The Landscape of Lent: Wind

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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.