Open Writing

In today’s Gospel reading Jesus tells the Rabbi Nicodemus:

"no-one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again … no-one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and spirit."

The term born again Christian is well known through the media so we all think we know what the phrase means. The various online dictionaries that I checked told me that a person who is born again is someone who experiences a dramatic conversion to faith in Jesus that makes them change their entire way of life. I’ve no doubt that there are people in this church who have been born again in that sense.

But that is simply one modern meaning attached to the expression. In the church it is also means spiritual regeneration through baptism. At baptism we make a promise to God to try to follow Jesus, and that is the beginning of a new road for us. We are literally born again. If you take a look at the Gospel passage, Jesus says "born of water and spirit", which means baptism.

I find it's interesting to read about people's conversion experiences because you can often see a common thread running through them. God seems to be in the habit of taking people by surprise. That fits in with this line from today’s Gospel passage:

"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."

In 2009 a woman called Janet Soskice wrote in the Guardian about how she never gave God much thought, but on a perfectly ordinary day when she was thinking about nothing in particular he surprised her:

"I was in the shower, on an ordinary day, and found myself to be surrounded by a presence of love, a love so real and so personal that I could not doubt it. I had not, as far as I know, been looking for God or thinking of God, or enjoyed a particularly good or an especially bad day."

Then take John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement. As he writes in his journal he was a bit reluctant about going to a meeting where he had an unexpected conversion experience:

"In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation: and an assurance was given me, that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."

And again, you can have a conversion experience and be so surprised you do not accept it. Something happened to the writer Terry Pratchett shortly after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

"I'm certainly not a man of faith, but as I was rushing down the stairs one day... it was very strange. I suddenly knew that everything was okay, that what I was doing was right, and I didn't know why.

"It was a thought that all the right things are happening in the circumstances, and I thought, 'Well that's all right then.' I don't actually believe in anyone who could have put that in my head - unless it was my dad, and he's been dead a few years."

As far as I know, Pratchett continues to believe that it was his Dad, although I think it was God.

The best example of a conversion experience where God takes the person by surprise and they are not too happy about it can probably be seen with the famous Christian writer C.S. Lewis, author of the Chronicles of Narnia. He was Christian as a boy and became an atheist as an adult but was experiencing strange feelings of joy that he later came to recognise as God. This is how he describes his conversion at Oxford University. It's literally as if God was chasing him down:

"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."

These stories of God's intervention in people's lives are very dramatic and interesting. We like looking at them in the same way we like hearing about how husbands and wives first met each other, or watching romantic movies about a couple getting together.

But as you know, a successful relationship between a man and a woman isn't about that first romantic meeting, it's about being able to live together decade after decade.

Christianity is a religion of relationship with God and with each other. It's certainly not all about dramatic experiences of God. That is just the beginning.

If you've never had a dramatic experience, I don't think you need to worry about it very much because God’s main business is how we live in our daily lives and how our lives affect others.

Let's go back to that Gospel passage. Jesus says "no-one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and spirit."

What is he saying? Have a born again Christian experience and get baptised and get into heaven? NO.

The entire Gospel is behind those words. Being born of water and spirit is about paying attention to every parable, every lesson from Jesus’s life, it is about the difficult hard grind of applying Christ's teachings to every action of your daily life.

I think that's part of God’s surprise for us. We would imagine that the whole shebang is about feeling God's love around us because after all he is the creator of the universe, but no, the wind of the holy spirit never blows the way you expect it to.

Is this gospel passage telling us that conversion and baptism will ensure your ticket to that floaty ethereal place called heaven after you die? NO, that’s the surprise. It's what happens on Earth that matters. That's the surprise.

The kingdom of God is the endgame, it is what God wants for all creation, it is a time when all creation will be in loving harmony. It will not happen unless human beings work hard at achieving that loving harmony. The surprise is that the creator of the universe is not saying "sit back, take it easy, I’m the creator of the universe so I can fix all this in a millisecond." The surprise is that the creator of everything is saying "tiny, little human being, work with me."

You know as well as I do that baptism with water does not automatically make you a better person. It's a promise made by us or our godparents on our behalf that we will try our best. We have to work at it.

Being baptised does not make us any different from people who haven’t been baptised unless we really try to reflect its meaning in our lives.

So what has all this got to do with Lent?

This is a time when we simplify our lives in preparation for the new life of Easter. Ideally we are supposed to give things up, make more time for prayer and perform charitable deeds in order to increase our focus on God. Easter will be party time, the church will be full of flowers and we will celebrate Jesus rising from the dead.

Our spiritual lives are rather like Lent and Easter, except I believe that for most of the time we are living in Lent. Where there's a dramatic conversion experience, a baptism, a sense of the presence of God, that’s Easter.

But the long days and years of working in daily life to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth, they are Lent. We should really be living throughout the year with as much thoughtfulness as we are supposed to apply to Lent.

Now, when I come to church or go to Lent discussion groups I often hear people talk about sensing the presence of God. But also I often hear people say how God feels completely absent when times are hard.

We often talk about our sense of his absence as something that is a failing in us. We talk about how we felt that God wasn’t there because we felt so awful, but when we look back we realise that he was and we just couldn’t see him at the time.

When people talked like that, I used to imagine that they had their fingers in their ears and God was yelling at them "I'm here, I'm here" and they just couldn't hear him.

Now I wonder if those periods when we can't feel God's loving presence around us are actually a kind of Lent for our souls. Perhaps God knows that his presence is so distractingly lovely, that we need to not feel it sometimes so that we can focus on building our relationship with him.

Perhaps that, again, is God surprising us with an unexpected gift, his absence.

If you're having a hard time and you can't feel God anywhere around you, you've got two options. 1.) Forget all about him and just concentrate on having a hard time. Maybe just stop coming to church. Lots of people leave the church that way. OR 2.) Put your spiritual walking boots on and go off into the wilderness looking for him. Live as Christian a life as you possibly can. Talk to God, reach out to him, even if it feels he is never there.

Be prepared, like Jesus to spend a long time in desert, maybe decades – as is well documented in the case of Mother Teresa who dedicated her life to Christ but who went for years without feeling any sense of God's presence – but know that through taking that walk through the desert, where no comfort seems to be available, you are actually building your own Easter. One day, it will all click into place again.

You are bringing the new life of Christ into your soul, and that is perhaps something you wouldn't have done if you had been living all that time with a strong sense of God's love.

So what I'm saying is this, do not be afraid if your spiritual life seems dead, if you have no sense that God is there, if you've never had one of these born again experiences and church is just a routine for you. Instead do what you know Christ would want you to do.

Being born again is easy. Living as a Christian is the hard part. Be brave, be tough, know that it is better to be an intrepid explorer hacking your way through life's jungle than it is to be some a soft weakling who can't do anything away from God’s presence.

Think about it, God wants a relationship with you the person. Won't that be so much more interesting for both of you if you have a strong independent character and aren't just asking for the presence of his love all the time? If you can do things for yourself?

He loves you beyond imagination, and gives you his love without condition, but because he loves you, perhaps he knows that it's better for you to be independent, resilient and self supporting. What loving parent, friend or partner would wish for you to be dependent and unable to survive without their reassurance? And so it is, I think, with God.