Born Again and Again
A few years ago, one of my students told me about a new development in his life. At Wednesday night church, he accepted Christ into his heart. He was very excited by this proposition, and his father even more so. Did I mention that he’s been one of my more difficult students for a very long time? I reflected a little on his news and I appreciated that he decided to tell me, but I would like to have a longer conversation with him, but he’s still young. If I did, I would say that accepting Christ into your heart is only a beginning, a planting of a seed, a mustard seed, that must be tended, watered, pruned, weeded, and so on every day of one’s life. To accept Christ in this kind of way, this everyday of our lives is difficult, it’s exhausting, it’s demanding; it takes everything that we have and more. And sometimes we fail. Spectacularly. It’s a life-long proposition.
The “born again” language is not nearly as old as Nicodemus’ story. The language, describing a personal relationship with Jesus began to gain notoriety in the 1960’s and was mainstreamed with Chuck Colson’s book, Born Again, published in 1975. It chronicles his path to faith that happened in conjunction with his criminal imprisonment. He writes that spiritual experience followed his struggle and hesitancy to have a “personal encounter” with God. Quoting from his book:
...while I sat alone staring at the sea I love, words I had not been certain I could understand or say fell from my lips: "Lord Jesus, I believe in You. I accept You. Please come into my life. I commit it to You." With these few words...came a sureness of mind that matched the depth of feeling in my heart. There came something more: strength and serenity, a wonderful new assurance about life, a fresh perception of myself in the world around me.”
If we’re honest, this language might a little uncomfortable for some of us. The born again language is not as common in our world of the Episcopal Church as it is in the Evangelical world, but it is a language that might be useful for us to consider and to take into consideration, letting it seep into our lives just a little. Because being born again doesn’t need to mean a one time conversion, a one time moment when you were sure of God’s presence in the world, it might mean a continual movement towards God, a process of always and already participating in the love of God in our lives, moving towards salvation with fear and with trembling.
In our church, we say that baptism is full and complete initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body the Church. We also say that bond that God establishes in Baptism is indissoluble. We baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and we baptize with water, water that has been blessed by the priest, made holy because of God’s mercy to us. As one of the two sacraments that Jesus instituted – he says at the end of the gospel of Matthew that we must go into all the world and baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – baptism is one of the hallmarks of our faith, one of the things that marks us as Christians. I myself was baptized when I was six weeks old in August of 1975, when I was still an infant. It was then up to my parents to teach me the things that I needed to know about God, the things about the day by day life of loving God that I needed to learn. But on that day of my baptism, I was reborn, I was born again, of water and the Holy Spirit; I was marked as Christ’s own forever, just like everyone baptized at Resurrection. This is the first moment of being “born again” that I experienced. But this was by no means the last.
If I were to say how many moments in my life I’d been “born again,” I’d have to tell you that they were too many to count. And I think this might be true for many of you as well. Chuck Colson says that being born again was a moment, a moment when he felt the intense love of God, as well assurance about life. Maybe in our tradition, we call these moments “ah-hah” moments. Maybe we call them moments of clarity. But what I’m sure about is that this is a constant part of life, not a one time moment, but something that each of us must participate in every day of our lives, something that we must strive towards, something that we must do every moment of every day.
If our wedding day were the last day that we actually loved our partner, then there would be no point in being married. If the day that our child entered kindergarten was last day we worried about what they learned in school, our child would grow up without a good education.
That’s why this thing that we’ve entered into, the kingdom of God incarnate in our lives, lived out, day by day is so important. It’s wonderful to have a moment when we feel God’s love so intensely that we are awash with it. It’s a wonderful thing to know without a doubt that God is interacting in our day-by-day lives in a way that we can’t deny, that we have fresh perceptions of ourselves, of God, of those around us – that is a beautiful thing. It’s wonderful to have a conversion moment, a time when you know without doubt that you’re born again. Things have changed; everything is new. You’re awash in a new world. But these moments must be marked by years of patience, years of faithfulness in the day by day, years of slogging and doing the right thing, sometimes without result.
This is what Lent is about. It’s about doing the right thing, about training our bodies to do what we know we want to do, even when we might not want to do it in the moment. It’s about preparing our hearts, minds, and bodies for the glorious resurrection of our Lord. It’s about being born anew, with water and the Spirit, about living into a reality that is so much more wonderful and fantastic than we could have ever imagined, and trusting God’s Spirit to bring us there.