Preached at St John’s, Devizes
Romans 4:1-5, 4:13-17; John 3:1-17
“How can anyone be born after having grown old?”
“Ye must be born again.” I saw this phrase a lot when I was a kid growing up in Belfast, on the noticeboards of churches and sometimes on posters stuck up on lamp-posts. It made very little sense to me, just as it initially made very little sense to Nicodemus in today’s Gospel reading.
As I became older, I started noticing that the street preachers who popped up in the city centre on Saturday afternoons liked using it. They were quite clear that they were born again, and therefore that they were proper Christians: and they were also clear that the rest of us were not proper Christians – especially if we happened to be Catholics.
Aged around eighteen, I found myself walking past a church where an Evangelical youth rally was about to start, and going in out of curiosity. I came forward at the altar call because I did indeed want a closer personal relationship with Jesus; perhaps, in the way of the young, I wanted some of the obvious sense of certainty that the people leading the rally seemed to have. I was quickly disappointed, however – on hearing my obviously Catholic name and the strongly Republican part of the city I came from, the people holding the rally clearly coveted a convert and a ‘conquest’. I found it the experience so nauseating that I bade my farewells and left as soon as I politely could.
I’m sure I’m not the only person here who has had experiences like this. This makes us rather nervous when we hear the phrase “you must be born again”. Indeed, it might seem that the translators of the Bible version we use in St John’s are nervous about it as well. They prefer the phrase: “You must be born from above”. Now, let’s be clear that this is not some get-out-clause invented by liberal New Testament scholars. The same Greek word “anōthen” can be translated either way. In any case, this matters little – whichever word is chosen to translate this phrase, Jesus is very clearly speaking of the idea of a rebirth – a heavenly, spiritual, rebirth.
But here’s the rub – in this story, being reborn isn’t something that people choose for themselves. “The wind blows where it chooses”, as Jesus says. If we are ‘born again’ it is because the Holy Spirit has blown its way into our lives for reasons of its own. It is not in our gift or our choosing. It isn’t something that we should wear as some sort of badge of pride or see as a prize for our achievements. To be born again is a gift of God the Holy Spirit.