Bourne Again
- St. Aidan's
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
Lent 2A: Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17
The Rev'd Cameron Partridge
March 1, 2026
God of peace in whose dream swords are forged afresh into ploughshares and strength is revealed in love: So infuse your people with the power of your Spirit, that all may turn to you from war and strife and breathe together as one.[1]
Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.
One of my favorite movies – series, actually – is the Jason Bourne series. It features a man named Jason Bourne who is rescued after having been found floating on the sea, injured and unconscious. When he wakes, he has no idea who he is. Gradually he discovers that he is a trained assassin who had been recruited into a clandestine military operation. Horrified by the honed, violent ways his body and mind automatically react to danger, he seeks to unravel who he has been and ultimately to turn away from it. Of course, this process is far from straight forward. Those who made him who he had become turn out to have a vested interest in his remaining within their system, or at the very least not threatening to undo it and expose its webs of deception and violence. The story is multilayered and unfolds over several movies, the most recent of which I have not actually seen.[2] But in the initial trilogy, and particularly in the first movie, I was moved by how Bourne takes up a kind of mission to discover, to reckon, and to change. His name is no accident. He was a bourn, a flowing stream, ever changing. His charge was to be He is to be reborn, to become anew as he had before. And he was to be borne, carried by something larger than himself, even as he was upheld in the waters where his barely living body had been found. He was to be launched into a process of turning, of becoming, driven by something larger than himself even as he was to be an agent, an active participant in his search, his discovery, his transformation. And so he sends himself forth as if something or someone else has said go. Go out into the world and uncover its pain and fractures. Discover your part in them. Find your way toward healing.
“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you,” God says to Abram in our first reading from Genesis (12:1). Go. Leave the territory that is familiar to you. Step out from all that you know. Leave it behind and become a parent of a people yet unborn. You and your kindred will become a blessing. Abram had nothing to go on except the word of the God who was sending him. Yet he stepped out into the mystery of this process of becoming, of discovery, of transformation. He turned away from all that had been and toward an unknown future. The collect that we prayed earlier, as well as in our formation series, often called “the Good Courage Prayer,” written by the Anglican priest Eric Milner-White who had served as a war-time chaplain, was inspired by our Genesis reading. In an early edition of Daily Prayer where this prayer appears, it is titled simply “The Call of Abraham.”[3] “Give us faith to go out with good courage, knowing only that your hand is leading us and your love eternally supporting us,” it prays.
The Apostle Paul, interpreting this ancestral story for early followers of the way of Jesus, emphasizes the role that faith played in the life of their shared forebear. Abraham – as he had come to be named – had not followed a step-by-step plan. His setting forth was not in obedience to legal requirements. He was responding to the call of God who through him was fostering new life – “the God in whom he believed,” Paul writes, “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17). Abram’s response to God exhibited a faithfulness that shines with righteousness and the promise of newness of life. He reminds us that wilderness wandering in all its mystery leads to resurrection.
Our gospel passage also meets us in a context of mystery. By night, we hear, Jesus is approached by Nicodemus, a leader who is filled with questions. His inquiries have a hyper-literal quality. “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” (John 3:4) He is responding to the ambiguity of Jesus’ term “born again” or “born from above” as the Greek term ἄνωθεν can be translated. But Nicodemus is asking this question, sensing and trying to dispel, a certain sense of mystery. Mystery surrounds this passage: its nighttime context, its questions, its ambiguities. Nicodemus does have a certain sense of wonder that he expresses in that context. Jesus responds to him, saying, “do not be astonished,” “do not wonder that I have said to you, ‘you must be born from above’” or “‘born again’” (3:7). Then follows my favorite sentence: “the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit” (3:8). Who is born ἄνωθεν. Words we will sing in the music that our new Music Minister Charles just wrote for this occasion. This phrase speaks to a context of mystery, expressing a kind of creation pneumatology, emphasizing the role of the Spirit in the process of creation. Because at the beginning of all things, the Spirit hovers over the waters, over the deep. It is out of that scene of mystery that God says, ‘let there be light’ and creation begins to come into being. To be born of that Spirit is to be created anew. The Greek word translated as Spirit, πνεῦμα, means breath, or wind. “Do not be astonished that I have said this to you.” We do not know where the wind comes from when we feel it, or exactly where it is going. We only know that God is calling us, inviting us. And in response, with an open heart, in faith, we can step into that mystery, prompted by God. This is the kind of scene evoked in the back and forth between Nicodemus and Jesus, by night, in the shadow of mystery. We step into a process allowing ourselves to be embraced by the wideness of God’s mercy, as we sang in our opening hymn (with the perfect tune to speak that phrase, written by Calvin Hampton). We step out embraced by the wideness of that mercy into a mystery whose unfolding we do not see. We are only given the promise. And what is the promise? It is resurrection life. That is the promise that awaits us at the end of Lent. The promise that meets us always here and now even as it awaits us at the end of all things. Resurrection life, being birthed anew in the most unlikely of places, when we least expect it, when we cannot see it, because we believe in a God who brings into existence the things that do not exist. This is the call to courage that God had issued to Abraham. The call that is embodied in the life and death, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, in the coming forth of the Spirit that breathes upon us here and now. This is the hope we need to sustain us in a bleak world.
We all have likely heard of the attack led by Israel and the United States upon Iran that took place yesterday. It is a fearful thing. In a letter released yesterday, Presiding Bishop Rowe asked for our prayer:
Pray especially for the people of the Diocese of Iran and for all of the Iranian people. In recent weeks, we have mourned as the regime in Iran has killed peaceful protesters, and watched with alarm at both its increasing repression of the Iranian people and the escalating response of the U.S. government. As Christians who follow a Prince of Peace, we mourn that today’s attacks will surely mean further hardship for the most vulnerable Iranians and, as retaliation inevitably follows, suffering that will spread across the entire region.[4]
As Archbishop Hosam Naoum, Primate of the Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East, also observed, “tragically, the cycle of violence has expanded with terrifying speed.” Iran launched attacks of “Israel and U.S. installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kurdistan-Iraq, Jordan, and Qatar,” as warning sirens blared across the Holy Land. He continued, “Suddenly our people from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf find themselves once again huddled in shelters, fearing for their lives as the threat of a total regional war looms over us.”[5] Here in San Francisco a march yesterday against the strikes upon Iran registered a spirit of protest not only of this particular moment, but also similar ones stretching back decades. One protestor broke out a sign reading “Don’t invade Iran” that he’s had since 1979 noting, “the fact that he’s had to break it out regularly over the years proves to him that the issue goes beyond either major political party.”[6] Archbishop Naoum wrote, “When the ‘spirit of fear’ threatens to consume our hearts, we must anchor ourselves in” – quoting from 2 Timothy 1:7 – “the ‘spirit of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.’” He called upon us to join in unceasing prayer, as did Bishop Rowe, but with more specificity. He asked us to pray for those caught in the crossfire of “‘Operation Epic Fury’ and the subsequent ‘crushing responses.’” He asked us to pray specifically for “‘a sound mind’ for the leaders of the United States, Israel, and Iran, that they might recognize the futility of this bloodshed and turn back” from the catastrophic precipices toward which they are racing. Archbishop Naoum calls upon us, lay people and clergy, to be beacons of comfort, sanctuaries of Christian love in a time of “regime change” rhetoric. We are to step out of the cycle of hatred and revenge and to do our darndest pull others out of those cycles with us, wherever we may be located, building one another up in love. We are asked to be bridge-builders “even as diplomatic windows seem to slam shut… refus[ing] to see our neighbors as enemies.” “Intercede for us now,” he writes, in the name of the God of peace who passes all understanding, to guard our hearts and minds.
May we join in that prayer this morning, knowing that our prayer and the actions that are informed by it, the most minute of interactions, building up of one another in love, comes from a rock solid, anchored place of hope. Hope lived out by Abraham and embodied by Christ, borne out in good courage. We may not know where exactly God is calling us in this fearful moment, but we do know that God is with us. God is that Spirit-wind pushing us forward, inviting to participate in the process of bringing into existence things that do not yet exist. This morning, in our fear, may we be encouraged. May we feel the Spirit, and with that Spirit may we pray for all those around the world who are in fear this day. God in the Spirit speaks, even groans, when we do not have the words (Romans 8:26), bringing leading us into hope and resurrection life.
[1] Adapted from the Collect for Peace, The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 815.
[3] Eric Milner-White and G.W. Briggs, Daily Prayer (Penguin Books, 1959), 24.
[4] Letter from Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe on Military Strike on Iran, February 28, 2026: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/publicaffairs/letter-from-presiding-bishop-sean-rowe-on-military-strike-on-iran/
[5] Letter from the Most Reverend Hosam E. Naoum, Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, February 28, 2026: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Image-2.jpeg.pdf
[6] Lucy Hodgman, “‘We reject this’: Hundreds in S.F. march against U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran,” February 28, 2026, San Francisco Chronicle: “https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/protest-iran-attack-us-israel-21947538.php
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