Rebirth.

John 3:1-21.          (February 15, 2015)

I.

            Being born once is not enough.  It’s enough to get by with a kind of shallow biological existence for a few decades.  It seems to be enough for most people.  But it reminds me of that line from an old song by Bob Dylan, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”  If our only birth is the one where our physical bodies are flushed into the world, then we are spending the rest of our time dying.  We’re just playing out the string and doing a lot of damage along the way.

            We’re born into this life… and we quickly fall asleep.  We descend into a state of semi-consciousness which acts like an artificial womb, keeping us safe but also disconnected from real life.  Each of us re-enacts the fall story from Genesis in a sense, and we end up sleepwalking through life, bound by fear, shame, and anger, spawning in our wake the broken world of grief, pain, confusion, hostility, indifference, and death that we know so well and take to be the only real world.

            When Nicodemus comes to Jesus, we are carefully told that it was “night”.  Night, a time of darkness when we cannot see – and remember that before about a century ago nighttime was really dark – symbolizes this state of living death, sleep, unconsciousness, and blindness in which we find ourselves after our first birth.

            Just like the stone water jars in the story of the wedding, and the Temple in last week’s story, Nicodemus, a Pharisee, also represents the failed, inadequate, stop-gap, provisional religious institutions of the time.  At best he was one of the blind leaders of the blind, managing a system in which the people try to grope their way through the darkness by following the written directions of the Law. 

            But at least he does show up, recognizing that Jesus is “a teacher who has come from God.”  He senses in the strange things Jesus is doing the presence and activity of God; maybe he wonders if Jesus’ actions which don’t seem to make much sense, actually reflect a different dimension of reality.

            To which Jesus responds, “I assure you, unless someone is born anew, it’s not possible to see God's kingdom.”  In other words, you won’t be able to see much of anything I am doing unless and until you have experienced a rebirth, a birth from above.  Being born once is not enough to see the Kingdom of God, the saving Presence of the living God all around us in the world.  If you’re only born once you are still in the darkness, still bound to the night, still basically blind to what God is doing.  You’re still busy dying. 

            As an indication of how blind Nicodemus really is, he takes Jesus literally, assuming that “rebirth” is a grotesque and ridiculous biological and physical impossibility.  He thinks it means somehow entering and emerging a second time from his mother’s womb.  Which of course is nonsense.  To take Jesus literally is often to reduce his words to gibberish.  He only makes sense if we are able to listen to him with ears to hear and new minds.  That’s what “repentance” actually means: thinking differently.  And repentance is a condition for seeing the truth that Jesus talks about.

II.

            “I assure you,” Jesus continues, “unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom.”  Jesus is referring to his own experience at his baptism, when he descends into the water of the Jordan, and a bird, representing the Spirit, lands on him when he comes back up.  It is this event that causes John to recognize him as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

            We start off mired in our once-born existence.  But we have this encounter with water and Spirit.  Remember that the Greek word for Spirit, pneuma, is the same word for breath and wind; so Jesus is also talking about being born of “water and wind” or “water and breath.”  Jesus says we emerge from this encounter in a twice-born life able to see and enter God’s Kingdom.

            It is not that we are able to rise above God’s creation; what we rise above is our fallen existence beneath God’s creation, unable to perceive the goodness and blessing of God’s creation.  We come out of our unconsciousness, we wake from our sleep, we rise from submersion, we move from the darkness of our own delusion up into the light.  We rise up into God’s creation, as symbolized here by the water and the wind, or breath or Spirit, or the wild bird.

            Until this rising up happens, we remain lost in an imploded and collapsed darkness that we imagine is the only world.  Jesus says that, “Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit.”  In other words, our first birth was a result of personality-driven, ego-centric impulses, and flushed us into a personality-driven, ego-centric world. 

            Our first birth began in unconsciousness and unconsciousness is what we inherited.  “Flesh” in the New Testament does not mean our physical nature; it is a selfish, self-centered, self-righteous impulse far below our physical nature.  “Flesh” is the power that actually separates us from our God-breathed nature.  Jesus is saying that whatever is born separated from God stays separated from God, until something else happens.

            The only way to be restored to connection with and in God, is to be born anew, into that true, good, blessed, and holy nature.  It is to be “born” a second time of water and wind.  It is to be born into God’s creation, God’s wild, uncontrolled, unpredictable, undomesticated nature.  “God’s Spirit blows wherever it wishes,” says Jesus.  “You hear its sound, but you don't know where it comes from or where it is going.  It’s the same with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

            We have to trust the Spirit’s wildness.  We have to surrender to not-knowing.  Remember which tree in the garden got the people into trouble: it was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

III.

            At this point, Nicodemus is as confused as we might be.  This is not what he is expecting.  This is not what he has always been taught or has been teaching.  He doesn’t find any of this “born of the Spirit” stuff in his Bible.  So he says, What?  “How are these things possible?”

            To which Jesus replies that his teaching comes from a place of which Nicodemus has no knowledge: heaven.  Now, in one sense heaven literally means “sky,” and refers to some realm above this one.  But in another sense heaven also refers to the inner life of the human soul, as when Jesus says in Luke that the Kingdom of God, synonymous with the Kingdom of Heaven, is “within you.”  

            So “heaven” is not just another place where the good people go when they die; it is also within and among us, here and now, in our hearts and in our relationships.  Heaven pervades everything, like the way physicists tell us most of our world is actually empty space.  Heaven is this other dimension from which we are separated by our own self-centered blindness.  It is what we enter when we are born anew, or born “from above,” which is another way to translate the word used there.

            We have to be born from above, born from heaven, in order to understand what Jesus is talking about. 

            Jesus then brings up a story from the Torah where the Israelites, due to their chronic grumbling, are attacked by snakes, and, at God’s instruction, Moses fashions a snake made out of bronze.  When he lifts it up and the people look at it, they are healed of their snakebites. 

            Jesus says he will also be lifted up; he will be like the snake.  He will be lifted up when he is crucified.  And just as the bronze snake becomes, when the people see it, the antidote to what it depicts, so Jesus being lifted up on the cross becomes, when people see what is really happening, the antidote to death itself.  Therefore, when people see him and trust in him and follow and obey him rather than the demands of their selfishness, they are restored to the original life and blessing they were created with.  They are free of the infection of separation and so free of death.

            Back in the prologue we heard that “the Word became flesh.”  Paul also says that Christ “became sin.”  Here Jesus takes on the role of the snake in the story from the Old Testament.  I do not have to remind you of the snake’s other role, in Genesis, as the tempter who coaxed the people into disobedience.

            All of which means that God’s salvation in Jesus entails this dive into the very depths of our twisted, crippled, darkness, and then lifting it up, revealing its full horror.  “This is the basis for judgment,” Jesus says.  “The light came into the world, and people loved darkness more than the light, for their actions are evil.  All who do wicked things hate the light and don't come to the light for fear that their actions will be exposed to the light.”

            When Jesus is lifted up bleeding and broken it shows how people love the darkness more than the light.  We see the regime of violence, fear, hatred, and inequality in which we are all imprisoned.  We see how we treat each other.  We see how we treat the God of love who made us.  We see the snake that is killing us.  And the snake is us.

IV.           

            For those born of water and Spirit, born from above, who trust and follow and obey Jesus and his way of radical love, his lifting up on the cross is not a sign of despair and just another bitter victory for the powers of evil.  The cross does not instill the fear and terror it is intended by the powerful to instill.  Whoever has been reborn sees that all the violence and hatred aimed at Jesus, and at all suffering people, is absorbed by God and pours into the infinite depths of God’s love, where it is neutralized and channeled away, the way a lightning rod takes all that powerful, unstable voltage from the sky and conducts it harmlessly into the earth.

            To trust in him is to live without the judgment and condemnation that are the main tools used by the powerful to keep people blind and bound.  It is to live without hierarchies and regulations, without threats and scarcity, without chains of command.  It is to live in community, connected to God, creation, others, and even your own soul.

            And following him is to place ourselves in the same position.  It is to find ourselves reborn, born from above, and therefore located above our debased condition, elevated into harmony with the blessed and good creation, taking our place as the Creator’s stewards, managing all these marvelous resources for the good of all. ++

            For this is the way God loves the world: by sending the only Son, the Word, the light and life of the world, by whom the world was created, into that world, becoming our lost and broken condition.  So that whoever sees him, the living God, lifted up in suffering, taking the full brunt of the consequences of our blindness and our addiction to evil, and giving his life, God’s life, the life of the Creator, to all, will be immune to the power of death, and live forever. +++++++