Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 17, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We all know the phrase. Born again. We’ve all known people who describe themselves as “born again Christians.” We may even have known people who say that if you haven’t been “born again” you’re not really a Christian at all. The term comes from the Bible. Although the NRSV translation that I just read doesn’t use it, the term comes from the passage from the Gospel of John that we just heard. In the NRSV John 3:3 reads: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” (Emphasis added) The Greek word that the NRSV translates as “from above” can also mean “anew” or “again,” or so the scholars tell us. The phrase has passed into the Christian tradition and into our culture as born “again,” and it is this meaning of the term that I want to talk about this morning.

“Born again” is a term that many of us progressive Christians aren’t very comfortable with. We associate it, for pretty good reason, with conservative, literalistic, judgmental Christianity, in other words, not our kind of Christianity. Indeed, many of us are in this church precisely because we reject that kind of Christianity; and we usually reject the phrase “born again” along with it. But I think that the term may yet have some meaning for us, and specifically I think that the term has some meaning for this church as we gather after worship today for our congregational annual meeting. So bear with me for a moment while I try to make some sense out of it for us.

Those of you who are familiar with Marcus Borg’s book The Heart of Christianity know that Borg is trying to reclaim the term born again for Christians like us. For him born again is the primary metaphor for the spiritual transformation that is at the heart of the Christian life. He asserts that to be born again is to be transformed in our inmost being from a life of self-centeredness into the life of a true disciple of Christ. He also asserts, correctly I think, that this transformation is usually not a sudden, once for all thing, as so many of the advocates of conservative “born again” Christianity assert. Rather, for most of us the transformation of being born again is a process not a single event. I know that to the extent that I have been born again at all it has been a process for me, not an all at once thing. Perhaps that is true for many of you too. Yet whether the experience is a sudden conversion or a process of spiritual growth, being born again in the sense that Borg uses the term is indeed the heart of the Christian life. Christ calls His followers to lives lived in the spirit and lived for others. That is the born again life, and it is what Christianity (on the personal level at least) is all about.

And here’s an important thing about being born again. Although some people do have sudden conversion experiences that they call being born again, it seems to me that even people who have that “road to Damascus” experience need to born again—and again. Being born again, it seems to me, can’t be something that happens to us and then we stop, then we freeze in our spiritual growth at the point where the born again experience happens. The arc of our human lives always bends toward inertia and complacency. If we don’t pay attention we will always backslide. The new life that comes from being born again quickly becomes old life. We stagnate. And then we need to be born again—again. That, it seems to me, is what the Christian life is really about, being born again—and again.

And it occurred to me as I was thinking about this afternoon’s congregational annual meeting and as I meditated on our text from John that it isn’t just people who need to be born again and who need to be born again—and again. Institutions need to be born again and again, especially Christian institutions, especially Christ’s church. In our Protestant tradition there is a principle, that Paul Tillich called “the Protestant principle,” of constant reformation. The Protestant Reformers of the 16th century proclaimed it in Latin. Semper reformanda, they said. Always reforming. That’s another way of saying always born again. The Christian Church was born again in the Reformation. Indeed as a result of the Reformation even the Roman Catholic church was born again through the Catholic Reformation, which we used incorrectly to call the Counter-Reformation. Like each of us individually, the church needs to be born again.

And like each of us the church needs to be born again—and again. The Roman Catholic Church was born again again at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The Protestant Church, and to a considerable extent the Catholic Church too, is being born again again today in the emergence of progressive, nonliteral Christianity, the Christianity that Borg calls the emerging paradigm and that I have elsewhere called liberated and liberating Christianity. The born again and again movements in Christianity always meet fierce resistance, yet in the end they always prevail. They must prevail because if the church is not constantly born again it will, like us individual people, stagnate and ultimately die.

For us here at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ the church being born again is not an abstract conceptual matter. It has been our experience here over the past several years. Many of you are rather new here, but you’ve heard the story. A mere five or six years ago worship attendance was about half of what it is today, and that attendance included no children. Not one. There was no Sunday School because there were no Sunday School children. There were no nursery attendants because there were no infants or toddlers for them to tend to. Membership and attendance had both declined significantly over the previous several years. Monroe Congregational was still a warm and welcoming congregation of God’s people with faithful and committed members who had kept the church alive through some pretty rough times. Most of those pillars of our church are still here, though some of them have passed. All of us who now make up Monroe Congregational Church owe them an immense debt of gratitude for their faithfulness in the past and their continued commitment to this church. A few years ago the church was alive thanks to their efforts, but it needed a rebirth. It needed to be born again if it were to thrive and become all that God is calling it to be.

Then you, the people of this church, caught a vision. You caught a vision of a progressive, Open and Affirming church that would be a true alternative to the much more conservative, rigid, and judgmental Christianity that characterizes so many of the other churches not just in this area but in our nation. You caught a vision of God’s unconditional grace for all people, and you proclaimed that vision to this community. And the church was born again. We are today filled with new life and new people because you caught that vision and because you extended that unequaled, authentic, warm Monroe Congregational welcome to those who came seeking and sharing that vision. Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ has indeed been born again. Thanks be to God.

But here’s the ringer. Like I said, being born again cannot be a once for all thing. People need to be born again—and again. So does the church, the larger Christian church and even little local churches like ours. Like an individual person, a church faces the danger of complacency and stagnation if it ever gets the idea that it has been reborn and is now done. I don’t mean to suggest that we are complacent and stagnating. We aren’t, but we can’t wait until we are to begin asking questions like these: Now what? What’s next for Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ? Where is the Holy Spirit calling us now? Are there new initiatives to undertake, new ministries to begin, new aspects of our identity to define and proclaim? Are we meeting the needs of our people, or is there more we should be doing? Are we meeting the needs of our community, or should be doing more? These are the questions that face us today as begin another year in the life of our church.

And so today I ask you to begin thinking about these things. I had originally scheduled a meeting, that I called a renewal meeting, for the third Sunday in January; but that meeting got canceled because of a scheduling conflict. Today I am announcing a rescheduling of that meeting for after church on Sunday, March 16, the third Sunday in March. That’s Palm Sunday, but I don’t think that matters. I invite you all to come to that meeting with your questions and ideas, your concerns and your inspirations. Let’s start a conversation about where we go from here. It’s time for us to be born again—again. Let’s begin together, with each other and with the Holy Spirit, a new rebirth of Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ. Amen.