A sermon on John 3:1-17 by Nathan Nettleton

One of the interesting and life-ging things that goes on within the liturgy of the church is the way it juxtaposes surprising things. Two or more elements collide with one another, and push us to see them from new angles or wrestle with them in new ways. It is sometimes tempting to avoid this. When there is a special event within the service like the infant presentation rite coming up tonight, it is tempting to ditch the lectionary and choose all the Bible readings to harmoniously relate to the special occasion. But it often proves true that juxtaposing the special occasion with whatever was to have been read anyway can push us into some richer reflections. I think this is the case tonight, but of course as the preacher, it falls to me to help us make something worthwhile of it.

As soon as I finish preaching, we will celebrate this rite which will have us thinking about baby Piper and who she is and how she is related to God and the community of God’s people that gathers in this place. We are celebrating both her birth and her relationship to us as a congregation. And a few minutes ago we heard a reading from the gospel according to John, the reading set for today in the lectionary we follow with many other churches, and in it we heard Jesus using the metaphor of birth to describe our relationship with the kingdom of God. So it seems to me that the juxtaposition of these two things invites us to look at Piper and reflect on what her experience of birth into our world might be revealing to us about ourselves and what it might be challenging us to become.

This birth metaphor that Jesus uses can be a difficult one for us to hear, because we think we know it only too well. The phrase “born again” which comes from this passage alone, has become a widespread slogan for the evangelical movement, and its overuse, and dare I say misuse, has meant that even if we haven’t been totally put off it, we tend to think we know what it means. This is a bit ironic, because in the context in which Jesus uses it, the question of whether we can even begin to know what it means is actually one of the key questions at stake.

In the story, we hear that Nicodemis comes to speak to Jesus on the quiet. Nicodemis is a member of the devoutly religious and highly respected Pharisee party. And in those days, if anyone could be trusted to know what the Bible had to say about anything, it was the Pharisees. Nicodemis’s opening line, when he meets Jesus is, “Rabbi, we know … blah, blah, blah.” “We Pharisees, we know…” And although what he is claiming to know is quite positive and affirming of Jesus, his certainty that they already know who he is and what he is about has already got Jesus challenging him. Jesus doesn’t quite say, “You don’t know nothing,” but he might as well have.

And already that should be a warning to some of us evangelical Christians who have been prone to using his “born again” saying as a kind of slogan that always seems to presuppose that we know what it is about and who is and isn’t truly born again. When we think we know what it is all about, Jesus is likely to pull the rug out from underneath us.

Part of the rug-pulling here is that the phrase “born again” is only half a translation of what Jesus is reported to have said, and that hearing it only as “born again” is actually the mistake Nicodemis makes. There is a word play here which can’t be translated into English. The word that Jesus uses can have two different meanings. Jesus could be saying that we must be either “born again” or “born from above”. Nicodemis gets it wrong because he only picks up on the image of being born again, and misses the imaginative possibilities which open up if Jesus was being deliberately ambiguous and actually meant both. And surely that is what Jesus is calling us to imagine. Not just being born all over again like the first time, but being born from a different source. And as Jesus continues to speak, he foreshadows his own death by speaking of being “lifted up” on the cross in order to be a source of life, and so we have the “from above” possibility interpreted for us. It is from the crucified Christ, lifted up above on the cross, that we are to be born again if we are to be born into the kingdom of God. And the language used, “being born of water and Spirit” is clearly language which would have called to mind the image of baptism for the early Christian community to whom this was written.

Now we could spend a lot of fruitful time exploring what it means to draw our life from the Christ who is lifted up to die, and how that is portrayed in baptism, but Piper’s special occasion here this evening invites us to consider what it means to speak of this as an experience of birth. Even though we are born from a different source, Jesus still points to the image of being born as a key to understanding what must happen to us. So, what might that be telling us?

Jesus points out some aspects of what it might mean when he speaks of the wind blowing where it will, beyond our control and our comprehension, and says that it is the same with those who are born of the Spirit. From wherever you are in the process, birth is like that: beyond our control and beyond our comprehension. I remember at Acacia’s birth, one of the most striking aspects of my experience was that of the impossibility of taking control. Neither I nor Margie could exercise much control over what was happening. We could complicate things and create problems if we resisted what was going on or tried to take control of it, but the only positive things we could do were to try to get in tune with what was going on and cooperate as best we could. Now if that’s what it is like for the parents, how much more so must it be for the baby being born. We parents could at least read up and go to classes before hand to know as much as was knowable about what was going to happen. But for the baby, it is a total mystery.

Now it may be the case with the new birth that Jesus calls us to that we have some control in the sense that we can refuse to respond to the call and resist the new life that beckons us, but apart from that, it is as beyond our control and comprehension as was our birth from our mother’s womb. The very act of responding to the call of Christ and accepting the gift he offers involves a surrender, a relinquishing of all control over our destiny. We can know no more of what life in God will mean than Piper could know of what life in the big wide world would mean before she was pushed uncomprehendingly into it. But life in the wide open spaces of God’s love is as much our destiny as arriving in the loving arms of Bec and Gord was the destiny of the unborn Piper.

There are plenty of people around who seem intent on repackaging the gospel as some kind of self-improvement or personal growth program. They make it sound as though the kingdom of God is something we grow into and bring about by a process of self-transformation and social engineering. But Jesus doesn’t present it as something we can bring about or grow into. It is something that is born, and that we are born into. We can resist it and abort it, or surrender to it and be born into it, but we can’t make it happen. And when it happens, we are not likely to even understand much of what happened to us, let alone be able to codify it into a four-step technique to manufacture or measure the salvation of anyone else.

The impulse or desire of new parents to utilise some sort of religious ritual to mark and celebrate the birth of a child is almost universal. Even parents who have no religious faith often feel suddenly moved to seek some sort of meaning-making rite. And one of the reasons for this is that a birth is such a mysterious and awe-inspiring event. Whether the birth experience is smooth and trouble-free or complicated and traumatic, there is something deeply primal and sacred about this uncontrollable birthing of a new life. It confronts us with the deep mysteries that lie beyond our capacity to manage and organise and understand. And it is at these moments when we stand and gaze wonderingly beyond the horizon of our own limits that we catch a glimpse of just what Jesus was on about and how closely bound up are these sacred moments; the birth of a baby, the birth of a new disciple of Jesus Christ, the birth of the kingdom of God. For all of them place us in total dependence on the grace of God, all of them spring from the restless, insatiable, generative love of God, and all of them are signs and fruits of God’s desire to love and be loved and to bring to birth the age of justice and grace and joy.

That’s why we don’t speak only of the birth of a baby tonight. The rite itself also speaks of the birth of the kingdom of God and looks forward in faith and hope to Piper’s baptism into that kingdom. We admit her as a catechumen and commit ourselves to being the kind of community in which she can see Christ and grow to faith and eventually pledge herself to following Jesus as a disciple. But if we ever delude ourselves into thinking we can make that happen – into thinking that if we pray hard enough or work hard enough or even love hard enough we can ensure that she will grasp her destiny of a life lived in Christ – then we will have lost sight of our own limits and fallen into Nicodemis’s mistake of thinking we can know and we can explain and we can control.

But thanks be to God who, in grace and humour, responds whenever we become so deluded by sending babies to confront us with the absurdity of our own pretensions and challenge us again to surrender ourselves to the birth pangs of the new world that is being born of water and Spirit to the glory of God.