2nd Sunday in Lent
Texts: John 3:1-17;
Gen 12:1-4b; Rom 4
“BORN AGAIN FROM ABOVE”:
REBIRTH INTO GOD’S LOVE OF EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE
Born again from above. What does that mean? It’s understandable that Nicodemus is confused.
I picture Nicodemus as someone closer to my age. Does he have grandchildren yet? He’s probably already done with actively raising his own children. He can be a mentor, hopefully, yes, a wise father available to give guidance if asked — and sometimes kindly and humbly offering even if he’s not asked. But his personal experience with birthing would be from the perspective of a grandparent. I try to imagine what he might be thinking: what does Jesus mean that he needs to be born again from above in order to enter God’s reign? He fears for his children and grandchildren. The life of most Jews in the Roman Empire is not a pleasant one, to say the least. Nicodemus is probably thinking:
Aren’t we God’s chosen people? And yet we live under such oppression from Gentiles who lord over us? It’s not easy being born into the world as a Jew right now. My fellow Jews are understandably angry, constantly on the brink of resorting to violent insurrection. It’s not a safe world in which to give birth right now. I come to this Jesus fellow at night looking for answers, hoping that he might even be the Messiah, the one God has sent to usher in God’s reign. That’s what we need! God’s reign! And yet he tells me that I need to be born again from above? What does that mean?
I can relate to Nicodemus. I’m old enough, even though I don’t have grandchildren yet. And, to be honest, I can understand why potential parents are hesitant to bring grandchildren into the world right now. What a mess! Authoritarian movements on the rise everywhere, including here in the United States. I never imagined I would be living through that — that after more than 200 years of democracy, we might actually be in danger of losing it. And there’s so many crises facing us: the continued existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the extreme weather that climate change is already bringing. The mixture of those two seems like a brewing disaster. People fleeing severe weather in mass migration to other parts of the world, and others trying to protect their space, with WMD’s if necessary. It feels like things are only getting worse not better.
So what can we do about it? It seems like a good time to double down on our religion, right? People need to get back to church! People need to get back to Christianity! That’s the answer! As a member of the Jewish Council, that’s no doubt what someone like Nicodemus thought, too. We need to double-down on living the life of Torah, he though, so that God will send the Messiah to free us and to usher in God’s reign.
Except that doesn’t seem to be Jesus’ answer. He doesn’t talk about doubling down on being a good Jew. He says we need nothing less that being born again from above. What does that mean!? I think we still need to know two thousand years later. If we are tempted to think that the answer is doubling down on being good Christians, is that any different than Nicodemus? Did Jesus simply come to give us a new religion?
This religion of Christianity has been in the world for two thousand years now. Is the world any safer? Or have Christians, too, simply added to the mess? Haven’t we primarily offered the world another way to be divided? Another reason to be fighting? Another culture from which to try to control others and say ours is best? That We are the answer? This is the question of the day: if Jesus was here to talk to us face-to-face, like with Nicodemus, would it simply be about doubling down on being a good Christian? Or would the answer about being born again from above still apply to us, too? And, one last time to ask, WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
Brothers and Sisters in Christ, after more than a year of hearing me preach, you can probably guess my answer: Jesus means that we need to become human beings with a new start. Human Being 2.0. Last week, we read in Genesis 2 and 3 the story of our first beginnings as human beings. We began with a conspiracy theory of believing we are rivals with God and one another. We began thinking we know as God knows the difference between good and evil. And that leads to lives and cultures based on Us-vs-Them thinking. Human Being 1.0 is a version of being human that is trapped in envy, rivalry, conflict, division, and violence.
Jesus came to give us nothing less than a new start on being human that begins with God’s perspective as the Creator of everything and everyone. For God, in a power of love that we cannot fathom, there is never an Us and Them. There is only Us. Us caring for each other as family. Us caring for our earth as if it is home to all of us — including all those plants and creatures that God lovingly evolved for hundreds of millions of years before we human beings even came along. God loves this world so much that God sent the special Son into the world to show us nothing less than a new way to be human that is born again from above with the Creator’s loving perspective on things.
Not, I repeat, not to start a new religion. Being Jewish is already the pinnacle of human religions. God chose Abraham and Sarah to be called out from their own culture to wander in strange lands as a Them wherever they went. God called them out of typical human cultures in order to give them a family that would one day be a blessing to all the families of the earth. It’s the calling them out of their own culture that’s begins the blessing.
And Jesus fulfilled that blessing by going way out, kicked out of even his own culture and religion to be executed on the cross. So being raised on Easter morning was not the blessing of bringing a new religion, or even a new culture in the strain of Human Being 1.0. No, having been kicked out of all typical human culture, he came to establish God’s reign of Human Being 2.0 that begins by being born again from above, being born again to somehow live as human beings more fully and more faithfully precisely by living in the perspective of God’s love — living in the perspective of no Us who is good and Them who is bad. There’s only Us, we who are both good and bad, striving to be better. There’s only Us living to love one another as if we are all family — and thus finally living into the blessing of being blessed for the sake of blessing all the families of the earth.
Let me repeat once again the part about not starting a new religion. What’s going to save this world, if it can be saved, is not any one religion. Not any one culture in the vein of Human Being 1.0. It is not more people going to church again. It is not about our church being more like the churches who do have folks still coming in large numbers, if it’s on the basis of a Christian religion still trapped in Us-vs-Them thinking. It’s about being born again from above in a way of being human that is finally moving past the Us-vs-Them thinking of our origins as a species. It is being born again into the love of the Creator whose perspective on Creation transcends all differences by loving all those differences toward a final harmony of Us-in-our-differences. We are called to be healers of the divisions and brokenness. Not purveyors of one religion or culture that stamps out the others, one religion that simply conquers the others by doubling down on Us-vs-Them thinking.
When we make the whole business about God making a final separation between Us and Them in the afterlife, that is anti-Gospel, the opposite of the Gospel. None of this is ultimately about being Christians in a way that’s somehow better than all the other religions. It’s about being human in a way that heals the divisiveness of all our religions, including Christianity. It’s about being born again from above by God’s Spirit in order to renew our way of being human itself.
Like Abraham and Sarah, we are called out of our cultures — including our Christian culture, to the extent that it is trapped in Us-vs-Them thinking — and we are called to the healing of our divisions that we might be One New Humanity, one new human family blessed to be a blessing to all the families of earth — including all the families of animals and creatures, all the families of plants, too. We are called to be a blessing to our earth home itself by being born again from above with the love of our Creator. Amen.
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethlehem Lutheran Church,
Muskego, WI, March 5, 2023
