A bumper sticker I see fairly often in my sleepy, hippy hamlet is "Born okay the first time." I always chuckle when I see it--not in that condescending, patronizing way too many Christians do when they say, "I'll pray for you"--but rather a chuckle of acknowledgment and understanding. There are few things worse than a self-righteous Christian talking to you about how you need to be "born again," when he or she knows little or nothing about your life.
When I point this our to my brothers and sisters in Christ, they often respond to me with John 3, Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus in which he says one must be born from above, being born from both water and spirit. In once sense, Christians have always understood this passage literally, in that the rite of baptism is our initiation ritual, it is the signal that one is "dying" to the world and is being "reborn" in Christ. But, to paraphrase the eminent biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan, we have grown so stupid as to take metaphorical stories literally. Christian pastors for too long have been so obsessed with getting people baptized that we too often ignore the spirit of the passage.
In my teens and twenties, I could be a self-involved jerk. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen still from time to time, but when I was younger I did a fair amount of drugs and drinking. I was on a spiritual quest, I told myself, but I was not very involved in the lives of my family or within my community. I pursued my own selfish interests. That began to change when my older brother was diagnosed as schizophrenic and my father underwent treatment for acromegaly, a rare pituitary disease that left him with the physique of a professional body builder, but the brain tumor the size of a grapefruit. Over the next four years, my life was dominated by hospital visits and trying, along with my mother, to keep the family together. I failed. But I grew. When Stephen, my brother, ended his life, I had a spiritual epiphany and underwent a dark night of the soul. What do I believe? Why do I believe it? What does it mean to be a religious person? A spiritual person? Which myth do I choose? Those, I think, are questions best left for reflecting upon at another time. But what I did decide was this: it is not enough to have my religion be about me.
When I read the Scriptures, I see a call for us to live in relationship with one another. Sure, there are disturbing parts of both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament, but there is also a deep message of love, companionship, and equal justice. Around me, I heard Christians saying, "Once I was baptized I knew I was getting into heaven." I began to wonder if the goal of the faith is all about a guaranteed place in the next world. But when I read Jesus' words I heard his concern for how we live here and now. I felt a convicting, a word we often use in the Church, of my life. I had been baptized at 25 by my then father-in-law, a wonderful man and my first pastor, but I had not taken it seriously as I should; when I finally found a church I could receive in, to quote Bono of U2, I decided to reaffirm my baptism.
If we are reborn, let us not be reborn as jerks. Let us not focus on "saving" other people, but rather on shedding ourselves of egotism and self-righteousness; let us assiduously remove the oak trees from our own eyes and not be obsessed by the splinter in the eyes of our neighbors; let us understand that the Greek word for sin, (h)amartia is an archery term that means "to miss the mark." We all miss the mark, but the Christian faith is about having the strength to once again face the target and give it another go. It is not about pointing out how others miss the mark. It is not about ranking who missed by a greater distance. It is not about a license to be a jerk. It is about an abiding belief that forgiveness, transformation, change, love, and solidarity are radically available to all. No one is to be left out. And, in my view, no one is required to confess Jesus in order to be a good person, to work for justice, to feel deep love, to be a member of the kin-dom Christians hope for; while I believe it is the best way for me, I also acknowledge that I could be horribly wrong about the Truth of human existence and the universe. I believe in God and Jesus, but I don't know.
So, yeah. I'm born again. I really hope I have died to being a jerk.