.” Jesus said, “If you want to be able to see the kingdom of God, you must be born “from above.”

It’s interesting that as popular as the expression “born again” has become it is a reflection of Nicodemus’ misunderstanding of what Jesus actually meant.

But old Nick doesn’t get it. He’s too smart for his own good. Education, experience, age can do that to you. It can set you up for failure, make you proud, make you think you know everything when you really only know a little and not all of that is true. A lot of the time before you can learn something new and change, you have to let go of what you think you know. Intellectual pride can be the greatest obstacle to change.

One cannot literally be born again when you are old, but one who would have eyes to see the kingdom of God, the ways of God in the world, must be born from above. A new birth from above.

But one can hardly blame old Nick for misunderstanding. Jesus rarely respond with clarity. As one writer put it: “Jesus seems congenitally incapable of giving a straight answer.”

Jesus tries to explain more about this new birth to Nicodemus, telling him it is a birth of water and the Spirit. Are these the waters of baptism we hear rustling? Perhaps. But one thing that is clear is that this birth from above is a birth of God’s Spirit within us.

We cannot make the changes within ourselves that need to be made in order to see the kingdom of God in this world. It will take the work of God’s Spirit.

That’s what Paul was telling the Romans as he talked about Abraham. Abraham dared to trust God to do what only God could do. We have to trust God to change us instead of trying to change on our own. The change needed in each of us to see the kingdom of God and live the ways of God in this world is a job that is too big for us. We could never do it for ourselves no matter how hard or how long we worked. It’s something only God can do. Only God’s grace can change us. It is sheer gift.

How it happens is as mysterious as the wind, the wind, Jesus said, that blows where it wills. You can hear the sound of it, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with the work of God’s Spirit in our lives. There are spiritual practices of worship and prayer and meditation and service in which we can engage and through which God can work. But the work of God’s Spirit in our lives is mostly a mystery. You can’t pin it down to three points or twelve steps or a sinner’s prayer.

There are ambiguities in the change we call conversion. And we are warned here, I believe, against trying to engineer our own change, our own new start, with self-administered therapies. A rebirth from above is required.

However change occurs, it continues within us as we remain open to the wind of God’s Spirit in our lives. With new birth we need time to grow into the new creation God is helping us become. It is God, said Paul, who calls into being that which did not previously exist, bringing to life what was dead.

All true and lasting change does not begin with you and me. It is a birth from above and changes us beginning on the inside.

And know this: As you seek to open your heart to the God who can change you, God does not condemn you. For God so loved the world, John says, that God sent Jesus not to condemn the world but to save the world, and our trust in him, not ourselves, keeps us from perishing and enables us to enter eternal life, which is the life of God that can be ours even now. God in love embraces us to reform us into the person God created us to be.

The stories of Abraham and Nicodemus confront us with an opportunity that is the most welcoming and the most unsettling thing we could imagine: the chance to begin again, to be born from above, to depart on a new adventure, a new way of life, a leap in the dark, led by the uncertain, dangerous, yet faithful, presence of God. To be led by the Spirit is to live at risk because the Spirit blows where it wills. Like the wind.

Or the tide.

In the movie “Cast Away,” Tom Hanks plays a man whose plane has crashed and he is the lone survivor, exiled on an island for several years. One day he catches the tide and rides the current back out to sea. He is rescued and returns home to find that his fiancé has moved on, married to someone else. She was certain he had died.

In a moving soliloquy, he sits on his couch and says, “One day logic was proven all wrong because the tide lifted, came in, and gave me a sail. And now here I am. And I know what I have to do. I have to keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. And who knows what the tide could bring?”

He was glad to be alive, but the circumstances of his life were not the circumstances he wanted. And yet, this new start was the one he had to live with. He had to live with it. And he had to keep breathing.

You and I have to keep breathing through the changes we want but never seem to come and the changes we do not want but come anyway.

Through whatever may come or not come, the Lord is our help, says the psalmist. The Lord who knows our going out and coming in. The Lord who will keep us from this day on.

You and I have to keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun’s gonna rise. And who knows, who knows what the tide could bring?