Poolesville Presbyterian Church
03.16.14; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: John 3:1-17
This last week, the internet had a birthday. Well, sort of. The internet has been around for quite a while, and it's had lots of birthdays. Back in the fall and winter of 1969, it was ARPAnet, set up during the cold war so that scientists from the defense community could robustly and securely share pictures of kittens with each other after a Soviet attack.
This last week we celebrated the twenty-fifth birthday of the web. With the introduction of hypertext tranfer protocols, suddenly an entirely new way of connecting with one another was opened up to humankind. The Mesh, it was called at first, but that name just didn’t stick.
Twenty five years, it’s been, since the web came into existence. It’s sort of bizarre, at this point, to imagine that there was a time when it wasn’t around. But unless I dreamed the first twenty years of my life--that doesn’t seem entirely out of the question--there really was a time when it wasn’t around. That’s hard to remember, because our connectedness seems to define every aspect of our existences. It’s how we share. It shapes the warp and woof of our communities. It’s how we shop. It fulfills the aspirations of humanity to take endless online quizzes about which character we are. I get Yoda, Dumbledore, Gandalf, and Shepherd Book. Mostly because I know the outcome I want, and I know my way around a survey instrument. I also recently got Aria from Pretty Little Liars. I have no idea why I even took that survey.
Clearly, our ability to know where we fit in with pop culture, we’ve reached the very pinnacle of human existence. In many ways, I’ll admit, things are different. We work differently, and shop differently. As the ‘net has moved out of we walk around differently, too, staring down at the tiny rectangles of light that we just can’t quite seem to look away from. It’s been an absolute revolution, or so the storyline goes. Our entire world is now completely connected...or, rather, the eighty-six percent of us that have the ‘net in the US are connected.
That it has changed us is without question. But as much as it seems everything has shifted, it’s easy to question just how deep that transformation really runs. The pace of things seems to have picked up, sure. We expect things right now, not an hour or two from now or even ten minutes from now.
But have we been changed? Has this been a new dawn for humanity, the birth of a new age of hope and happiness? It’s hard to look out at the world and see anything really deeply better. We seem to do all the same things we always did, but we just do them faster. We’re much more efficient at getting things done, but we’ve managed to take that and make ourselves even more stressed. War continues. Hunger continues. The poor are still poor, and there’s still plenty of hatred out there in the world. We still misunderstand one another, turning the countless differences we’ve been able to tally up into reasons to turn on one another. In fact, we seem to have gotten better at misunderstanding and hating on each other. Twenty five years after the dawn of the web, the mess of humanity bumbles onward with a few more distractions and free two day shipping.
We so easily get confused around change, assuming that a change means something that it does not. We don’t know what to make of What are the changes that matter? What do they even look like?
Nicodemus struggles with this, as the strange man he’d heard of demanded his attention. He wants to talk with him, but can’t do so in public without destroying his reputation. So he waits until darkness, and then goes sneaking into the house where Jesus was staying at night like a ninja rabbi.
The discussion they have is a remarkably rich conversation, as the Pharisee asks question after question of Jesus, and Jesus responds. Nicodemus is particularly confused by the idea of being reborn, which he’s heard from Jesus on several occasions.
How can you be born if you’ve already been born? How is that even possible?
It is John’s story of the Gospel that first gives us that phrase, to be “born again.” Or rather, we think that it is. Nicodemus describes it as being “born again.” How can that even happen, he stammers.
But those are Nicodemus’s words, not the words John’s Gospel writes for Jesus.
In the Greek in which John was written, what Jesus says, over and over again, is that we must be "gennethenai aneuthen." As an aside, the rule of thumb for pronouncing ancient Greek when you have to speak in public? Sound like Arwen and Aragorn speaking Elvish.
The first word means "born," and it has a familiar root. Think "generate," or "genesis." The challenge comes with the word aneuthen, which if you’re reading the NIV and the KJV translate as "again."
That word occurs 31 times in our Bibles. It surfaces eighteen times in the Septuagint--that's the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was circulating at the time of Christ--and thirteen times in the Gospels and Epistles.
Of those 31 occurances, it is translated "again" only three times. Two of those are the verses we just saw in John 3. The third is in Galatians 4:9--but there it disappears into part of a two-verb construct with the verb form palin. And palin is--guess what--the most commonly used Greek term for "again." Which, oddly enough, is exactly the word say whenever I see Sarah Palin’s face.
In every other location, aneuthen is translated to mean "over," "on top," "from the beginning," or "from above."
Given the dominant Biblical meaning of aneuthen, what Jesus said in that conversation with Nicodemus--despite the influence of the English translations--was not that we should be born "again."
The word we hear in scripture does not mean doing the same thing over again, or doing the same thing better and faster. Jesus is expressing a much more powerful spiritual truth to Nicodemus--that we should be born "from above," or born "from heaven."
Honestly, for mature Christians, the distinction is mostly moot. Even with that verse historically mistranslated as "born again," we still know exactly what Christ was talking about from the broader context of his teachings. We are to be transformed. We are to be "born of water and the Spirit." (John 3:5) Those who have felt the Spirit moving in their lives, and whose lives have been--and are being--changed by Christ?
They know what it means, no matter what word is used. They're feeling it. They're living it.
It is also interesting that these words conveyed in John’s Gospel have a specific theological meaning, one that resonates with all of Christ's other teachings about the change he is bringing us. The birth that Christ describes has to do with what is "above," which in the context of John's Gospel indicates a connection with something of God. It is a reality that has not yet happened, a state of being that is not yet a part of the world we inhabit.
That, I think, is the key to Nicodemuses struggle. He is earnestly trying to imagine the story as being a repetition, a reiteration of the things that he already knows. Jesus is trying to kick him loose from that understanding. God’s spirit shakes us loose from those old patterns of being. It doesn’t exist to help us do them faster, or help us do them better.
Being born from above means being born into a reality...a sense of your own self...that you have not yet inhabited. You don’t yet know what that is. You’ve not ever experienced it.
That, I think, is why twenty-five years of what appears to be astonishing change has actually really changed very little at all. We’re just being born again, new and yet not new, as we are when we wake every morning, repeating the same reality faster and faster.
We have not yet really begun to be born from above, from that reality that represents the Reign of God that Jesus calls us towards.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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