First Presbyterian Church of
100 North Hillcrest Boulevard
Telephone numbers: (310) 677-5133 Fax (310) 330-8342
Electronic mail: PRESBYTS@SBCGLOBAL.NET
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Rev. Heidi Worthen Gamble
John
3:1-10
“Born Again…and Again!”
I
want to thank you for having me here today, and congratulate those of you who
decided to come instead of watching the Super Bowl pre-game reports. You all get an extra special corner in
heaven for being here on Super Bowl Sunday!
As
it reads in the bulletin, I am the Mission Advocate for Hunger, Poverty &
Peacemaking Concerns in Pacific Presbytery, and I have been working a few
exciting projects, like a mission trip to Nicaragua in 2008 and a youth Habitat
Build this summer that we hope your church can get involved in—my mission is to
offer mission opportunities to churches in the presbytery that offer
opportunities to grow in the Christian faith, and that help connect us in
mission as Presbyterians, which I believe always makes us stronger. I am honored to preach here today, as your
pastor leads a Hurricane Katrina work group from the Synod, and I invite us to
be committing them to prayer this morning in a powerful way as they seek to
live our their faith and be good news to those who have suffered so much.
In
today’s gospel passage we meet Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling
council, who comes to see Jesus at night, likely at risk of his own life after
Jesus cleanses the temple in the preceding chapter. We do not know why Nicodemus comes to see Jesus—all we know is
that he comes—and that he pays Jesus a complement: “Rabbi, we know you are a
teacher who has come from God. For no
one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
Jesus
then responds to Nicodemus (knowing that this was going to be a theological
debate) as if the theological debate had already begun, and issues these
mysterious and powerful words to Nicodemus in verse 3: “I tell you the truth,
no one can see the kingdom of God unless she is born again.”
Being
born again. What does this mean?
I
once heard a story about a young man who had a powerful personal conversion
experience, and after his conversion he felt called to go and preach the gospel
in airports. He would stand outside at
a terminal and ask people: "Excuse me, have you been saved?" Most people were very uncomfortable with his
approach and many would avert their eyes and try to avoid the young evangelist,
walking quickly by. But the young man
was not easily deterred and was very courageous; he persisted in asking his
question to everyone who passed by.
After a while he noticed an older man sitting on a bench, quietly
watching him.
When
he realized the older man was looking at him, so he walked over to him and
asked, "Have you been saved?"
"Yes"
the older man replied.
After
a morning of dealing mostly with rejection, the young evangelist’s eyes lit up
at the stranger’s words, hopeful for some fellowship and encouragement. "When were you saved?” he asked,
“because I was saved June 15, 1996 at 7:35 PM!!”
"Well,
I was saved a little further in the past,” the older man replied slowly. The young man nodded his head
enthusiastically, wanting him to go on.
"In
fact,” the older man said, “I was saved around 2000 years ago when Jesus died
on the cross, but I didn’t learn about it until—oh--sixty years ago or so from
my folks."
(pause)
What
does it mean to be born again?
John
Wesley, the great founder of the Methodism, writes: “To be born again is to be
inwardly changed from all sinfulness to all holiness. It is fitly so called, because as great a change then passes on
the soul as passes on the body when it is born into the world.” I love his words here, that it is a change
that “passes on the soul”.
In
the Greek the words “born again” are actually only one word: anothen, which has three meanings. Anothen
can mean “again” in the sense of “one
more time” (that is, again in the sense of being chronologically repeated,
which is how Nicodemus interprets Jesus’ words). But anothen also means
“born from above”; that is, from the realm of the transcendent, from God. Some of your translations may read “born
from above” rather than “born again”. Anothen also means “born from the
beginning, a re-creation, with a new, different nature.” So in the fullness of the meaning of the
Greek text this phrase might be translated as: “No one can see the kingdom of
God until she is born again, born anew, born from above.”
In
addition to understanding the Greek text there are also important insights from
more recent biblical scholarship. John
wrote the gospel from his experience in community with other believers called
the “Johannine community”. The
Johnannine community was distinctive because it was a diverse mix of Jews,
Samaritans and Gentiles, and although they did not have a common race or
identity, they had common experiences of conversion and a shared belief in
Jesus as the Son of God that identified them as a community. For the Johannine community it was not
longer race and culture that marked your identity; it was belief.
It
is belief that is the primary
theme in the gospel of John and of primary concern to the Johannine
community. In John’s gospel we are led
to see how Jesus’ identity as the Son of God comes to be recognized and how it
fails to be recognized. We learn that
those who fail to recognize Jesus are often the religious authorities or those
who claim they can see: the chief priests, the Pharisees, members of the Jewish
ruling council (like Nicodemus).
Ironically, those who do recognize Jesus are a ragtag bunch of outcasts
and outsiders: the Samaritan woman at the well, a royal official in Herod’s
service, an outcast invalid at the Bethesda pool, the five thousand who were
hungry, a man born blind, the women Mary and Martha. Each story has a similar plot to the story of John’s gospel as
whole. Will this person see Jesus for
who he is, experience a miracle, and receive eternal life, or will they not see
and not believe, deserting Jesus or plotting to kill him?
Nicodemus
is a member of the Sanhedrin, the top Jewish ruling institution in the Jewish
relgious state, who is struggling to see.
So he continues the theological debate with Jesus and asks him in verse
4: “How can a man be born when he is old?
Surely you cannot enter a second time into your mother’s womb!”
Jesus
replies, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he
is born of water and the Spirit.” Jesus
basically repeat his point, but with some changes; this time he emphasizes entering
the kingdom of God and being born of water and the Spirit, which
then moves into baptism, because for the Johannine community as for early
Christian communities the experience of being “born again” was culminated in
being “born of water and the Spirit” in the experience of baptism. Confessing one’s faith and being baptized
were one and the same thing. After
Jesus talks with Nicodemus about being born again and of water and the Spirit,
he then goes to Aenon west of the Jordan River where people flock to be
baptized by him. So to be “born again”
meant right belief and a baptism.
We
know that the confession of faith that happened at baptism for early Christians
was very clearly about entering into a new reality, a new way of life. Early Christian baptisms were often
life-altering experiences. In the early
centuries of the church, when you came to be presented for baptism after a time
of preparation, study, and fasting, you were sent down into the catacombs
without clothing, and were asked to renounce evil and death. Then you were asked if you believed in Jesus
Christ. Upon confessing your faith, you
were immersed in the murky dark waters of the catacombs three times, after
which you would emerge and receive new white clothing from a deacon. Once you were clothed you would then walk up
into the light and be fully embraced by the community of believers, receiving
the kiss of peace.
“I
tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of
water and the Spirit.” After being
baptized in the early centuries as a Christian you had truly been risen from death
to life with Christ, had been washed clean, marked as Christ’s own. You were reborn, not from a mother’s womb
but from the womb of the Spirit, from God.
You were born again.
Now
most of us here today don’t have an experience of coming up out of the
catacombs when we confessed Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. In fact, if you were baptized as an infant
like me, which is what Presbyterians do, you don’t even remember your baptism,
so at a later date, as an adult, you had a moment when you confessed Jesus
Christ as your Lord and Savior.
So
I want to contend that today you and I are not just born again through the
waters of baptism or a confession of faith as an adult—we are born again and
again. One scholar writes: “Christian
initiation is only the beginning; it launches one on a lifelong journey of
becoming the being one is made by baptism.”
In other words, we continue to become the cleansed people we are
already made at our baptisms. The time
of baptism and confession of faith are points of departure for a life lived in
the Christian faith, where we continue to grow into what happened to us at
those pivotal moments of our faith journey.
While our salvation happens once, our sanctification, or the process of becoming
like Christ happens over a lifetime.
Whenever we have moments of deeper revelation,
moments when we are showered again with God’s love, moments of serving the Lord
that expands our hearts, we are being born again and again. The group that is going to New Orleans is
going to serve the tremendous need there, and I do pray that they will serve
faithfully in that place. But my prayer
is also that they will experience moments of rebirth in their faith while they
are there, so much so that when they come back they will see that God wanted
them there not only to serve the people of Louisiana, but also to grow closer
to Him in their own walks of faith. As
we grow in the faith, we are invited to continually be born again, to
experience the awesome power and grace of God again, to be showered with the
love of God one more time, to be reminded that we are loved beyond all measure
once again. And each time we do that,
we grow closer to God, which is exactly what God desires.
We are blessed to be born again, born from above,
born from water and the spirit. And we
are blessed that our God in Jesus Christ will continue to shower us with
moments of rebirth in the faith that will deepen our understanding, strengthen our
vision, and lead us on. Alleluia. Amen.