New Birth

​Nicodemus is one of my favorite characters in the Gospel of John, and the Gospel reading we just heard is one of my favorite exchanges.
 
Although he was a Pharisee and a leader of the Jews, Nicodemus was intrigued by Jesus. So, as we just heard, Nicodemus approaches Jesus one night and acknowledges that Jesus was a teacher from God.
 
It’s not obvious how one should respond to that kind of greeting. Jesus interprets it as a request for a lesson of some sort, and he tells Nicodemus, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” or, in a different translation, “born again.”
 
Understandably, Nicodemus has no idea what Jesus is talking about. Nicodemus’ first impulse is to take Jesus literally, which is always a mistake. “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” he asks. “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
 
Jesus tries to set Nicodemus straight. I don’t mean literally born again. This is more like a parable that you need to sit with. I’m talking about birth by water and the Spirit. I’m talking about a gift that God offers you. I’m talking about God’s love and about your eternal life.
 
Nicodemus still doesn’t get it, but to his credit, he goes home and ponders these things in his heart. And it takes three years, but Nicodemus’ pondering eventually bears fruit. The next time we meet Nicodemus, he is cautiously defending Jesus before his colleagues (7:50-52). The time after that, Nicodemus shows true bravery. He helps Joseph of Arimathea bury Jesus (19:39-42). At that moment, Jesus’ disciples had abandoned him and were in hiding.
 
Two thousand years later, we are more accustomed to the language of being born again than Nicodemus was on that first night when he met Jesus. But it is good for us to do what Nicodemus did, to ponder what Jesus means when he tells us we need to be born again.
 
As Carrie can tell you, I am no expert on the experience of birth. When our first son was born, I commented that his head looked so small. Carrie, who had been in labor for twenty-four hours to push that head out, was not amused. Nearly thirty years later, I continue to hear about it. But since then, I have watched fourteen seasons of “Call the Midwives.” For those who are counting, that’s 128 episodes showing 208 births.
 
And here is what I can say. Being born looks horrible.
 
The poor child is just sitting there in the womb, getting a little cramped but otherwise perfectly content. All of a sudden, she starts getting pushed and pulled by powerful forces she cannot understand. She gets shoved through a birth canal small enough that it deforms her head. And when it is over, she finds herself in a strange and scary world of bright lights, cold, and large strangers who do things like whack you.
 
If you sit with it, being born again is a terrifying image for the ongoing process of spiritual transformation to which Jesus calls us.
 
And it doesn’t get better if we keep going. Not only is a newborn thrust into an utterly alien world; the poor child is totally helpless, incapable of meeting even her most basic needs or making sense of anything around her.
 
It’s a humbling image for people who like to think we have been transformed by God.
 
A contemporary Christian author named Brian McLaren says that when Jesus told us to be like children, “He was inviting arrogant, complacent, or misguided adults who think they have arrived to humbly realize that they are only beginners in adulthood, and they have a lifetime of adult growth ahead of them.” Being born again, McLaren says, means becoming “beginners again, with the insatiable curiosity of children who know there’s a lot they don’t know, and aren’t ashamed to admit it.”[1] If you think about newborns, I’m not sure that McLaren puts it strongly enough.
 
But all is not grim. Newborns can do two things really well. They can grow. And they can learn. And that is the invitation to us in Jesus’ image of being born again: however hard it may be, we can grow and we can learn.
 
Different people imagine their own lives in different ways. My father pictures his life so far as a more or less straight line, without many big bends in the road. Other people’s lives seem to get turned upside down over and over again.
 
My own life to this point has had one big bend, one period that was like being born again.
 
In my mid-thirties, I was on top of the world. My life was unfolding exactly according to plan. I was married to a beautiful woman and had two beautiful children. I wasn’t making that much money, but I was thriving in a job that I found very fulfilling. My life was comfortable. My needs were met.
 
What I didn’t know is that I was like a baby in the womb right about nine months.
 
Over the next few years, I got pushed and pulled in unwelcome ways. My job became less satisfying. So did my marriage. My sense of identity, of who I was, was called into question.
 
I resisted new birth as long as I could. I wanted everything to get back to the way it had been just a few years before. But I couldn’t get back into my comfortable womb of a life. God was pulling me in a new direction, even if I only went kicking and screaming.
 
It took a few years, but eventually I found myself in a new life. I wasn’t a teacher in Georgia, which I knew how to do. I was a priest in Massachusetts, who needed a LOT of learning and growing.
 
Part of that learning and growing was professional. I didn’t know how to do lots of things that priests do. But the more important learning and growing I had to do was spiritual. It had to do with my relationship to God and my life as a disciple of Christ.
 
When I was a literal newborn—sixty years ago—I assume I was traumatized by the experience of birth and terrified at the new life that was opening up before me. Still, looking back, I am glad to have been born!
 
My experience of new birth was analogous—also a little traumatizing, and the new life that was opening up before me at forty was kind of scary. But I am glad to have been reborn as a New England priest.
 
I encourage you to ponder your own experiences of new birth. They may have been marked by external changes in your life, and they may not. But I would guess that everyone has gone through periods of change and growth, the kind of experiences that Jesus calls being born again, born from above, born by water and the Spirit.
 
My own next big change will be retirement. I don’t know what that will look like for me. I hope it turns out to be a period of growth, even if growth usually includes pain along the way.
 
The next change for Saint David’s as a parish is coming at the same time. My prayer is that the pain of transformation will be limited. But here is what I know. Your learning and growth will be significant. That’s because God calls us to constant renewal, to rebirth over and over again, to growth in love, to maturity in faith, and to ever deeper relationship with him.
 
In Christ’s name. Amen.


[1] Brian McLaren, Life After Doom (2024), 203.