Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

October 28, 2007

Born Again

John 3:1-16

What is it that defines you? I think I have asked a question like this before. What is it, what characteristics of your life, what qualities of your life, if somebody were to ask you, “Who are you?” what are those things that define you?

Maybe it would be easy to think about what questions we ask of other people as we try to get to know them so we can define them. Most common, I think, is profession or vocation. There are certain jobs that get a little bit higher on the respect scale. There are certain jobs that are a little bit lower on the “I’m not sure I care” scale.

If you have a teenager in the house and the teenager begins to date someone you don’t know, one of the first questions is, “What do her parents do? What do they do?” What’s the profession? We think we might get a little bit of insight into who they are.

It’s football season, so we just might as well admit, one of the things is school. What school do they go to? If someone else says, “Well, she was certainly uncouth,” and somebody says, I hate to say this, “Well, you know she went to Auburn.” Those of you who are guests today, that’s the only one I can say and not get in trouble because if I had said that about any other school, other than my own, people might think I meant the truth, but because I said it about Auburn, everybody knows I am kidding. But we define people sometimes by school.

If you imagine yourself as a teenager again in this dating situation, parents, it’s a name I don’t recognize. “Where does he go to school? Does he go to school with you? Does he go to one of the other high schools around here?” We begin to get a picture, we begin to get an image and we are already formulating what we are thinking based on profession, either of the person or someone in the family or the school, either of the person or someone in the family. Where do they live? What’s the address?

There are only a couple of zip codes in Rome. In larger metropolitan areas, as we have seen from shows on TV, there are always attractive zip codes. What is the zip code? Where do they live?

Street address. If I can’t find out by zip code, at least I know what street they live on. We are all defining people by these things. Or if we are trying to make an impression, we are telling these things about ourselves. This is what defines me. This is how you can know who I am. “I live on that street,” as if that tells something.

Clothes, cars, all manner of things that define us, people that try to find out about us, observe about us, ask about us, or that we tell about ourselves so that people can get an idea of just who we are.

This is my last sermon—it is really not a sermon series but it has been a number of sermons that have been informed by a trip I was able to take earlier in the year to Israel. One of the things that struck me while on that trip was that in Israel, none of these things come first. None of them, in any way, come to be as close to being as important as the No. 1 thing that defines people in the area around Israel, including it. The No. 1 thing would be family. The No. 1 thing that would define who you are, what people would think about you, what people would expect from you is family, not just people who live under a household but also the extended family out into if you want to call it a tribe or a clan. The family doesn’t simply define who you are, but it determines who you are. It sets the limits; it sets the boundaries; it’s all you are ever going to be. The family is the circle that you can draw and pull somebody out and say, “I know who that is. They are part of that family. Therefore, I can tell you all these things about them.”

We had a couple of different guides. Both of our guides were Palestinian Christians. You need to understand that there are three groups of people in the area: Palestinians who happen to be Christians, like most of them who live in Nazareth, Palestinians who happen to be Muslim who live in other areas, and the Jewish population. They all live in such proximity, and even with the wall that is being erected to separate the West Bank, there is still just this tremendous sense of interaction, one being right next to the other, so we asked our female guide who took us around Galilee, “How often do people convert?” With these three faiths being so close to one another and with people being right next to each other all their lives, it would seem to us as if there was a lot of opportunity to hear, explore, and perhaps change. How often do people jump the boundary from one of these faiths to the other? Her answer was very simple. “It is not possible.”

We were all kind of stunned because in our country there is unlimited change, unlimited jumping around, you can be anything. Isn’t that what we were always told growing up? You can be anything.

If people in your family have never been to college, you can still be the first person in your family to graduate from college.

If your parents worked in a mill, you can be a physician, an attorney, or anything that you might think would be something else. While my parents may shape somewhat of who I am, to think that my parents would set the limits on my life, to think that my parents would set all that I can ever be, we don’t believe like this. We believe that we can change all the time.

If you were raised a Methodist, we are glad you are Baptist. There are a lot of people who were raised Baptist that we don’t see today. They are at the Methodist church or the Episcopal church. People change faith traditions all the time. They change cars. I once was a Ford man, now I buy a Honda. I once voted in the Democratic primary, now I vote in the Republican primary. People change. The idea that family is going to limit you, that family is simply going to say, “This is all you can be and no more,” is totally, totally foreign to us. But when we understand this, we begin to get a little insight into some of the stories that we have read in scripture before.

Jesus was a carpenter. Why? Because his dad was a carpenter. Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Because what one person did, most likely the next generation was going to do the same thing.

Aaron begins the line of priests, and priests in ancient Israel have nothing to do with the sense of calling, as we would think, nothing to do with a special set of skills. It is just because they can trace their family back like current members of the DAR. If you can trace your family back and you are part of the Aaron’s lineage, you get to be a priest. We realize that the Jewish name, Cohen, means priest, and if you know someone here or somewhere else and their name is Cohen, that means they are part of that Aaron tradition. If there were a temple, they would get to be a priest. All of a sudden, you begin to understand that the family defines.

The story of the Prodigal Son isn’t just a young man squandering his living, in loose living, it is total rejection of his family. He has turned his back on who his family is, has gone off to another place, and he has wasted it.

So when Jesus confronts Nicodemus, and Nicodemus starts off, “We know you are a teacher because nobody could do these things if they were not from God.” Jesus turns it around and zings them and says, “You must be born again.” When he says you must, which is often the way we emphasize this, he is creating also the possibility that you can. Why would Jesus tell you that you must do something if you couldn’t do it? You could be born again.

Now to Nicodemus, and sometimes we think he is just a little bit dense, “How does this work? How do you get back in the womb and get born again?” he says.

Jesus says, “You are a teacher of Israel and you don’t understand what I am trying to tell you.”

What part of what Nicodemus’ resistance is, not simply that a person cannot be physically born again, but how could you be born to something different. How could you be born to something other than what you have born into now? How on earth could you be born into a new life that doesn’t look like the life you have always had? Because my family, my clan, my tribe, and my people have always defined the limits of what my life might be.

I asked a minute ago about how you define yourself, and all the examples I gave, all the examples I tried to get you to think about were all external. They were all on the outside. They are all the things that people can see. That’s what we would rather focus on. So when it comes to things like, “Sure, I can change schools. I went to Georgia and my child went to Auburn” or wherever else it might be. You can change. “I raised my children Roman Catholic, and today, they are going over here to a Pentecostal church.” Those things are easy and we would rather focus on those externals. But those that we know on the inside, those things that we define ourselves by that we hope nobody else ever guesses, those things that only we know about in the recesses of our heart, those are the things that really define us. Things like a person saying, “Well, I’m the one who lies under pressure. I’m the person—I don’t set out to do it every day—but if you really put me under pressure at work and I think I am going to get caught for something I was supposed to do and didn’t do, I lie.”

Or another person who says, “Who am I? I’m the angry person. I don’t know why I am so angry. I’m so angry that I’m really not a very nice person. I’m mean to people sometimes and I hide it by saying that I’m kidding and I hide it by saying that I’m laughing around, but I’m not a very nice person.”

Or the person who says, “Who am I? I’m a fake. I hope nobody in here ever realizes who I am because if they ever get around to realizing who I am, if my mask ever slips off, I’m doomed. I’m doomed. I don’t want anybody to know who I am.”
Another person, “Who am I? I’m the person who has had a lifetime of bad judgments in the relationships with my family, in the relationships with my friends, the amount of money I have or don’t have, all based on the fact that I have made just a lifetime of bad judgments.” People who feel like a failure, failure at life, failure at marriage, failure at friendships, failure at morals or whatever it may be, and while if we were to take the external things like where you live, what school you went to, what profession you have, we would probably want to argue with the tour guide that when you say, “Do people ever change?” and she says, “It is not possible,” we would say, “Yes, they do.”

But when we think about these things that define us on the inside that we hope nobody else knows about, we probably tend to agree with her. It doesn’t happen. It’s not possible. People don’t change. Can you really be born to a new life? Can you really be born to a life that is no longer defined by our sins and our failures but defined because we are a child of God? Is it really possible to begin a new life, to be born again so that the long line of bad decisions, that long line of failures, that long line of immorality that we hope people don’t know about, is it possible for God to break his spirit into our life to give us a new beginning that is so different that all we can describe it is as a new birth. Is it possible or would we say like the tour guide, “It doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen.”

Most preachers say, “You must be born again.” Let’s just take a little bit different angle today and say, “You could, you could, you could be born again. You could be born again into a new life that is not defined by anything, any of the baggage, any of the heritage, any of the past deeds. You could have a life that is not defined by any of those things but a life that is only defined by the possibility found in Jesus Christ.

Most of us think people are foolish if they believe things that are not so. There is a new commercial on TV where a guy is sitting in a restaurant and, face to face, he is being confronted by the content of one of these e-mails. “I am from Nigeria, and my late husband has left 38 million dollars. If you will just give me $50,000 as good faith, I will give you most of the money.” It says, “It doesn’t work well face to face, does it?” Most of us think, “People who believe that stuff are foolish.” People who believe things that are false are foolish.

What is it if you fail to believe something that is put before you that is true? What if it’s true and you didn’t believe it.” Wouldn’t that be foolish, too? You could be born again. Good news.

Copyright 2007. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved.

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