A Sign
2 Chronicles 36: 14-23; John 3:14-21

March 26, 2006


Something’s happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear! The Gospel according to John contains a series of seven signs or miraculous events of Jesus that point to his Messiah-hood, typically called “The Book of Signs.” This Gospel reading does not contain one of these signs, but John 3:16 has become a sign for a lot of Christians.

Just about every major televised sporting event has had big placards with “John 3:16” writ large for the cameras to catch. You can get just about anything today with “John 3:16” emblazoned upon it -- coffee mugs, ties, T-shirts, jewelry, screen savers -- and some might even have the complete verse written out.

That’s where the trouble starts: when does the sign/symbol lose sight of its content? Are we just supposed to be satisfied when we see chapter and verse that all is right with the world and our soul?

I am suspicious and wary of the move to reduce our faith down to short-hand signs or symbols. Inevitably, one ends up knowing the signs by rote and forgetting, no longer comprehending the content of what one believes. I find it fitting that one of the least authentic arenas of modern culture - World Wrestling Entertainment - has one of their wrestlers touting the title of “Austin 3:16”? Oh, were a lot of Christians upset! My all-time favourite mocking those signs was during the World Series when John Olerud could still hit and had just won the batting championship after flirting with the magic .400 all season - the sign read “John .363”.

This famous verse finds itself in the midst of that nearly forgotten midnight escapade of Nicodemus to seek out and talk with Jesus. Nicodemus, a member of the ruling Sanhedrin or Council, knew an awful lot, and possibly could cite by rote the entire Torah. But what Jesus told him was embarrassing, for he could barely comprehend the depth of Jesus’ ideas. Jesus advised Nicodemus, “You need to be born again,” and Nicodemus could not make sense of it. Born again is still difficult to understand and live without reducing the phrase to a catchy password for the in-crowd. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten son, that whoever believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.” We have to be born again before that really makes sense.

Being born again is a technical term which in many Christian vocabularies has acquired a life of its own. Jesus is punning, utilizing a double entendre in Greek in the word “anothen.” Anothen means “from heaven” or spiritual - one must be spiritually born. But it also has the connotation of “again,” for a second time. Over the centuries some segments of Christianity have imprisoned the phenomenon of being born again in the clothes of an ecstatic, dramatic inner experience occurring at a specific, singular moment. I know some Baptists and Pentecostals are not going to be happy with that assessment, but I have listened to enough of them declare emphatically that it has to be like that or it isn’t being born again. Such a narrow and rigid requirement of being born again is the reason a significant part of Christianity does not buy into this definition. Yet we try to ignore being born again at our spiritual peril, for this is how we become and continue to be Christian.

A point arrives when you realize that what you have assumed and known is no longer the way it’s supposed to be. The way you have lived your life has a flaw and in order to get things right you have to turn around and look in another direction. There usually isn’t some bright light that turns on in your head at a specific time to tell you this, but gradually it does dawn on you that you’ve got to be different. And it just doesn’t happen once and for all. It keeps on happening once again and again for all your life. That is a sign that God figures it is worth bothering you and being annoyingly present in your life.

Some signs are harder to take. The Books of 1 and 2 Chronicles are seldom read in worship, largely because they present an idiosyncratic retelling of the great narrative history of Israel and its kings originally told in the books of Samuel and Kings, from Saul the first king all the way down to Jehoiachin, the last king forcibly brought back to Babylon in an exile that lasts the rest of his life. The Exile was the death of Israel and the death of God, or so most Jews concluded.

Everything was gone: their political independence, their capital city, their great Temple, the customs of their worship and faith, their God, though Jeremiah had told them why God did not save them this time. They had lived as if he did not really exist, even while going through the motions of devout worship.

In Babylon, there were still Jews who felt strongly that God existed for them. Yet most could not imagine how you could worship properly without all the trappings of the majestic Temple, without a marvelous sanctuary? Yes, but there’s got to be some different thinking to worship the same God in a different way. The smaller community-based synagogue was developed, in which there could be no proper sacrifices, but there was the reading of the Torah, preaching and teaching and prayers. Our approach to worship bears a remarkable resemblance to the Jewish synagogue. The whole way of being a Jew had been born again.

The last words of 2 Chronicles relate the bitter end of Israel, how God kept sending messengers, but no one would ever listen, and so Israel died for 70 years, plenty of time to forget about God. Strangers in a strange land again, hope was reborn as a new world power, Persia, defeated the Babylonians. God went to Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, and stirred up his spirit, inspiring him to rebuild Jerusalem and to liberate the captives, physically and spiritually, to declare an unheard of religious freedom. Even Jews did not advocate that kind of generosity of spirit, nor did the early Christians. Let’s all meet in Jerusalem, Cyrus encourages, ironically the same hopeful sentiment shared around every Passover Seder meal.

Now Cyrus was not the proper person to be the Messiah of Israel, although Isaiah would call him that (Isaiah 45:1). Cyrus was a Gentile, an idol-worshiper, and unclean beyond cleansing. Yet, God decided it was Cyrus who would enable Israel to be born again.

What would you do today if one of the imans or ayatollahs of Iran proclaimed a word of reconciliation and wisdom that sounds amazingly and authentically like the Gospel? Would you and I listen, or would we disparage the message and the person since he really wasn’t Christian? Being born again is not just a case of spiritual inner pyrotechnics; when you are born again the world you take for granted is turned upside down and you have to recalculate and rethink not only what you have to think, but how you are now supposed to go about thinking and acting with all the rules being changed.

In the hard political and religious realities of today this will never happen, we are grimly certain. What was happening when we were listening to Mahatma Gandhi, a Hindu, who summoned us religiously to non-violence as the means to undoing injustice? What was Martin Luther King, Jr., a black Southern Baptist preacher, doing listening to the spiritual message of Gandhi’s non-violence? What is happening to us when we listen intently to the words and soul of the Dalai Lama, a Tibetan Buddhist incarnation? We are being born again, being transformed by the renewing of our minds, as Paul so eloquently said (Romans 12:2).

When Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born again in order to bring the depth of his faith in God back up to standard, Nicodemus could not comprehend at first what Jesus was talking about. It was so foreign, so radically against the way his culture and religion had long ago determined it had to be. And Nicodemus was part of that generation that had lived through the Babylonian Exile, had learned what it meant to be born again in how one sees and understands the presence of God, yet had slipped back again to the old safe self-sure ways.

God so loved the world, so loved humanity and all creation that God did the unthinkable - at least what we cannot allow ourselves to think. God sent his Son not to condemn the world, but to redeem, to recreate the world, God’s very essence getting mixed up in a world that acts as if God does not exist. Jesus was not always respectful of the religion of Israel, breaking a number of laws and customs, acting in ways that holy men and rabbis are not supposed to act, and in the end, failed in the mission a lot of people thought he was about.

What Jesus was really about was the call to you and me to transform our thinking, to renew our minds, to start all over again from the beginning like a humble child to perceive how God arranges the real world. You begin a new life by listening carefully, deeply, to the truth of what others say, no matter who they may be. You cannot settle for signs, for you must hear God spelled out to the last letter. Who knows who God will stir up next to proclaim the Good News for God’s people, and invite us all to meet next year in Jerusalem?

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan