Born From Above.

Genesis 12:1-4a; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17

March 8 MMXX

I.

“No one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above,” says Jesus.  Simply being born into this mortal/temporal existence is not enough for us to see God’s Kingdom.  Because, he says, “What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.”  

In order to see and know and live in the Spirit, you have to in some sense come to know yourself to be spirit.  You have to participate in God’s Spirit.  And that requires a personal transformation as comprehensive and traumatic as being born.  It is a movement from one mode of life to another.  Like morphing from a caterpillar into a butterfly, or an acorn into an oak tree.  It is a complete reorientation and reconfiguration of our life. 

Only those who are “born of the Spirit,” or “born from above,” are able to know what is going on in Jesus’ ministry and death.  With our eyes of flesh we only see a pathetic loser, dying on a cross for no apparent reason.  Paul says that the Greeks think it is foolishness to worship him, and the Jews think it is a stumbling block.  But with eyes born of the Spirit we know that he is God’s love, and in him, on the cross, God is offering us eternal life and salvation.   

The question then becomes, What does it mean to be “born of the Spirit?”  What does it mean to be “born from above?”  How does it happen?  How can we experience this?

Some Christians think Jesus is referring to specific kinds of individual intellectual, emotional, or ecstatic experiences.  As if simply having this “born again” experience is all that is required to be “saved,” and once that happens, we’re good.  But often they do not seem to pay much attention to whether and how our life after that experience is any different from our existence before it.  

So we get a situation in which there are Christians claiming to be “born again” who nevertheless willingly and enthusiastically participate in and support all kinds of ignorance, violence, and injustice that Jesus himself abhors and rejects.  I don’t think Jesus means being “born again” to be like a kind of do-over,  what golfers call a “Mulligan,” a new start to what is basically the same mortal, temporal, egocentric existence we had before, only dressed up in Jesus-y language, as if we get to do and think what we were doing and thinking before, but now with a self-serving, self-righteous, pious rationalization. 

This goes for all Christians, of course, for we all affirm a spiritual rebirth in our Baptism.  And yet few of us seem to live into that rebirth in such a way that we live lives noticeably, let alone radically, different from anyone else.  

Being reborn in the Spirit has to make a difference in our life.  That’s why the translation “born from above” makes more sense.  The rebirth Jesus describes is not in any way a going back.  Any use of the word “again” in the life of the spirit can be a big problem.  “Again” implies repetition; it implies a return to some previous conditions.  As if we will keep doing this again and again until we get it right.  

Jesus recognizes something Albert Einstein would say, that no problem can be solved with the same level of consciousness that created it.  Doing something again and again isn’t good if it’s the wrong thing.

II.

But Jesus describes this experience as being “born from above” to show that it is not definable or reducible to our normal ways of thinking.  The Spirit is like the wind, he says.  Indeed, “spirit” and “wind” are the same word in Greek.  The Spirit is wild and unpredictable.  It is not from “here,” the level of consciousness we are used to.  It is not generated out of our memories or desires, our fears and anger; it is from somewhere else.  It is not even something we know about.  “You do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit,” says Jesus.

The Spirit is not about recovering our past or projecting or providing for our future.  The Spirit is here and now, radically and eternally present.  And to be in the Spirit is not to wallow in nostalgia about the way things supposedly used to be.  And it is certainly not to try and build a future based on our own prognostications.  

But it is to be here now to the needs and pain, the joys and wonder the depth and the beauty of God and God’s creation, including every cherished person. 

Jesus says that to be “born from above” means believing in him.  Now, in the first place, “believing” is not simply an intellectual, cognitive, verbal opinion we have about Jesus.  It’s not just a bunch of words we say.  Still less is it a religious label we apply to ourselves or a religious institution we join.   

Rather, believing is a full-hearted, deeply grounded trust in Jesus Christ that is expressed and reflected in a change in our entire way of life, that is, in our actions.  It’s not about what we just think and say so much as what we truly know and then do.

To believe in Jesus is to follow Jesus.  It is to obey his commandments, which are all about love, expressed in terms of the humility, service, generosity, and compassion he embodies.  To believe is to do with our bodies in time what he says to do.  “Only the one who is obedient believes,” says Bonhoeffer, “and only the one who believes is obedient.”  Don’t tell me you believe in Jesus if your life and actions are all about benefiting from, apologizing for, commemorating, supporting, or actually doing self-serving violence.  You’re lying.    

That is why we have that reading from the Torah about Abram’s obedience, where God says: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”  Following Jesus also means “leaving home,” in the sense of getting out of your comfort zone, letting go of all the securities and allegiances that define your current existence as someone born of the flesh.  Following Jesus means leaving your ego behind, and setting out for the unknown, the unfamiliar, the risky, the alien, the new.  Following Jesus means entering into the wildness of the Spirit.  

III.  

In the second place, Jesus Christ is not just a historical figure, a mortal, temporal human of a particular far-off time and place.  Jesus certainly is all that.  He is truly human in every respect.  And he is also at the same time truly God, the eternal Word by whom everything was created, who is ever-present by his Spirit, and therefore within each of us and everything.  

Coming to this realization is what it means to “be born from above.”  To be born of the flesh is to become conscious as a limited entity with tiny perception and single perspective.  To be born from above is the opposite; it is to realize our connection to, and oneness with, everyone and everything; it is to live by God’s universal, eternal, all-inclusive perspective; it is to have our sense of our self expand to include all.

Sharing in Christ’s true humanity is also to share in his divinity, and therefore in his integration into everything.  This awareness informs our obedience and discipleship.  It means that we cannot dismiss or disregard anyone.  It means our heart breaks, for example, for every asylum seeker who sought freedom and safety, yet who, when they arrived in this country, had their children taken from them and now languish in squalid detention centers waiting for a hearing.  For what is done to the least of our sisters and brothers on the earth is done to Jesus Christ, and therefore to us.  He is our connection to everyone.  He is the basis of our compassion and empathy.      

To be born from above, then, is to see Jesus Christ in ourselves and in everybody.  It is to see in his unity with God by nature, our unity with God by grace through our trust in him.  In him we perceive God’s Presence everywhere and in everything God created.  

That is the point of the Lord’s bringing up that story from the Torah about how Moses lifts up the image of a snake so that those who look at it would be inoculated against snake-bite.  He says that action is like the way he will himself be lifted up on the cross and those who look at him and believe in him, which is to say trust in him by following him, will be thereby inoculated against the power of death. 

Because by looking at and connecting and identifying with him on the cross, we are also expressing solidarity with all those with whom he identifies: especially the victims of organized, legal State violence.  We identify with the broken, the lost, the rejected, the incarcerated, the tortured, the executed, the abandoned, and all the other victims of heartless and brutal regimes dominated by paranoia, greed, and rage.  It means we see the world from his perspective which is their perspective.  It means we believe the abused.

This is the way the early church functions.  They reach out to the people at the bottom of Roman society, which is in the spirit of the whole Biblical tradition based on the liberation of a motley gang of slaves from Egypt.  They said, “Look at the man whom the Romans killed for blasphemy and sedition… but who didn’t stay dead and now lives in all of us!  Wouldn’t you rather become part of this movement that Rome can’t kill, than keep working to make them even richer?  See how he is still present in the love we have for each other, for you, and for all!  See the freedom he has given us!  We have been reborn from above!”

IV.

This is the way, through the cross, that Jesus Christ finally fulfills the prophecy of God to Abram.  This is the way God makes of his and Sarah’s spiritual descendants  “a great nation” that will be a blessing to the whole world.  This is the way that God chooses to bless all the families of the earth.

We, those who follow and trust and obey Jesus, are that great nation, seeking to know how we have indeed been “born from above,” seeing and knowing our union with God and all things.  We are that great nation, who live now in the all-embracing wildness of God’s infinite love, realizing in Christ the eternal life that pulses within us and everything. 

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