All Saints, Dorval
March 8, 2020
Let’s face it, really brand-new babies are seriously weird looking.
Many of you have probably watched, or at least heard of, “Call the Midwife,” the surprise hit BBC series based on the memoirs of a district midwife in London’s East End in the 1950s. In addition to being one of the best advertisements for Anglicanism ever broadcast – the midwives are based out of a Church of England convent, and the sisters are portrayed as courageous, skilled, generous people animated by a serious spiritual life – the show also broke new ground in the realistic portrayal of birth on television.
We didn’t have a TV growing up, and like many people, I find it more intense to watch things on screen than to read about them and imagine them inside my own head. And while I love “Call the Midwife,” it is sometimes hard to watch, particularly the scenes where babies and their mothers are in danger.
Birth is scary. It’s messy, and dangerous, and unpredictable. We are never more vulnerable than when we first come into the world, naked, hungry, slimy, and helpless, unable even to hold up our own heads, let alone express our needs to others. Adults, knowing this and having a natural impulse to care for and protect these tiny humans, sometimes flinch from watching situations where children are in danger, even when they know they are dramatizations.
And I wonder whether this visceral fear doesn’t play a role in Nicodemus’ response to Jesus. Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” There is an ongoing scholarly debate about which aspect of the meaning of the Greek verb should be translated into English – whether it should read “born from above” or “born again” – but that’s irrelevant in this context: Nicodemus clearly understands Jesus to be referring to a physical birth, and reacts accordingly: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
Part of Nicodemus’ disbelief is simple lack of imagination: he imagines an adult person trying to be physically born out of the body of another adult person, and is accordingly (and understandably) horrified. But I wonder whether he is also reacting to the idea of going back to the state of radical vulnerability in which a newborn enters the world. In Nicodemus’ gut, is he thinking, “Does this teacher really want me to strip off all the layers of my privilege: my gender, my wealth, my literacy, my age, my position, my social status – and go back to being a naked, screaming, helpless creature that can’t even control its own bowels?”
However we understand the theological concept, you and I are so used to the language of being “born again” that it barely registers for us. For Nicodemus, it clearly registered, and it was alarming. Jesus was, in fact, asking Nicodemus to start over, to voluntarily give up his privilege, to be born again in the Spirit. That is what God asks of each of us. At some point in our lives – it’s pretty much guaranteed – we will be the spiritual equivalent of that helpless newborn baby, brand new, slimy, hollering and flailing as we are shoved head first into a new world where we have no clue what’s going on and no idea how to communicate. But just as the newborn baby is embraced, washed, fed, held, taught and loved by its parents, so we are lovingly received, cleansed, nourished, and guided by God.
And this experience, if we are able to embrace it for the learning and rebirth that it is, will teach us, more clearly than anything else can, that the only absolutely reliable source of support and protection in this life, is God. This is the lesson that Nicodemus is never quite able to learn, as he dithers and hesitates to give up the privileges of his comfortable life in order to throw his lot in with Jesus. And it is also the lesson that God calls on Abram to learn in the reading from Genesis.
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”
In Abram’s time, “your country and your kindred and your father’s house” was a person’s entire support system. The family, the clan, the tribe, were what protected you, upheld you, gave you your identity. Sent out from your father’s house and your tribe’s territory, you would not only be terribly vulnerable; you would barely exist. This is what God is asking of Abram: to start over; to rebuild himself from the ground up; to become, to all intents and purposes, a helpless newborn baby, on his own, relying solely on the protection of God. And God does promise powerful protection: “I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse.”
Either Nicodemus or Abram could easily be the speaker of today’s Psalm, that brief and beloved text that begins: “I will lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come?” And the answer is unequivocal: “My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.” All other sources of help and protection are liable to fail us – or to hurt us worse than we would have been hurt without them.
And in the reading from Romans, Paul rebukes the Jewish Christians at Corinth who want to continue to take refuge in their identity as Abram’s heirs and followers of the law, and relegate Gentile Christians to second-class membership. No, says Paul: your physical descent from Abraham gives you no special privilege. Only the spiritual descent, faith in Jesus, is relevant, and that belongs to all those who have gone through the new birth by water and the Spirit.
Being born from anew, like Nicodemus – being sent out from our home and family, like Abram – this happens to all of us, at one time or another. Some time or other, we will be brought face to face with the fact of our profound vulnerability, with the reality that nothing we can do will ever ensure our safety and comfort, or that of those we love. Whether this realization comes with death, or divorce, or illness, or job loss, or realization of a new identity, or simply the kind of quiet crisis that overtakes otherwise comfortable lives – it is a hard realization: as traumatic as that first, physical birth. And sometimes we have to do it over and over again before it sticks. And yet, once we have really internalized the knowledge that the only thing we can truly rely on is God, there is tremendous freedom, joy and blessing in that knowledge.
It’s no accident that in the Gospels, Jesus was clearly most comfortable spending time among those with acute knowledge of their dependence on God. The working poor and the prostitutes, the tax collectors – who may have had material wealth but who knew themselves to be outcast and despised – and the sick and the suffering, who had exhausted all other avenues for help and healing. These were Jesus’ people, and it is among their equivalents today that God’s presence can most reliably be found.
One way we can understand our Lenten discipline is as consciously removing one or more of the things (other than God) that we typically rely on to get through the day – like a daily coffee, or cocktail, or cookie – or, alternatively, adding something that reminds us of our dependence on God, like prayer.
John 3:16 is often used to beat people over the head – “are you saved? Because if not, you’ll burn!” What if, instead, God sending his Son into the world was proof that God never gives up on us, but instead will be at our side through this messy new birth and into the new life to come?
This Lent, how are you being reborn in faith? And how is that rebirth making you – with God’s help – a blessing to others?
Amen.
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