A Second Birth

Jesus has traveled from Cana, where he changed the purification water into wedding reception wine, to Jerusalem for Passover. When he reached the Temple, he was consumed with passion for God’s people who came there to worship and drove out the money changers and sacrifice salesmen. Then, throughout the Passover Festival, he has performed many signs and many people believed he was the Messiah.
All of this had not gone unnoticed by the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling counsel. They had watched and discussed his signs. They knew he had to be a teacher anointed by God. No one could do the things he did if God weren’t with him. We can only imagine their conversations. What will this mean for the Temple? For them? Would it be possible to eliminate him quietly? Is it possible to discredit him? How many people are following him now anyway?

One of them has a different question, though. Instead of being concerned about preserving what he has, Nicodemus yearns for more. He is a Pharisee. He knows and keeps the rules. He is on the Sanhedrin, he is on the court the handles people who don’t keep the laws. He doesn’t dare speak his desire to the others in the Sanhedrin.

At night, under the cover of darkness, he sneaks through the streets to the place where Jesus is staying. He can hear his heart pounding. No one has seen him. He approaches Jesus. “Rabbi, we have seen the signs you have performed. We know you are a teacher who has come from God.”

Rabbi. Nicodemus, a prominent Pharisee, a member of the Sanhedrin, a leader of the Jerusalem Temple, addresses this country, carpenter Jew from Galilee as Rabbi. But, I just imagine Nicodemus in a black trench coat with a black fedora and dark sunglasses staying in the shadows and standing beside Jesus with his eyes cut sideways and the back of his hand over his mouth, “Rabbi, 10-4 on the ID. Prepared to receive the message.”

Jesus knows Nicodemus’ yearning. Nicodemus has spent his whole life seeking to do God’s will, to follow every law, every rule and to serve as a judge of what is lawful and what is not. He wants God’s will to be done on earth. He hopes for the Messiah who will establish God’s reign. He hopes that he will see the kingdom come in his lifetime. And now that he has seen the signs Jesus has performed, he – well, he is filled with anticipation, but also fear. He has heard the response of the other members of the Sanhedrin. He wants to be included in what he believes the Messiah will establish, but he also doesn’t want to risk losing – he has so much to lose.

Jesus replies that “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born anothen.” Now this word, anothen, has three meanings: it can mean from the beginning, like describing your core make-up, completely, radically; it can mean again, in the sense of a second time; and it was used to refer to things “from above” or “from God.” Jesus tells Nicodemus that entering the kingdom of God requires a complete, radical change in who you are at your core, like having a second birth. Like our first birth, we cannot birth ourselves. This birth is from God.

And Nicodemus’s response reveals that he is confused. Maybe he takes Jesus literally, or maybe his reaction reveals hesitation, too. “How can someone be born when they are old?” he asks, “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” I’m too old for something new. I can’t start all over again.

“It’s the only way, though,” says Jesus. “…no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water”, the foundation of earthly life, this birth is our first birth from our mother’s womb. “And of the Spirit,” we must also have a spiritual birth from the Spirit of God.

What you are searching for in the dark, Nicodemus, is God. But you won’t find him – not in the ways you have been looking. You have been looking in rules and laws – lists of to-dos and not-to-dos. You have been searching for a checklist – something you can grasp and control. But God won’t be captured.

The Hebrew and Greek words for Spirit – ruah and pneuma – also mean breath and wind. The Spirit of God is so like breath and wind that it shares the same name. The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes. It is mystery. You can see and feel and hear its movement, but you can’t legislate it. You can’t produce it or predict it. You can only place yourself in the open, where you can experience it.

Have you experienced it? The wind of the Spirit blowing through your life and ruffling the pages? The breath of God giving you a second birth? Sometimes, we experience mighty wind, other times it is a gentle breeze. As critical to our life as breathing, we continually open ourselves to receive it.

I think that’s my biggest frustration with the question “Have you been born again?” Some people have a date when they first stood in the open and felt the Spirit of God blow through their lives. Others of us were born into families that taught us to name us in the breeze even as infants.

Rev. Dr. Susan Elliot tells about inviting some of the older members of her congregation to share with the Confirmands at their first get together about their confirmation experience and to talk about their faith and what it had meant to them. She says, “When I asked him to come, Dieter, an immigrant from Germany, told me: ‘Well, I was never confirmed, because it was during the War in Germany, you know.’ I told him, ‘Then just share whatever your experience was. That’s what they need to know.’ None of us was prepared for the rest of the story when Dieter took his turn in the meeting. ‘I was never confirmed, you see. We had started classes, but it was in the War. One day we came for our class and the church had been bombed, and our pastor was lying there dead in the rubble of the sanctuary.’ Dieter went on to describe the succeeding years of confusion and anger at God for everything that happened in the war, moving to the U.S. and putting some kind of life together, the death of his first wife, and his experience of the profound absence of God. Now in this story, we want some flash of recognition, some dramatic moment, some sudden conversion … one day. There was no such thing. Yet maybe his simple story gives us some courage to proclaim what we know and to testify to what we see. Dieter met his second wife, and she persuaded him to come to church with her. He obliged not because he had had any conversion, but simply because he loved her, and he was committed to getting along with her and making her happy. Going to church seemed harmless enough. Now somehow over the course of years, Dieter started to realize, simply by being with people who gathered each week to seek and to acknowledge the presence of God, to give thanks together in a sanctuary for the mysterious gifts of life … in the midst of this, he started to realize that God is present—no flashing lights, no big event, on no particular day—just the slow realization, a realization that seemed to be taking place even as he spoke to the Confirmation class about it, ‘Now, I know that God is here with us.’

A second birth. A breath. Whether a gentle breeze or a rush of wind. God is here with us. This is the assurance that Nicodemus went out in the darkness searching for. This is the truth that is good news for you and for me. May we be open to receive it. Amen.