The Chapel of St. James the Fisherman

     Have you ever thought about starting over again?
About going back and reliving your life? Being born again?
   
    If not, haven’t there at least been times in your life - times when you’ve made a grave mistake or done the wrong thing or when you’ve hurt or injured someone by your words or actions?

    Haven’t you wished - if just for the moment - that you could go back and start again?
   
    I surely have.

    While I’m not sure I’m prepared to live my entire life again. In part because my senses tell me that I don’t have what it would take to make it through all that I made it through these last seventy-four years.
   
    And in part because I think I might not be as lucky the second time around.
   
    And quite frankly because I’m not sure I deserve a second chance on top of the one that was so good.

    Starting over or not has a lot to do, I suspect, with how we feel about our lives. Whether we’d like to relive what may have been some painful and difficult times as well as experience the joys and satisfactions that all of us have had to one degree or another.

    But especially if a second chance at life would include the possibility of our doing some things differently, I suspect many of us might well say yes.

    In this morning’s Gospel lesson a Pharisee, a member of the Sandhedrin, the ruling aristocracy of the Jews, comes at night to Jesus.
   
    We don’t know from our reading  why he has come; only that he’s aware of some  signs and wonders that he’s heard about or possibly witnessed himself.

    Was it curiosity or an acting out of his duty as a member of the Sanhedrin to investigate and examine someone who might be a false prophet.

    Whether it was either of these reasons or something else we simply don’t know.

    All that we have is a series of declarative statements from Jesus about being born anew, about being born of the Spirit, something about the nature of the Spirit, eternal life, and salvation of the world. All packed into sixteen verses.

    So what was it that this aristocratic Nicodemus came to  Jesus for?

    I think it was the same reason that most people are drawn to a holy person. And that is to somehow touch and feel and in some sense enter into and experience the Holy.

    And to carry into that engagement those parts and aspects of our lives that are anything but holy. Those things for which we often feel shame, regret or remorse. Those things that we keep in the dark and hidden closets of our lives.

    Something that seminary did not prepare me for was confession. By that I don’t mean Confession with a capital C which our Prayer Book now calls The Reconciliation of a Penitent. No, it wasn’t those quite occasional times in Penitential seasons when an occasional parishioner asked to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation. But rather those much more frequent times when almost out of the blue and in rather ordinary conversation someone would tell me, as a priest, something about themselves that they’d perhaps never told anyone. It was always something of a profane nature in their lives that was a secret kept in a closet for the world not to see or be aware of. Often it had to do with sexual transgressions. But in all cases it was something about which shame, or embarrassment and regret were profound. 

    We all carry with us much that we regret, perhaps are ashamed of, and wish had never happened. And that we keep hidden from the world, especially from those in whom our lives are most intertwined. But that we find somehow easier to bear when brought into the light of day in the presence of the holy which we experience through the Church, the Sacraments, or the sympathetic ear of a priest.
   
   
    And so I think there was something like this at work in Nicodemus’s engagement of Jesus.  A desire to experience and be with this holy person, carrying with him what he perhaps considered his dirty laundry - shame and regret about all the things of his life that he so wished he could rid himself of. That he could go back and make right.  To start again.

    To which Jesus says there is a way. A way that is about being born anew. A being born again in the Spirit rather than the flesh. A birthing that comes from God rather than the womb.

    A birthing that takes form in prayer,… in reflection and meditation,… in listening for God in our prayers and in the life of the world around us,….  in being obedient to God and in trusting our very lives to Him.

    A rebirth in the Spirit that is our redemption - our return to God from whom we have been estranged. A redemption, in the words of Flannery O’Connor, that makes it possible for us not to be our history.

    A redemption that enables us to be friends of God, spiritual children of a Father who gives us life, sustains us in all circumstances, and gives us eternal life by sharing his life with us.

    Our redeemed Life in the Spirit frees us from the constraints of our past. And makes it possible to wake each day to a new life in God. A life that is no longer earthbound because it is lived in the Spirit which like the wind “blows where it chooses” and soars to heights beyond our imagining.

    Being born of the Spirit means we don’t need to relive our lives. Nor carry the burdens of our past with us. Our redemption in Christ frees us from all of that. And assures us that our lives are imperishable because like God’s, they are now of the Spirit  and therefore eternal.

Thanks be to  God.
Amen

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