RECORDING SCRIPT — Can I Begin Again?

Prepared from the approved narration script. It has not been checked word for word against the recording and may differ from what is heard.

Second Humanity. Can I begin again? You can understand something and still find yourself doing what you hoped to leave behind. You hear yourself defending a remark before you have heard why it hurt. You decide to stop comparing your life with someone else's, and by the afternoon you are measuring again. You ask for a new beginning, and tomorrow arrives with the same responsibilities, the same memories, and the same person answering to your name. What would new life mean there? Inside a life already being lived. This is one of the questions I have carried into Second Humanity. If life and love are received from God, how do we receive them? What changes? And how do we keep the invitation from becoming one more demand to produce a better version of ourselves? There is a man in John's Gospel who asks almost exactly the question in our title. He comes to Jesus by night. His name is Nicodemus. Jesus speaks to him about being born again, and he answers, “How can a man be born when he is old?” Listen to how much that question can hold. The years that have already happened. The habits that have become familiar. The difficulty of imagining a beginning you cannot manufacture. Nicodemus asks about returning to his mother's womb. We may hear our own question alongside his: how can someone begin again after so many years of becoming this person? I want to follow that question carefully. Because the answer Jesus gives begins with something received. This is What Are You Seeking. The show takes a question every other Thursday. Today is the second of three special editions about the founding questions behind Second Humanity. Together they are called The life we receive, the life we share. The first followed the hope that God raised Jesus and that death does not have the final word. This one asks how new life begins within the life we have. The third will ask what that life requires of us together. The written essay is Born from Above: What New Life Asks of Us. It carries the sources and the fuller discussion in the Anchor. Here, we will stay with the people and the movement of the story. When I say, “We read this,” I am naming Second Humanity's reading, so you can consider it as a reading. Our conviction is simple enough to say at the beginning. New life is received before it is achieved. What it asks of us follows from the gift. Before we return to the conversation at night, there is a garden. Genesis begins with goodness. Human beings are made in God's image. In the garden account, the human creature is formed from dust, and God breathes life into him. There is a place to live, food to eat, work to do, and company to be given. No one earns the first breath. No one produces the garden by becoming worthy of it. The life is already given when the work begins. And there is work. The human is placed in the garden to tend and keep it. Receiving life already includes responsibility for something beyond oneself. Then comes a command. Listen to how it opens. “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat.” Freely eat. Before the exception is named, there is permission. The world in this scene is offered as a place in which a human being can live. One tree is named as the boundary, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The warning is plain: “thou shalt surely die.” Genesis calls this a command. It also tells a story in which the human beings can reach for what has been forbidden. No barrier prevents the eating. The possibility of refusal is real. We read that possibility as part of the seriousness of love. A relationship of trust allows a response that has not been forced. The Father invites human beings to receive what he gives, and that invitation can be refused. That is how we understand the freedom in the garden. The story gives us a command, a gift, and people whose response matters. The serpent speaks into that freedom. “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” I hear permission being turned into suspicion. The abundance recedes, and the boundary fills the view. Perhaps the giver is keeping something from you. Perhaps what you need is on the other side of the limit he has set. The serpent promises that their eyes will be opened and they will be “as gods, knowing good and evil.” The woman sees that the tree is good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and desirable for wisdom. Earlier, Genesis has described the garden's trees as pleasant to the sight and good for food. Beauty and nourishment were already there. The humans had already been made in God's image. Yet the promise of knowledge adds something. We should let the text say so. Later in the chapter God says the human has become “as one of us, to know good and evil.” Knowledge is gained. They do not become the source of their own life. The woman takes and eats. She gives to her husband, who is with her, and he eats. We read a withdrawal of trust in that movement: reaching to secure life on terms of our own, treating the giver as someone from whom our future must be wrested. When we speak of becoming our own source, this is what we mean. We begin to act as though our worth and our safety depend entirely on what we can seize, control, or make others acknowledge. Receiving means something different: living from what is given, trusting the giver, and using our capacities within that relationship. It includes choosing and working. It releases us from having to create the grounds of our own worth. Now watch what happens to the way they see. Earlier, they were naked and were not ashamed. After the eating, “the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” They make coverings. They hide. When God calls, the man says, “I was afraid.” The story has moved from a life received into a life being concealed. Asked what happened, the man points to the woman and to the God who gave her. The woman points to the serpent. Something has happened between them as well as within them. God calls, “Where art thou?” Then, “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” He asks whether the man has eaten from the tree. He asks the woman what she has done. These questions bring what happened into the open. They hold people answerable. They also address the people who are hiding. The relationship has not disappeared because they have withdrawn from it. That matters to Second Humanity. The one whose love could be refused still calls to those who refused it. Coming out of hiding can begin with answering from where we actually are. Afraid. Defensive. Aware of something we do not know how to put right. There are consequences. Genesis speaks of painful toil, thorns, sweat, and a damaged relationship between the man and the woman. The word “rule” enters that relationship among the consequences described. We read these also as a picture of what happens when life is governed by fear and the struggle to secure ourselves. Another person can become a rival. Enough can become impossible to recognize. Power can begin to feel like the only available safety. This reading is about a pattern we can participate in and suffer under. It gives us no reason to tell a hungry or frightened person that their hardship is their fault. The person being dominated needs protection, and the person doing the dominating needs to answer for it. Before the humans leave the garden, God makes them clothing. The account keeps that act of care beside the judgment. Their dependence on what they receive continues. In the next chapter, the question reaches a brother. Cain and Abel bring offerings. Abel's is regarded, Cain's is not, and Cain is angry. God speaks to him before the violence. Then Cain kills his brother. The account leaves questions about the offerings that we cannot settle by supplying motives. But we can recognize a terrible possibility in the story: another person's acceptance becomes something we experience as a threat. His life begins to look like an obstacle to mine. God asks, “Where is Abel thy brother?” Cain answers, “Am I my brother's keeper?” Two questions now stand beside one another. Where are you? Where is your brother? The first calls us out of hiding. The second asks what has happened to someone in our care. We cannot answer the first truthfully while treating the second as irrelevant. This is why receiving life matters beyond our own peace. A life spent proving itself can become so occupied with its standing that another person's need scarcely enters the account. The question of new life is also the question of whether we can become available to that person again. Paul places Christ beside Adam as another beginning for humanity. In Romans he uses the language of one man's disobedience and another's obedience. In First Corinthians he says, “The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” Quickening means giving life. Then he speaks of “the second man” from heaven. This is where the name Second Humanity comes from. It names a hope for human life renewed through Christ, in relation to God and to one another. There is no superior class of human beings in that name. Anyone receiving a gift stands on ground they did not make. Paul asks the Corinthians a question that reaches every way of making ourselves superior: “what hast thou that thou didst not receive?” What did you receive and then begin to use as evidence that you were above someone else? Knowledge. An ability. A spiritual experience. Even the ability to describe your own humility. John gives us a picture of life received again. On the evening of the first day of the week, the risen Jesus comes to his disciples. “He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.” The Greek verb recalls God's breathing life into the human creature in the Greek text of Genesis. We hear an echo of creation in the scene. The new beginning comes as a gift. That gives this conversation its connection with the first. The hope that God raised Jesus opens onto a life to be received now. And it returns us to Nicodemus, asking how such a beginning can happen. Nicodemus is a Pharisee and a ruler, a teacher within Israel. He comes to Jesus with respect. The signs Jesus does, he says, show that God is with him. Jesus answers, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” The word John writes can mean again, and it can mean from above. Nicodemus hears another birth and asks about returning to the womb. Jesus speaks of birth from water and the Spirit. The saying holds a new beginning and the source from which it comes. We can hear our own difficulty beside his without inventing his private life. John does not tell us that Nicodemus felt empty, or explain why he came at night. He gives us a respected teacher asking a question that his knowledge has not already answered. Jesus asks him, “Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?” The question points back into Israel's own promises. Ezekiel speaks of God cleansing a people, giving them a new heart, and putting his Spirit within them. In the next chapter, a valley of dry bones receives breath and lives. The people had said their hope was lost. God speaks to that lost hope. This conversation belongs within that Jewish world. Cleansing and renewed life were promises Nicodemus could be asked to recognize. Readers differ over the water. Many hear baptism. Others place the emphasis on Ezekiel's promise of cleansing, and those readings can meet: baptism understood through the promise of water and Spirit. The traditions do not all describe the relation in the same way. But the source of the life is clear in John's account. It comes from God. “The wind bloweth where it listeth,” Jesus says. The wind blows where it wills. You hear its sound. You do not direct its beginning or its destination. Wind and Spirit share a word in the Greek of the passage. There will be a response to make. There will be a life to live. But the life cannot be produced by arranging the right appearance of spiritual success. Nicodemus is being addressed about something he must receive. And the gift has a face. The conversation goes on to speak of the Son of man being lifted up, as Moses lifted the serpent in the wilderness. Then come the words many of us know so well that we can stop hearing their direction. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” God loved. God gave. The initiative belongs to the giver. John asks his readers to receive the Son, trust him, and find life in relationship with him. The gift has a particular content. It is the life God gives through Jesus. A person can still be weighing that claim. The invitation does not require us to conceal our questions. It does ask us to see what is being offered: relationship with the one who comes toward us before we can present a finished account of ourselves. In the next chapter, Jesus is tired. He sits by a well in Samaria and asks a woman for a drink. She notices the boundary his request crosses. He is a Jew. She is a Samaritan woman. Why is he asking her? He answers with the word we have been following. “If thou knewest the gift of God.” If you knew the gift, and who was asking, you would ask him, and he would give you living water. In the preceding conversation, a teacher struggles with birth. Here, a woman asks how water can be drawn from a deep well when Jesus has nothing to draw with. Both conversations begin with people trying to understand the promise through what they know. Jesus continues speaking with them. He speaks openly about her life, including her marriages. John does not give us enough to reconstruct the circumstances of those marriages, or to declare her an outcast. We can stay with what she does. She leaves her water jar, goes back to the town, and invites others: “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?” She becomes someone through whose testimony others come to hear him. The woman who was asked for water has something to offer her neighbors. I hear a possibility for us in that movement. To be known need not mean being reduced to the most difficult part of our history. An encounter can open a way to speak and participate again. Her invitation is enough to begin a movement toward Jesus. It leaves the people she addresses room to come and see. Jesus' own life gives receiving a shape. Before Mark narrates his public ministry, he describes the baptism. A voice names Jesus the beloved Son. Then the Spirit sends him into the wilderness. Matthew tells the testing at length. Jesus is hungry. The tempter says, “If thou be the Son of God,” command the stones to become bread. The hunger is real. So is the invitation to put his sonship at the service of the tempter's demand. Jesus answers from Scripture, and remains faithful to the Father. We hear an answer to the garden here. Food is again present in a test of trust. This son does not take the offer on the tempter's terms. He lives from the relation in which he has been named. We should be careful with the application. Eating, working, planning, and accepting help belong within a life received from God. The question is whether the need before us becomes permission to abandon trust and responsibility. Paul later speaks of the Spirit of adoption, by whom believers cry, “Abba, Father.” Jesus' sonship and our adoption are not interchangeable. Yet Paul's promise brings belonging close to people still learning how to live. The Spirit bears witness that they are God's children. They are addressed within a relationship that can sustain their response. That is the order we want to recover. Receive the life. Learn to live from it. People bring children to Jesus. The disciples try to stop them, and Jesus is indignant. “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Let them come. He says that the kingdom must be received as a little child receives. Then he takes them in his arms and blesses them. They arrive as people who can be welcomed and given something. They do not have to establish their importance first. We can attend to that without pretending every childhood was safe. The welcome in the scene is something being done for them. In Luke, Jesus also speaks of where the kingdom is. The King James says, “the kingdom of God is within you.” Other translations say, “in your midst.” These are different readings of the phrase. We should keep that difference visible. At Second Humanity, we understand inward renewal and our life with other people as belonging together. We offer that as our theological reading, not as a way to make the translation question disappear. John gives the continuing relationship another image: a vine and its branches. “Abide in me, and I in you.” Remain. A branch lives through what it keeps receiving. The passage describes what remaining involves. His words stay with them. They pray. They keep his commandment. And the commandment is, “That ye love one another, as I have loved you.” The source of the life and its fruit are joined. A beginning can be real, and the receiving can still need to continue tomorrow. Following Jesus can also cost us something. He speaks of denying oneself, taking up a cross, and following him. A cross was an instrument of execution. His words carried the possibility of rejection, loss, and death. Luke includes the word “daily,” bringing the response into the repeated decisions of a life. In Mark, Jesus speaks of losing a life and saving it. The Greek word translated life is also translated soul in the question that follows: what does it profit someone to gain the whole world and lose their own soul? Today, people sometimes speak of the death of the ego. That can describe a release from the need to defend our importance. It is our modern language. Jesus' saying reaches the life we live, the loyalties we choose, and what we are willing to lose in following him. An apology can cost us the account in which we were always right. Restitution can cost money. Refusing an unfair advantage can cost an opportunity we wanted. The losses are real. Our worth no longer has to depend on keeping every advantage. And the life entrusted to you includes your own. Seeking protection, leaving danger, and naming a wrong can be faithful actions. When an officer strikes Jesus, he challenges the blow: “If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil: but if well, why smitest thou me?” We have no permission to use self-denial to make someone available for abuse. A person can relinquish the need to dominate while keeping the boundaries that protect their dignity. We are learning how to love as people whose lives matter. How quickly does that learning happen? Some people can name a moment when their life turned. Others recognize a beginning only by looking back over years. Some speak from their baptism, into whose meaning they are still growing. A vivid story can be a gift. It is a poor entrance requirement. Paul describes people buried with Christ in baptism and called to walk in newness of life. The new beginning opens into a continuing walk. John gives us Nicodemus three times. First, the conversation at night. Later, when others are condemning Jesus, Nicodemus asks whether the law judges a person before hearing him. Finally, after the execution, he comes with burial spices and joins Joseph of Arimathaea in caring for Jesus' body. John reminds us that this is the man who first came by night. Readers differ over what these scenes tell us about his faith. John never gives us a sentence declaring Nicodemus born again. What we can see are the actions. A question. A word on behalf of a fair hearing. Care for the body of a man who has been executed. We read a possible movement toward costly allegiance. We can let the movement matter while leaving his inward state where John leaves it. Our own growth may be easier to recognize in actions than in the size of the claims we make about ourselves. Returning sooner after a familiar defense. Listening when corrected. Beginning a repair while the hurt is still being named. Asking for help before we have made the same wound deeper. First John brings us back to the brother. “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.” The letter names Cain. Then it names Christ, who laid down his life for us. Then it brings the question to someone who has the means to help and sees a brother in need. If that person shuts compassion away, how does the love of God dwell in them? The movement is there in the text: Cain, Christ, and a person whose need is before us. Love becomes recognizable “in deed and in truth.” Jesus' teaching also takes us toward the wounded stranger and the enemy. The circle keeps reaching beyond the people who make loving convenient. This gives us a way to examine a spiritual practice. Does it make us more able to hear another person? More willing to make a repair? More attentive when care will cost something? Knowledge and unusual experiences can matter. The person before us still has a claim on our attention. The same letter says, “We love him, because he first loved us.” The gift remains first. Care is the fruit of a life received; it cannot purchase the life that sustains it. The letter also speaks of perfect love casting out fear, in a passage about confidence before God in judgment. We hear a direction of growth in that promise. A frightened person does not need to turn their fear into evidence that they have failed to receive God. They may need time, support, safety, and someone to remain with them. Receiving care belongs within this life too. So what can we do with this tomorrow? Begin where the first question begins. Where are you? A short prayer can tell the truth about that. Here is the thing I am defending. Here is the shame I keep hiding. Here is what I do not understand. Here is the help I need. Then remain. Read a little. Give a sentence of Scripture enough room to address the life you actually have. At the end of the day, return to one encounter. What governed your response? Was there room to hear the other person? Is there something to repair? The Upper Room is there to support this practice of prayer, reading, and reflection. The practice serves the relationship. Missing a day does not make the next act of care unavailable. Then the second question. Where is your brother? Where is the person your effort to secure yourself has taught you to overlook? Sometimes the response will be an apology that asks for nothing in return. Sometimes it will be help offered, or help accepted. A promise kept. A wrong named. Rest taken so that exhaustion does not make every encounter a demand you resent. We can begin while questions remain. We can ask honestly for life we do not know how to give ourselves, and take the next truthful step that is available. Can I begin again? Nicodemus asks how a person can be born when he is old. Jesus answers with a birth from above. A beginning whose source is God. The years already lived are still part of the life being addressed. So are the habits, the regret, and the people who have been hurt. Grace gives us a place from which to answer for what we have done and grow. At Second Humanity, we hold that new life is given through Jesus, received in trust, and lived by the Spirit in continuing relationship with him. It can have a decisive beginning and a long, uneven growth. There is room in it for joy and grief, courage and the need to be cared for. To receive. To remain. To turn toward the person before us. These are ways of responding to a gift already offered. Tomorrow may ask you to face something difficult. You do not have to make yourself the source of your worth before you face it. And when people begin to live from what they receive, the question changes again. What will we do with what we have together? Who will be welcomed? Who will still be left outside? That is where the third conversation will meet us: in the life we share. For now, the question in the garden remains open. Where are you? An answer can begin there. Second Humanity. What Are You Seeking.