SERMON FOR PARISH EUCHARIST
ST JOHN AT HAMPSTEAD
20 FEBRUARY 2005
Lent 2, Year A
Psalm 121
OT Reading: Genesis 12.1-4a
NT Reading: Romans 4.1-5, 13-17
Gospel : John 3.1-17
Text: You must be born again (John 3.7)
It is perhaps a sign of our embarrassment with born-again Christians that the old language about being born again has given way to a new translation which speaks of being born from above. However, it’s hard to see how Nicodemus could have asked about re-entering the womb if Jesus words had been so unambiguously spiritual, so I am going to carry on using the old familiar words. You must be born again.
I understand that some 40% of American Christians describe themselves as born-again Christians. I switched on a TV programme about this phenomenon recently. It began with a clip of morning prayers around the board room table of a Bank in Atlanta, which moved seamlessly from a collectively rumbled Amen in the shampoo position to ‘Well, how are we going to make more money to-day?’ or words to that effect; and the next clip, in the banking hall at the end of the day was of a cashier giving a passionate if somewhat wobbly rendering of ‘Amazing Grace’. I’m afraid the cringe factor was too much for me, and I switched off, so perhaps it’s poetic justice that I should now find myself faced with this very passage from St John’s gospel. So, the question I have been asking myself is: how do we rescue the notion of being born again from the cringe factor?
When Anne’s goddaughter telephoned last week-end to invite us to come and meet her week-old baby boy, I rather hoped that young Liam might have some of the answers for me. He was for the most part a contented baby, who lay lightly in the arms of his mum or dad, or indeed a privileged stranger, occasionally raising a comically furrowed brow to open his startled eyes. If the Garden of Eden is partly a story about growing up, as Father Stephen was suggesting last week, then perhaps it is not entirely fanciful to suggest that the very young child passes through a pre-lapsarian state of grace, in which the baby is totally dependent upon its parents ? particularly its mother of course ? and there are no barriers to the giving or receiving of all the loving care which the baby needs. As we grow up, and assert our physical and social independence, we find it harder to give, and harder still to receive, the affectionate care of others, if it seems to threaten what we see as the dignity of our independence. But it is a grace which many of us may have to relearn, little by little as we get older.
Observing little Liam reminded me of that. One of the characteristics of the born-again Christian is an uncomplicated dependence on the love of God. Liam also reminded me that happiness does not depend on having lots of things ? a baby has very few possessions ? but on having lots of love. But to my surprise, it was the reading of a collection of letters (see footnote)from a woman in her late 50s wrestling with an incurable form of cancer, which in the end had more to say to me than a new baby about the concept of being born again.
Janet was almost brutally honest, matter-of-fact, unsentimental about the progress of her disease and its treatment. She fought it tenaciously, but she refused to ask God to work a miracle for her, arguing that such an act would not be just, nor true to the God in whom she believed. No sensible or loving God, she wrote, would cure me, while leaving millions of children to die in poverty, never having had the opportunity to develop their gifts. Once she had got over the initial shock, she was grateful, she said, that it was not a younger member of the family who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. You might suppose from these remarks that her letters might be full of pious and improving comments. Not at all. There is a lot about her illness, because in the first year or so, getting a secure diagnosis, understanding the disease, coming to terms with it in practical ways, coping with the treatment, all took up a lot of her time and energy. But she also writes with zest and humour about her work, about the art and music she loved, the films and plays she had seen, about family and holidays, even about financial planning, which she rather enjoyed. She did nothing by halves. From the age of eleven, she had latched onto a prayer which included the words: Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might, that God in all things may be glorified.
That was I suppose the first theological truth she embraced, perhaps because it expressed and affirmed her own character. The second was a certain scepticism about the nature and even the existence of God. However, since life would be somewhat meaningless without God, she resolved to live as if God was, until she found reason not to do so. In the event she did eventually receive a more positive sense of God’s presence. Some few years before her illness, just sitting at her desk at the start of the working day, she had an overwhelming and totally unexpected experience of God’s love, which she later came to understand as a gift she had received in part at least to strengthen her for the string of family bereavements which followed, but also for her own illness a few years later.
And this is where I return to the theme of new life, being born again. Faced with the certainty of a limited life span, yet sustained by that inner conviction of God’s love in her heart, she experienced such a new lease of life that I can only describe it in the terms Jesus used in speaking to Nicodemus. Treating every month and every year that was left to her as a gift of God, she resolved to live and enjoy every moment to the utmost. She visited her cousins in Australia for the first time, she took a holiday with her daughter who was studying in South America, she walked the first half of the Santiago pilgrimage route, from Le Puy in France to Pamplona in Spain, she enjoyed good meals, days out and holidays with her husband, and although she had to give up full-time work, she continued to preach and teach, and she saw through to completion a project to establish a local headquarters and drop-in centre for Age Concern.
Near the end of her life she wrote this: I can look back over these years living with cancer and say that ? for me – it has truly been a blessing. I cannot regret it. In five years I have done things I should never have done if I had lived another 40. Cancer woke me up to take the chance of doing things right away. I stopped thinking, ‘I’d like to do that sometime’. It has made me realise there is no time like NOW. So, don’t wait, say ‘I love you’ and say it NOW. Well, perhaps not just now, but there may very well be somebody to whom you should say just that at the very next opportunity, maybe even when we exchange the peace in a few minutes time.
Is that what it means to be born again? I think it is. To receive each new day as a gift from God, and live it to the utmost, loving to the utmost, as we have been loved. For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son. That’s how much we are loved. And Jesus invites us, as he invited Nicodemus, to respond to his love ? as simply, as utterly, as naturally as a new-born baby responds to the love that he or she receives. Jesus said: you must be born again.
Handley Stevens
Letters from Janet: The Challenge of Cancer are available from John Nightingale, 192 Hanover Road, Rowley Regis, West Midlands, B65 9EQ, price £5. All profits from the publication go to the Georgina Unit at Russells Hall, Dudley, where Janet was cared for.