To be born from above

One of my biggest pet peeves - exacerbated by youtube/tiktok/social media influencers - is when people try to domesticate God. Inevitably, they do this by taking passages of Scripture - without reference to other parts of Scripture understood through Jesus’s own life, death and resurrection - and apply them to a current situation. This is a form of idolatry that is technically called, eisegesis (reading a passage out of context). A good example of this has happened a few times in history with a passage like Jeremiah 29. In the Biblical context, Jeremiah 29 has God telling his prophet Jeremiah to tell the Israelites not to intermarry, have children, or worship with other nations i.e. with those who are not Israelites. 

Why? Because Israel has been sent into exile by God for their faithlessness. They are being disciplined and restricted not to hurt them, but most certainly NOT to suggest that they are purer than the surrounding nations. They are sent into exile with the restriction of marrying, having children, and worshipping with people outside of Israel specifically to cajole them; to whittle away their defenses; to unstopper their eyes to how they are destroying themselves. That is, to renew them in their faith by pressing them to return to and to call out for God. 

It is with terrible irony then, that this passage has, even very recently, been used to suggest that a given country or Christians themselves (following Israel), should seek cultural or even Christian purity. This is a highly problematic interpretation for two biblical reasons: 1) no country, not even the country of Israel itself, is a witness to God. It is the body of followers offering themselves - not their land or animals or possessions, that are witnesses to God. This is what God repeats to us over and over and over. This is why the Church is not a country, but a body of followers that exist and have existed across the world for centuries; 2) the reason that God tells Israel not to intermarry or have children with other nations in this particular passage is because they have failed in their witness and need to be, as our gospel reading today puts it, “born again in the Spirit; for they were living sinfully, according to the flesh.”

To be born of the Spirit is to be remade in Jesus’s image so that one can be a witness to God. Until one is so renewed, one cannot be a witness. But this is a temporary condition. It is temporary because when Christ comes, no longer, as Paul says in his letter to the Roman Church today, is the body of God’s followers dependent upon following the ceremonial laws, the ritual laws, the rules to help guide and help mitigate the worst of their tendencies. For the law -to love God and neighbor - is fulfilled by Jesus. 

In Jesus you have seen God in full: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Recalibrating God’s direction to Israel through his prophet Jeremiah, Paul directs people to God’s intention all along: how can you become a faithful witness to God. Not a witness to your own desires with a sprinkling of Jesus thrown in here and there to make your perspective seem more divine and less worldly.

And in recalibrating, just as Jesus will do with the Jewish teachers concerning the Sabbath, Paul says to the fledgling Christians struggling with what to do about marriage: “are you married to someone who is not a follower of Jesus. That’s fine. Stay married to them. Damn. Not Jeremiah 29. Not the letter of the law. The point is not following the law, but following Jesus; the point is not DOING, but RECEIVING so that you can become a witness to Jesus. Paul continues: “Now if you’re not married don’t do it because it’s a big distraction from your mission of following Jesus. But if you really must, because you are filled with lust and deep emotional hunger. That’s okay, get married. Paul’s point throughout, especially in his letter to the Roman Church today echoes Jesus’s own words in the Gospel: you have life not through your own righteousness, or your own purity; like Israel, assuming you’ve got it right leads to exile from God and out into the desert of biting serpents i.e. of sinners. No, Paul says, don’t go there. Don’t rewrite God’s will or the Church’s mission in light of your desires for you will lose sight of your new life and end up with Israel in the exile of Babylon or the desert.

Having been reborn in Jesus through his Spirit - go wherever it is the Spirit leads you - go out to the stranger and enemy, do not worry about who you are married to or if you fall in love with someone who doesn’t believe; for perhaps, in your faithfulness, your persistence, your kindness, gentleness, compassion and love - all fruits of that Spirit you receive in Christ - will help them to see and follow God too. So it is that the early disciples don’t batten down the hatches of the countries they live in trying to use Christianity or the Christian faith to maintain some imagined purity, or even presume that their little house churches are pure. Instead, with humility, they recognize that no one except Christ is pure. No one, except Jesus, can save.

And so they do precisely what it is that God demanded of Israel through Jeremiah in chapter 29: this new body of followers - Jew and Gentile alike, examine their own lives; they take stock of how what they say and do is capable or not, of bearing good fruit, that is, of showing anyone whom they encounter, the hope, faith and love of Jesus Christ. They ask of themselves: if Jesus has come for me and has filled me with the Holy Spirit so that I might be born again in his likeness for eternity, what of my life now must I lay down, or what of my life now might I change, or what might I take on, so that I can allow God to work through me for the sake of others, just as he did for us?  AMEN