Did all that thinking. Might as well preach it.

I pulled together various parts of my posts on the meaning of being born again and wove them into a sermon I delivered the Sunday before New Year 2014. Here it is in all its glory--or whatever.

US BORN-AGINNERS

Olivet Church, New Westminster BC

Dec. 29, 2013

I had recently moved to Illinois to attend Trinity Evangelical Divinity School near Chicago. Having reached a fairly wooly state about the ears, I paid a trip to a hairdressing establishment in the small town in which we were now residing. My barber, having determined my reason for moving to the area, immediately placed me in a pigeonhole of his choosing. He began to speak of 'us born-aginners'.

While I would not have employed the term in quite that way (particularly with the connotations it carries in the U.S. of the Religious Right), I did not object in principle to the notion that he and I shared a certain religious experience. I had long ago memorized scriptural passages emphasizing the need for some kind of birth from above in order to enter the kingdom of God. The best known involves the conversation between Jesus and a prominent Jewish teacher named Nicodemus that Don read moments ago.

John 3:3-7 

³ Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” 

⁴ “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”

⁵ Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. ⁶ Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. ⁷ You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’

That lovely Christmas carol Hark the Herald Angels Sing clearly emphasizes that this is the whole point of why we celebrate Christmas:

v. 3. Hail the heav'n-born Prince of Peace,
Hail, the Sun of Righteousness.
Light and life to all He brings,
Risen with healing in His Wings.
Mild He lays His Glory by,
Born that man no more may die,
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.

Now as a card-carrying member of the Protestant wing of Christianity, and for most of my life as part of the evangelical expression of that faith, I was pretty sure I knew what the term ‘born again’ meant. But recently I have been deliberately exploring familiar biblical concepts while attempting to keep my life-long, if fairly unexamined, beliefs at arm’s length to ensure that I am not reading into the biblical text teaching that is not really there. Regrettably, I've lost contact with that barber--in fact, I rarely need one now--so I’ve had to go it alone.

As most of you probably know, the New Testament of the Bible, including our passage this morning from the Gospel of St. John, was written in the Greek language of the 1^st century A.D. The word translated ‘again’ in the term ‘born again’ is actually much more accurately translated as ‘born from above’. In other words, it’s not timing that is the emphasis here—I was born once, and then I was born again at some later point—but the source of the re-birth. One is born on earth of human agency—a Dad and a Mom--but one must also be born from above, which can have only a divine agency—God. Source, not timing.

Purely human birth puts us on the track to living a life to a large extent dictated by whatever country and culture we happen to grow up in; taking our values, opinions, and goals from those groups that have the most influence on us, with whatever resources we are fortunate enough to have, or unfortunate enough not to have; stumbling along in life as best we can; aging; and eventually going the way of all flesh.

As I mentioned in my last sermon here at Olivet, about pouring new wine into old wineskins, we live lives largely informed by our culture. While we may have a small number of goals or opinions that are uniquely from our faith, most of us are pretty much good old hockey-loving Canadians with a dash of British Columbia thrown in to separate us from the Newfoundlanders. Our worldview has a particular shape that is the product of our upbringing in this country and this culture as opposed to another. We are unaware of our blind spots. They are part and parcel of our upbringing, our heritage, even our patriotism, and have sunk to a pretty sub-conscious level.

Of course, that was exactly the problem with the lukewarm 1st century Laodicean Christians in Revelation chap. 3. They were so indistinguishable for the most part from their fellow citizens that God was ready to write them off as a neither hot nor cold, but merely tepid. There was nothing that could remotely be called “value added” that characterized their professed faith. God’s language was colourful and pretty scary: I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

But being born from above allows us, quoting St. Paul, to know Christ and the power of his resurrection. It gives us the means to take a bird’s eye look at our prevailing culture—via the scriptures, the Holy Spirit and the church—rather than being immersed in our culture (more of a worm’s eye view). We can determine what is genuinely helpful and what is a hindrance to living the fruitful, giving, principled, intentional life that God would have us live; to be the agents for change that God intends for us to be. We can know the real difference between right and wrong, not what our culture says is right and wrong. We can even rise to the biblical challenge to Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you (Mt. 5:44). That we don’t take advantage of this great privilege is, of course, the number one problem for the Christian church and for individual Christians in being a significant force for change in our needy world.

Now, if we accept that being born-aginners (sorry, I mean born-from-abovers) is a desirable thing—and Jesus certainly thinks that it is—we are still left with the challenge of figuring out how it occurs. While there may be a consensus on that issue here in this congregation, there are very different views held by equally fair-minded fellow Christians all over this community, not to mention this country and the world at large.

While a bit of a caricature, a Catholic web page I consulted recently summarizes the typical evangelical view fairly well:

For an Evangelical, becoming "born again" often happens like this: He goes to a crusade or a revival where a minister delivers a sermon telling him of his need to be "born again." 

 

"If you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and believe he died for your sins, you’ll be born again!" says the preacher. So the gentleman makes "a decision for Christ" and at the altar call goes forward to be led in "the sinner’s prayer" by the minister. Then the minister tells all who prayed the sinner’s prayer that they have been saved—"born again."

In fact, this was very similar to my own experience. May 4, 1958, Lorne Ave, Gospel Hall in Trenton ON. The biblical text was Is. 53:5-6, a passage that I love to this day.

But that same source (It’s called “are-catholics-born-again”) went on to outline the position that would be taken by Time Magazine’s 2013 person of the year, the admirable Pope Francis:

When a Catholic says that he has been "born again," he refers to the transformation that God’s grace accomplished in him during baptism.

In the vast majority of cases this would be infant baptism.

How significant is this rite in the Catholic faith? Consider the response of the priest who gave Mafia mobster Vito Rizzuto a full Catholic funeral (National Post, January 7, 2014):

Monsignor Igino Incantalupo, who conducted the service for Mr. Rizzuto and a similar funeral in 2010 for Mr. Rizzuto’s father, Nicolo, also a Mafia boss when he was shot dead, defended his stance.
“He was a Christian and he had the right to have a funeral in the church. Now, I know that everyone is not in agreement with that but the church cannot refuse a baptized person. We don’t have to judge so that is why we make the funeral of that guy and to make the funeral of his father two years ago and of his son more years ago,” he said.

Catholics and many Protestants believe that the biblical references to being baptized by water as well as the Spirit (as in John 3:5) mean the rite of baptism; i.e., that a person is born again, born from above, or spiritually regenerated by being baptized, presumably by some suitably credentialed church official.

The Orthodox Church does not stop at baptism. It must be their baptism.

The Orthodox Church makes no judgment concerning the efficacy or validity of baptisms performed by other denominations, as regards people who are members of those respective denominations. The precise status and significance of such baptisms has not been revealed by God to the Orthodox Church; however, as a practical matter, they are treated as non-efficacious (that means theydidn’t take!) unless and until the person joins the Orthodox Church (see http://orthodoxwiki.org/Baptism).

Now you can decide for yourself whether God would insist on something as cumbersome and arbitrary as a religious rite, widely unavailable in many parts of the world, as his method of conferring his love, forgiveness, acceptance and empowerment.

But the best way to decide this is to return to our passage in John chap. 3 and mine its content further. This leads me to giving you the following advice: When in doubt about the meaning of the Gospels, ask a Jew.

It came as a considerable surprise to me that I had a breakthrough in my wrestling match with the concept of being born again through an encounter (admittedly via podcast) with a Jew. He was being interviewed in my son's church in Ontario. With respect to the concept of being born again, he mentioned that to Jews of Jesus' time, the notion was well established and had specific meanings. This led me to much fruitful research.

I have to remind myself from time to time that Jesus was immersed almost entirely in the Jewish thought world. His encounters with non-Jews were few. His audiences would have been almost 100% Jewish. When he spoke, he used metaphors and parables that could easily be identified by his audience as typical of their experience. When he referred to backup material, it was always the Jewish scriptures. No wonder that his disciple Peter balked at having to do something completely at odds with Old Testament teaching when commanded to eat ritually "unclean" food (Acts 10:9-16). Jesus' brother James and other early Christian church leaders of Jewish origin were similarly scrupulous about following Jewish traditions (Acts 11:1-3), greatly resisting St. Paul’s attempts to remove their blind spots.

So what did it mean to a Jew--and a very high-ranking one at that--when Jesus said to Nicodumus, "You should not be surprised at my saying, you must be born again."

Just before I give you the list of what ‘born again’ meant to a Jew--one observation about being born the first time. According to the Jewish sources I've consulted, "born of water", referred to in John 3:5, was simply a Jewish idiom for physical birth (a reference to amniotic fluid), and had nothing to do with baptism. Whatever those of the baptismal regeneration school of thought think of the matter today, to Nicodemus and his fellow Jews Jesus' use of the term ‘born of water’ would have simply meant the physical birth of a baby.

To a Jew of that day, the term born again was commonly applied to a variety of events, rituals, and achievements, such as:

• The conversion of a non-Jew (or Gentile) to Judaism.
• Coming of age, the bar mitzvah celebrated when Jewish boys turn 13. The equivalent celebration for Jewish girls is called the bat mitzvah.
• Getting married.
• Repentance. For a pious man like Nicodemus repentance was probably a regular practice, but every observant Jew would repent of his/her sins at least yearly at Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).
• Baptism. Jewish people were very concerned about ritual cleanliness, so there were many immersions in Rabbinic Judaism. When they came out of the water they were ritually clean, and thus able to participate in religious rites. Remember how the Pharisees baptized not only themselves but even their dishes and their beds (Mark 7:1-4). 
• Ordination to become a rabbi, which Nicodemus, "a teacher of Israel", certainly was.
• Being crowned king. 

All of these events were described as being born again. 

Keep in mind that the Israelites of the Old Testament, and the Jews of the New, had made the mistake of thinking that God's love and providential care applied only to them. Rather than seeing their status as God's people as a means to God's objective of blessing the whole world, they somehow concluded that they deserved that special status as theirs and theirs alone, and that there was nothing more to be discussed.

So I can just imagine Nicodemus running down the list as Jesus was telling him, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."

"What the heck is Rabbi Jesus talking about (however a pious 1st century Jew might phrase it)? We both know exactly what born again means, yet he’s telling me that I haven’t had the experience. I'm certainly here, so I was physically born once. I'm a Jew so there's no need for conversion. I'm well past 13. I'm married. I repent routinely. I practice ritual immersions as any good Pharisee would. I'm a rabbi myself. What's left--that I become the next king of Israel?"

Rather than answering in a confused fashion, Nicodemus might simply have been humouring Jesus when he replied, "How can a man be born when he is old? Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!"

Jesus took no offense, but reiterated, "No one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water (physical birth) and the Spirit (birth from above). Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit."

Jesus made clear to Nicodemus that being safe in God's grace (Filled with his goodness, lost in his love, as hymn-writer Fanny Crosby so beautifully put it) has nothing to do with birthright, ethnic derivation, religious affiliation, human attainments, or rituals—all of the items that Nicodemus might have listed as evidence that he was indeed born from above. That’s all water-birth, flesh-birth.

Birth from above—spirit-birth--is all God's work, and his alone. In fact, it is as it has always been with God's people from the earliest passages of the Old Testament: God made a covenant, took all the initiative in doing so, was constantly faithful in keeping it, and made it clear that the covenantal people had two choices: stay in or opt out. But there was nothing that could make God opt out. Therefore, St. Paul could say confidently, Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Now we could spend a most interesting study time on just how one becomes a born-from-abover. Calvinists and Lutherans suggest that God arbitrarily picks a relatively small number of the world’s population for salvation and leaves the rest of the world’s inhabitants to their own devices. They call this grace.

Universalists have absolutely everyone making it. Herr Hitler, meet Rev. Bonhoeffer and Rabbi Shlomo, with hugs and handshakes all round.

Catholics and most evangelicals come somewhere in between those two extremes, but traditional evangelicals believe that one must have specific knowledge of the Christian message to be born from above, except perhaps for children.

Emergent Christians believe that all God’s creatures begin life as both water- and spirit-born—in other words being born from above is God’s gift to all—not just theoretically or potentially, but in actuality--through the death of his son—but that some will choose to reject this gift as they make conscious moral and spiritual choices in their lives.

But this is not the point of today’s message. What is? Well, two things:

1.     You can’t improve on God’s gift of birth from above. There is nothing to add to it. No rituals or behaviours or affiliations can make one whit of difference to what is God’s free gift to you. You are not stuck merely with human birth, water birth, drowning in a culture or subculture that completely forms who you are and what you do. That’s why we born-from-abovers should see ourselves as citizens of the kingdom of God, not of New Westminster, Abbotsford, the Lower Mainland, Canada, America, anywhere. That’s why anyone in need, no matter where they live, is my neighbour, as the parable of the Good Samaritan taught.

2.     We can’t improve on this gift, but we can take fuller advantage of it. Nicodemus was so loaded up with assumptions that he completely missed the point of God’s gracious gift. He saw his spiritual life as an ever-more-moral, ever-more-accomplished Tower of Babel—you had to keep building up merit, keep being born again, as if one could never fully earn God’s full gift of renewed life.

Take the time to read through the passage I referred to earlier with respect to the Laodicean Christians, Revelation chaps. 2 & 3. There you see loveless Christians, fearful Christians, confused Christians, over-indulgent Christians, spiritually dead Christians, cowardly Christians, and completely self-satisfied Christians. But God did not reject them, or threaten them with the withdrawal of their status as his children. Rather, in every case he urged them to shed their culturally induced arbitrary restraints and to take full advantage of the privilege, power, and responsibility that come with being a spirit-born person.  “See, he said to them—and to us—I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut.” A door into the fullness of born-from-above living.

Now there’s a New Year’s resolution worth keeping. Walk through that door.

Perhaps I've fallen into a trap

Perhaps I've fallen into a trap....of my own making. When I hear the term 'born again' (which is probably better translated 'born from above'), particularly when it is compared in some fashion with natural birth (see the New Testament gospel of John 3:3-6), I think of a once for all experience.

One is only born once in the natural way. From there on the process of growth and development occurs in the usual fashions until one dies--all laid out in a timeline that we are all used to. It is our entree into the human race.

But if the term 'born again' is meant to be more metaphoric than we usually think, we get a new sense of the full import of the term.

For those who link being born again with being baptized, whether as an infant or at some later time in life, then being born again is a once forever event. I am not aware of any of the baptismal regeneration folks allowing for people to show up routinely to be re-baptized. There may be other aspects to spiritual growth (confirmation, communion, confession, penance, re-committal, etc.), but the baptism itself happens once, as far as I know.

For traditional evangelicals, being born again means accepting Christ as Saviour, confessing one's sins that stand between the person and God's forgiveness, and becoming a new creation--again a one-time experience. After that, evangelicals switch from terms like being born again, being redeemed, being justified, etc., and move on to a new set of experiences called by names such as sanctification, and so on. I don't think that even the Arminian Christians, some of whom believe that a person could fall from grace and then be restored (others don't accept the restored part) call the restoration a new birth.

What I'm trying to say is that the idea of being born again is understood pretty literally, whether linked to baptism or to repentance, whether infant or adult, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox. That is not to say that growth in one's faith and practice is not expected, but the birth itself happens once, just like human birth. It is the way one becomes a Christian, and by extension, represents one's entree into the kingdom of God.

Could it be understood in a different way without doing violence to the biblical text? That's what I want to explore next. Just as soon as I can lift off this blasted trap.

Rub-a-dub-dub, born in a tub

Please pardon the irreverent title to this post. I'm just trying to get your attention, not to offend. What I am alluding to in this case is baptismal regeneration, or being born again by being baptized.

Catholics and many Protestants believe that the various references to being baptized by water and the Spirit (as in John 3:5) mean the rite of baptism; i.e., that a person is born again, born from above, or spiritually regenerated by being baptized, presumably by some suitably credentialed church official. A defense of this interpretation can be found at http://www.catholic.com/tracts/are-catholics-born-again.

I won't go into a lengthy critique of the Roman Catholic position, because I don't want to get into a nit-picking quarrel with Catholic readers. I'll simply revert to my 'theology from the ground up' approach and note the difficulties I have with it:

1. Many of the passages cited refer to both believing and being baptized. Other scriptures dealing with spiritual regeneration speak only of believing. I'm not sure how a newborn is supposed to exercise any genuine belief in something as profound as God's saving grace.
2. Water is used in so many metaphorical ways in both testaments of the Bible. It has long been a symbol of purification. But rites themselves (animal sacrifices, ablutions, etc.) are always dismissed in the Scriptures if there is not genuine belief present.
3. Many people have looked to God for forgiveness very much at the last minute; e.g., on their deathbed, in an accident where they subsequently succumb to their injuries, in situations where baptism might be impossible. Would God withhold his forgiveness and acceptance because there was no handy priest lurking nearby and suitably equipped? If not, then why is water baptism actually needed?
4. Some of the world's most infamous people were baptized as infants; e.g., Hitler, Stalin, Castro. While the individuals cited as examples eventually renounced their beliefs, others whose lives were very much at variance with their professed faith continued with the religious rites throughout their lives; e.g., Robert Mugabe, many prominent mafiosi, Joseph Kennedy. 

I'm not the first person to raise objections along these lines and I won't be the last. I'm sure that thoughtful Catholics have gone through them and found satisfying responses. My biggest problem is that God would insist on something as cumbersome and arbitrary as a religious rite in order to confer his love, forgiveness, and acceptance. Consider this from the Orthodox Church:

The Orthodox Church makes no judgment concerning the efficacy or validity of baptisms performed by other denominations, as regards people who are members of those respective denominations. The precise status and significance of such baptisms has not been revealed by God to the Orthodox Church; however, as a practical matter, they are treated as non-efficacious unless and until the person joins the Orthodox Church (see http://orthodoxwiki.org/Baptism).

Relying on a rite, done the proper way by the right church official, stacks the deck against too many people, just as does the evangelical insistence on specific knowledge of the salvation message. It still means that most of the world's inhabitants won't make it into the Kingdom for reasons completely beyond their control.