Born Again . . . To Love the World

Photo by rockpaperpixels licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

June 28, 2020
John 3:1-20
Trinity Baptist Church
Newton, NC

There is a famous pair of truisms in the proclamation of the gospel in this morning’s reading from John 3. The first is the truism that we must be born again. The second is the truism that God so loved the world that God sent God’s Son, not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through him. Those are truisms in the proclamation of the gospel.

Truisms are common statements that are widely held to be obviously true and universally applicable. But truisms tend over time to become a mile wide and an inch deep in our understanding of them because truisms tend to be understood in isolation from each other and in isolation from the contexts of their origin and of their application. When someone states a truism, everyone nods in affirmation. Because, well, it’s widely held, and it’s obviously true. Why would anyone even need to think about it? This morning I want to us to think about these two truisms, “You must be born again” and “God so loved the world” in relation to each other, in relation to the context of their origin in John 3, and in relation to our context in the application of them.

In the gospel of John, Jesus said, “You must be born again,” one time to one person. In John 1, Jesus said to Andrew, “Come and see” (v 39). A few verses later, Jesus said to Philip, “Follow me” (v 43). In chapter 5, Jesus said to a lame man, “Take up your mat and walk” (v 8). In chapter 8, Jesus said to a woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more” (v 11). In chapter 9, Jesus said to a man who had been blind from birth, “Go and wash in the pool of Siloam” (v 7). In the gospel of John, the different paths by which different people come to faith and to following and to forgiveness and to healing are as varied as the persons themselves and their circumstances in life. As John’s gospel recounts Jesus’ ministry, Jesus reaches out to touch precisely the place in each person’s heart and soul and mind that needs healing, forgiving, changing. And in John 3, Jesus evidently knows it is not enough to say to the one named Nicodemus, “Come and see” or “Follow me” or “Get up and walk” or “Go and sin no more” or “Go and wash.” No. To this one Jesus says, “You must be born again.” “Man, you gotta start all over.” From scratch. From the get-go. Return to Start, Square One. Why did Jesus say that to Nicodemus and no one else?

Look at what Nicodemus says to Jesus at the beginning of their conversation in John 3:2: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.” Did you hear that? Who knows? “We know.” Who is this “We”? Does Nicodemus “have a rabbit in his pocket,” as they asked where I grew up when someone said “we” in place of I? Are there others with him in the room? John 3 doesn’t say that Nicodemus came to see Jesus alone, but it also doesn’t say that anyone else came with him.

When Nicodemus is introduced in verse 1, he is identified as “Pharisee.” So, according to John’s gospel, Nicodemus was a member of the first-century Jewish denomination of the Pharisees, a Jewish group distinct from the Sadducees and Zealots and Essenes and Samaritans, as Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans and Presbyterians and Episcopalians and Catholics are distinct denominations among modern Christians. Nicodemus is then also identified as a “leader of the Jews.” In John’s gospel, the expression, “the Jews,” οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι in Greek, is used as a technical term for Jewish religious and political authorities regardless of their denomination. So in addition to being a Pharisee, Nicodemus was a member of the religious and political power structure in first-century in Jerusalem and Judea.

So when Nicodemus says, “We,” to Jesus, that “we” represents the religious and political powers that be in Jerusalem and Judea. And Jesus responds to that “We” with a “Ya’ll”: “You” in the plural in Greek. “Youse guys” in Scotland and Yorkshire and South Philadelphia. “You-uns” in western Pennsylvania and Appalachia. “Youse guys, You-uns, Ya’ll must be born all over again.” That “We” from Nicodemus and that “Ya’ll” from Jesus mark the opening salvo in a gospel-long conflict between Jesus and the religious and political authorities who are represented by Nicodemus. In other words, in the context of the origin of the truism “You must be born again,” Jesus did not say it to unrighteous, unruly, unreligious people the way it is commonly applied in preaching and teaching in our time. The people whom Jesus said “must be born again” were self-righteous, rules-based, religious and political authorities who despised, condemned and excluded all but their own kind. To those people, Jesus said, “Ya’ll are so messed up in your thinking that you gotta go back to the beginning and start all over.” So, where, exactly, is Start? Where is the Beginning for someone whose thinking about righteousness and rules and religious and political power is so messed up that they need to go back to the beginning to start all over?

That’s where “God so loved the world” comes in. The beginning to which self-righteous, rules-based, religiously and politically exclusive people must go back is the divine motivation expressed in John 3:16: “God so loved the world.” “God so loved” the fallen, sin-filled, screwed-up world that God sent the Son, “not to condemn the world,” v 17 says, but that the world might be saved. Love was God’s motivation, according to John 3:16. And as God was motivated, so must we all be motivated. If the reconciling love of God does not motivate our attitudes and our actions at home and at work and at school and in our neighborhood and community and state and country and world, if the reconciling love of God does not motivate every mission and ministry of Trinity Baptist Church, then Jesus is saying to us, “Ya’ll must be born again.” We’ve gotta go back to the beginning and start all over.

That’s what the Pharisee named Paul understood that the Pharisee named Nicodemus didn’t get, at least not yet, in John 3: “In Christ,” Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:19, “God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” God did not entrust the church with a message of God’s condemnation of the world but a message of God’s reconciliation of the world. The sole motivation of the church in the world is the reconciling love of God for the world revealed in Jesus Christ the Son.

Have you looked at the Beliefs of Trinity Baptist Church lately? They are published on the website. The first of the six stated Beliefs of this congregation is “To practice being the love of God to all people within and without its fellowship.” There it is: This is a John 3:16 congregation—Being the love of God to all people within and without its fellowship because that’s how God so loved the world. No self-righteous, rules-based, religious and political power-mongering here or anywhere else Trinity folks go, right?  Right.

But before you breathe a sigh of relief that I just let you off the hook collectively and individually, our “Beliefs” are not always reflected in our attitudes and our behavior. Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 bestseller Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking provides example after example of the power of our unconscious mind, our snap judgments, our “thin-slice cognition,” as it is called. “We have our conscious attitudes,” Gladwell wrote. “This is what we choose to believe. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately.” But there is another level of attitude and the decision-making that follows. It is our unconscious attitudes by which we make decisions and act on them before any deliberation about how those unconscious attitudes relate to our stated values, the things we choose to believe.

Let me give you just one example from Blink. More than 30 years ago now, major symphony orchestras began to change the way they managed auditions. You might think that the professional musicians who served as the committee of judges in the auditions for positions in top-flight orchestras would be clear-eared and clear-minded and rigorously analytical enough to rate the performers based solely the musical talent they demonstrated in the audition. But listen to what happened when the rules for the auditions were changed.

Musicians were identified not by name but by number. Screens were erected between the committee and the auditioner, and if the person auditioning cleared his or her throat or made any kind of identifiable sound – if they were wearing heels, for example, and stepped on a part of the floor that wasn’t carpeted – they were ushered out and given a new number. And as these new rules were put in place around the country, an extraordinary thing happened: orchestras began to hire women. In the past thirty years, since screens became commonplace, the number of women in the top US orchestras has increased fivefold. (Blink, p. 250)

Even the most clear-eyed, clear-minded, most rigorously analytical of us bring subconscious assumptions to our decision making, subconscious assumptions that sometimes contradict our conscious attitudes, our stated values, what we have chosen to believe. Blink contains a host of other examples from neuroscience, psychology, personal relationships, education, business, the military, law enforcement, race relations, ethnicity. Gladwell peels away the veneer of our explanations and or rationalizations for our attitudes and our behaviors to show how often our minds were made up before we even consciously considered the decision or the person or the thing in front of us in the light of our stated values, what we have chosen to believe.

Our unconscious mind is extremely perceptive, and our snap-judgments are very often better than decisions we wrangle over endlessly in the paralysis of over-analysis. But here’s the thing: When we find ourselves thin-slicing, snap-judging people who are not like us socially, politically, economically, racially, ethnically, religiously despising, condemning, and excluding them, then we have become the ones whom Jesus called Ya’ll, Youse Guys, You-Uns: We have become Nicodemus and the Pharisees and the religious and political authorities in Jerusalem and Judea in John 3. And we must be born again.  

It doesn’t matter if the people whom we are thin-slicing are on the right or on the left or caught in the middle. We have become Nicodemus, and we must be born again. It doesn’t matter if the people whom we are thinslicing are of African or Asian or European or Indigenous or Middle Eastern or Latinx extraction. We have become Nicodemus, and we must be born again. It doesn’t matter if the people whom we are thinslicing are demonstrating for #BlackLivesMatter or  #ReopenNorthCarolina. We have become Nicodemus, and we must be born again. It doesn’t matter if the people whom we are thinslicing are unruly or rules-based, unrighteous or self-righteous, religiously and politically inclusive or exclusive. We have become Nicodemus, and we must be born again.

When we find ourselves thin-slicing, snap-judging people who are not like us, despising, condemning, or excluding them, we must go all the way back to the beginning to the divine motivation expressed in John 3:16 that “God so loved the world.” “God so loved” the fallen, sin-filled, screwed-up world that God sent the Son, “not to condemn the world,” John 3:17 says, but that the world might be saved through him.” “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

The message of reconciliation: God so loved the world that we “practice being the love of God to all people within and without [this] fellowship.” Be that person. Be that church. 

Copyrighted © 2020 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. This material may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff@jeffreysrogers.org.