Saturday, May 17, 2014
Trinity Sunday - 2012 ~ Nicodemus and Birth from Above
We are all born of water, in a flood of water, amniotic fluid.
“Born of water” means natural birth, in which we become individuals – separate
from our mothers.
But to enter the Kingdom of God, we must undergo another
birth: we must be born “from above”, born of the Spirit.
I think this opposition refers to two kinds of consciousness:
individual and personal. I am born, naturally, as a new center of awareness, in
which I appear to myself to be the
center of the world. Everything revolves around Me. In its extreme, known as solipsism, this can
be the view that the entire world is an illusion of my own imagination. This is what Jesus and Paul refer to as
“flesh”. It is not merely our material nature, but the sense of myself as ego.
Flesh = ego.
Spirit, by contrast, is the growing consciousness of
participation in the community of other centers of consciousness. It is not all
about ME. It is about US. This is what Jesus tells Nicodemus is the “birth from
above” that must happen before one can enter the Kingdom of God. Because the Kingdom
of God IS that community of other subjects: the society of individuals-in-the-process-of-becoming-persons.
Now Nicodemus, as an eminent religious teacher himself, ought to have known
this – and he probably did. But the Gospel uses him as a foil for Jesus’s
expression of the basic truth of Being as Communion. Poor Nicodemus is in the dark (he comes “by
night”), but he honestly wants to be enlightened. He doesn’t get it. He thinks
Jesus is speaking literally, as many since him have thought about spiritual
birth, imagining it to be an instantaneous experience, marked by some
extraordinary phenomena, like speaking in tongues. At worst, this misunderstanding of
“spirirtual rebirth” reduces it to a kind of possession of the individual ego:
something “I have”. “Born again” means my own individual relationship with God,
which is pretty close to the opposite of what spiritual birth really means.
But IC doesn’t even say “born again”, but rather “born from
above”. That is a metaphor, I think for being born into the Beloved Community –
the Community of Love, the Community of the Most Holy and Life-giving Trinity, the
Mstery to which this Sunday is dedicated.
As I say constantly, individual
is the opposite of person. Just as
Spirit is the opposite of flesh, not in the sense of immaterial/material, but
in the sense of ego-consciousness opposed to communion-consciousness. The
Kingdom of God IS communion, therefore, it is really a no-brainer to observe
that one cannot enter it unless one has been “born from above ”, because being Born
of the Spirit IS entrance into the Kingdom of God, which is also called the
Communion of the Holy Spirit. This
points us, again, to the Trinity. The Spirit, descending at Pentecost, opens
this Divine Community to all flesh, transfiguring flesh into spirit, beginning
at Jerusalem, that is beginning with human beings. An individual’s spiritual birth is the dawning
awareness that life is not something I
have, but something in which I participate,
along with others, the beginning of the growing awareness that life itself is
communal.
The Church’s ceremonies symbolize this. The newborn is
brought to the font, where she is immersed in water, reënacting – among other
things – her material birth. But at the same time, this bath reënacts the
passage through the Red Sea, from slavery to freedom. From death to life. From
the death that is the inevitable end of life as an individual, to new and
eternal life in the beloved community of persons. This passage is a result of
the activity of the Holy Spirit (God sent a strong East Wind to drive back the
waters, which stood as walls on both sides of them, as the Children of Israel
passed through on dry land. Here, again, is something that a learned Pharisee
might be expected to “get”. ) So, in the Sacrament of Holy Baptism the Church
marks the “birth from above”, of which Jesus speaks to Nicodemus. It is a
birth, in the words of the old rite, “which by nature we cannot have”. Our natural state – our natal state is individual – flesh; the invincible life of the
Spirit comes “from above”, that is, entirely from outside my ego-consciousness.
Baptism is entry into the Church, which represents the Kingdom of God. Baptism
is the beginning of participation and increasing identity in the Beloved
Community. No longer “I” but “We”.
And the “We” includes ta panta, “all flesh”.
Spiritual birth – birth from above – also admits us into a
new relationship with God, who is no longer only the dread Adonai or the majestic but awful God of Hosts, nor the terrifying Lawgiver thundering on Sinai, nor
even the Beneficient Shepherd, leading Joseph like a flock and David beside the
still waters, but ABBA, papa! As Paul
says, it is the Spirit within us that addresses God that way. The Spirit within
US. Not within ME, but within US. Among
us, really.
My Father
in Heaven, Hallowed be your name…Give ME today My daily bread, forgive ME my
sin as I forgive..lead Me not into temptation, but deliver ME from evil.
This horrible parody illustrates, perhaps, the opposition
between flesh and spirit. It’s not all about ME! Flesh would pray “My Father”,
the Spirit – praying even within us little individual egoists – prays “Our
Father”.
The Spirit among us cries ABBA.
And if we do too, it is because we have been so taught by the Son. This word expresses the relationships within
the Community of the Three Divine Persons – the relationship the Son and the Spirit have
to the Father. By teaching us to address God as they do – as ABBA
– the Son invites us to participate in
that Divine Community, the Kingdom of God, and the Spirit gives us the capacity
to do so. The Orthodox refer to Communion as “participation”. Indeed, the
Eucharistic liturgy celebrates our participation in the Life of God. It is not
by chance that, right before Communion, we address God as taught by the Son and
moved by the Spirit: “ABBA – Our Father”.
HOLY, HOLY, HOLY IS THE LORD OF HOSTS
WHO WAS, AND IS, AND IS TO COME
ALLELUIA!
