February 17, 2008
(The Second Sunday in Lent)
Listen to the Wind
by
The Rev. Joe
Behen, Clergy Assistant
Genesis 12:1-4a • Psalm 121
• Romans 4:1-5, 13-17 •
John 3:1-17
(From
The Lectionary Page)
It’s hard to imagine why it is that Jesus would be so abrasive to the Jewish leader that comes by night to question Jesus. After all, Nicodemus does seem to “get it” on some level. He tells Jesus that “…no one can do the signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” So why, then, is Jesus so hard on him? Are we not to question our faith, but simply to accept what we are told?
Nicodemus comes to Jesus with two things: knowledge (he is a “teacher, and a leader of the Jews”), and he comes with questions. His questions are direct. He wants to make sense of Jesus, to find a category for Jesus in terms of what he already knows. In short, Nicodemus wants his confusion replaced with certainty. He wants Jesus to put aside the ambiguity and to simply come clean – to give him something that he can grasp onto. But Jesus returns his questions with a challenge. “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” Jesus is pointing towards Nicodemus’s knowledge as perhaps being the very thing keeping him in the dark. In other words, Nicodemus knows how things work in the world. Jesus and his teaching are true to Nicodemus only to the extent that he can fit them into this framework. In a sense, he is asking questions for which he is unable to be open to the answer that Jesus gives. It is this sense of the challenge that Jesus issues to Nicodemus and to us, that still gives me goose bumps when I read this passage. Am I really open enough to see God doing new, unexpected things? Jesus catches both Nicodemus and us quite off-guard. It’s like stepping around the corner while walking down a brisk, February street, only to be confronted by an unexpected gale that touches your bones in an instant. Often, my only thought then is the warm familiarity that four walls and a cup of coffee will soon provide.
“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.” There is a kind of mysterious quality to wind. It can be explained scientifically, but that explanation cannot replace the experience of it. I love the times in the spring and fall when the air conditioners are off and the windows open. The feel and smell of the breeze always suggests the strange and the unknown. It’s almost like it reminds me that there’s more to the world than meets the eye. Writers throughout the ages, including the evangelist John, have used the wind to convey a sense of life’s uncontrollable and unknowable mystery. The very first sentence of the Bible sort of sets the stage for this peculiar sensation: “…the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the waters.” The wind here is from God, but its purpose and its workings remain unknown.
Joanne Harris’s book Chocolat begins with the words, “We came on the wind…” The book is about a small French village that knows God only through tradition, not unlike the image that John paints of Nicodemus. Completely unaware of it themselves, the people in this village are unable to see God working in their midst when the wind blows into town people that don’t fit neatly into their traditional view of life. It is only when they become reacquainted with the wild and uncontrollable God that is our God, that they begin to see God’s hand in the present. It’s also interesting to note that the book begins on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent, and concludes on Easter Monday. During the course of Lent this little community learns to be touched by what they cannot grasp, what they cannot control. They learn that it is God that defines reality, and that God does this in their very midst, every day. Rather than grasping at the wind and rejecting what they can not possess, they learn to listen to it, to let it act on them, to change them.
Our own community is about to enter into a process of trying to listen for God in our midst. Early next month there will be an All-cathedral gathering, a time in which we will come together to be in God’s presence, to listen, and to say, “your will be done, not ours.” What do we expect to happen? How will we know we are doing God’s will? I’m not sure, but I do know that by the very act of being still before God, we will be changed. We will take a step towards becoming a people who do not “already know,” a people who seek an open-ness of being that refuses to confine God to our own worldview; to be a community seeking the wild and mysterious God in the world today, a vision that we cannot do without if we, The Church, are to point the world towards this God; we will take a step towards becoming a community trying to listen to the wind rather than grasping at it.
That Jesus is challenging Nicodemus in today’s gospel is an important point to make. The lesson ends by saying that, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Nicodemus first came to Jesus “by night.” Dark and light are used extensively by John to portray Truth vs. untruth, real knowing vs. ignorance, or life-giving open-ness to God vs. a closed view of God in which God is and does what we think God is or should do. Nicodemus will eventually move in John’s gospel into the light. He comes into the light because he hears Jesus’ challenge to understand how he is blind to God because of his own expectations of God. Jesus continues to issue this challenge to all who would follow him. Let’s use this Lenten season and our gathering on March 1st to respond to this challenge by fully expecting to see God in our lives, without creating expectations about what that will look like. Let’s replace our knowing with some listening. Let’s listen to the Wind.
