Sunday, March 30, 2014

The Landscape of Lent: Mud

Image Source (interesting insight about these struggling brick makers in India)
March 30, 2014 - Fourth Sunday in Lent
John 9:1-15, 24-34, 39-41

As he walked along, Jesus saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. 4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6 When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, 7 saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. 8 The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.” 10 But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” 11 He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” 12 They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”
13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. 14 Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. 15 Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.”

24 So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, “Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.” 25 He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 26 They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” 27 He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” 28 Then they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. 29 We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” 30 The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. 31 We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. 32 Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” 34 They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.
39 Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” 40 Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” 41 Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.

Sermon:  “The Landscape of Lent: Mud”

I detest scary movies.  Well, today’s scary movies, that is.  I have no interest whatsoever in seeing anything with saw, horror, haunting or Halloween in the title.  Give me Hitchcock over Hannibal Lector, any day.  My favorite scary movie, though, admittedly drawing from the tiny pool of those I’d actually watch, stars Audrey Hepburn.  In this movie by Terence Young, Audrey plays a blind woman who unfortunately finds herself in a game of cat-and-mouse with murderous drug dealers.  She accidentally winds up with a doll stuffed full of drugs and the criminals searching for it discover she has it and break into her apartment.

Anyone know the name of it?  Wait Until Dark.  It’s creepy, right?  Her blindness that could be seen as a disadvantage becomes her advantage as she evades those trying to attack her by breaking all of the lightbulbs in the house, plunging it into darkness that doesn’t phase her, but will keep them from being able to find her.  But just when we get certain she’s outwitted them, that downfall of many an American on a diet proves a threat: the refrigerator!  It has a light of course, and she forgot to unplug it.  The clever drug dealer opens the door and can find her, but finally she overcomes him and, in the act of unplugging the fridge, plunging the apartment back into total darkness, she saves her own life, of course at the very last possible minute.  Now, that is a scary movie, y’all.  Her blindness was her salvation, in the end.

The blind man in our reading from John this morning also found salvation through his inability to see.  He had been reduced to a life of begging to survive, and Jesus disciples decided to use him as a guinea pig for figuring out Jesus’ understanding of sin.  “Who sinned, Rabbi,” they asked, “that this man is born blind: him or his parents?”  But Jesus wasn’t in the business of using people on the margins of society as pawns for a theological lesson.  He was in the business of healing them.

“Neither,” Jesus said.  “But because he happens to be blind, my glory is going to shine through him even brighter.”  And then, to prove the point, Jesus spat on the ground and made mud.  Those disciples might have been thinking this was an odd moment to choose to make mud pies, but Jesus knew what he was doing. 

He smeared that earthy substance on the man’s eyes and told him to go, wash in pool of Siloam, and he would be healed of his blindness.   And he did.  And he was.  Healed of his blindness.  If only it was so easy to heal the Pharisees – the religious elite – of their blindness. 

But, I’m getting ahead of myself: I want to think a moment about that muddy miracle.  Why the spit and dirt?  Why the mud?  Was such an (admittedly gross) exercise really necessary for Jesus to heal the blind man?

It’s really fun, actually, to hear the different theories people have for why Jesus used mud. 

Some say saliva was used to treat blindness in Jesus’ day (ew, but this still doesn’t answer the question of mud).

Others make a connection with Genesis our reading today, making people out of dirt of the ground.
A particularly creative person said rubbing mud on someone is offensive, just as the gospel is offensive to some people. 

My favorite blind interpretation (forgive the pun) is that the blind man probably had no eyes to begin with, so Jesus showed his divine nature by actually making them out of the clay (like in Genesis).  Jesus the Eyeball Sculptor!  A bit creepy, isn’t it?

The truth is, we don’t know why Jesus used mud.  And we don’t know why that blind man had to go wash in the pool of Siloam to be healed, either.  Jesus did not need mud to heal that man.  He could have done it without sticking mud in his eyes.  But he chose not to.  Which is really fascinating to me.

He chose to use something tangible, something that could be explained and seen and felt, something as ordinary as mud, to do something that could not be explained or understood.  And I don’t think this is because Jesus needed to heal that way.  I think this is because the blind man needed to be healed that way.  And those skeptical religious leaders needed to see it happen in that way.

When God uses earthly means to bring divine wholeness – such as mud, or medicine, or doctors, or counselors, or the small kindnesses of strangers – this isn’t because God can only work that way, it’s because we need such things.  We do not need the sort of healing that is experienced on some spiritual plane, far above and beyond the struggles and trials of this life.  We need a healing that is tangible, tell-able, transformative in the muddy, everyday grittiness of this life.

And God knows this.  So God, who is so far beyond us, who did make us out of the dirt of the ground (in whatever way we understand that to have happened), sheds a little bit of glory to kneel in front of us, get God’s hands dirty and bring wholeness.  And God, who doesn’t need our help at all to do this, chooses to involve us in our own healing and the healing of others.

This is why I believe that blind man’s healing was half what Jesus did in putting mud on his eyes, and half in going himself to wash it off in the pool of Siloam, meaning Sent.  The blind man had a part to play in his own healing.  We have a part to play in seeking the wholeness God has for us, our community, our nation, our world.  Because healing absolutely has to be earthly.  How can someone believe in the sort of spiritual peace God brings if another human being hasn’t ever shown them compassion or love on this earth?

I wish that the blind man had experienced a bit of that before he met Jesus.  We have reason to believe he hadn’t.  And worse, after his healing, the religious leaders were even more hateful to him.  They called his parents in for questioning, grilled him on how this so-called healing happened and eventually chucked him out of the synagogue, continuing to exclude him from worshipping God, naming him as some sort of con-artist.  All of this is because they were blind to the wholeness God could bring, blind to the fact that Jesus was capable of acting outside of the carefully-orchestrated religious establishment. 

This story ends with one man being cured of his blindness and many, many more continuing to fumble around in the dark because their vision of God’s work in the world was all black-and-white, all certainty and no mystery, all power and no vulnerability, all cleanliness and no mud.

Jesus ends this story just as it began, with a question of who sinned to cause such blindness.  Jesus began by saying that it was not sin that made the blind man unable to see from birth.  He ends with quite a different statement – it is exactly that, sin, which makes the Pharisees blind to God’s glory right in front of their eyes, in the eyes of one they could only ever see as “other.” 

And so the question for us is, are we sinfully clinging to a narrow vision of God and our neighbor and thus blind to God working in the mud and mire of this world?  Or are we desperately seeking after the wholeness God brings, using every possible earthly means to discover it, and playing our role in the healing of ourselves, our neighbors and our world? 


Choosing the first means a black-and-white world where people only get what they deserve, grace is an extravagance we can’t afford, and wholeness is just a mud-pie-in-the-sky-dream.  But choosing the second (which I hope we will) means we are all of us sinners fumbling in the dark toward salvation, but people who know amazing grace, people who once were lost but now are found, who were blind but now, in ways we cannot explain or understand, see.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.

Monday, March 24, 2014

The Landscape of Lent: Water

Image Source
March 23, 2014 -- The 3rd Sunday in Lent
John 4:5-29 
5So Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.6Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
7A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 15The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
16Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’ 18for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25The woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
27Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” 28Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”


Sermon: “The Landscape of Lent: Water”

We don’t even find out her name, this woman.  We know only her label – Samaritan – half-breed, Pagan, less-than-Jewish, less-than-human in the eyes of many. 

We don’t know everything about her past, but we know enough to believe she was no saint.  The fact that she went to draw water from the well at noon shows that.  Drawing water from the well was the equivalent of men “holding court” at the gas station in Cameron at the bottom of the hill each morning.  It was social hour.  But this Samaritan woman, well y’all, she wasn’t invited.

Perhaps having to do with her unconventional relationships with men, or the cliquish ways of the other women drawing water, she was forced to draw her water in the heat of the day, so as to avoid the scorching judgment of the other women in the community.

Perhaps this daily ritual was a painful reminder of her exclusion from her people.  Perhaps it was a welcome time for solitude, away from pointed stares and whispered accusations.  She certainly did not expect company.  But she got it anyway.

As she walked to Jacob’s well, she saw someone sitting by it.  A man!  One glance told her he was one of them, a Jew, and she got a bit nervous.  Talking to him was unacceptable. Sharing water with him was illegal, for she was Samaritan, unclean.  But he didn’t  seem to care much for legalities.

No greeting, no explanation for his presence at the well at high noon, just a demand, “Give me a drink.”

Was it a trap?  She thought it might be.  Surely he knew that was impossible.  Perhaps he worked for the government.  Answering like a student dutifully saying the Pledge of Allegiance, she said, “How is it that you – a Jew – ask a drink of me – a Samaritan?”  Then he said, “If you knew who I really was, you’d give me a drink.  I have a gift from God – living water, and I could give it to you.”

Not understanding any of this, she replied, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep.  Where do you get this living water?”

There are several wells she might have been referring to.  The deep cavern of emptiness failed marriages and social isolation had placed within her: that well was deep. 

The dark places within this society that were so adamant about keeping people separated, making sharing a simple cup of water with someone of another skin color or religion illegal: that well was deep.

The recesses of her own heart, tired of trying to find the love and worth that always seemed to elude her: that well was deep, too.

We also know what these deep wells are like.

The well of disappointment that we haven’t lived up to the expectations we, others, God have for us.

The well of spiritual emptiness amid material overconsumption, where buy as we might, worth doesn’t seem to come with that credit card statement.

The well of grief left after losing someone we love, or losing a way of life we loved, or a mobility we loved, or a career we loved.

The well of numbness that can’t seem to be sparked into feeling no matter how hard we seek after God.

The well is deep.  And you have no bucket.

That nameless woman knew this.  But still, though it was both impossible and illegal, she asked anyway: “Give me this living water, that I might never be thirsty again (and that I might never have to come to this place of gossip and judgment again).”

She did want that water.  What she did not want was for this Jewish stranger to know her story, for when he found that out, his eyes would grow as cold and judgmental as all the others.  He would leave her to her reputation, and she would be alone again.

So, imagine her dismay when he said, “Go get your husband and come back.”  Just in case he hadn’t heard the rumors, she clung to the tatters of her dignity and said, “I…I’m not married.”

“You’re right,” he said. “You’re not.  But you were – 5 times! And the guy you’re with now isn’t your husband.”  She was about to just drop her jar and leave right then.  So, he was like all the rest.  All of that “living water” talk was just a prelude to gossiping about her.  Instead, she tried to change the subject – this guy clearly liked talking about God, so she brought up worship spaces for his people.  But he wasn’t having it.

“Those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.” he replied.  Ah, truth.  Such a simple little word.  Such an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, being truthful.  For when she told the truth about what she had done, people were hateful to her.  Lies weren’t right, but at least they didn’t shun you at the well, or cross to the other side of the road when they saw you. 

She could worship God with her spirit – the part of her that felt clean, whole, happy.  It was a small part, and some days it was all but invisible, but she could at least offer God that.  But this man – this strange law-breaking man – said God wanted more.  God wanted all of her, even the shameful parts.  But wouldn’t God then shun her like everyone else?  She couldn’t risk feeling rejected by God, too. 

Denial was better than that.  Face burning with embarrassment as much as that noon heat she said, “I know a messiah is coming.  Maybe he’ll explain how to get this living water to me.” 

“I am he,” said this Jewish stranger.  And the crazy thing was (other than some random guy at the well claiming to be the Messiah), she believed him.  Especially when his followers showed up and seemed to mimic his actions, which meant they weren’t hateful to her either.  They didn’t even question his law-breaking. 

She couldn’t explain it, but somehow this Messiah made her feel like God welcomed her, just as she was, in a way no one else had ever done.  With that overwhelming acceptance, that irrational compassion, she felt something, like a first drop of rain in the desert place of her parched heart.  She felt hope.  Life.  Perhaps he had living water after all, and maybe he didn’t even need a bucket to reach it.  Just honesty.

So she ran, leaving her water jar behind, and into the city square, not even caring what people thought.  “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done!” she shouted, much to her own surprise.  “He can’t be the Messiah, can he?” she asked herself as much as the bewildered crowd.

Honesty.  That was what reached this living water.  This Messiah was honest about who he really was, even showing his nature despite cultural and religious customs.  He didn’t hide who he was, even if it meant being arrested.  And so in response, in the face of such honesty, she could be who she really was.  Then, and only then, could she began to experience this living water, not as something that covered up her past, but as something that washed it clean. 

She became the first preacher to call Jesus the Messiah, that nameless woman.  She told everyone who would listen.  And perhaps it was her bravery at being honest about her checkered past, perhaps it was the fire in her eyes, perhaps it was something God stirred within the listeners, but people believed her.  They believed that this Messiah was not just the Savior of a random Samaritan woman, he was their Savior.  And they believed that he wasn’t just their Savior, but the Savior of the whole world. 

All because of a noon encounter at a well, a bit of loving law-breaking and a whole lot of honesty.  Worshipping God in spirit and truth.

Salvation, you see, isn’t just for our souls, those parts of us that feel most connected to God.  Salvation is for our guilt-ridden, queasy stomachs, for our weary, tired hearts, for our calculating, skeptical heads, just like it was for that Samaritan woman’s deepest regrets.  Salvation is for all of us, because this Messiah still comes demanding nothing less than every part of who we are.

And salvation isn’t just for our pious churches, or our prayerful community.  Salvation is for the midnight Walmart shopper who can only buy groceries after getting off work at the fast food joint at eleven.  Salvation is for the prisoner who feels that their entire life now centers around what might have just been one mistake.  Salvation is for the systems that reward the greedy and reduce the poor to statistical burdens.  Salvation is for a planet plagued by overpopulation, pollution and the disasters they cause. 
This Messiah doesn’t just demand the most comfortable or seemingly-holy parts of us or this world.  He demands all of it.

All must be filled with the living waters of salvation.  And so this story of that unnamed woman must be told, alongside our own stories.  We call this testimony.  Testimony is not saying how perfect God has made us.  Testimony is saying how God knows our imperfection and loves us anyway.  And such counter-cultural honesty changes things.  Honesty about the way we and the world really are.  Honestly about all the places where salvation needs to be found. 

Such holy truth-telling starts first, a few drops of hope, then a trickle of change, and then a flood of salvation, not just of souls.  Saving souls is just the beginning.  These waters of truth seep into the most deserted places of this world and our lives, leaving salvation in their wake, until all we can do is testify with a question, “He can’t be the Messiah – can he?”  Amen.

Monday, March 17, 2014

The Landscape of Lent: Wind

Image Source
March 16, 2014 - The Second Sunday in Lent
John 3:1-17
1Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 2He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” 3Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” 4Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” 5Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 6What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 8The 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.” 9Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 10Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?
11“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. 12If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
17“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”


The Landscape of Lent: Wind

What was the darkness made of, What color was that night?
Was it clean,
Did it crunch underfoot,
And did cicadas chew its edges?
In what temper had the sun gone down? Had day sagged off
Like a shop boy pulling down the blinds? Or did it dance away in skirts and bangles, A bride leaving her father's house?
O God, that night-Was it cold and did it taste like fog? Did it wrap me in its arms
Or push me into a street of eyeless houses?
It's gone, that night.
I remember only the voice.

A lamp is not the sun. A dish of fire in the corner plays a little with the dark, rearranges the shadows. It cannot make a day.
Shadows ate his elbows, sprawled across his knees
And smudged away his face.
Fingers of lamplight
Stitched a crown around his head.
It came and went.
I heard what I could not see,
I saw with my ears,
And was not happy with it.
"Born again? How can this be?" meant— and he knew it—"I do not want it so." An infant's naked flesh did not appeal to me.
No more the windy sea.
Creation was, is, had been;
leave it alone.
Those who go down to the sea in ships
are young,
the unestablished, the uncreated.
Let them.
Who are you?
Who are you to demand such things, To drop me into the sea's womb And flay me with such a wind?
"Who are you?" crawled up my spine and clamped its teeth around my neck.
Easy now to understand
Why I do not remember that night.

Later, I saw.
I saw the naked flesh soaked in the blood of birth, under an unshadowed sun.
What wind there was— such wind I had feared— was no more than a breath wheezed from between swollen lips.

Rabbi, my friend,
I will follow you out to sea.
I will walk with you
a thousand darkened streets.
I will walk farther than that.
Who are you?
I will not ask again.
I am afraid I know.
And further will night instruct me.   
And morning.

This poem, “Nicodemus”, by Miriam Pollard, speaks of that Jewish leader who thought he knew it all until he met a Rabbi named Jesus.  He came seeking answers, or more honestly put, seeking Jesus’ validation of the answers he already had. 

“Are you who people say you are?” he asked bluntly.  Jesus dodged the trap of a question and instead spoke deeply, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

“But what does that mean?  How can you be born twice?” an irritated Nic responded.  A patient Jesus continued to answer with riddles, “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit.  What is born of the flesh is flesh; what is born of the Spirit is Spirit.  The wind blows where it chooses, you hear the sound of it, but you don’t know where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

“How can this be?” a frustrated Nic demands.  Now it’s Jesus’ turn to ask the questions: “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet don’t understand these things??”  Then Jesus speaks about heavenly and earthly things, about his journey to bring eternal life, that the world might be saved through him, because that was always God’s plan. 

We don’t hear what Nic says in response.  We don’t see the carefully-crafted answers he has for God evaporate in the experience of a moment with this strange sort of Rabbi Jesus.  Which is why I like the take of the poem I began with so much: it imagines Nicodemus as utterly befuddled by the windy riddles of this Teacher.  You see, though Nic was Jewish, these days we might have called him Presbyterian.

I say this because he like to think about his faith, he wanted a faith that engaged his head as well as his heart, (well, perhaps his head a little more).  He wanted to reason his way through the story of who Jesus was and why he came.  And instead of presenting him with a thesis on the incarnation or a lecture on the Holy Spirit, Jesus preached poetry.  In other words, for this man so obsessed with engaging his head, Jesus instead engaged his heart, a heart it seems Nicodemus hardly trusted.

Some things can’t be explained away, though we’ll always try.  You can put John 3:16 on a bumper sticker and recite it from memory every morning, but that sort of sacrificial love offered through Jesus Christ can never really be explained, or fully understood. 

You can think about the Spirit as a holy intuition or instinct, but we can never tame the wild blowing of that stirring Wind, or decide where it goes.  We can do all the things we think we’re supposed to do as Christians, and know all we think we’re meant to know, and yet still we will find ourselves swept up in the wind of that Spirit in ways we can’t really explain.

Some things just have to be experienced.  

You don’t ask a child first tasting ice cream to describe its chemical composition, you ask “How does it taste?” 

You don’t ask a blind person seeing a sunrise for the first time to methodically recite what colors they can and cannot make out, you ask, “What do you see?” 

You don’t ask a teenager holding someone’s hand at the movies for the first time the ordered way they interlaced their fingers, you ask, “How did it feel?” 

You don’t ask someone hearing Clair de Lune for the first time to recite each note in perfect procession, you ask, “How did it sound?”

And so we don’t ask Jesus to fit into our already-full head of doctrine.  He instead asks us, “But what do you believe, in your heart?”  This isn’t hyper-emotional manipulation (which we Presbyterians are particularly wary of, and rightly so).

This is our faith moving beyond the page, beyond the head knowledge, beyond the salvation formula to the unpredictable wilds of our hearts.  This Lent, we are called, just as Nicodemus was that day he got the answers he never wanted, to lay aside our agendas and overstuffed ideas and let ourselves be swept up by God’s Spirit.

Who knows where we will be blown to.  Perhaps the wind of the Spirit will blow us into the life of the man selling newspapers in downtown Aberdeen who could really use a hot cup of coffee, or a cold glass of sweet tea.  Perhaps the wind of the Spirit will blow us into an uncomfortable conversation with someone we need to make peace with.  Perhaps the wind of the Spirit will blow us into more heart-felt prayer, or more regular worship, or more space for silence in our overcrowded life.

We have no control over where the Spirit will blow us, and this is both liberating and terrifying.  But we can be sure of one thing: the Spirit who hovered over the chaotic waters of creation, who hovered over Jesus at his baptism, who blew through the church at Pentecost, is always on the move, always sweeping us up in that dance. 

Sometimes, it is not the time for carefully-crafted answers.  Lent is one of those times.  Sometimes, we just have to let go, to be caught up in the mysterious wind of God’s Spirit until we are carried beyond ourselves.  And in these miraculous moments of being caught up, we do not ask how we earned them or try to make clear meaning of them.  We simply experience them, and embrace them, until we arrive somewhere we never intended to be, with answers we never expected to hear.


Thanks be to the God who creates and re-creates us over and over again, to the Son who responds to our head-focused certainty with heart-stirring riddles and to the Spirit who, uncontrollable as a wild wind, refuses to leave us as we are, amen.