We Must Be Born Again
THE SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT
Genesis 12:1-4a • Romans 4:1-5, 13-17 • John 3:1-17
Are you tired of Lent yet? My Lent Madness bracket is busted. My Lenten disciplines are hanging on by a thread. My quads and hamstrings are tight from all this kneeling. But there’s more to Lent than what we make of it. Several of you have reminded me that you don’t have to take on a penitential practice in order to experience a Lenten wilderness. For all too many of us, that desolate place of struggle comes and finds us whether we’re looking for it or not.
Several years ago, a bishop told me that he is suspicious of people who enjoy Lent. He was talking about me, of course. He had seen how much I love these forty days of self-imposed misery, and his words were offered as an important counter-balance—a reminder that my ability to choose a season of voluntary hunger and self-prescribed longing is a sign of considerable privilege. Not everyone has that choice. There is nothing holy about going to bed hungry each night if you don’t even have enough cornmeal to make one griddle cake for you and your child.
For plenty of us, there is a different nagging, crippling hunger that follows us day after day—the hunger to know that we are beloved of God. Too often religious leaders have singled us out as sinners in need of repentance—not because we carry our share of a universal brokenness that needs to be restored but because we have not lived up to their standards of holiness. You know what Jesus says to spiritual leaders who take pleasure in making us feel bad about ourselves? “Woe to you…for you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” Nevertheless, for those of us who have come to the Episcopal Church from other traditions that deal primarily in guilt and shame, Lent’s annual call to lament our sins and acknowledge our wretchedness—no matter how grace-filled we intend it to be—strikes at an old wound, reopening painful experiences of spiritual abuse.
Perhaps we should skip Lent altogether and jump straight to the end. Maybe we need less wilderness and more resurrection. Someone I only know through social media shared a post that rightly criticizes the institutional, imperial church for imposing a period self-denial instead of nurturing a season of human empowerment. The author of the original post, Susan Thistlethwaite of Chicago Theological Seminary, asks, “Why isn’t Lent observed by marching into the centers of power, overturning some tables, healing people, and arguing with authorities?” The answer she identifies is Constantine, which is to say the church’s continuing love affair with power. The problem, though, is that until we examine our own love affair with power, any tables we turn over in the name of Jesus we will only reset in ways that serve our own needs and not those of God people—God’s reign on the earth.
As if he were anticipating this intrinsic problem, Jesus warns us in today’s gospel lesson, saying, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the reign of God without being born from above—without being born again.” Those might be Jesus’ words, but is there anything more thoroughly un-Episcopalian than being born again? I’d bet that we’d happily accept the Great Litany every week during Lent if it meant we could avoid talking about being born again. Even the NRSV—the translation we use here in worship—renders Jesus’ criterion for seeing and entering God’s reign not as “born again” but as “born from above.” That’s how much we’d rather avoid it.
But it turns out that there’s a funny little word play in the Greek text that makes it seem like Jesus might be telling a joke at Nicodemus’ expense. The word in question—ἄνωθεν—means both “again” and “from above.” If you think about it, that dual meaning makes sense because starting over again is, in a way, like starting from the top. So, when Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born ἄνωθεν, and Nicodemus responds, “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born [again]?” it’s possible that Jesus chuckled a little bit because this religious leader, who had come to him by night, isn’t quite picking up what Jesus is laying down. Nicodemus seems to be confusing a heavenly rebirth with a second earthly nativity.
But I’m afraid that most of us aren’t getting what Jesus means either. Despite our namesake, aren’t we here at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church somewhat skeptical of any story of radial conversion as belonging to a brand of Christianity with which we’d rather not identify? We often use the label “born-again Christian” with a derisive tone in part because those who would emphasize the need for a born-again experience usually look down on those of us who never had one as insufficiently Christian. But Jesus wasn’t speaking to evangelicals or fundamentalists when he told Nicodemus that no one can see the reign of God without being “birthed” again.[1] He was talking to a died-in-the-wool religious elitist just like us.
We need to be birthed again, which is to say birthed from above, as much as Nicodemus. How often do we walk where he walked and ask the questions that he asked? We, too, have heard about this Jesus and the signs that he is able to do. We recognize that there must be something good and godly at work in this man. But, when it comes to showing up and taking our stand beside him, we’d rather lurk in the shadows, walking quickly in the dim light, lest someone confuse us for one of those religious zealots we like to point our fingers at.
Nicodemus came to Jesus at night, when no one else would notice, but isn’t our equivalent Sunday-morning worship, when there is nothing out of place or unseemly about showing up in church? This is the safe time to be faithful. No one thinks twice about you walking through those doors on a Sunday morning. But what if they saw you looking for Jesus at the quorum court meeting or the booking room at the county jail or standing in the line at the polling place? What if they heard you at a rally in Little Rock or at a march in Washington? What would they think if you went all in for Jesus? What would they say if you were truly born again?
We cannot follow Jesus into the majesty of God and do so halfheartedly. And if we are going to leave behind our attachment to this world and our love affair with the power structures that are inextricably intertwined with our way of life, we must climb back into the womb of God and be born anew—born not of the flesh of our earthly parents but of the water and the Spirit of our Mother God. Jesus challenges the assumption that our primary identity comes from this world. He asks us to believe that there is nothing more fundamental to our being than our place and participation in the family of God. And he knows that we will never achieve that focus—that singularity of identity—he knows that we can never give ourselves completely to God— until we are born all over again—reborn in the waters of baptism and in the tears of repentance and restoration.
We who belong to the institutional church have a rather unpleasant habit of rushing in and turning over all the tables so that we can put new tables in their place. But too often we do so without remembering the privilege that we carry or repenting of our lust for power. Think Christian antisemitism. Think Islamophobic crusades. Think transatlantic slave trade. Think settler colonialism. Think Manifest Destiny. Think marginalization of queer people. Think domination of women’s bodies. In every case, Christians, working in the name of Jesus, pushed aside an example of embodied power that they found threatening in order to establish their own self-serving power structure in its place. And to them it sounded like gospel work, but it was really just the kingdoms of this world operating in a Christian disguise.
There are plenty of tables of injustice and oppression in this world that need turning over, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ has shown us that in time God will flip them all. But, if we are going to be about the work of recognizing God’s reign and offering ourselves as vessels through which God’s majesty comes, we cannot skip ahead to the end. This Lenten journey of self-examination and repentance is essential because it is how we leave behind our attachment to this world and embrace the coming majesty of God. If we are going to be a part of God’s reign, we must be born again.
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1. I am indebted to the Rev. Dr. Wilda Gafney for the use of the word “birthed,” which she read aloud as her own translation of the text.
© 2023 The Rev. Evan D. Garner
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas