Anita told us that part way through her week at camp, she had gone out into the woods and had poured her heart out to Jesus, this best friend and savior that all the counselors seemed to know and love so well. Alone in the forest, Anita cried for all the things she had done and not done. She wept for all the mistakes and missteps and mishaps in her horribly long yet terribly young life.

She must've been there an hour or more, Anita said, crying and praying and pleading. "Please, please Jesus. Come into my heart. I accept you. I want you. I want you to change me. I want you to save me. I beg you to come be my Lord and my Savior."

And he did come, Jesus did. He struck her soul like a lightning bolt, sudden and sharp. He came in a pure flash of light, piercing the darkness of her heart, changing everything in an instant. When she came down off that mountainside, Anita said, she was not at all her old self. She had been born again.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Under the cover of darkness, Nicodemus seeks Jesus out. This isn't just anyone, this Nicodemus. He's a Pharisee, a rich aristocrat, a member of the ten-man ruling council his people call the Sanhedrin. A devout man who has made a solemn vow to observe every detail of the scribal law.

Because Nick comes at night, and because he is part of the religious establishment that has challenged Jesus' authority, we may wonder about his motives. We may presume that this hard-core Jew doesn't want to get caught being associated with this fresh-visioned wandering ministrel of a minister, Jesus. If we're biased in this direction, we're not the first: tradition has long been suspicious of Nick's timing.

Tradition may have gotten it wrong, though. Few of us ever learned this: that for ages the wisest rabbis suggested studying the Torah at night when the air was quiet, when distractions were few, thus making God's truth easier to perceive.

Maybe this is what has inspired Nick's timing. Maybe after Nicodemus fed the cat and turned off the porch light he went into the den to devote himself to a particularly rich passage from holy scripture.

And maybe as he read, a certain question came to roost or some new insight broke through. Something that so immediately possessed Nicodemus that he felt he had no choice but to leap up right then and there to seek out the perspective of the Galilean famed for his complete connection with God, one that enabled him to heal and inspired his teaching. A sense of urgency can sweep down and possess anyone, after all, even a member of the Sanhedrin.

Maybe that's how it is that Nicodemus finds himself standing there, standing in the dark cool of the evening before the one who would later come to be known as the Light of the World. "Illumine me, Jesus." Nick says, surprised perhaps by his need. "Illumine me. You are, after all, the one whose signs confirm God's affirmation of you. Please be so good as to shed light on my pursuit of God's truth."

Now as earnest and urgent as Nick is, and for all that he has going for him, he lacks one big thing: spiritual imagination. Like a collector of insects and like many of his peers, Nicodemus prefers his faith pinned down and clearly marked. Certainly his vocation has nurtured and rewarded this approach to God's holy law.

Commitment to his faith, Nicodemus has it. Knowledge, that too. But not spiritual imagination. Not the ability to move into new spheres of understanding. Nicodemus has little aptitude for anything that isn't literal. Toss him a metaphor and it's as if you had turned off the lights and left him to stumble around in the dark.

Which explains why when Jesus begins talking about how seeing God's kingdom and how being a part of that kingdom requires a second birth, Nicodemus is confounded and confused. To a literalist, Jesus' remark makes no logical sense whatsoever. No grown man can re-enter the womb. As far as Nicodemus is concerned, this is a most ridiculous proposition. It is pure nonsense, an opinion he makes plain.

The more Jesus tries to explain, the more he elaborates, the more befuddled Nicodemus becomes. By the time Jesus has finished his poetic "born from above" soliloquy, Nicodemus is gone. He has slipped back into the shadows and home again, back to the comfort of nailed-down requirements, back to a life free of ambiguity and metaphor, back to a life where white is white and black is black, a life where everything makes complete and reassuring sense.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Those who are in the business of keeping an eye on American religious trends say that one of the reasons mainline Christianity has declined while other churches are growing is because we've allowed our more conservative brothers and sisters to take the microphone and speak for the faith.

Ask just about anyone you know--believer or not--to explain the term "born again," and you know what I mean. Even mainliners like us, if asked, tend to speak not in our own language but that of our evangelical friends. If asked what is meant by that term, we will define the experience as something akin to my friend Anita's.

What does this say about us though?

What does it say about those of us in mainline denominations that we are adept at invoking a definition that doesn't describe our own experience or even our expectations around conversion?

Why don't we feel comfortable speaking about being born again in new and more imaginative ways? In ways that might bring light into the darkness of people who, like Nicodemus, have unmet spiritual needs or questions that remain unanswered.

I wonder why it is that we don't speak of the conversion process (emphasis on the word process) with as much vigor and passion as do those who speak of having been or needing to be born again.

I wonder why it is that when a fellow Christian happens to ask if we've been born again we break into a secret sweat and with awkwardness (and even sometimes a sense of apology) endeavor to explain that we understand being born again as a faith journey, not a discrete event.

Partly, I think we lack confidence. We've let our brothers and sisters in other rooms in the house that is this faith define the terms.

Certainly I see this all the time not just with the matter of being born again but whenever there is talk about Jesus, salvation, and eternal life. Even with the definition "Christian" Churches in the mainstream lack confidence and we also lack practice. Faith for us is far more a private affair than it is for many of our evangelical brothers and sisters; we don't talk about it much or for very long when we do.

Part of the trouble, as I see it anyway, is that our definitions, our understandings, here in the mainstream church (which is, could so easily become a sideline if we're not careful), is that to speak with authority we need more to rely upon than simply the teachings of the church.

We need more than what our Sunday school teachers taught us. We need more than what the preacher says. We need to be able to draw upon the rich resource of our own experience. Our own spiritual lives, in other words.

Certainly there is precedent for this. Jesus relied on his experience all the time.

When he spoke to Nicodemus about the need to be born again, Jesus wasn't merely elaborating upon a theme in Hebrew Scripture. He was speaking straight out of the life he was living.

A life in which he experienced God's loving, life-shaping presence as an on-going reality. A life in which his active relationship with God informed and inspired his clear-seeing.

A life in which his spiritual imagination was ignited every time he perceived the gap between God's longing for the world and the current state of things. A life that had him see that in order to grow in truth and love one must be in a continual process of dying to the old so as to be born to the new.

I would agree with those who say that Christianity finds itself at a new threshold. A threshold that opens onto a more spacious understanding of what it means to be Christian, what it means to be a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, what it means to be forgiven, saved, and free, what it means for society to be just and compassionate as God is just and compassionate.

We stand on a threshold, just as Nicodemus did that night with Jesus. Dare we step across and trust that faith is more than black and white, more than something to be pinned down and labeled? Something to conform ourselves to?

Dare we trust the power of God working with and through our imaginations?

Dare we believe that through the Spirit who dwells in each of us God is laboring to birth a new era of faith? An age in which faith becomes more than holding fast to certain ideas or doctrines but is indeed, an exciting, real, abundantly rich lived relationship with God?

A God who exceeds our capacity to imagine and yet who reaches out to us, giving us new birth moment by moment. A God who only wants to look upon us with love.

Can you imagine a God who is at work in your life, in our lives in such a way as to bring new birth not only to individuals but to Christianity itself?

Even when you can't, God can. And does. And is imagining this even as we gather on a Sunday morning in June in Paducah, Kentucky. Even now.

Amen.

© Rev. Karen Winkel
United Church of Paducah (UCC)

Noted Christian scholar and popular lecturer, Marcus Borg speaks passionately to this issue (and what may be at stake) in an interview that can be found on at www.ucc.org.