You Must Be Born Again (Part I)

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NicodemusOne of Jesus’ most intriguing encounters took place when a Pharisee named Nicodemus sought him out fin the wee hours for a private conversation.

John 3 records Nicodemus’ desire to learn from Jesus about how one enters or participates in the reign of God (His Kingdom).

Again or Above

Depending on your English Bible, you might see Jesus speaking of the need to be born AGAIN or from ABOVE (Jn 3:3). William Barclay hits the home run by keeping both terms: “Reborn from above.”  Jesus is emphatic: One enters the flow of God in a radically new fashion.  She cannot enter by striving or straining; he cannot evolve or inch his way past the threshold.

In other words: “Nicodemus, there is one path from here to there, and you can neither find it, nor walk it.  You must be born again.”

Not surprisingly, this fails to answer every question and raises several more. That list is headed by this query:  “How can this be?” (Jn 3:4)

Smarter than We Think

We have not flattered Nicodemus; we have laughed that he would envision a physical rebirth. But Nicodemus is no numbskull. Among the brightest and most educated minds of his nation, it is highly unlikely that this teacher is tone-deaf to metaphors and is instead visualizing a man being crammed back into a uterus.

Far more likely, Nicodemus has engaged the rhetoric and is actually on to something fairly profound. He might have thought it like this:

Each man is the sum of a lengthy equation. We are who we are today as a result of all our yesterdays. That lengthy equation is a bundled mess of doubts and dreams, hopes and hurts, faith and fear. It includes choices wise and foolish, and habits healing and harmful. All of this is layered and swirled over a lifetime. Surely, everyone longs at some point for a clean break and a fresh start. But that is a fantasy. I mean, if physical birth is beyond possibility, how much greater a miracle would it take to remake the core of a person?

Hmm.

Good question.

And accordingly, Jesus replied: “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” (Jn 3:5)

Water and Spirit

How are we to understand this phrase? The mention of water quickly takes many minds to baptism. This may be, but it is certainly not Christian baptism as we know it. That imagery would have meant nothing to Nicodemus at his point on the timeline. If any baptism is envisioned, it is John the Baptist’s work for purifying repentance.

That said, a better interpretation awaits.

The first clue is hidden in the Greek grammar. The words are cobbled together in such a way that one phrase is indicated, not two concepts. So we are not decoding water and Spirit; we are speaking of one thing. I call it Spirit-water.

And what might that be?

water_dropWell, it might be this.  Rabbinic writings often used “water” as a graceful euphemism to speak of semen. In other words, “You must be born of spiritual seed.”

The miracle of life begins with a woman’s egg cell being fertilized by a man’s sperm cell.  Within the woman’s body, there is a monthly potential for new life. What makes all the difference between life and no-life is the fertilization of that cell. In this light, Jesus is declaring, “As surely as you live and breathe in this world, you are here because one of your father’s cells fertilized one of your mother’s cells. With that same certainty, you will function in the Kingdom of God only if the Father fertilizes something. Within everyone lies the potential to participate in the divine nature, but mark it down: There is no such experience apart from the Holy Spirit’s awakening fertilizing.”

So yes, Jesus and Nicodemus were basically bouncing around sexual (ie: reproductive) innuendo filled with spiritual connotation. And the dominant point within it all: Nothing is happening minus the Spirit’s conceiving and birthing efforts.

Commentator extraordinaire Leon Morris says it like this:

”It is the perennial heresy of the natural man to think that he can fit himself by his own efforts for the kingdom of God. Jesus makes it clear that no man can ever fit himself for the kingdom. Rather he must be completely renewed, born anew, by the power of the Spirit.”

That is enough for today. Tomorrow, we will add one more layer.

See you then.

Saturday Six-Pack (40)

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Welcome to the final Saturday Six-Pack for May 2013!

Grab your mug and settle in. Here are are six of the best articles I’ve read recently.  Most are faith-focused or ministry-minded; others are just a bit of who-knows-what!

If you need help starting, begin with my two *Picks of the Week*, and move from there.

For a steady stream of such links, follow me on Twitter ( @JasonBandura ) to the right of this post.  Sharp quotes and solid articles are tweeted 3-4 times daily.

Today’s edition:

1) Six Recent Lessons from Turnaround Churches
Thom Rainer has discovered that 9 of 10 North American churches are shrinking or growing at a rate behind their communities. Here are six lessons he recently learned from such churches who are turning it around.

2) The Divine Dance (*PICK OF THE WEEK*)
Scot McKnight shares these Tim-Keller-filled reflections on the Trinity. What does it mean? A whole lot!

3) Learning the Gospel from My Children
A pastor named Jason Micheli recently preached this sermon, and I am a sucker for anything that revolves around Luke 15.

4) Daily Rituals of the Most Creative People (*PICK OF THE WEEK*)
I am fascinated by how creativity works. This little essay, based on a full-length book, scratched that itch for a few moments.  For the record, I am unlikely to adopt many of W.H. Auden’s “labor-saving devices”.

5) Hotel Pornography and the Market of Morality
I found this piece, from The Public Discourse, ten months after its publishing. Well-written piece that uses a movement looking to ban hotel pay-per-view pornography as a case study on the strange dance between morality, economics, politics, and more.

6) 8 Habits of Highly Productive People
While the title looks like a knock-off of a best-selling classic, and the article contains a handful of typos, a few ideas here might help those longing to be more productive.

May your weekend be full of awareness and enjoyment of the God who already fills it with Himself and every good thing.  Blessings on you, my friends.

YOUR TURN: Direct other readers to the best stuff with a comment below, or weigh in on what you read.  Your input makes this post better!

[You can subscribe to this blog via RSS or email, in the upper right corner of this page.]

I Want to be This Woman

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When I grow up, I want to be this woman.

Well, er… not this woman. Or even any woman, for that matter.

But watch, and you’ll know exactly what I mean!

Losing Faith VII: Trading It In

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This is the seventh post in a series called “Losing Faith”. All posts can be viewed HERE.

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As mentioned in the first post of this series, it was a blogging friend who originally dispatched this train of thought for me. He observed how travel had played a part in the unraveling of a faith he once held.

I would echo that sentiment with an alternate angle.

TREASURE OF TRAVEL

farawayExposure to faraway lands and interactions with the folks of those places have led me to lose much of my faith as well—particularly faith in my culture, in popular Western thought, and more specifically in myself. However, those undoings only served to intensify my felt need for some form of Anchor, some Foundation upon which to construct.

There is a special pleasure to deconstruction. Who has ever carried a tool more fun than a sledgehammer? But at some point, there is need for some skilled builder to enter the scene. Creating rubble is fun, but it hardly provides a place to live.

This is my metaphor. others can grasp at their own well-fitted images. But for me, this is glove-like.

For I love to play the cynic more than most. To feign enlightenment through critique, this is the safe and satisfying life of the skeptic.

At least, it is until it isn’t.

Safe or satisfying.

My travel experiences and other life-tastes have at times fed that cynical, skeptical streak with a fresh spread of questions and rebukes toward the status quo that had both nurtured me and numbed me up to that point. Some of this caused me to grow; some just caused me to grump.

When it comes to religion, Christianity in particular, I often chuckle. I can recall a handful of conversations where speakers in attack mode unveiled their “faith-destroyers” to me. Typically, these “questions” ended with periods, rather than question marks. But punctuation aside, the tone carried a whiff of superiority silently declaring that the statement being made was surely news to me, and perhaps everyone else who ever “mindlessly” fallen into faith. In fact, it appeared certain to at least one in the room that surely no human in history had ever formulated this ground-breaking assessment of reality.

Feet in SeaNow to be sure, I learn things every day, from sources and angles of every sort. But these types of encounter cause my chuckle to rise because they suppose shallowness.  To discover that my feet touch the sand on the bottom hardly means that I’ve plumbed the depths of the sea.  It merely means I can touch where I am.  To crucify Christianity for its smallness when the “great big world” enlightens is one form of losing faith.  To move my feet in pursuit of deeper and purer waters was mine.

Though I didn’t foresee the amount of seawater I’d have to swallow along the way!

I SAY THAT TO SAY THIS

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAI can state with confidence that the faith I have lost along the way was a small faith.  Perhaps that is exactly why I lost it. It is easier to lose coins than cars.

In exchange for my feather-weight faith, heavy on its need for certainty and control, I am receiving a more substantial faith, rooted in dependence upon the eternal Spirit of God and a recognition of my need to keep step with Him.  This need is driven by neither fear nor threat, but by the simple recognition that moving out of rhythm with the beat that drives the universe is clumsy and costly.  I would rather sync myself to sink myself into the groove awaiting those whose stride is guided by the All-of-Life-Giver.

LOSING THINGS

I hate losing things. Misplacing keys or phone drives me almost mad. Part of that is driven by the fact that I am typically very careful with my things, seldom losing track. So when I do, it cracks my composure. Losing my faith, even the small version, has felt like that. It had grown dear to me; it was worn and comfortable from years of use.

But it no longer fit.

Perhaps it never did.

Happy Birthday Youtube!

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Recently Youtube turned eight years old. In case you struggle to grasp the site’s impact on our lives, this piece may offer some much-needed perspective.