Born Once, Born Twice
Sermon preached by Rev. Patricia Farris
June 11, 2006

Those of you who know me might be surprised to learn that if I’m home on a Saturday morning, I like to listen to the radio show called “Car Talk,” a quirky call-in show on NPR, featuring brothers Tom and Ray, car mechanics in Cambridge whose banter and humor interests me as much as the actual advice they give troubled car owners.

They do puzzles and quizzes, they laugh with their callers and at each other. From time to time they like to feature callers’ nominations for new words, made up words that are just perfect for certain situations. One of my favorite new word nominees from a show around last Christmastime is the word “stupiphany.” You church goers may notice that it’s like our word “epiphany” which is when the light goes on and you get something that you had been clueless about, actually, it’s when you see a manifestation of GOD. The first Epiphany in the Bible was when the Three Wise Men saw the baby Jesus and realized that he was the Messiah.

The new word nominee “stupiphany” plays on that word. It’s a combination of the words stupid and epiphany. As the caller who nominated it explained, it means: “The realization that you have been a complete idiot for way too long.” Stupiphany. The realization that you have been a complete idiot for way too long.

In a funny way, stupiphany is a great word to help us understand the story we heard Rachel read a couple minutes ago about Jesus and Nicodemus. It’s a story filled with humor and word play. It’s a story about a guy who risks looking foolish in order to learn something new. It’s a story about a guy who might have wondered what took him so long to figure it all out.

I have a feeling that something somewhere between an epiphany and a stupiphany was happening for Nicodemus that night so long ago in that strange and intriguing encounter he had with Jesus.

And believe me, Nicodemus was taking a big risk that night. He was an important person, a person of status and respect. I’m sure he was a man very aware of appearances, of propriety, of the role he played. For Nicodemus, a devout man, a Pharisee, a man who lived (continued...)

"Born Once, Born Twice" by Rev. Patricia Farris, June 11, 2006

by all the rules, respected teacher, to seek out this upstart Jesus in order to learn from him was about as shocking as Brad Beeman being willing to be dunked in the dunk tank at our all-church picnic a couple weeks ago.

What’s going on in this story? What motivated a man like Nicodemus to seek out Jesus? Yes, he was devout, but something must have been eating at him, inside. Something must have been missing in his relationship with God. Something that kept him up at night, kept him tossing and turning when he should have been sound asleep. Something was troubling Nicodemus. And he heard of this other teacher. Someone he felt he could respect. Someone he felt he could trust. A colleague, another rabbi like himself. And under the cover of darkness, he sought him out.

In contemporary terms, we might call Nicodemus a seeker, someone asking of life: Isn’t there something more? Nicodemus is like so many of us who have all the trappings of success—degrees, good jobs, nice homes, a comfortable life. And yet something stirs up within. A question. Is this all there is? What does it mean? What am I really here for?

You gotta give Nicodemus a lot of credit here. So many people, so many of us, maybe, just squash down those kinds of questions. They’re unsettling. They’re disturbing. We’re vaguely aware that they might take us somewhere we don’t want to go. Somewhere out of our comfort zone, out of our ordered lives. Beyond all the external measurements of success. But Nicodemus is brave enough to go deeper. Out of courage, out of conviction, maybe just out of sheer desperation—whatever—he was brave enough to go to Jesus, to risk being seen with him, to dare to go and ask his question. Nicodemus knows that, while he may look foolish, without questioning, there is no growth in faith.

“Rabbi,” he said, “we know that you are a teacher because no one can do what you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus said: “No one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above, born again, born anew.” You see, Jesus takes Nicodemus seriously and responds to him with an intriguing challenge. It’s a little tough to do this word game in English, but in the original Greek the same words mean “born again,” “born from above,” birthed from the womb and birthed by the power of the Holy Spirit, are the same word. Born once, born twice. Nicodemus gets stuck on the literal level at first and can’t make heads nor tails of what Jesus is saying. But Jesus persists and teaches this fellow teacher what it means to be born through the love of God into a life of meaning and purpose.

You know, the journey for Nicodemus begins in that nighttime exchange with Jesus and starts him down a path he couldn’t have foreseen. It turns his life around. How do we know that? In the Gospel of Luke, it’s Nicodemus who defends Jesus when he appears before the high court and it’s Nicodemus who criticizes the judges for passing judgment on Jesus without ever hearing from him. And later, Nicodemus joins Joseph of Arimathea, to wrap the crucified body of Jesus in linen cloths and lay him in the tomb. (continued...)