It’s the Second Sunday of Lent and the pace is picking up. We’re heading toward the Easter Vigil when we’ll once again stir the waters of the baptismal font and renew our vows as followers of Jesus.
And something else is going on as well. As Leah Forbes reminded me the other day, March is a big birthday month in our community. Some of us are turning 26 for the second, even the third time. She and Cecil brought a special cake.
And it just so happens that in the midst of this journey to the baptismal font, and these birthday celebrations, we listen in on Jesus talking to Nicodemus about being born again, being born from above. Good time to reflect on this, this Second Sunday of Lent, whether you’re 26 for the first, second, or third time.
Because no matter how old you are, life can throw many things at you. Your life can be filled with zest and passion and purpose. It can also wear you down--the constant daily efforts to make a living, do the chores, struggle with relationships, look for a job, recover from disappointments, and heal from our wounds--these things can, if you’re not careful, make you half-dead, steal your joy.
How do we stay alive, increase the joy? Or to put it negatively, how do we not lose our souls, our spirits, our passion and zest and purpose? Or to put it still another way, how, in Jesus' words, can we be born again? How do we do this?
It’s not what Nicodemus thought. Being born again is not something to be taken literally--an absurd image Nicodemus had of a grown man trying to re-enter his mother's belly. Being born again is obviously not that.
Rather it’s a spiritual awakening that somehow changes us and the way we see ourselves and the world and people around us.
Nor is being born again like simply hitting the reset button on your cell phone, an act that completely wipes out all memory and data--all our mistakes, all the bad things we may have done or that others may have done to us--suddenly erased, gone, as though they never happened. Being born again is not like that.
Rather it means that we come to see those sad and painful things in a whole new way. They take on a new meaning for us. We come to see God at work in them, wiping away the tears from our eyes and bringing us--through those very mistakes and failures and disappointments--from pain and sadness to a more abundant life. It’s what we Jesus freaks call “resurrection”.)
The other day I ran across a poem by David Ray in which he tells of a conversation in which the great American poet Robert Frost was asked about hope. This poem tells us something about being born again.
Thanks, Robert Frost
Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.
A good poem whether you are 26 the first, second, or third time--whether you’re old enough to have more past than future or future than past. It’s about being born again. Not erasing our past mistakes and failures and disappointments, but seeing them in a whole new way. Hope for the past.
This is what we believe: That God is always working for us, transforming our past mistakes and failures and sins into gateways to a richer and more abundant life.
I once went through the loss of a relationship. At the time it felt like the end of the world. But after a while, I was able to see how that loss helped free me for a richer and fuller life. With all its grief and sadness, the loss of that relationship was a blessing, not a curse, both for me and for him.
I've also made many mistakes and often failed to live up to my aspirations, but, as the writer Parker Palmer notes, rather than looking back with regret, it’s possible to see all of our mess-ups as humus or compost for the growing we needed to do.
He notes that “humus”, the Latin word for compost, is the root of our English word humility, a big word for us in these days of Lent.
The good I do today may well have its roots in something not-so-good I did in the past. Knowing that takes me beyond both the sinkhole of regret and the hot-air balloon of pride.
Regret shuts life down. Humility opens it up.
This is also true in how we think of forgiving others, of being born again after we have been wounded by others. Here again, it's not a matter of simply hitting a reset button and erasing all memory of being hurt. Forgiving does not mean forgetting.
Rather, when we forgive someone, the memory of the wound might stay with us for a long time, even throughout our lives. Sometimes we carry the memory in our bodies as physical scars.
But forgiveness and being born again change the way we remember those moments and those wounds, they change a curse into a blessing.
When we forgive our parents for their mistakes, our spouses for their lack of attention, our friends for their unfaithfulness in a crisis, our co-workers for their betrayals, we cease to be victims of events we had no control over. We claim our own power and refuse to let those events destroy us. In being born again we enable these wounds to deepen the wisdom of our hearts; make us more compassionate, joyful, loving; and lead us to a fuller life.
We Christians say that every movement from death and pain and sadness to more abundant life is the work of God, the one who is continually at our side, leading us from death to life, inviting us to be born again. With the passing of the years, and on this Second Sunday of Lent, this is the basis of our hope--not only for the future but also for the past.
A couple of questions for you:
- Do you have in your own life, wounds either self-inflicted or inflicted by others?
- As Christians, we believe God is working in and through those wounds, to lead you to life. So what are the ways God has been part of your story even in those moments, leading you from sadness and pain and disappointment to more love, more joy, more life? How do you see God at work in your life?
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