Caitlin scolded Rhett for being rude to the woman, which means she is somebody’s (if not his) wife-in-training. Anyway, Rhett confessed both his own arrogance and his distaste for that kind of witnessing. He felt that she had prejudged the faith of another person before knowing that person. He realized he had done the same.

This is a tricky matter, witnessing, but when Rhett and Caitlin sat down at a sidewalk table, all subtlety went out the window. Across the street a man stood up on a newspaper vending machine and began to preach. He made it clear from his elevated position that Jesus had died on the cross to save him and that anyone else who believed in him would be saved. But, he said, if any did not accept Christ as Savior and Lord, they would burn in hell forever. Then he got personal. He pointed to people like Rhett and Caitlin at Razzoo’s and 8.0’s down the street. He charged them all with being alcoholics and fornicators that needed to change their ways before it was too late.

Some mocked him, yelling, “Amen, brother. Give ’em hell.” Others shook their heads in embarrassment. Others talked about how he was giving Christianity a bad name. Rhett just thought how unlike Christ it was to put oneself in the place of Christ to judge.

In our text today from John 3, we see that even Christ did not put himself in the place to judge. What’s more, in the verse right after the most commonly memorized verse in the Bible—John 3:16—it says, God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved though him. So why is it that when some Christians go about telling the good news of God’s salvation in Christ, they come off sounding like it’s really bad news? Why is it that the good word about not perishing comes off accenting the perishing, not the not?

Jesus’ own approach to witnessing is seen in his encounter with Nicodemus. We would do well to note it. Look how Nicodemus comes to Jesus, not the other way round. That is not to say that a Christian should never open a conversation with another person about matters so important as eternal destiny, but it does suggest that Jesus did not have the same urgency as the man on the Fort Worth street corner. We must look for those times when people we come into contact with are open to such a conversation. We may even probe, but we must always do so respectfully and humbly.

Notice, too, who Nicodemus is. He is already a religious person, a Jewish Pharisee, a member even of the ruling council. Sometimes we neglect to realize that even those who appear on the outside to be the most religious have spiritual longings that are not fulfilled. Instead of focusing only on those outside the church, on the “alcoholics and fornicators,” as the street preacher called them, we ought to remember that those in our own houses and houses of worship may not yet know the depths of the good news in their depths.

Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, Nicodemus says. “We know,” he says. Nicodemus begins with groupthink. It’s safer that way, don’t you know?! As long as others think the way you do, you don’t feel as alone. But you cannot feel the emptiness of someone else’s soul the way you can your own. And so the very fact that Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night suggests that although he says he knows, he knows there is much he doesn’t yet know and hopes to come to know. This is the opening we should all look for—in others and in ourselves. Until we realize we do not know everything, that we do not have all the answers enough to judge others, we will be siphoning off spiritual experience from soggy slogans more than having fresh experiences of our own with a life-giving Lord.

We expect Jesus to offer Nicodemus a clear presentation of the gospel. Isn’t that what we are told we must do in witnessing? We need to get the words right so that we can deliver them the same way to anyone we have an opening with. And that causes many of you to shy away from witnessing, because you figure you’ll get all tongue-tied and end up sounding like you failed Toastmasters, or you are so smooth at it that you sound like you are making a direct-marketing pitch. As if it depends on you! As if it’s a matter of how to pass some data!

The Danish pastor and existentialist Soren Kierkegaard suffered looking out week by week from his pulpit on those in his pews and from his church to those in the streets of Denmark that thought they knew already all they needed to know to feel safe with God. He considered them sleepwalkers, going through the motions of the faith without any consciousness of the wonderland of grace that they inhabited. He agonized over how to lead them into a deeper relationship to God, one that would grip their souls and rend their hearts until they felt the power in the blood of Christ at work in bringing them to life.  There is no lack of knowledge in a Christian land, he said; something else is missing, and it is a something that the one man cannot communicate to the other.

What Kierkegaard meant is not that no one can ever pass along the good news of salvation in Christ to another, but that the gospel flies under the radar screen of handle-able knowledge. So he became a master storyteller, conjuring images and tales that opened the mind by opening the heart. Eternal life is not data to be collected and stored on your spiritual hard drive. It is not information to be memorized or a prayer to be recited or a church to be joined. It happens to you more than it is something you make happen.

Which is why Jesus had to be unclear with Nicodemus before things could come clear. He had to use double talk in order to get him thinking past the things he already knew. He had to employ images instead of ideas, or ideas through images.

You must be born again, Jesus says. It’s become almost cliché to us today, this phrase “born again.” It’s even a category in polls that ask what subset of Christian you are. It’s a dead metaphor that needs resurrection in order for it to breathe new life again.

Well, the Greek word that John uses to report what Jesus says to Nicodemus is anothen, which could mean “born again” or “born from above.” Nicodemus took it the first way first. “How can a man crawl back into his mother’s womb and be born again once he is old?” It’s a left-brained response to a right-brained metaphor. Jesus tells him that being born of flesh is one thing—the mother’s water breaks and out you come; being born of Spirit is another thing—your spirit has to break, and your heart has to open so that there will be room for the Spirit of God to give you new life. And all this happens at places of knowing that can’t be spotted on an MRI or plotted on an SAT. It’s personal knowing that is really trusting. It’s trusting that is really believing IN more than believing THAT.

And that’s just what Jesus invites Nicodemus to do, to let the Spirit of God move his spirit. To let go the control he has over his life by his “we know” this and “we know” that. As if “we know” can ever substitute for “I know.” The whole matter of personal salvation comes down to the movement from the horizontal to the vertical, from sideways knowing to upward knowing, from being that is from below to being that is from above, from a humanly fashioned self to a divinely fashioned self. But it takes a faith leap to allow God to do just that.

Which is why Jesus recalls the story of Moses in the wilderness. A plague of poisonous snakes had been biting the Israelites as punishment for their sins. God told Moses to raise a caduceus—a staff or cross with a snake hanging on it. (You know a caduceus as the symbol for the American Medical Association.) If the children of Israel would look up at the despised creature that was causing their death and look long upon it, then they would be healed. Stop looking down and around and start looking up. Look to the very thing you think is the enemy, and you will find your healing. The antidote that heals contains the very poison that would kill.

Jesus alludes to his death by being lifted up on the cross as one who is despised. The one who loses his life on the cross is the one who can alone give life to those who look up to him. You must be born from above! You must let go of your sure knowledge and let God reveal something to you that is missing in all your surety. You must move from being self-made to spirit-born, from holding a passport of an earthly country to one that is heavenly, from having an achieved identity to a born identity.

Matt Damon starred as Jason Bourne in the liberal film adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s novel The Bourne Identity. Bourne is a highly trained assassin for a black-ops CIA group. Bourne is shot twice in a failed mission and is left for dead at sea when he is rescued by a fishing vessel, but he is bereft of memory of who he is or how he got in the shape he is in. He finds himself fending off one attacker after another. He figures that his only hope is to discover who he really is and why someone wants him dead.

My apologies on the word play of “born identity,” but I figure with all the word plays in John 3—born again/born from above, wind/spirit, etc.), I am in good company. What Jesus wants us to know is that we will never know ourselves truly until we are born into the world to come. This takes a Spirit-birth. The world that is passing away wants us dead; the God who is coming to pass wants us alive. But we cannot continue to claim our identity by where we come from when at best all that will get us is a long sleep with the worms. If the only life that lasts is the life to come, then we must be born to it and find our identity in light of it.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him may not perish but have everlasting life.

If you’ve been in or around church much of your life, you know that verse by heart. But do you really? Do you really know it BY HEART? Or has it slipped so into slogan status that you miss the meaning altogether? Do you need to hear Jesus say to you this morning, You must be born again? It’s only a cliché if it’s lost its cache. In which case you need indeed to be born from above. Look up, then.