Born As Often As Necessary

It is tempting to set the scene as either Abram's call and response to God, Paul's telling us that it all about what God does before we respond or Nicodemus coming to Jesus in the night with the marvelous question concerning the Kingdom. What occurs to me is that this is really a single scene rather than separate ones taking place in time and space. It is almost like the transfiguration of Jesus when the disciples saw him with Moses and Elijah and then heard God.

Over the years, when I preached from this text our friend Nicodemus was seen as a rather nebulous fellow who comes to Jesus during the night in order to avoid being chastised by his colleagues. As I read this passage this week the whole scene changed. I saw Nicodemus responding to what he has seen and heard from Jesus and desires to participate at some level.

Back in the 60s I served a church that was extremely hostile to the move to integrate the community and schools. I'm sure you will be surprised that they were very hostile to their pastor who stood on the other bank of the integration stream. It was a most difficult year for the church and for me. However, there were members who came to me in the night, literally, to say, “Ben, we believe the way you believe but we can't say anything because we will live here after you've moved away.” At first, I resented these folks for not standing up with me, openly. However, today, I'm just glad they came and allowed me to know they were for me. They responded to what they were hearing and seeing and had come to venture deeper – and we did.

So, this is not a bad guy story. It is the story of men, women and children who hear Christ teaching of God's love and somehow experience the miracle of their transformation and want to get deeper into the flow of God's love. They come to Jesus in the darkest night of their lives and seek to know how they may enter the Kingdom of God.

Let Nicodemus be a model for each of us rather than a scapegoat. He comes to Jesus seeking to know more to be closer to Jesus and to find the door into the Kingdom. Nicodemus is a seeker and the conversation is in traditional and usual rabbinical form – ask a questions, receive a response, ask another question, receive another response, etc. The response is seldom, if ever, a direct answer but a response that is open to further investigation.

This a passage that lends itself to those who believe and teach that one must be “born again” in order to enter the Kingdom of God. If we hear this as a question answer exchange it sounds like one must be born again to enter the Kingdom.. However, I understood this differently than ever before. Am I right? I don't know. I just know that I heard these words and this story differently this time.

John Wesley believed God's grace is the very center of the Christian Faith. Like the lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures this morning, Abram was not chosen because he was so good but because God chose him. Abram was called righteous by God before he did anything other than live and be Abram. God chose him and Abram responded to God's call -- “Pack up and go where I lead you.”

Wesley called this Prevenient Grace – that which God does before we do anything. This is the Grace provided by God for every man, woman and child in all ages. Even before one knows that there is a God, God is at work within. God is transforming and calling to each and every person. It is God acting before we make even a hint of an action.

Here God provides the door, opens the door, into the Kingdom. This is what Jesus hung on the cross about – to provide us the justification that we cannot earn through believing the right things, saying the right words, or even living the right behaviors. Jesus opened the door to the Kingdom by leaving heaven, living as one of us on this earth, hanging on a cross for our sins, and being resurrected by the redeeming power of God Almighty. All of these things we are not capable of doing or being. We are justified by God rather than ourselves.

We walk through the door by holding our lives up to the hands of this redeeming Love. We say, “Here am I, send me.”

We walk through that door into the Kingdom with feelings of foolishness, of wondering, of confusion, of desiring to understand the un-understandable. Without the foggiest notion of what all this means or where it will lead us we just wonder around in God's Kingdom. We may try to form it into what we want it to be but God will have none of that. Indeed, God's Spirit becomes the main transforming power in our lives. We grow throughout our lives because of God's work rather than our own initiative.

Albert Einstein is generally thought of as being far beyond the intelligence of those of us who are just ordinary. However, he denied any special powers other than that of having a passionate curiosity. He understood that the more we know the more we know we don't know and he was comfortable with this when others are not. He said the thing that made him stand out is:

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious," he said. "It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science." (Science@NASA, Was Einstein a Space Alien, Science@NASA web site, 2/13/08)

Abram experienced the mysterious when he heard God's voice and he responded to the Spirit leading him. As Ben McCurdy pointed out, he did it with a flaw. The flaw was taking Lot along after God had told him to leave all his kindred behind. God continued with Abram who became Abraham the father of Isaac and Jacob. Here we have the father of what we now live as Christians. Abram, Abraham, defines faith as that which is beyond our capture or completing. It is the Fairest Thing We Can Experience for it is the mysterious God.

Nicodemus has experienced the same God-mystery. We don't know what he heard from Jesus or where he saw Jesus performing miracles but we know that he understood that Jesus offered something beyond what he had ever known. Now, he goes to Jesus to seek a deeper level of understanding but Jesus is telling him that it is not a matter of understanding but of living. No matter how much Nicodemus could ever understand about the Kingdom it would not be complete. Grow in understanding only by living in the Kingdom – living by loving God with all one's heart and soul and one's neighbor as oneself.

Where are you in your meeting Jesus? Abram was pulled away from what he knew as the comforts of life. He was drawn into a life of wandering and listening for God to lead him on his life's journey. A journey that he would have never been able to lay out for himself.

We don't know if Nicodemus became a follower of Jesus or not. I've never really thought of him as a follower but as a colleague, a fellow rabbi. However, there will come a time in the next few weeks when we will see Nicodemus in a totally different scene where he will defend Jesus to those who wish to kill him. No small thing, it seems to me.

Monday evening we heard Bill Gandy and Terry Bentley preach to us at the District Conferencing – I wish the entire church had been there. Terry spoke to us about raising the BAR of excellence in the church. He painted a word picture of our being with Jesus and are asked, “Tell me about how you are a Christian?” Perhaps most of us would have to say something like, “Well, Jesus, I'm a pretty good Christian. I go to Sunday School and Morning Worship unless there is something else that I think is more important. Sometimes, I even go to Evening Worship. You know, like when they have a special program. And I give an offering to the church. One of these days, I plan to even tithe. I'd say, I'm a pretty good Christian.”

Terry reminded us that Jesus has not called us to be pretty good but to be all that we can be for him. Our face is most likely going to turn red when we start talking about being something other than an excellent disciple.

Folks, Jesus has chosen each of us to be his disciples. As long as we decide what it means to be his disciple we may feel comfortable but we will miss experiencing that Joy that come with being a partner in his redeeming this world. The only way we can experience that Joy is be with him in the business of world-redemption.

John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believe in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Let's say it together ...

We like John 3:16 because it gives us a chance to make it – or it seems that way. We pay not attention to John 3:17 because it takes us to a new level with Jesus. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that they world might be saved through him.” We are chosen to step out of what we are sure of and of our comfort zones in life and join Jesus in his saving the world. In order to do this we will need to be born again, not one time, but many times. For me it is usually more than once a day when I'm called to go beyond my comfort zone. Trust that God will birth you and me as many times necessary to get the job done. That is, we can and need, to be born again, and again, from this moment to the end of our lives – and beyond. Amen.