NO EXCEPTIONS

Every once in a while on my travels I come upon a billboard with these words: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” That is true from several perspective even though, when I read those words, I often cringe because the people who pay for the billboard really do not fully understand what those words mean. Their understanding is that only baptized Christians can enter heaven, which makes one wonder what they do with Mary and Joseph and Moses and anyone else who has never heard about Jesus?

Even so, those words are true. First of all, if one’s vision of heaven is life after physical death here on earth, one certainly will have to be born again to enter heaven. There is no other way. We must first die and then be born again to live the new and eternal life God freely offers to each and everyone of us, Mary and Joseph and Moses an all those Chinese non-Christians, etc., etc., etc. No one excepted and no exceptions on how to get into heaven. The billboard people just don’t or won’t understand.

What I think they, and maybe you and I, don’t fully understand is those words are true right here and right now in our own lives. Jesus came among us not to die so that we can get to heaven when we die, because that is God’s free gift to us: unmerited and undeserved on our part. Rather Jesus came to bring about the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, here on earth. And we do that by living out what he taught us, fulfilling in our very lives his one very simple message: love God above all else and love our neighbors as we love ourself.

To do that we have to be born again, and maybe again and again and again. While in the womb and once out of the womb, the only person we were concerned about was ourself. Life centered around everyone fulfilling our needs whatever they were, food and security being at the top of the list. It took a while before we learned and understood that others were just as important as we were. That was a born-again experience. And it was a difficult lesson to learn. We had to die to our selfishness in order to be born anew into the life of God’s kingdom even if, back then, we didn’t have a clue what that is. That’s the way it was for us and for every human being. No exceptions.

That’s the way it still is. God’s kingdom is alive here on earth. Sometimes it is very alive and well and at other times not so. It is alive and well when we live our lives in love and care and concern for others. It is not well when we revert to putting ourself and our wants over the needs of others. Unfortunately, and I think this is what the billboard people do not understand, we need to understand that the kingdom of God is not just lived in the life to come through death, but it is here on earth and it is to be lived out by each and everyone of us if it is to be lived in its fulness.

And, unfortunately again, and this time for all of us, if I may be judgmental, we fail everyday to live out our life as our faith in Jesus asks us to do: to the fullest. And so every night at the end of the day we can and should reflect on how well or how poorly we helped make God’s kingdom a reality where we live and move and have our being. And then off to sleep to rise again the next day, born again, to live and love as best we can.

Yet none of this can happen if we believe that the kingdom of God is somewhere out there and not right here on earth. God is in charge of what happens when we die. We are in charge of what happens while we are very much alive. It is up to us to make the kingdom of God here on earth what God wants and expects and even demands that it be. It won’t be easy as we know all too well. But to do that, sinful human beings that we are, we must be born again each and every day. And for that there are no exceptions.