By Pastor Marcia Sietstra

April 25, 2004

John 21:1-7a

Galatians 1:13-17

Acts 9:1-6 (7-20)

Today I want to talk to you about a phrase we rarely use in the UCC born again. The phrase makes some of us uncomfortable. It may even conjure up unpleasant memories of being asked, ‘Have you been born again? If you haven’t, I can tell you God’s plan for your salvation!’ How does that kind of thing make you feel? The question and the zeal to provide ‘God’s plan’ usually carries with it a sense of judgment that you risk damnation if you haven’t experienced a remarkable conversion experience of some kind. It also strikes some of us as assuming to know an awful lot about God’s thinking. For some folks who claim to be ‘born again’ it means they have spoken in tongues, a sort of ecstatic language. In the ‘Left Behind’ series of books that are so popular, the meaning of being ‘born again’ is even more narrowly defined as believing in the imminent second coming of Jesus and the ‘rapture’ which they see as a horrific time on earth for everyone except the chosen few who will instantly be raptured upward into the heavens. I am personally uncomfortable with the phrase ‘born again’ because the people who most often use it tend to draw sharp boundaries between an in-group and an out-group, leading to a rigid kind of judgmentalism, which can come across as self-righteousness.

Our theological issues study group has been reading an excellent book lately entitled The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg, who is a brilliant, mild-mannered, Christian historian and progressive theologian. Borg describes how this phrase has been monopolized by the religious right. He wants to reclaim the term ‘born again’ for all Christians, and here’s why.

When Jesus uses the phrase ‘born again,’ he uses it to mean dying to an old way of being and being born to a new way of being. In the story where this phrase is introduced, a man named Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night and asks what he must do to be saved. Jesus tells him, ‘No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above,’ which can also be translated ‘born again.’ Nicodemus says, ‘How in the world can anyone be born again, enter a second time into his mother’s womb?’ Nicodemus’ mistake, of course, is in taking Jesus literally. Jesus repeats: ‘You must be born from above [or again].’ If we take our lead from Jesus, to be born again is to be born of the spirit, to become centered in the spirit of God. It’s a spiritual, internal rebirth, a dying to the old way of thinking and being, and a birthing into a new way of thinking and being.

Here’s where I think many of us part company with the understanding of many fundamentalist Christians around this term. To be born again spiritually is not usually so simple a thing as a one-time, dramatic experience suggests. It is not so simple as saying, ‘OK, I believe in my head that Jesus is my savior.’ It is a daily dying to one’s old self and being resurrected in Christ. Ask anybody who has radically changed their life, and they’ll tell you they didn’t just decide one day to change their priorities and love God more than the stuff that stood in the way of their relationship with god. An alcoholic doesn’t decide one day to become spiritual; it’s a day by day dying to the old way of being and a daily commitment to seek the things that make one spiritually strong. People whose lives were once ruled by fear and anxiety don’t change overnight and suddenly become centered in spirit.

It was not so simple for Paul either, who describes his own experience as a daily struggle. He didn’t write this account in Acts that we read; his own accounts were written decades earlier in Galatians and Corinthians and Romans, etc. And by the way, Paul’s own account of his conversion is much less dramatic and differs somewhat. It’s found in Gal. 1:13-17 if you want to compare it to this version written 10-30 years later by someone else. Throughout his writings, Paul repeatedly describes a symbolic dying and rising with Christ, which for Paul it is a metaphor for an internal psychological process. Paul says ‘I have been crucified with Christ;’ it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.’

This process that is at the very center of Christian life is also central to several other religions. In the Jewish faith it is the concept of having a new heart and following the way of the Torah so you are daily centered in God. In Buddhism the idea of ‘letting go’ is very similar to Christian dying to the old way of being and rising to a new way of being. Lau Tsu wrote: If you want to become full, let yourself become empty; if you want to become born, let yourself die. Personal transformation is at the center of all the enduring religions. Because it is what human beings need to be about in life.

Borg sees in the creation story of Genesis this personal transformation that every person needs to undergo. But first he tells this imaginative little story. Pretend for a moment that a young couple with a 3-year-old daughter become parents again, of a new baby brother. Within a few hours of the parents bringing a new baby boy home from the hospital, imagine the little girl making a request: she wants to be alone with her new brother in his room with the door shut. Her insistence about being alone with the baby with the door shut makes her parents a bit uneasy, but then they remember that they had installed an intercom system in anticipation of the baby’s arrival, so they realize they could let their daughter do this. If they hear the slightest indication that anything strange is happening, they can be in the baby’s room in an instant.

So they let the little girl go into the baby’s room, shut the door, and race to the intercom listening station. They hear their daughter’s footsteps move across the baby’s room to the crib, and then they hear her say to her three-day-old brother, ‘Tell me about God—I’ve almost forgotten.’

Now, granted, this story is imaginative (and not meant to imply a theology of pree-istence), but I like it because it illustrates something about human beings. It suggests that we are born with a sort of innocence that we lose in the process of growing up. Very early in our lives, perhaps in infancy or as a toddler, we experience the birth of self-consciousness or self-awareness. It is then that we first understand the distinction between self and the world. As we become self-aware we inevitably become more self-centered.

This has long been thought to be one of the central meanings of the Garden of Eden story, a story full of metaphor and possible meanings. By the way, throughout Christian history, there have always been scholars who understood Genesis as symbolic story. It’s only in the last 300 years or so that there’s been this widespread insistence on it being factually, literally accurate history. Like many scholars, I think the creation story is true, not in a factual, literal way, but in its deeper, symbolic meanings. It is the human story. Adam (which in Hebrew means ‘humanity’) and Eve, live in a paradisiacal state of innocence until they become mature, knowledgeable, and conscious of good and evil. Marcus Borg explains:

The birth of the separated self [commonly called ‘the fall’] is something we go through early in our own lives. We have all experienced this. It cannot be avoided; it is utterly necessary. Imagining that Adam and Eve could have avoided it misses the point. We cannot develop into mature human beings without self-consciousness.’

By the time we are teenagers, we feel okay or not okay about ourselves to the extent that we measure up to the messages we have internalized. We become concerned with our appearance and our achievement, and become preoccupied, prideful, or perhaps worry-filled, grasping, miserable. Borg summarizes:

We are created in the image of God but we live our lives outside of paradise, ‘east of Eden,’ in a world of’ self-preoccupation. It is the inevitable result of growing up, of becoming selves. Thus we need to be born again. It is the road of return from selfishness to recover our true selves’to be born again involves dying to that way of being and to be born into an identity centered in the Spirit.

Have you and I been born again? Yes, I would say so if we are daily trying to center our lives in God. What does that look like? For the majority of us it is an incremental process that happens over the course of our lives, especially apparent in periods of major transition in our lives, and when we get our priorities right.

Can you make it happen? Not exactly, and yet you can be intentional about midwifing the process along. A life with regular worship and meditation, time to be quiet and experience being in relation with God—this is how we become conscious of and intentional about a deepening relationship with God that rises in us as the old self-centered anxieties die away.

This deepening relationship—this being born again—is not intellectual belief of a set of specific doctrines, as so many Christians these days seem to think. To be born again is to enter a new way of being, born of the grace and spirit of God. It is, in the words of Thomas Moore, ‘to learn the simple lesson that by giving ourselves we find ourselves’the cure for our narcissistic way and insecurity is the Jesus solution: go out and nurse, heal, forgive, teach and love one another.’

Paul speaks about the new life in Christ in the most extraordinary terms. He says it’s marked by freedom, joy, peace and love: freedom from the voices of all the would-be lords of our lives, the joy of life lived trusting God. Jesus sums up this new life by saying it is a life centered in compassion. He says, ‘Be compassionate as God is compassionate.’ So if you’re looking for a truly ‘born again’ person, look for the one who shows compassion, which may come with or without an ecstatic experience, with or without a particular set of beliefs or doctrines.

If you want to be born again in the finest sense of this term, practice paying attention to God more than to the world. Watch for God all around you this spring and summer, worship God regularly and practice compassion, for in practices such as these, you are made new from above. May it be so, Amen.