Nobody Signs Their Own Certificate

The pen at the registrar's counter is on a little chain, as if anybody would want to steal it, and she keeps looking at the chain because it is easier than looking at the form.

The waiting room is full. A father in work boots with a toddler on his knee, two grandmothers comparing photographs on a phone, a couple who have plainly not slept, all of them holding a numbered ticket and a folder. Her number is called and she wheels the pram to the counter, and the registrar, who is kind and has done this ten thousand times, starts asking the questions. Child's name. Date of birth. Place of birth. Then: mother's full name. And she says her own name, and watches the woman write it, in blue ink, on the line that says mother, and something in her goes very still.

Because the child did nothing. Three weeks old, asleep in a knitted hat that is slightly too big, mouth open, one fist up by her ear. She did not apply. She did not attend. She did not say the right words at the right moment or keep coming back until somebody was satisfied. She was born, and because she was born, she belongs, and a woman in a registry office is writing it down as a fact of the state, and the baby will sleep through the whole thing.

And her mother stands there with the chained pen and thinks about a tent seven years ago, a Tuesday night, sawdust and a keyboard and a man with a microphone saying, you are born again, and everybody clapping. She had said the prayer. She had meant it. She has been at church every Sunday since. She runs the tea rota and knows every child in the building by name and is called sister by people who mean it. And she has never, not once, felt like anybody's child. She has felt like a member. Somebody who was let in, and who has to keep being the kind of person they let in.

You know that counter. You have a certificate in your head that has been waiting seven years for the right signature, and you have been trying to be the signature. Stay with me. I want to show you whose handwriting a birth is in.

Whose will a birth is

Here is the first thing, and it is a matter of grammar before it is a matter of comfort. John opens his Gospel with a sentence about who the children of God are, and he takes care to say how they got that way. Not by descent. Not by wanting it hard enough. Not by anybody arranging it.

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.John 1:12-13

Three wills are ruled out and one is left standing. Not blood, so it is not inherited. Not the will of the flesh, so it is not achieved. Not the will of man, so nobody grants it, not the man with the microphone, not the church, not you. Born of God. The verb is passive, the way it is for every baby who was ever born: born, by somebody else's doing, and the baby did not sign.

You have, in John's own sentence, the only terms on which anybody is ever a child of God, and they are the terms of a birth done to you and never by you. I am not pronouncing over you tonight; I do not know your Tuesday and I do not need to. I am reading you what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the bearing, not the one who checks the paperwork.

What Jesus said at night, and what word He reached for

Nicodemus came at night, and Jesus told him a man must be born from above, and Nicodemus asked the plainest question in the Gospels: how can a man be born when he is old. Jesus said this:

That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.John 3:6

Two births, and in both the one being born is on the receiving end. Then Jesus says the wind blows where it wishes, you hear the sound of it, you do not know where it comes from or where it goes, and so it is with everyone born of the Spirit. He reaches for the wind on purpose, because in the Hebrew Scriptures Jesus grew up reading, the word for the Spirit is ruach, and ruach is also the word for wind and for breath. It is a feminine noun in Hebrew grammar, the way many nouns are, and Scripture uses that word for the Spirit who hovered over the deep like a bird over a nest at the beginning. That is grammar and it is picture. It is not a claim that the Spirit is a woman, and it is not a correction to the Father: God is neither male nor female, He is not a man, Scripture says so plainly, and He is not a woman either, and He reaches for a father's traits and a mother's traits to tell us who He is because everything good in both came from Him. So when Jesus says born of the Spirit, born of the wind, born of the breath, He is putting the whole birth on the far side of your control, where a wind is. You do not summon a wind. You are found by one.

You were, if you were born of the Spirit, born on the far side of your own control, because there is no other side a birth can happen on. That is what is written, spoken at night to a religious man who had done everything right. It is the wind's doing, and the Holy Spirit does not do it halfway or on probation.

The God who carries from the womb

Now a mother picture God chose for Himself, the one for a birth. In Isaiah, God speaks to His people about being carried, and He goes back further than any of us can remember:

Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been borne by me from before your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.Isaiah 46:3-4

Carried from the womb. Borne from before birth. That is a mother's language and God chose it for Himself, and in the same breath He is the God of Jacob and the Maker who says I have made, so the tender and the strong are the same speaker in the same verse. He did not choose it to replace the Father. He chose it to tell you that your belonging began before you could do anything about it, and is held by Someone who was carrying you before you knew you were being carried.

You are carried by the God who carried you from the womb, and He has never put you down to check whether you have kept up your end. The word says I have made and I will bear, and it is His Spirit who makes a written promise a present arm under you. Not a member. Borne. There is a difference and it is the difference between the tea rota and a birth.

The name on the line

Let us name the thing that has actually been happening at that counter, because I think you deserve to hear it said back to you plainly. You kept trying to sign your own certificate. Every Sunday, every rota, every kindness done on an empty tank, some part of you was adding a signature to a form, so that when the question came, whose child is this, there would be enough ink on the page for the answer to hold. And underneath that, quieter, is the fear that the man with the microphone said a thing over you that a birth would have felt like, and it did not feel like a birth, so perhaps it was only a membership, and memberships lapse.

Hear me. A birth is not located by feeling. Nobody remembers being born, and no baby has ever proved her belonging by describing the delivery room. I am not going to send you back into your memory to find a night warm enough to stand on, because a night is not what a birth stands on. It stands on the One who did the bearing. If you have come to Him, if you have received Him, then John says you were born of God, and the not-of-the-will-of-man clause covers your own will too. You did not birth yourself into this family and you cannot un-birth yourself out of it by failing to feel it.

You have a Father who is neither male nor female and carries the whole of a mother's tenderness in Himself, and He wrote His own name on the line that says parent, in His handwriting, before you picked up the pen. That is not my warmth. It is written, born of God, and the Spirit who bore you is the one reading it over you now.