Sunday Musings

Born again . . . and again

This is the second Sunday of Lent, the season that leads to Easter. And Easter is about new birth. In today’s lectionary text from the Gospel of John, Jesus explains the mystery of being born into “the kingdom of God.” And the story prompts us to reflect about renewal and rebirth — and how we are spiritually transformed.

But few texts are more misquoted and misinterpreted this selection from John — and few have been more widely influential. Since the First Great Awakening in the 1740s, it has been a key passage for evangelical Christians, usually quoted in revivals to convince “unbelievers” to be “born again.”

I’ve written about John 3 in three of my books — Christianity After Religion, Grounded, and Freeing Jesus. Each time, it has been from slightly different angles. In Christianity After Religion, I emphasized the meaning of “believe.” In Grounded, I explored “the world.” In Freeing Jesus, I dove into what might be the most compelling words in the passage: “born of water and Spirit.”

My reflection from Freeing Jesus (below the photograph) looks at John 3 through the lens of women’s experiences and feminist theology to restore a sense of inviting wonder around Jesus’ words. What does it mean to be born of the Spirit?

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John 3:1-17

There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And 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.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

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From Freeing Jesus, “Presence,” pp. 224-227

It was a long birth, more than twenty-four hours of labor, when my daughter finally came into the world. She was born in the evening, and my husband held her while the doctor and nurses did their postbirth business, making more hubbub in the hospital room than I had expected. She was finally placed in my arms, kisses and pictures followed, and then she was taken to the nursery. The room quieted. I was exhausted; Richard was exhausted. He headed home, and I fell asleep alone.

I heard a voice. “Mrs. Bass? Mrs. Bass?” I opened my eyes, blinking in the hospital light. It was the nurse, the same one who had squeezed my hand a few hours before as she said, “Keep going, keep going. Push.” Now she cradled the baby, tightly wrapped in a blanket. “Time to feed your daughter.”

I sat up, reached out to receive my infant, and drew her close. The nurse, who had been my birthing teammate, smiled and walked out of the room. Two of us remained, the newborn and me. I was not particularly skilled with babies; only once before had I held an infant this young. The nurse had closed the door behind her, and silence surrounded us, as if swaddling mother and child. Except for my own heartbeat, made more rapid by uncertainty about what to do, the only thing I heard was a soft cooing and gentle breathing, like the ha, the Hawaiian word for “breath of life.”

I nuzzled her—and natal sweetness filled my senses. We were two who had been one, and yet still were one in some mysterious way. And so we remained, fully present to each other, lost and found in a moment of new creation that neither had ever experienced. I glanced at the clock on the wall. More than an hour had passed since the nurse left. I looked down, and the baby opened her eyes, seeming to look up at me. Pure love enfolded us, a hallowing of this intimate world. The room had become a temple.

I had always known birth would be hard. I never knew it would be holy.

Scottish writer John Philip Newell often shares the story of being overwhelmed by seeing his newborn grandson for the first time and how profoundly spiritual the experience was. Ancient Celtic Christians believed that infants came from God and that in gazing in a newborn’s face, we see the very image of God; and conversely, through the infant’s eyes, in some mysterious way, God beholds us. The birthing place is a sort of inner sanctum where we encounter the freshly born presence of God.

No wonder that Christian tradition makes much of the birth of Jesus, the one whose birthplace opens to angels, animals, shepherds, and shamans. It is more than the silent midnight holiness between Mary and her son; the whole cosmos witnesses the birth. More than an image fresh from heaven, the Infant is the very embodiment of the divine. Every birth is echoed in this birth—no wonder the stars fill the heavens, the light shines forth. The presence of God made manifest, the glory of the One from the womb of grace. Darkness of birth, light of the world.

“Very truly, I tell you,” said Jesus, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” (John 3:3). “Born from above” is the phrase that some Christians translate “born again.” Back at Scottsdale Bible, it meant saying the Sinner’s Prayer and confessing Jesus as Savior. As much as that meant to me at fifteen, I did not really understand Jesus’s words until my daughter was born, when the womb opened and water broke forth, and then, in the silence, the breath. Water and spirit. Cradling the image of God so close, the image staring back.

“She [woman] will be saved through childbearing,” says one of the letters written in Paul’s name (1 Tim. 2:15). Yes, indeed. Women understand this transformation, this new birth, in all its tenderness, the freshness of God’s presence come into the world. This was true for me, and mysteriously, painfully true for one of my best friends, Teresa, whose son was stillborn. Even with the sadness of simultaneous birth and death, she felt it too: “God’s presence was in the midst of the worst of our lives; they will call him Immanuel, God with us.” Years later, we shared our memories of those days. “Birth,” she said knowingly, “is so transformative.”

“What is born of the flesh is flesh,” said Jesus with more than a little irony, “what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). Everyone is born of both, flesh and spirit. The problem is that we forget.

I was born into this world. I had been born again at fifteen. And then, I got born again again when giving birth some two decades later. “Do not be astonished that I said to you,” Jesus reminded his friends, “‘You must be born from above’” (John 3:7). Jesus, the birthed one, is also the ever-birthing presence, calling new life from the womb of God into the world. Not once, but many times.

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INSPIRATION

How good—to be alive!
How infinite—to be
Alive—two-fold—The Birth I had
And this—besides, in—Thee!
— Emily Dickinson

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
     And he said:
     Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
     For they have their own thoughts.
     You may house their bodies but not their souls,
     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
     You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
     The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
     Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
     For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
— Kahlil Gibran

"Relax." the midwife says in another language.
The membrane breaks, weeping light and water.
You ride water downstream, towards the falls and

"Push!" she says.
Light pours over the edge, floods the table, stuns the midwife's
knotty hands. In one minute,

a new order, a new earth, transforming
old orthodoxies, transfiguring the room.
In the end, we are faithful

to what cannot be avoided.
Light breaks from your new knees
and shoulders. Light peals
like an unbearable, high bell.
— Jeanne Murray Walker, from “Birth,” read the ENTIRE POEM HERE

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International Women’s Day is March 8.

Women are on the front lines.
Women have always been the first to see what is coming.

—Sobonfu E. Some

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