BEING BORN AGAIN

Sermon for October 25, 2009

Scripture: Job 42:1-7; John 3:1-10

I'm coming to the point where I have just some countable number of sermons left to give at Sojourners before I retire, maybe a dozen more or less. I haven't really thought about that much up until now, but I confess I did have that thought this past week, and it caused me to ask myself what I wanted those last sermons—last for a while anyway—maybe at some point in the future you'll invite me back as a guest preacher—what I wanted these last sermons to be about. Are there topics I haven't preached about so far that I'd like to get around to, or something I'd like to take another try at? Those kinds of questions are starting to occur to me. And, by the way, if you have any thoughts about what my sermons should be about between now and the end of January, I'd be glad to hear them. But asking myself that question—what I want to preach about in these last few months of my ministry at Sojourners—has proved to be a little unsettling for me, and there's a certain sense in which I don't like the question.

It's not just because I'll soon be needing to let go of this odd activity of preparing and giving sermons every week that I've been doing for such a long time. That's a little unsettling, but there will be an up side to that as well, and that's not really what I'm thinking of in saying I don't like the question. It's more that the question implies a sense of finality that I'm not at all comfortable with. I sometimes get in a mood where I ask myself who I think I am, getting up here every Sunday and pretending to have something to say worthwhile enough to ask people to listen or if not to listen then at least to twiddle their thumbs while I run on for fifteen or twenty minutes in the middle of a worship service. Just who do I think I am standing up here every week making faith statements or spiritual pronouncements of some kind? Well, if that's the way I actually thought of myself, I think I would have—I hope I would have anyway—given up on giving sermons a long time ago.

What I tell myself that has allowed me to keep at it is that in my approach to them, sermons are not supposed to be statements or pronouncements about anything. They are more like just words along the way, words that hopefully come from some place of faith, but just words along the way. They are small pieces of a much larger conversation we carry on as people of faith, actually not a single conversation but many conversations, conversations we have with scripture, with the world around us (with scripture providing context), conversations with ourselves, with things going on inside us (hope, discouragement, love, loneliness), conversations we have about such things with God in our minds and hearts, lots of different kinds of conversations. Sermons, I remind myself, are just pieces of these conversations, meant to do no more than keep the conversation going, offer or stimulate a thought here and there, challenge a thought here and there, and do their best to touch on the dimensions of faith that are present in so many, if not all, of our human conversations. Sermons are not supposed to be the last word on anything. Any sermon I give is not even my last word on anything. I may find myself contradicting myself in the next week's sermon. Sermons are just some words along the way.

So to ask myself whether there are topics I want to preach on before I retire as though there might be some things I would want to weigh in on or make a statement about while I have the chance, or to think about whether there might be something I had said before that I would want to revise…well it all has a kind of flavor of finality about it that makes me uncomfortable. Since sermons in my mind are by their nature temporary and tentative, there is no point in my trying to come up with my last or best word on anything. I might still ask myself whether there are things I haven't preached about before, but only in the spirit of ongoing faith conversations that will be ongoing for both me and Sojourners after I have stopped giving sermons.

All that is quite a long introduction to a sermon, but it all has something to do with what I want to talk about today. I was looking over the lectionary scriptures for this Sunday, as I most always do, and the first on the list was the reading we heard from Job. You know the story. This almost disgustingly good guy, Job, who also happens to be disgustingly prosperous—has everything most people seem to want out of life—family, friends, material comforts, respect from rich and famous and also from the poor folks he tries his best to help—everything including as clear a conscience as human beings can have—Job all of a sudden experiences a series of calamities. Piece by piece everything he has is taken away from him—his fortune, his family, his reputation, eventually his own health, and oh one more thing I didn't mention before: his relationship to God.

At first Job tries to take things in stride, or at least be philosophical about it (no one goes through life without some hardship), then he moves on to being theological (the Lord gives and the Lords takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord). But finally it all gets to be just too much and Job gives in to his understandable grief and anger. He begins to question God, question his faith in God, even accuse God of…well essentially of being cruel and immoral. Maybe God is not the kind of God Job had always thought God was. It sure does seem like God is causing things to happen, or at least allowing things to happen, that are just plain not right, not right because Job doesn't deserve them and really because when you get right down to it few, if any, people would deserve such things happening to them. Job eventually confronts God about all of this, and because of that, he has come to stand forever for all those who may have reason to question or accuse God or be angry with God because of the suffering visited upon human beings, whether their own or that others. For some of us Job is a kind of a hero because he dares to stand up to God on behalf of humanity, not accepting the phony rationalizations of his friends, not backing off from making his case, and not backing down in the face of God's ability to overwhelm us and make human beings feel small.

Except in the end Job does back down, and that has been disappointing to many readers including myself. The verses we heard this morning were from chapter 42, the last chapter in the book where Job essentially seems to apologize to God for venturing into matters he is not qualified to deal with, and God plays nice too and says that in spite of everything Job acted with integrity and God understands and so God goes on to restore Job's fortune, makes him even wealthier than before, gives him a bigger family than before, makes him a father and grandfather and great grandfather, gives him a satisfying old age. “And so,” it says in the last verse, “ Job died, old and full of days.” Amen. The end.

All of this has always been very disappointing to me. Am I now just supposed to forget all the passionate confrontation between Job and God that occupied the core of this book? Am I supposed to think that giving Job a new family makes up for the losses he had experienced, as though people are replaceable? And I'm not the only one who has had trouble with this ending. It's so out of character with the rest of the book that some scholars have argued this last chapter was probably added on to the story by some later editor who had a deep need for a happy ending. So I would probably not have chosen this passage to preach on, except that a couple of verses in there caught my eye. Speaking to God, Job says: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear; but now my eyes see you…”

That verse is worth pausing over. That verse suggests another way to read the whole book of Job, not only as a story that deals with the thorny intellectual problem of how and why God would allow all these awful things to happen in God's own creation, not even as a story about the emotional side of that, how we deal with devastating loss and how we deal with our anger at God, but also as a story of one man's journey toward a personal encounter with God, where God becomes not just an idea, not just a piece of furniture in the household of an upright life, not just someone we talk about when we're being religious, but a being, a power, a living spirit we meet up with face to face. In this sense the book of Job is a story not only about a particular question that people of faith do struggle with. It's also a story in a very basic way about the life of faith per se.

It's also in that sense a story about being born again. And so to go along with the Job reading, I chose a passage from John that is not part of today's lectionary but that is a passage that explicitly talks about being born again. And as I began in my thinking to sort of focus in a bit on the notion of being born again, it did occur to me that I probably haven't said very much in my sermons at Sojourners about being born again, can't remember giving a whole sermon around that concept, probably haven't referred to it very much. Understandably so, from my point of view.

It's not comfortable or natural for me to talk about being born again. I don't identify myself as a born again Christian, don't think of myself that way and probably wouldn't say it out loud if I did, because for many people the phrase has come to be associated with a particular way of being Christian that many of us are uncomfortable with. Born again Christians are a subset of Christians who claim to have a particularly close relationship to Jesus, who think that if you don't think of yourself as having a particularly close relationship to Jesus then you are a second class Christian or maybe not a real Christian at all, who often claim to have had some dramatic conversion experience where they let Jesus into their lives and accepted him as their personal savior, who believe that without such an experience and without accepting Jesus as your savior you will not spend eternity with God, and who way more often than not will have a conservative political leaning and a conservative cast on many social issues.

It's all a stereotype, of course, and there are certainly many people who consider themselves born again Christians who don't fit the stereotype. Jimmy Carter was the first prominent person I remember who identified as born again who didn't fit the stereotype, and he taught me early on not to be too quick to make assumptions about born again people. Nevertheless, if it's true that I should be careful not to make too easy assumptions about others, it's also true that I don't want those assumptions being made about me, and so I have avoided thinking of myself that way and have certainly avoided presenting myself in that way, especially since in our culture some people, if you say you are Christian, will assume that you are one of those born again people, and I would like to avoid that if I can.

But the funny thing is that in a way I am one of those born again people. I can say that to you because I trust you not to make all those assumptions I just listed or others like them. And I will go farther, and this may fall into the category of things that if I haven't said them already in sermons at Sojourners that I would like to say before I leave. Being born again is not such a bad thing. At its most basic level being born again is about our desire to see God, to know God, to encounter God in some direct way. I don't know what words to use here. Maybe the words I'm able to come up with right at this moment, still sound stereotyped in some way. Maybe they don't say it the way you would say it. Maybe there are no words that say it quite right. But I hope you can intuit what I'm trying to say here. There is something very real behind Job's simple way of saying it: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you.”

For me there is something important too about hearing Job say that. One of those assumptions we often make about those born again folks, and it is to large degree because of the way they themselves talk about it, is the notion that being born again is matter of having your heart warmed (as John Wesley would say), being granted some sure belief, having this wonderfully positive and rewarding relationship to God or to Jesus. Job reminds us that this is not what seeking the face of God is all about. It is in fact a kind of irony that born again believers so often claim this kind of sure and settled faith. That is not at all necessarily the case for at least two reasons that I can think of.

One is that it is often precisely those times when we need to struggle with God, when we need to question God, when we want to strike out in anger at God, it is often precisely in times of trouble that our desire to make some direct contact with God is most deeply felt. Being born again is not all about having some experience that results in having your heart lastingly filled with faith. I don't want to say that never happens or dismiss such experiences as unreal or unimportant. But being born again is not all about that. It is sometimes just as much, just as often, just as truly about an aching or grieving heart reaching out to God, grieving maybe over personal losses or aching over a world whose sorrows weigh on our souls.

A second reason that being born again is not all about being given a sure and settled faith is that when our hearts do seek a direct experience of God, we are likely to become more than ever aware that coming into God's presence is more likely to unsettle our faith than it is to settle it. Coming into God's presence is much more likely to fill us with wonder than it is to provide us with answers. Job found that out. We all find that out when our hearts reach out for God. To seek God's face, to seek God directly and sincerely, may well mean having to give up our certainties and our assurances. Again ironically, it is often those who are not so sure of God, for Job's reasons maybe, or for any other reason, it is often those who are not so sure of God who in the end have the most direct encounters with God. In any case, there is no reason, no reason at all, why we should exclude ourselves from the ranks of born again Christians. You may not ever hear me refer to myself as a born again Christian, but at some level of my soul, I do hope to be one. Amen.

Jim Bundy

October 25, 2009

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