"Born Again, Really"
First Congregational Church - Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
2nd Sunday in Lent – February 17, 2008
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Textstexts: Genesis 12:1-4a; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3: 1-17]

“Are you born again?” How many of you have ever had someone ask that question? I think I’ve told you the stories of my being in clerical dress and being asked that question, so I’ll spare you that reminiscence. I also remember someone asking my devout Roman Catholic Grandmother whether or not she had been saved, born again, and her smiling, sweet response: “I hope to be, dear, but it’s all up to God, isn’t it?” Grandmother was on to something, that being born again, really, involves a great deal more than answering questions, offering rote recitations of prayers or belief statements, or being strangely moved by people waving signs at televised football games – no matter how well-intentioned – that say “John 3:16” on them. The point is made right there in that often memorized and quoted verse. It’s up to God because “God so loved the world…”

"Does it matter? Grace is everywhere . . . " With those words George Bernanos ends his classic novel, The Diary of A Country Priest. The novel chronicles the life of a young priest right up to the time of his death; those words are his last. In the course of the diary we encounter a young man on a journey, moving away from a conception of God and life as legalistic and from self-hatred to understanding. To me, his last words, sum up not only the readings, but the whole Lenten season, and indeed even our faith, this notion peculiar to Christianity of being “born again.”. It's all grace.

When Abraham had his encounter with God and received the call to become "a great nation," it was not because he had done anything to merit it. God smiled on that idol maker in Ur of the Chaldees and decided that he would bless the whole world through him. In Abraham the whole of human history begins to become salvation history. The flight from God, what the church Fathers called aversio a Deo and, which marks the previous eleven chapters of Genesis, changes. The movement away from God becomes a turning toward God, a conversio ad Deum, as Abraham heeds the call in faith. What we see in the whole rest of the Scripture is God's reaching out to humanity in grace.

So what is grace? The classic definition is "unmerited favor." I like what the Puritan theologian Thomas Goodwin wrote:

"Grace" is more than mercy and love, it superadds to them. It denotes, not simply love, but the love of a sovereign, transcendly [sic] superior, one that may do what he will, that may wholly choose whether he will love or no. There may be love between equals, and an inferior may love a superior; but love in a superior, and so superior as he may do what he will, in such one love is called grace: and therefore grace is attributed to princes; they are said to be gracious to their subjects, whereas subjects cannot be gracious to princes. Now God, who is an infinite Sovereign, who might have chosen whether ever He would love us or no, for Him to love us, this is grace. . . .Grace is the freeness of love.

Grace, then, is simply God being God . . . and loving us because it is God’s his choice so to do. That's what Abraham experienced when the voice of God called him from home and family, taking him on the journey of a lifetime. Grace is what knocked Paul off his horse on the Damascus road and set him to examining what the life of faith is all about. Grace is what led Nicodemus to seek out Jesus by night because he knew he had "come from God." It's all grace.

What is important for us to understand, however, is that we come to grace through faith. Abraham could have chosen to stay home in Ur -- after all he had a nice house and a profitable business. It was only when he opened himself to the gift of faith that he was able to act upon grace. That's where we Christians get into trouble. We think that 'faith' and 'belief' are the same thing -- they're not. 'Believing' is something we can do purely through the strength of our own will and intellect. Belief can lead people to do some horrible things because they "believed" they were right. Hitler undertook the eradication of the Jews because he believed it to be right. Planes flew into the World Trade Center because their hijackers believed they were doing God’s will. God knows what the person who did the shooting at Northern Illinois University believed he was about last week. One can say that he or she 'believes' in God and still have no evidence of it in his or her life.

Nicodemus 'knew' -- 'believed' -- that Jesus "came from God," but he couldn't act on what he believed. He still had too many questions that weighed him down: "How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?" His sense of what was right, what he believed about the nature of the world got into the way of what God wanted to do for him in Jesus Christ. In fact, that's the case with most of us. We constantly want to make things more 'manageable,' more 'believable' so we set up all sorts of systems of belief to guarantee what we believe, what we know. More often than not, those systems end-up being filled with rules and we find ourselves outside the experience of grace; legalism is no substitute.

Abraham believed, had faith, that God had called him, but he didn't let it go at that. This is how the whole notion of "salvation by grace through faith" works. It's not enough to just say, "I believe" and there's an end to it. When Abraham heard the call of God, he acted upon it. He set out on his journey to the Promised Land, to become a great nation, the father of God's people by faith. You see right belief -- orthodoxy -- gives birth to right actions -- orthopraxy. Orthodoxy without orthopraxy is dead, cold, lifeless. I think that's why so many people have trouble with the Christian faith . . . no, I think that's why they have trouble with the way the faith is practiced. Too many of us, 'believers,' aren't living what we're supposed to be about. We forget that God calls us into covenant relationship, which means we have a part to play too. If we’re being born again, then it is supposed to show in the way we live – concretely, in the way we talk, act, conduct our business, raise our families. Being born again isn’t a tick-off point on the to-do list of life (the “Bucket List” if you will) – it’s a way of life; at least it is when we’re born again, really.

Nicodemus wondered how one could be "born again" and Jesus told him that it came from "water and the Spirit." Nicodemus "knew" but he couldn't act on it until God in Christ had revealed the truth that it's not what we do, but what God does in us and enables us to do that matters. Salvation, then, is more a process of growth and change than a simple moment of crisis. Salvation is our entering into the covenant relationship and then living as God would have us live, and modeled for us in Jesus Christ. John von Rohr summarizes the teaching of the great Puritan spiritual writer Richard Baxter on the issue in The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought:

However, in this lifelong process under the care of God's covenant there must be a faithful covenant-keeping in order to reach the promised goal. A dead faith, Baxter knew, does not justify; it must live through its works. So he could write: 'Our first faith is our Contract with Christ. . . . [But] all Contracts of such nature, do impose a necessity of performing what we consent to and promise, in order to [receive] the benefits. . . .Covenant-making may admit you, but it's the Covenant-keeping that must continue you in your privileges.' Thus, he added, 'Faith, Repentance, Love, Thankfulness, sincere Obedience, together with final Perseverance, do make up the Condition of our final Absolution in Judgement, and our eternal Glorification.'

Abraham was judged righteous because he heard the call of God and responded in faith. We are made righteous because the benefit of that covenant has been extended to us and been made real by the lifting up of the Son of Man so that "whoever believes in him might have eternal life." God allows us to be "born again" and in so doing does not destroy our nature but, as Aquinas said, "grace builds on nature." God takes what is here and brings us to what we're supposed to be. As another Puritan author, Robert Leighton, wrote:

Grace does not pluck up by the roots and wholly destroy the natural passions of the mind, because they are distempered by sin. That were an extreme remedy, to cure by killing, and to heal by cutting off. No; but it corrects the distemper in them. It dries not up the main stream of love, but purifies it from the mud it is full of in its wrong course, or calls it to its right channel, by which it may run into happiness and empty itself in the ocean of goodness.

Yet another Puritan author has something to say on what being born again, really looks like; actually many do, but I’ve just brought forth the best. John Preston's language almost bubbled when he wrote of what happens in the life of the believer:

Christ leads them into his Sellar, as it were, and makes a man heart glad with Flagons of wine, that is, with the consolations of the Spirit; I say, it quickens him, and makes him zealous, and ready to every good worke, when hath once tasted of this Wine, his case is like Elihues, he cannot hold it in, but hee must breake forth into good workes, into holinesse of life.

One who has truly been "born of water and Spirit" is going to show forth the reality of grace at work in his or her life. To be born again, really, isIt's all a matter of growth . . . and grace.

Bernanos' character struggles to understand both his situation and himself. Soon he learns the peace of self-acceptance and comes to realize that grace is at work in him, frail as he is. The final entry that the author has him make in his diary reads:

. . . .Well, it is all over now. The strange mistrust I had of myself, of my own being, has flown, I believe for ever. That conflict is done. I cannot understand it any more. I am reconciled to myself, to the poor, poor shell of me. How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity -- as one would love any one of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ.

Perhaps that's the grace God gives, that we can come to love ourselves and know ourselves lovable? Maybe that's the journey all of us are on as we travel the road to the love of God, love of self, love of others? What does matter is that we understand, believe, own that we are God's children by adoption and are recipients of a great gift. When we can get ourselves past the need to control, to manage our world, rather than allowing God to be God, we’re being born again, really. When we open ourselves to the reality of God’s transforming presence through the Holy Spirit who can live and act in and through us, we’re being born again, really. When we get past that being born again is reciting some words by rote – be it the “Sinner’s Prayer” or a classic creed – or going through the motions of so-called religious life, then we’re being born again, really. Because being born again isn’t so much about my intellectual assent as it is about my opening my life to God’s Spirit and getting out of the way so God can make me the person I was meant to be in God’s image and likeness. Being born again is living in oneness with God and with God’s creation (yes, even all those people who annoy us, especially those folks who ask, “Have you been born again?”). And when we’re being born again, really, thenThen we can see the truth of those words: "Does it matter? Grace is everywhere...." It's all grace and that is how we are born again, really.. Amen.