Every once in a while as I am driving somewhere I come across a sign that tells me in King James English or a more modern translation that unless I am born again, I’ll never see the kingdom of God, and by that I know the sign-posters mean I’ll never get to heaven when I die. They are wrong of course both about what it takes to get to heaven after death and about what the kingdom of God is all about.
First of all, there is nothing they or anyone else can do or has to do to get to heaven upon death. Heaven, the life to come, is God’s free gift to each and every one of us. Whether, upon death, we accept that free gift is up to us. We will still have the free will to decline the invitation. I can’t imagine anyone doing so, but there you go. Some fool might but I know I will not.
Second, I am born again every day. Every day is a new day to live the life I know God calls me to live and every day I know, at the end of the day and, in all honesty, at times during the day, I do not live the life I should. In other words, I sin. But come the next day, I can be born again to do better today that yesterday. I’ll never get it totally right, imperfect being that I am. That is no excuse. It is simply the truth.
And, third and finally, the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, is not some place out there. It is where each one of us lives and moves and has our being. The problem of course, and the reason I think the sign-makers get it wrong, is that this world is certainly no one’s idea of what heaven is to be like. As wonderful as it is at times, in all reality it is a mess and often a colossal mess. And it is no one’s fault but our own.
Jesus came among us not to show us how to get to heaven but to make this earth, the kingdom of God, into what God created it to be in the first place and which it is now not. And he showed us how to do it even if we already knew how to do it. Jesus’ message was nothing new. If we would only love God above all us and on another in the same way, including ourselves, as the Old Testament prophets said we should, we would bring in the kingdom in its fulness. We haven’t so far.
Thus, what we have to do is be born again every morning intent on doing all we can in every way we can, do our part in helping make this kingdom a reality. There is neither a magic formula nor a simple formula – like be baptized and profess faith in Jesus. What it is is hard work, sometimes really hard work. Sometimes pain and suffering are involved, maybe even death (see Jesus as an example).
When we awake each morning, born again to a new day, all we have to do is open our eyes and we will see the kingdom of God. It is a beautiful, messy, but hope-filled world waiting for us to do our part to get rid of some of the mess and help make it into what we know it can become. Or we can hide under the covers. The choice is ours.
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