Lent 2, 2005--A Second Birth

*Preached at Grace North Church by John R. Mabry on February 20, 2005.*

In the recent film "Seabiscuit," Jeff Bridges plays a depression-era tycoon named Charles Howard who, despite his success in business, feels as if his life is over. His son has died in a car accident, and, unable to cope with the grief, his wife leaves him. Suddenly everything he has worked so hard for simply seems empty and meaningless. He was forever talking about the future, but the future no longer seemed to hold anything for him. Even his beloved racing cars sat silent and undriven out in his barn.

But fate had some strange twists yet to unveil. While at a Tijuana horseracing track he meets a young woman named Annie. She knows a good thing when she sees it and woos him. Life, to his great surprise, begins to have meaning again. Bitten by the horseracing bug, he begins to cast about for a horse of his own to race.

First he meets Tom Smith, played by Chris Cooper, a washed-up horse trainer sleeping, who is homeless and spends his time looking after a mare with a broken leg that he rescued from a bullet. In a touching scene around Tom's campfire, he tells Howard, "You don't throw a whole life away just because he's banged up a little." That statement reverberates through Howard. Tom was talking about a horse, but Howard recognizes himself as the one who is banged up. He also recognizes Tom as being banged up a bit himself.

That one sentence haunts the rest of the film, as Tom finds Seabiscuit, a young horse so banged up he was deemed worthless. But Tom sees in his eyes not a loser, but an angry fighter, just waiting for someone to understand him, and to give him a fair chance.

Tom also finds Red Pollard an aspiring jockey who is a little too tall, and has been reduced to cleaning stables to earn his keep. He is also as hotheaded as his flaming hair might suggest. Tom senses that the chemistry between these two fighters might work miracles, and when he puts them together, magic indeed ensues.

You might think that layering the stories of four losers getting another lease on life-three men and a horse-might seem to be, well, if you'll pardon me, beating a dead horse, but Seabiscuit is an artistic triumph. The film works on so many levels, and if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to rent it soon. Instead of being tedious and predictable, it is, on the contrary, deeply touching. Probably because most of us, at one time or another, have been a little banged up ourselves, and in our souls most of us believe that everyone deserves a second chance.

God seems to agree. Abram, in our reading from the Jewish scriptures, was a man who sorely needed a new start-but the book of Genesis doesn't really tell us why. For that we have to look not to Bible but to the Koran, in which we are told that Abram is horrified by the rampant paganism in his community. The Kabaah, the large stone structure in the center of Mecca, was at this time filled with idols to hundreds of gods. Abram asked his people, "What are these images to which you pray?" They told him, "They are the idols our ancestors worshipped." He told them their ancestors were in error, and when no one was around, he took hammer and smashed all of the idols except the chief idol. The townspeople were enraged at the destruction of their idols, and confronted Abram, saying, "Did you do this to our gods?" Abram laughed and said, "No, the chief god has done it. Why don't you ask him what happened?" "You know very well that these gods do not speak!" They said.

Abram said, "Do you worship instead of God that which cannot profit you at all, nor harm you? Have you no sense?"

Of course, to this insolence, they said, "Burn him and stand by your gods!" Abram fled for his life, and succeeded in escaping the mob. But he was faced with a real problem: he could not go back to Mecca, and he was afraid that even his own father would turn him over to the angry crowd. It is that this point that God spoke to Abram, and made him a deal: Get thee out of thine own country, go to the land that I will show thee, and I will make of thee a great nation.

Abram had to step out on faith, which is never an easy thing to do-but he did it. And think about it-here is an almost prehistoric man with no prospects except certain death at the hands of his own people, and we're still talking about him today. I can just hear God saying to himself, "You don't throw a whole life away just because he's banged up a little." God was willing to give Abram a new start, a second chance. But Abram had to do something too: he had to take that chance; he had to step out on faith.

The ministry of Jesus was all about second chances. Again and again, he went to those people whom society had given up on as a lost cause: the political traitors, the prostitutes, the widows, the poor, the sick, and the hated. And he turned their worlds upside down by treating them with dignity and respect, by showing them love and support, by picking them up and saying, "Let's start again."

He is still doing this. God is the expert at taking lemons and making lemonade. What Jesus saw so clearly was that it doesn't matter how badly we screw up, God is always willing, at any moment, to say, "Okay, the past is past. Let's start HERE. Let's do something new." And when we screw up again, God says, "That's okay. Let's start HERE." There's no end to the new starts with God. The only one who limits us and refuses to forgive us is US.

One definition of madness I have heard is repeatedly doing something that you know just doesn't work. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to stop us. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to stop God, either. God is always waiting: waiting for us to get fed up with how our lives are going and have the faith to try something different.

This is what Jesus really means when he says to Nicodemus, "You must be born again." Nicodemus is confused at this and says, "What, can a man enter his mother's womb a second time when he is old? How can a person be born again?"

But Jesus is not talking about a physical birth, but about a psychological or a spiritual one. And we do not know where this new life will take us, either; the wind bloweth where it will, but you cannot tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth. It requires that leap of faith, faith that you can change direction, that the new place where God will be taking you will be better than where you are, that anything can different in the long run.

That these things are true is not in question in scripture, but whether we can let go of our own fear, break our inertia, and enter into a new country-that, my friends, is entirely up to us.

This passage from the third chapter of John has been so hijacked by evangelical Christians that it is hard for us to see what Jesus was really trying to say. Evangelicals tend to view conversion as a one-time event, one simply says the magic words and "presto," one is born again. But in the real world, where the rest of us live, conversion is a more gradual process. It is also something that happens again and again. For Christianity is not a religion that calls us to conversion once-Jesus calls us to conversion every time we swing our feet from the bed to the floor. He calls us to convert our self-loathing into self-love, our shame into self-esteem, our miserliness of heart into generosity. Jesus calls us to be born again not once but every day. For every day we are given a chance by God, by the universe, by society for a second chance. The question is not "will someone give me a new start?" but will you allow it for yourself?

I am facing this very thing right now. Clare has been my constant companion for 12 1/2 years, over one quarter of my life. There are few places I went without her. Now that she has died I have to figure out who I am without her. I am not the same person I was when she was living-I feel like I have lost not a dog, but a limb, an arm or a leg. I have lost something necessary to my own wholeness. I have lost someONE, someone who is never coming back. It is scary; it is hard. Any of you who have lost someone dear knows exactly what I mean. I am tempted to withdraw into my own anguish and depression; I am tempted to feel my life isn't worth living without her. Yet even in the wake of death, I am being given a chance for a new life. It might not be the life I want, or the life I would have chosen if I had my druthers-but few of us ever get that. I am being invited to begin again, and with this invitation, I am faced with a choice. I believe Clare would have wanted me to choose life.

But how about you? Call this a belated new years resolution sermon if you must, but I think it goes deeper than that. I'm not asking you to reflect on how you might do things better this coming year. This is about identity. Who ARE you? And who is God inviting you to BECOME?

Every morning you are given the gift of a new day, and with it comes an invitation to change yourself from the inside out. And from someone who is tempted to give up, I say to you, DON'T. God isn't giving up on you-why should you? "You don't throw a whole life away just because it's banged up a little." That isn't scripture, but it ought to be. "Ye must be born again"-that's scripture. God is holding the door open to a new life, a new mission, a new identity, but only you can walk through it. What do you say?

Let us pray. God of second chances, thou art far more forgiving and gracious towards us than we are to ourselves. Give us the vision to see what we might become, give us the courage to claim by faith that vision as ours, and place within us a new heart. For thou art the master of death and resurrection-raise us to a new life ripe with potentiality, for we ask this in the name of Jesus, who gave everyone he met a chance to start again. Amen.