Day Eight - Jesus and Nicodemus - John 3:1-21

Words sometimes lose their meaning. There is a great hymn with a line that says, "Here I raise mine ebenezer." I'm sure that generations have sung those words, never quite sure what they are raising, but singing about it anyway. It's actually quite a good word - a Hebrew term that means, "God is my helper or my rescuer." The problem is that the original meaning and the contemporary use of the word have become separated.

That's how I feel about the term 'born again' that we find in Jesus' encounter with Nicodemus. I like to think of Nicodemus as a religious seeker - one whose religious experience left him longing for more. There are a lot of those in our world today. Jesus had clearly captured his attention and impressed him. Nicodemus attributed everything that he witnessed Jesus doing to the presence of God in his life - no small recognition for a Jewish leader.

What fascinates me is the way people have taken the term 'born again' and fashioned it to mean whatever they want it to mean. In our world, it can be used to refer to a type of person, usually in the pejorative - "a born again type!" Or it can be used to infer identification with a particular political philosophy or stance on a moral issue - President Jimmy Carter who self-identified as being 'born again.' It can be used by religious people like a lion enclosure in the bush - a thorny word, a sharp fence meant to separate, keep people out who don't belong to their sort of group. Again, a separation of meaning and usage.

The reality that Jesus is describing in using the term is something we all long for. It describes an authentic work of God in the soul of a person that creates the reality of spiritual life. What Jesus was saying to Nicodemus is that the reign and rule of God - the Kingdom that's breaking into the world in the person of Jesus - cannot be perceived with understanding or experienced as transformational apart from a work of God's Spirit from outside ourselves - literally, 'from above.'

I almost never use the term 'ebenezer' and I rarely use the words 'born again.' I heartily believe in the reality of both. The problem though is bigger than just words that have lost meaning. Jesus told Nicodemus that the problem was really believing, trusting.

God's love expressed in Jesus, the giving of his Son in order save the world - to redeem and restore it to God's intended creation purposes - is like a bright light shining in human experience. Jesus knew us well when he reminded us that we are resistant to the light. We'd just as soon not be exposed.

The season of Lent is a focused, intentional time when we welcome the light that has come into the world to shine in our hearts, our souls. It may expose disordered desires, painful hurts and numbing wounds, places of resistance and rebellion, or indifference and self-satisfaction. But like Nicodemus, exposure to Jesus may become the beginning of longing for more. And perhaps, in an authentic way, those old words might connect with spiritual reality and the life of God, from above, might begin in a new way.