To be Born Again

When I was in college, I went to see a self-help guru. We met in his house with my then boyfriend and he told me a bunch of stuff and I needed to work on and I had no idea what he was talking about. It was one of the strangest conversations of my life. I could not tell if I was just dumb and could not comprehend his wisdom or if he actually, literally, made no sense. I left more confused than when I came.

The conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus was a bit like this. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a member of the elite group of Jewish scholars called the Sanhedrin, and he was used to being the smartest man in the room. But Nicodemus also knew when God was doing something and, unlike his fellow Sanhedrin, he recognized God in Jesus. Afraid of tarnishing his reputation as a wise man, he went to Jesus by night, to question him about God.

What Jesus told Nicodemus was so profound as to completely stump him. He had no idea what Jesus was talking about. But the words stuck in his mind and he kept chewing on them for years. When it came time for Jesus to be crucified, Nicodemus was there in the background to take his body down and, along with Joseph of Arimathea, to bury him. Clearly, something did sink in.

Jesus told Nicodemus that in order to be of God, one must be "born again." To this very day, Christians all over the world have wondered what Jesus meant by being "born again." All that I can offer you are my own musings, for the meaning of this concept goes far beyond anything that most of us can comprehend.

The Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor tells a story about herself in college. She was agnostic, having been raised in a home where her folks just didn't seem to care about God or think about God. She was studying one night in her dorm room and two girls from Campus Crusade for Christ came and knocked on her door. She opened it and groaned. There they were, the pests, standing there with their electric smiles, clutching their bibles, so earnest and so annoying. Barbara thought to herself, "How can I get rid of these girls fast? I need to study!"

The two girls asked her if she had accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. She decided that the easiest thing to do would be to just play along, so that she could get them to leave. So she admitted the truth,. "No," she said. "I have not accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior."

"Do you want to?" they asked earnestly.

"Sure," she said.

So they came into her room. They faced her and asked her to repeat after them, "I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior."

She said the words. They hugged her and then they left.

Thank God, Barbara thought. Now I can get back to studying.

She sat back down at her desk and couldn't concentrate, so she went for a walk. The leaves on the trees looked so beautiful to her in the setting sun. Something was different. Everything looked so beautiful.

Then she realized, with a start, that maybe she actually had accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior and maybe that's why everything looked different. And from that moment on, things didnt get easy, they got harder. She was turned upside down and began to study religion and her parents thought she was crazy and she ended up a priest!

Something happened in that dorm room. Something definitely happened.

Think about birth with me for a moment, from the perspective of the one who is born. God made it so that we don't remember our birth and that is probably a good thing because it could not have been anything but painful. Getting squeezed through some tiny spot. Leaving warmth and comfort and a place where your every need is taken care of and emerging into a cold, confusing place that makes no sense at all. When we are born, we are lost at first. We cannot distinguish colors, sounds, smells. We are helpless and must learn how to do everything. To be born again must also mean to go through something that could be quite painful or taxing and emerge as someone new, having to learn how to do everything all over again. You might need to learn to see again after being born. If this is true, then being born again is scary and I'm not sure I want to do it.

In the first life, the physical life that we are born into, we are the center of the Universe. People feed you, dress you, change you. And, as we grow up, human beings think of our own needs and wants and we wonder what we will become in the world and what is happening to us. And our lives belong to ourselves.

To be born again means to give up your life and belong to God. Your self dies and is reborn as God's child. It is God who lives in you and directs your life. You literally give up the drivers seat and become helpless again. And this process, of dying to self, can be painful and scary and many people, even those who say that they are saved or born again, have never really done it.

In his book The Dance of Hope, Bill Frey tells the story of a teenager named John who was in an accident and lost his sight. John was so angry and bitter about becoming blind and helpless that he just went to bed and shut the door. At first, his parents and family waited on him hand and foot and he was miserable. But, his parents got weary of his self-pity and his dad did something radical one day.

John's dad came to his room one morning and told him that he expected John to mount the storm windows around their house that day. "Winter is coming soon. I need you to do this. Do the work before I get home or else," his dad said. And then he left.

John was furious. He groped his way to the garage where his dad kept the storm windows. Crying and muttering in anger, he found the tools, the stepladder, the windows and felt his way around the house. He could not believe that his dad had asked him to do this. "They'll be sorry when I fall off the ladder and break my neck," he said to himself. But he didn't fall. Little by little, he groped his way around the house and he completed the task. That was the beginning of a new life for John. He realized that, even though he was blind, he could learn new ways to function and he could put in storm windows and he could learn. He began to live again.

It was only years later, when he was home from college and talking with his dad one night, that he spoke of that pivotal day, the day his dad challenged him to move beyond himself, beyond his misery. He told his dad how shocked he was that he had asked John to do something so dangerous. "I could have fallen and broken my neck," he said.

It was then that his dad told him that he had not gone to work that day. At no point in the day had he been more than four feet away from his son. His dad had no intention of letting John fall.

Being born again is scary. It can often involve something painful, in which you are asked to give up your old self and become someone new. Sometimes the catalyst for new birth is suffering, illness, depression, loss of work, grief. But the suffering acts as a catalyst for the emergence of something wholly new. A new life emerges in which you are no longer asking Jesus to follow you but actually being willing to follow him. Sometimes the only thing that can bring about this kind of rebirth is the total and complete failure of the first life, a time in which you realize, consciously or unconsciously, that doing things your way just is not working. Being born again can happen sometimes suddenly and unpredictably as it did for Barbara and sometimes it takes a long and painful process before a new life emerges. Being born again is as unpredictable as the wind, Jesus said.

But one thing is clear. There are many of us who claim to follow Christ but what we really want is for Christ to follow us and help our lives be better, more comfortable, more successful. It is only when we give our whole selves up to Him and let Him be in charge that we can be born again. You have to let go of life as usual before you can begin eternal life. Being born again is an all or nothing kind of a thing. You either are born or you are not. And when you are born again, you are blind for awhile. You have to grope your way around and trust that Jesus is close by, waiting to catch you.

What's it going to be, your life or God's life? Your way or God's way? You have to say goodbye to comfort and your own way and be born to a new life of grace if you are to stand a chance of catching a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven. You have to be willing to be helpless in the face of the unknown before you can understand what it is that God has in store for you.

Jesus didn't die to keep us safe. He died to help us be born again, into Him.

- The Very Rev. Kate Moorehead