John 3:1-17 -- homily: Christian atheism

John 3:1-17: “Born from Above”

By Loy Mershimer

Today’s text faces us with the inner mystery of Christian doctrine.

Divine truth is like that – it brings us pretty quickly to mystery, to the end of conventional human wisdom. When Jesus speaks, we humans face a choice: we can bow and be transformed, or we can cling to what we think we know…and stay the same.

So the text confronts us: Will we choose wisdom from above, or below?

Many modern theologians approach divine reality from a default position of human wisdom: ‘I can’t believe that!’ And so they don’t…

John Shelby Spong is a retired Episcopal Bishop who doesn’t believe in Jesus. Spong once asked, “My daughter has her Ph.D. in physics. How on earth is she expected to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus?”
To which Dr. Willimon, dean of Duke Chapel, responded, “Well, I guess we’d have to meet your daughter. Has she any imagination, some physicists don’t. Has she ever traveled outside New Jersey? Does she enjoy surprises?”[1] :-)

In today’s text Jesus pointedly says that it is impossible to understand divine reality with mere human thinking.

A religious leader named Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night.
Perhaps you can see him in his manicured religious robes, outlined in the smoky lanterns of early Judean evening: He walks quietly, softly…with somewhat guarded step. After all, one cannot be too careful with one’s reputation! But he has deep questions. He has heard truth calling, and so seeks in the night: “Jesus?” “You’re the one the call Jesus?” “Who are you, what are you?”

Verse 2: “Rabbi, [surely] you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with Him.”

Jesus replies with an answer of mystery: Verse 3: “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” “No one can enter the kingdom unless she is born from above.” ‘If you really want to know who I am, you must be born again.’

Nicodemus is stunned. “Born again?” He has no answer for this.
Mystery: What would you say?
Nicodemus stutters out the reply that most of us would have given [v. 4]: “How can we be born when we are old?” “Surely we cannot enter a second time into our mother's womb to be born!”

Nicodemus, like us, stumbles over divine truth.

Unless we are born again, we cannot see the kingdom of heaven.

What is this new birth? Jesus replies: It is a birth of the Spirit.

Or, as John later says, “We know that we know Him…we know that He lives in us, by the Spirit He gave us” [1 John 3:24].

So Jesus replies to Nicodemus: ‘You have a Ph.D. in religion, Nicodemus, and you do not know this?’ Verse 10: “You are Israel's teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things?”

Religion, education…and goodness all fall short. What then is it?

It is a Spirit birth through Christ Jesus: ‘Son of Man’ descended from heaven to save.

Jesus speaks to the religious leaders: Vv. 12-13: I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven -- the Son of Man.
“I am the One who has come from heaven, for the sake of this new birth…”
Then the verse that echoes the center of the Gospel: Verse16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

This is something we can hear about from others, but must experience for ourselves.

Consider Blaise Pascal: The most brilliant mind in France, yet in need of God. Intelligence, yes: In his spare time, working between the years 1642 and 1645, he invented the first digital calculator. He went on to prove the vacuum, directly disproving Descartes. From May 1653 he worked on mathematics and physics, in that year producing a complete and systematic outline of hydrostatics, the first in the history of science. And this as a young man, feted by France!

In all the worldly acclaim, Blaise grew cold in soul and hungered for God. He entered a period of Scripture meditation, fasting and prayer. And on the night of 23 November 1654, something happened. There, “from about half past ten in the evening…” Blaise experienced the wind of the Spirit. The revelation of Christ was so intimate that Pascal wrote an account, “Memorial,” and sewed it into the lining of his coat, carried it over his heart, hidden from the eyes of the world…found only upon his death.

FIRE!

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,

not of philosophers and savants.

Certitude. Certitude. Heartfelt. Joy. Peace.

God of Jesus Christ.[2]

This revelation of God shaped the rest of his life. It founded his calling upon certitude and weaned him from secularism. It formed his theological method that astounded his world, and astounds us still.[3]

What are we talking about? Being born of the Spirit!

You and I probably won’t have Pascal’s experience, but we will have our own…encounter with Christ and new birth.

However, there is something frightening here, for us. Jesus says, ‘The wind blows where it will…” The Spirit moves where He will, not where we will…
This causes us issues! New birth means Spirit life, Spirit control…to those of us caught up in managing, controlling our lives and plans, this is dangerous, and we shy away.

Joan Osborne asks some haunting questions that highlight faith’s mystery, demand:

If God had a face what would it look like
And would you want to see
If seeing meant that you would have to believe
In things like heaven and in Jesus and…all the prophets?

Or, our text today would ask: Would you want to see…if it meant giving Spirit control?

Being ‘born again’ is not just some religious experience we claim in the past, wear it on a bracelet or necklace, but then go on living life in human wisdom, controlling life just like the rest of the world…such thing may be called ‘born again,’ but it is not life in the Spirit.
To say ‘born again’ without Spirit control is only comfortable, modern ‘Christian’ atheism.

Being born again is, in the power of Christ, opening every room, every chamber of our spirit to the Holy wind of the Spirit of God.

It is an utter scandal, to our human minds, that the Spirit blows like wind, wherever He will…we cannot measure it, we cannot quantify it, we cannot own or control it…
But when this Holy wind sweeps over us…it catches us up to the very life of God!

There is a birth of flesh, and there is a birth of the Spirit. Until we are born of the Spirit, we cannot understand reality…we cannot even understand ourselves.
Until we are utterly open to the Spirit, we are living life in false control, with false understanding. You cannot see the kingdom, unless born from above…

This is such a hard word! It is the inner mystery of the Gospel.

How does Nicodemus respond?
Our text today does not record his answer, but these words must have burned in his soul! For, we see him next, after the Cross… bringing spices…for the body of Christ – on the very scandal day of Christ!
From coming to Jesus at night, he is now a child of the day, owning the Cross, owning Christ in death…caught up in the wind of the Spirit! Mysteriously changed…

That wind is blowing still! Can you feel it?

We, like Nicodemus, come to Jesus by night…perhaps hoping to hold onto the old ways, at least in part…perhaps hoping for control, power and managed life…but the wind of the Spirit in the name of Christ…sweeps away the old, and offers us new…life…new birth.

That wind is blowing still…

Can you feel it?

Will you bow?

Will you be born…anew…from Above?

Amen.

_____________________

[1] http://www.chapel.duke.edu/chapel/worship/sunday/viewsermon.aspx?id=60
[2] Blaise Pascal, “Memorial,” quoted in Bruce Gordon, “Living Reasons: Blaise Pascal and the Rationality of Religious Belief,” Foundations: The Journal of the Religious and Theological Studies Fellowship, 5 no 1 Win 1997, 5.
[3] Cf. Emile Cailliet, The Clue to Pascal, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1943.