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David Orendorff        John 3:1-10        June 7, 2009

You might be surprised but Jesus is a puny kind of guy.  That is, in today’s scripture he makes a pun.  Translators have a tough time letting us in on the play on words so I will just have to straight out give it to you even though there few things more boring than explaining a pun.

Jesus says to Nicodemus, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being gennhqh anwqen.” Gennhqh anwqen can be translated two ways.  Most often you have heard it translated “born again” which is how Nicodemus takes it and is very confused and asks about re-entering his mother’s womb.  It can also be translated as “born from above.”  This is how Jesus means it.  To see the kingdom of God one must be born from above, i.e. be born of God.

John Wesley calls this the new birth.  He also calls it God’s sanctifying (making holy) grace.  Of new birth he says it is “great work which God does in us, in renewing our fallen nature.”[1] To be born from above (or born again) is to be restored to our loving selves.

Joan and Lowell Uda are long time friends and have an interesting story of new birth, of sanctifying grace and discipleship.  Some of you got to meet Lowell when he and Joan were here in early May.  Their mutual story begins in Iowa were they met in graduate school while attending the Iowa Writers Workshop which is a well known and respected graduate program.  At that time the workshop was headed by Kurt Vonnegut.

After graduate school and a short stint of teaching at the University of Montana, Lowell became a grant writer for the state of Montana and Joan became an attorney in family law.  Neither career really suited their talents or passions.  Though successful they were spiritually dry, they were not being born from above and they could barely see the kingdom of God.

Joan was raised a United Methodist but like most college students and young adults she left the church to find her own life. Lowell was raised a Mormon but also left faith to others.  Then in Helena they felt the mutual urge to return to church, they felt the call of the spirit to come home.  They chose the United Methodist Church I was serving and I became their pastor.  Their children, now young adults, warned them to stay away from church because we would steal their souls.  The children were right but I like to think that we returned their souls to them.

To make a long story short at nearly 50 Lowell felt the strong call to attend seminary and become a pastor.  Joan lay her career aside and went with him to the Iliff School of Theology in Denver.  Then Joan took a couple of classes out of curiosity (I wonder who put that in her), got hooked, and got her own Master’s of Divinity degree.  They both became United Methodist pastors serving with love and grace congregations in Colorado for more than a decade before retiring.

Theirs is a story of the Holy Spirit breathing deeply into them and giving those new lives, new birth.  It wasn’t so much that they were made anew as they were given the lives they were made to have.

I tell you all that as an example of what Jesus is trying to tell Nicodemus.  And I tell you because Joan now writes a daily online devotional and last Monday she wrote about her life and Jesus’ call for being born from above, or being born again.  These are her words:

You must have a second birth in order to be with God, Jesus says. And it “comes from above,” which I think means that it comes only through God, by turning to God, and never through human will or any other human means.

Then I think Jesus says, loosely paraphrased, “This second birth changes you so much that you cannot really understand what it is until it happens to you.”
I believe this change is so intense and transformational that it not only makes a person see reality through a new lens, it’s as if it alters the “spiritual DNA” we’re born with by adding some “I’m coming to Jesus” genes. These changes, I believe, let us see God’s kingdom that is both already among us and not yet here.
Though many people believe this transformation can happen instantaneously, complete in a moment, it did not happen that way for me. In my youth I had a moment that I thought was a complete new birth, but on the way home from church I found myself the same old Joan. For me the process has been long, arduous, sometimes complicated (since my brain sometimes likes to complicate things), with a lot of back-tracking, reversals, and, “I’m sure you can’t really mean THAT, Lord!”
But in that struggle of many years, my spiritual DNA has begun to change. It has changed enough that I can see glimmerings of what it means to be “born again,” or “born from above,” or “born to be part of God’s kingdom.” It has changed enough that my spirit encounters God in a new way, and the Holy Spirit opens more of the Scripture to me, so that I see many things now that before were entirely invisible to me.
This transformational change means everything in this life and the next.

I like the story of Joan and Lowell because being church is, for me, about being a community in which the Holy Spirit finds folks and gives them the lives they were made to have, gives them birth from above.  Joan and Lowell are two of those folks.

In its short history, not even two decades, Bear Creek has been a community of lives transformed by the love of God.  This small congregation of believers has already produced three pastors that I know of, Brad Beeman, Mary Sellon Huycke and John Peterson.  It also has one pastor in process, Gus Peterson.  And currently there are a couple of folks, they know who they are, who I have encouraged to think about being a pastor.

For a short history it seems to me remarkable that so many folks have been called to pastoral ministry from Bear Creek.  Few congregations, some a hundred years old, in Washington have such a remarkable record.  The research on congregations which give us pastors is clear.  Such congregations are places in which the Holy Spirit, the love of God, whatever you want to call it, is changing lives.  Congregations where there is birth from above, where the Holy Spirit is actively changing the spiritual DNA of its members and its body, lead folks to ministry.

The ministry may be clergy, it may be in the life of the church such as Jamie Wilson, our new youth pastor, and Lyda Barr who serves as the youth pastor at Snohomish UMC, or it may be in the larger world we are called to love and serve.  In other words, communities into which the Holy Spirit lives and gives new birth lead persons to be born from above and born again.  To be in such a community is to see the kingdom of God.  And to be such a community is to offer the gift of sight to others.

Today we have honored our graduates.  It is a onetime gift and a chance to acknowledge and celebrate their achievements.  But the real gift we give them is our love and faith offered in word and deed over the years they are with us. Through the constancy of our faith and the breath of the Holy Spirit these graduates have been given the opportunity to see the kingdom of God among us and on into their new lives.

We are the living body of Christ through which the Spirit blows as it will and I love it.  Being the people born from above is, of course, not always easy nor is it even always clear, but it is who God has called us to be and to the best of our efforts and the gracious forgiveness and direction of God, it is our life together and our gift to the graduates and the world.  Thanks be to God!

Shalom and Amen.