Year A
 Genesis 12:1-4a
 Psalm 121
 Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

May the words of my mouth…  O God…  speak your truth…

Even though he calls Jesus Teacher…  even though he knows that Jesus and God are connected because of the signs that Jesus has done… the first part of the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus leaves Nicodemus wondering just what Jesus is talking about…    but he’s taking it all too literally…  of course no one can enter their mother’s womb after having grown old and be born again…  but why would Nicodemus even think that…  why would he even go there…  he is after all…  a teacher of Israel…  where is his theological imagination…  where is his understanding that something can be figuratively true without being literally true…  so what is it to be born again…

In our time…  to be “born-again” comes with some cultural baggage…  carries with it more than one kind of meaning…  when a college friend of mine was “born again” in 1976…  and his vocabulary changed…  and his perspective on certain things changed…  I wondered whether our friendship could survive…  and because so much of what “born again” describes is a conservative Christianity…  ]  for some…  it seems to be more about a political conversion and less of a theological one…

Lisa Wolfe…  professor of the Hebrew Bible at Oklahoma City University…  wrote…  the conversation with Nicodemus is set before Jesus is crucified…  but it was written about fifty years afterward…  ]  and while this passage about an afterlife of salvation was being written…   the Roman Empire was pushing Jesus’ followers underground and following up with horrific persecution…  and while it seems obvious to most Christians today…  that we are saved through the death and resurrection of Jesus…   Jesus’ earliest followers were still trying to figure out how a leader who was brutally executed could be their Messiah…   a Messiah who was expected to officiate a peaceful rule from Zion…

In the second part of the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus…  Nicodemus is stuck at the level of blood…  he’s having a hard time getting his head around how Spirit fits into the equation…  but the prologue to John’s Gospel tells us that…   to all who received him…  who believed in his name…  he gave power to become children of God…  who were born…  not of blood…  but of God… 

Birthing happens when conditions are right…  when things are right…  when the time is right…  and birth happens to a baby… what Jesus is saying to Nicodemus…  is that being born of God…  isn’t something we choose to do…  all we may choose to do is not resist it…  but that it is something that happens to us…  and Jesus is not talking about blood… that is…  about physicality…   but Nicodemus cannot get beyond it…  and so Jesus clarifies that being born again…  entering the kingdom of God…  means being born of water…  that is birth water…   and of Spirit… a holistic integration of the physical and the spiritual…  and Jesus compares the process of this integration…  this new way of Being…   to the wind…  which blows where it chooses…

My brother and sister-in-law have two cats…  which run around like the wind…  there’s a gray one…  a little more than a year old…  and a younger black-and-white one…  more of a kitten…  and a few weeks ago…  my sister-in-law posted a short video on Facebook…  in it there was one of those cool-mist humidifiers sitting on the floor…  and as the mist came out of the nozzle…  and rose up into the air…   the kitten was jumping up and trying to catch the mist that was falling down towards him…   he launched himself upwards several times…  trying to catch the mist with his paws…  trying to catch what can’t really couldn’t be caught…  it was adorable…  and it reminded me of a line from one of Bob Dylan’s songs…   Dylan laments of unrequited love…  he imagines how that relationship might be…  and he names the things he hopes would be in it…  but he recognizes that it too is all just out of reach when he sings…   but I may as well try and catch the wind…

When we think about the ice and snow storms we’ve had recently in the upper midwest…  and the tornadoes across the south…  and the many different kinds of weather systems there can be…  we rely on the most modern technology…  and the training that goes along with it…   to makes it possible to predict what’s going to happen when and where…  almost to the minute…  and almost on specific streets…  but still…  there are variables which remain unpredictable…    out of our control…  and which can leave forecasters shaking their heads…

On January 9, 2016…  a Saturday…  at about 6:30 in the evening…  I canceled Sunday morning worship [ at Two Churches ] because all day on Saturday…  the meteorologists on The Weather Channel…  the premiere source for all things weather…  with the go-to professionals…  predicted that Grand Rapids, MI was going to get clobbered with a record amount of snow…  and that it wasn’t expected to taper off until 7:AM Sunday morning…  and so reluctantly…  with great trepidation…  I canceled worship…  but the experts were wrong…  oh so very wrong…  because when I woke up on Sunday morning…  all we got…  wait for it…  was an inch…

And so while weather prediction in Jesus’ time may have been a bit more imprecise…  the general experience was simply that the wind was unpredictable…   and just as unpredictable are our inner movements…  no amount of technology can predict them…  or the movement of the Spirit…  who the Spirit will touch…  and when…  what lessons the Spirit will teach…  about ourselves and others and God…  because we cannot be formed into the image of God completely on our own… and that it’s only in willing partnership with the Spirit that we are able to embody and manifest more and more of God’s will for us and for creation…  we cannot do it without the Spirit’s help…  because if we could…  the world would be far less chaotic than it is…  and part of that answer is that the Spirit never imposes its will on us…  we must be open to it…  willing to engage…  and follow it… 

It came to me some years ago…  that Jesus turned resurrection from a historical event… into an eternal state of being… that’s available to us in each and every moment… for a healed and new life…  and for reconciled and restored relationships…  resurrection is about more than just life after death… it’s about a new kind of life that starts here and now… and about a new way of being in the world and with God…

And Natalie Wigg-Stevenson…  who teaches at Emmanuel College in Toronto…  wrote that even the idea of being born again…   has become stagnant because of a  narrow set of criteria…  but…  she wrote…   I think Jesus meant being born again… to be more like a posture…   an orientation…   a continual disruption of all we think we’ve figured out about God…   so that the living God can always come to us anew…  and as we journey with Nicodemus this Lent…   let’s let him remind us…  that to be born again is not a one-time event…   but is instead…   a continual openness to God doing a new thing among us [Is. 43:19]…  Holy God…  help us to be open…