March 10, 2024 | Rev. Loren McGrail
This Lenten Season we’re invited to repent, to reorient, to begin again, and now to be born again. God the creator, mother, and father, creates us and gives us life. And as Jesus tried to explain to the Pharisee Nicodemus who came to him in the dead of night, this God also invites us to be reborn from above.
Now I know we UCCers are a little leery of language that tells us that we must be reborn, so I invite you to think of this rather as an invitation to become renewed or refreshed in every moment. And yes, it can also involve letting go or moving on. Being born again is not a static state but an ongoing process of growing in wisdom and stature in partnership with the one who gave us birth and breath. Listen to how Maren Tirabassi sees it as a birth that is also a blessing in this prayer:
Dear Ones, Jesus, the birthed one, was not the only one incarnated with God’s image. We also can be when we accept or allow his ever-birthing presence to call us into new life. I would like to pause and invite you to reflect for a moment on this invitation:
- When have you had to let go of something in order for something new to happen?
- Was there a moment in your faith journey where you felt like a new you was born?
- Where is the thin place between your habits
and a new birth? - What in our church is struggling to be reborn? What is your role in the process?
At one point in the conversation Jesus refers back to an ancient story from Numbers which Nicodemus probably knew inside out, which says: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
Dear Ones, this is such an odd comparison, is it not? The loving saving Messiah compared to the bronze replica of a poisonous snake? What does it mean? In the Hebrew Scripture, God requires the Israelites to look up, to gaze upon something horrible that their sin has conjured. It’s the thing they fear the most; it’s the thing that will surely kill them, says theologian Debi Thomas, “if God in God’s mercy doesn’t intervene and transform the instrument of pain and death into an instrument of healing and life.” You see, if they are going to be saved, they must confront their sins, the serpent; they must look hard at what harms, poisons, breaks or is killing them.
The Israelites have to see their own failure to trust the God who delivered them from slavery, who sustained them in the desert; they have to see the consequences of their sin to trust. Hence, the bronze serpent takes what was for the wandering Israelites one of the very worst things in the world (a lethal snake) and remakes it into sign of hope, a new life, a sword, if you will, turned into a plowshare.
This looking up forces them to stare down the poison until they can see it in the grief, the anger, the judgement, and unending mercy God has for them, a love that will heal and save. Accordingly, the Christian cross can also be understood as a symbol of torture and death which is divinely transformed into a sign of hope and new life. This is how these symbols are related. Again, I turn to Tirabassi for guidance:
Dear Ones, Jesus did not tell Nicodemus he had to be reborn again. He invited him into the mystery that is God.
And he offers that invitation to us, too; to be born again in the fullness of who God created us to be, born again, and again.
But why did Jesus die? Why did he have to die on a cross? John might say he died because he unveiled the poison, showed us the snake, or that he showed us what our human kingdoms become when left to themselves. In the cross then, we see how we have turned against each other in betrayal and violence. In the cross we are forced to see what our refusal to love, our hatred of difference, our fear of the other wreaks. Thomas says, “When the Son of Man is lifted up, we see with chilling and desperate clarity our need for a God who will take our most horrific instruments of death, and transform them, at great cost, for the purposes of resurrection.” Therefore, Dear Ones, to believe in the power of the cross is to rely on Jesus for our very lives. This lifting up of the Son of Man is our only hope, our ‘anti-venom, our only means for a saving grace.
Dear Ones, like Nicodemus, I believe we are not only challenged to rethink our past lives but to reimagine our future through the eyes of redemptive possibility.
This is what it means to believe in the one who came to share our suffering with love, to touch our lives with grace. “For God loved the world in this way.”
Dear Ones, it is not too late to be born again even if some of us are closer to dying than childhood or others full of doubts and fears. We are all invited to be born again into the beautiful beloved family of God, into the mystery that is bigger than belief, which is precious abandoned Love. The love of Christ becomes embodied among us that we - and all the earth - may truly live.