Duane Shank

Lent 2                                                                                            Genesis 12:1-5
February 17, 2008                                                                       John 3:1-17

Open to the Spirit

Let’s imagine Abram.

This story is the first encounter we have in the Bible with Abram.  His father had just moved the family from Ur to Ha’ran.  Abram has settled in, bought some land, gotten married, is part of his father’s household.

Then God says to him, “"Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.”  In other words, leave everything you have and go.  I’ll let you know where.

Most of us, if we heard God say that to us, would reply – Well, just wait a minute,  I’ve got a wife or husband, a family and friends, a job, a mortgage, possessions.  I can’t just get up and leave.  And where am I going? You left out that little detail.

But, the story tells us, “So Abram went, as the LORD had told him.”  He leaves everything he’s known and follows God’s call.  And that trust in God resulted God promising him, “I will bless you … and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

Let’s imagine Nicodemus.

A leading Pharisee, a member of the Sanhedrin, well educated in Torah, comes to Jesus by night. This is traditionally taken to mean that he wanted to come secretly because he was afraid (although I’ve never been sure what it was he was supposed to be afraid of.)  A better explanation is that it was common then (as it is for us now), to work all day and then study and visit at night.  Nicodemus had finished his job for the day, eaten dinner, and wanted to spend the evening talking with this new teacher.

He initiates the conversation, “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."  He’s heard of Jesus, perhaps heard him preach and perhaps witnessed his miracles.  But he doesn’t ask a question – who are you? What are you really about?  He simply states his observation, his belief, that this is something new and different – he realizes that God is present in this man. 

But Jesus doesn’t answer by saying, yes, you’re right. I have come from God. He responds in another direction. He replies, “I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again/from above/anew.”  We can’t really say the words in English the way Nicodemus heard it.  In Greek, and I’m told, the Aramaic-Hebrew root, the words carry all three of these meanings. 

Jesus is telling him, you can’t really understand me, you can’t understand the kingdom of God, unless you are born again/from above/anew.

Jesus is saying, Nicodemus, if you really believe what you just said, then be prepared for some radical changes. You must start over. You must be changed from above.  Unless you do this, you can’t understand the kingdom.

But Nicodemus doesn’t get it.  He thinks Jesus is speaking about a physical rebirth- a return to his mother’s womb - which he knows is impossible. So Jesus tries again. And the word he uses here, in Hebrew and Greek, means both spirit and wind.  Most of our English translations confuse us by using first one word, then the other, when they are intended to be synonymous.  God’s spirit – the creative power of God – is the wind from God that began creation and changes everything. 

So, Jesus tells Nicodemus, (and this is from The Message, which I think captures that dual meaning) -

5 Jesus said, "You're not listening. Let me say it again. Unless a person submits to this original creation - the 'wind hovering over the water' creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into a new life - it's not possible to enter God's kingdom. 6 When you look at a baby, it's just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can't see and touch - the Spirit - and becomes a living spirit. 7 "So don't be so surprised when I tell you that you have to be 'born from above' - out of this world, so to speak. 8 You know well enough how the wind blows this way and that. You hear it rustling through the trees, but you have no idea where it comes from or where it's headed next. That's the way it is with everyone 'born from above' by the wind of God, the Spirit of God."

He’s saying that human nature creates human ideas.  But the creative power of God, the wind, the spirit, the power of God that blows on all of creation, brings new life.  And this spirit of God blows where it chooses.  We can observe its effects – the wind rustling through the trees – but we don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going.  So it is, Jesus says, with those who answer the call to follow the Spirit. 

The question for us in these two stories is, are we open to the call of God, to the creative rushing wind of the Spirit, to take us places we don’t know?  Do we trust God enough to follow to a new land, to his Kingdom?

Both stories remind me of a line from Chilean folksinger Victor Jara – “being able to live, working at the beginning of a story without knowing the end.”

Our human tendency is to want control, to do things our way, to know where we’re going.   But God is free, the rushing spirit/wind of a new creation.

Walter Brueggeman wrote in The Prophetic Imagination of the “reality and confession of God’s radical freedom … the alternative religion of the freedom of God” and concludes that “we will not have a politics of justice and compassion unless we have a religion of God’s freedom.”

The freedom of God, the new land the Spirit of God calls us to, might make us afraid, threaten to overwhelm us – but only if we seek to maintain control rather than surrendering to the freedom of God to lead and create.

Looking at my notes from our retreat, we acknowledged that we have community not because we created it, but as a gift of God given to be a blessing.  We confessed that we need to be open to transition, to be willing to change and grow, to give up power and control, to nurture new leadership.

I am struck by the words of Chris and Dora in the introduction to our Lenten booklet –

We know where we come from and where we’ve been. Our history is rich and remembered.  We do not know where we are going.  Some of us are embarking on new roads, others are reconsidering the road they are on, and others of us are still sitting by the wayside. … God still calls us to be witnesses to God’s kingdom – in our neighborhoods, our city, and our wider world.”

And we believe, like Abram, that if we follow God’s call, God will bless us and make us a blessing.  God says to us as he did to Abram – trust me, start the journey, follow the spirit.  I’ll be with you, I’ll guide you to a new land.  And as Jesus said to Nicodemus, we must be born again/from above/anew.  We must be willing to reorient from old ways to God’s new ways.

In our individual lives and as a community, we need to be open to the call of God, to the creative spirit of God.  We are called to begin a journey without knowing the end. 

For unless we are open to the new things God wishes for us, the new creation God wishes to make of us, the new land to which God desires to take us; we cannot follow Jesus, we cannot live the kingdom of justice and compassion, we cannot see the new land.

My prayer for myself and for the Community is that we allow ourselves to be open to the Spirit, to the call of God, to the transition we have embarked upon.  If we respond, if we believe God, trust God, if we follow the rushing wind of the Spirit, it will, as with Abram, be “reckoned to us as righteousness.”  And God will bless us and make us a blessing.