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One way?                                         John 3: 1-17                                     February 17, 2008

Someone once said that all the religions of the world can be described as a series of overlapping ovals. It's a helpful image, I think. You don't even need to close your eyes to picture it in your mind.

The central premise of that belief is that there is a common core in all religions; and then there is a bunch of other stuff that is outside of the core - the part of the ovals that don't overlap.

Some religious people have ovals that have very little overlap with the rest of us - Fundamentalist Christians, Zionist Jews, Radical Islamists and angry Atheists. These people scare me, frankly. They scare me partly because they blow up buildings and bomb buses and burn family planning clinics -and somehow manage to do that in the name of God - but mostly they scare me because they seem to have forgotten that love, not hate, is what God calls us to express to one another.

Yes, it seems pretty clear to me that the world would be a much better place, and certainly a much more peaceful place, if people of faith could find a way to come together, focus on our common, core beliefs and stop fighting about the things that make us different. After all, all religions include some common spiritual core on which everyone can agree - don't they?

Sounds naive, doesn't it? It sounds like I'm suggesting that if we could all just gather 'round, hold hands and sing Kum Ba Ya, we'd all stop fighting and everything would be just fine.

Actually, you may also be thinking, right about now, that I'm about to go off the proverbial "deep end." You might be saying to yourself, "Wait a minute. There is only one God; the One True God, and all other gods are not really gods at all." As one scholar put it, "Only one God spells his name with a capital G, and it just so happens that this 'capital G' God is my God."

And, to continue that thought, you might also be thinking, "It is not just that there is not only one God, but there is only one way to have a relationship with that God. There is only one way to be assured that you will spend eternity in the presence of God.

After all, even we good Moravians, proud of our "in essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, in all things love" motto, still affirm - each year, on Easter Sunday, as a matter of fact - our belief in the "one only God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who created all things by Jesus Christ and was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself."

Yes, even the most open-minded of us must acknowledge that one of the central tenants of our Christian faith - one of the "essentials," if you will - is the belief that our God, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God who's Son was crucified and resurrected; our God is the one true God and His son, whom we call the Christ, is the one who saves us.

Candidly, affirming the one God and the one Savior is, in relative terms, anyway, the easy part of our faith. If you're a Christian, I don't have to tell you that God is your Creator and Lord and Jesus is your Savior. You've heard it hundreds of times and you know it to your fingertips.

The tougher part comes into play when we look our Jewish or Buddhist or Muslim or Hindu brothers and sisters in the eye - all 2.6 billion of them, around the world. Can we, as Christians, affirm - as we must - that God loves all of those folks, and then go on to add "but, God will condemn them to an eternity of suffering and torment because, by the simple accident of their birth, they have never acknowledged that Jesus is Lord"?

My guess is that most of us struggle with that. I know I do. Even though Jesus is without a doubt my Savior, I find myself parting company with those proponents of what theologians call Christian exclusivism. With those who believe that you must know about Jesus and believe certain things about Jesus in order to be s aved.

Rather, I find myself in agreement with Marcus Borg - who you've heard me quote before - when he writes that the salvation that Jesus talks about - specifically in our Gospel lesson for this morning - is "the path of death and resurrection as the way to rebirth in God." And, then also points out, importantly, that this "way" to salvation is one that is spoken of by all the major religions of the world.

The Bible illustrates, again and again, that when humans are left on our own we grow separate from God. Alienated. Exiled. The biblical picture of the human condition is - in a word - bleak. There literally seems to be no evil act that is beyond us.

And this squares perfectly with our modern- day experience, by the way. Over the centuries we have simply found new ways to move farther and farther away from the ideal that God had in mind for us.

So therefore, it should come as no surprise to us when we hear that we must be born again. To quote Borg again, "It is the road of return from our exile, the way to recover our true self . . .the exodus from our individual and collective selfishness."

Or to put it slightly differently, it is the way - the one way - to salvation.

The familiar story of Jesus and Nicodemus, our text for today, makes this point as clearly as any other passage of scripture:

Nicodemus was most likely a man in his mid fifties, gray haired, physically distinguished, accomplished and uccessful in his work. He was a Pharisee. A teacher of the law, a professor of religion at the temple in Jerusalem. A leader in the community.

In his relationship with God, however, Nicodemus was a man who was going through the motions. He knew the law, but his inner enthusiasm for God was gone. He was experiencing some of that separation from God that I referred to a moment ago.

Then Jesus of Nazareth shows up in town, and Nicodemus goes to hear Jesus preach in the temple. He senses that Jesus has something inside of him that Nicodemus no longer has. He is touched by Jesus' preaching and decides to talk to him.

So, late one night, in the darkness, not wanting his fellow religious law professors to know, Nicodemus quietly goes over and knocks on the door of the place Jesus is staying. You can picture Jesus coming to the door and saying, "Yes, what is it?"

"I know it is late," Nicodemus probably says, "but my name is Nicodemus. I am a teacher of religious law at the temple, and I would like to speak with you for a few moments. Do you mind if I come in?"

Naturally, Jesus opens the door and Nicodemus comes into the room. "How can I help you?" Jesus asks. Nicodemus responds, saying, "Things are not quite right with me. They aren't quite right inside of me. I am tired. My lectures are stale. I am getting old and slow. I am interested in any advice you would have for me."

Jesus, of course, with his uncanny ability to look right into a person's heart, says, "I know the problem that you are having, Nicodemus. It is not that you are old; it is not that you are tired; it is not that you are worn out. The problem is this: you are no longer close to God. You have drifted away from God. God is no longer living in the center of your heart. Nicodemus, you need to be born again."

To that, Nicodemus replies, with shock, "Born again? Return into my mother's womb? Come on, Jesus. Be serious. I can't be born again."

"You don't understand, Nicodemus," Jesus then says. "You need to be born anew, to experience a rebirth in your relationship with God. The old Nicodemus needs to die and a new one needs to be born of the Spirit, to be born from above. You, Nicodemus, need to experience rebirth."

At which point Nicodemus shakes his head and says, "I'm not sure if I understand. Anyway, it is time for me to go. Thanks for the advice."

Nicodemus then leaves, closes the door behind him, looks down the street both ways to make sure that nobody is in sight and disappears into the darkness.

"You must be born again." How many times have we all heard those words? For Jesus, this was - and is - the ticket of admission to the Kingdom of God. Each of us must die to our old, separate-from-God selves and be raised to a new way of being, centered in God.

As I mentioned before, Marcus Borg points out that the process of death and rebirth is not only at the heart of Christianity, but of the other religions of the world as well.

The importance of a new self, centered in God, is central to Judaism. In Islam, the faithful are called to surrender their life to God. And Lao Tzu, the author of one of the most important texts of Zen Buddhism, said "if you want to become full, let yourself be empty; if you want to be reborn, let yourself die."

Borg's conclusion, when he observes these similarities - these intersections of the ovals that represent the world's religions - is this: "Not only does it mean, to echo an exclamation from the book of Acts, that the Spirit has gone out to Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and so forth," he writes, "but it also adds credibility to Christianity. When the Christian path is seen as utterly unique, it is suspect. But when Jesus is seen as the incarnation of a path universally spoken about elsewhere, the path we see in him has great credibility."

In other words, instead of condemning two thirds of the population of the world with our affirmation that Jesus is the Way, we can celebrate the fact that Jesus revealed, for all the world, the fact that we must die to our old nature and be reborn of God's spirit in order to enter God's Kingdom.

For us, as Christians, the rebirth that Jesus was talking about is an incredibly positive thing. It is a life of reconnection to God. It is a life that includes freedom, joy, peace and love - most of all love.

It appears, from his reaction to this talk of rebirth, that Nicodemus fails to grasp what Jesus is saying. He shows up two more times in John's Gospel; first as one of a group of Pharisees who are debating whether Jesus is truly the Messiah and again as one of the men who take Jesus' body and prepare it for burial. We can only speculate as to whether he ever allowed the Spirit of God to fill his life so that rebirth could happen.

Here's the key: The only person that any of us can know, for sure, has experienced the death and rebirth that Jesus was talking about is the person we see each morning in the mirror.

Once again, Borg is helpful. He points out - correctly, in my view - that being born again is the work of the Spirit. It is nothing that we can make happen, either by strong desire or by learning and believing the right beliefs. We can, however, be intentional about being born again. We can make sure we are open to the Spirit of God. Open to being born again - and again and again.

Our task as individual Christians - and our task together as a Christian congregation - is to nourish the process of being born again by engaging in the practice of spirituality.

"There is nothing mysterious about paying attention to our relationship to God," Borg concludes. "We do so. . . by spending time in it, attending to it, being thoughtful about . . through worship, community, prayer, scripture and devotion."

I'm sure you've heard this classic New York one-liner: "Question: Pardon me, sir, how do I get to Carnegie Hall? Answer: Practice, practice, practice."

The same is true for our spirituality. So do yourselves a favor, brothers and sisters. Give the Spirit a chance to birth you once again. Practice your spirituality. Practice it today, and tomorrow and the day after that. It is, after all, the way - the one way - to enter the Kingdom of God.

                                                                             AMEN