Walking with the Spirit

It seemed to come out of nowhere. In the dirt yard of his Aunt Seneva’s house, John Lewis was happily playing with his fourteen cousins.1 Suddenly they saw the sky grow dark, they felt the wind come at them, and they glimpsed distant flashes of lightening. As Aunt Seneva rushed the fifteen terrified children into her little house, the wind began to howl, and the house started to shake. Then the wood plank flooring of the house began to bend, and a corner of the room began to rise. As the children wondered whether they and the house would fly away, Aunt Seneva had them all join hands and walk toward the rising corner of the floor. As the storm howled and beat the outside of the house around them, the children walked back and forth, changing direction with the changing direction of the wind and holding the house down through the sheer weight of their bodies. After that experience, “walking with the wind” became a metaphor for Lewis, a way of talking about his life that reminded him of Jesus’ invitation to Nicodemus. From his childhood home in Troy, Alabama, Lewis walked with the wind to Fisk University and the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville. That same wind pushed him onto freedom rides and civil rights marches, and into leadership of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and other community organizations. In 1987, again pushed by the Spirit, Lewis joined the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Georgia’s fifth Congressional district, a position he has held ever since.

Like John Lewis faithful people are restless people. Faithful people are always ready, faithful people continually hear God’s call to leave the safe, the familiar, the cozy, and the known, to head out into the unknown, trusting in the leading of the Spirit. Today we’ve heard one of the most challenging sentences in the entire Hebrew Bible: “Abraham went, as the Lord had told him….” Here Abraham was comfortably settled in Haran, with his wife, his in-laws, his servants, his tents, and his flocks. Although he was childless, God made him a most astonishing promise: “I will make of you a great nation.” But with that promise there was also a command: “Go from your country and your kindred … to the land that I will show you.” Did Abraham want to hear that command? We don’t know. Scripture only tells us that the father of the members of at least three faith communities didn’t argue, or hesitate. He packed up his family, his servants, and his tents, put his animals on the road, and headed out towards Canaan. Thank heavens, brother Lot was willing to go along! Paul too was ready to accept God’s call. Knowing full well what his own change of direction on the road to Damascus had cost him, he strongly identified with Abraham’s willingness to trust God’s call and do the unthinkable.

Nicodemus’s story is a little different. John’s Gospel was written at the end of the first century. By this time the lines had hardened between the Jewish religious leaders and those who professed allegiance to Jesus, and the easy co-existence of the two communities had begun to dissolve. We don’t know much about Nicodemus, other than that he was a leader of the group that read and followed the Mosaic law very strictly. Yet clearly he and others had seen the “signs” that Jesus was doing, the signs that clearly demonstrated his identity as the Word made Flesh. Nicodemus had come by night, perhaps in some fear and trepidation, perhaps to confirm what he had seen and heard. Jesus doesn’t affirm or dispute Nicodemus’s opening statement. He doesn’t ask Nicodemus who he represents. Instead, he offers Nicodemus an invitation: “Come, be born anew, experience that inner transformation that will lead you more deeply into God’s life than you have ever been.” Birth. Think about it for minute. It’s a messy, difficult process, that’s painful for all concerned. Good Pharisee that he is, and used to parsing every aleph and bet of the law, Nicodemus, of course, takes Jesus’ invitation literally and thinks he has to be reborn physically. Was Jesus being deliberately opaque when he answered Nicodemus by talking about the wind? Both in Hebrew and in Greek, the language in which the Gospel is written, the word for “wind” and “spirit” is the same. Like the wind that blew through John Lewis’s life, like the Spirit that delivered God’s call to Abraham, perhaps Jesus was inviting cautious, confused Nicodemus into something completely new and different. After he voices his confusion, we don’t know how Nicodemus responded – he drops out of the conversation after Jesus’ mention of the wind. We do know that he reappears twice more in John’s Gospel: in chapter 7 when he comes to Jesus’ defense, and at the time of Jesus’ burial. In each case, his motivation is unclear. Did he eventually walk with the wind into a Christian community? We don’t know.

We do know this. The Spirit/wind continues to blow, Jesus continues to invite us into renewed life, and during Lent especially, we are invited to engage in self-examination, and inner transformation. We are invited to listen more attentively to the Holy Gust, both personally and corporately. Martin Buber once said that the young of any age are those who have not yet unlearned what it means to begin. The voice teacher in Jonathan Levy’s “Master Class” gently tells her students, “Let us begin again.” Abraham, Sarah, Paul, and, hopefully Nicodemus show us that faith to “begin again” is essential to a deeper relationship with God. Where are you stuck? What do you need to let go of in order to begin again? Perhaps the place to which Jesus invites us is a place of wondering, even confusion. Yes, change is difficult, but, if you were born again, would you grow up differently? If you had the chance, would you let the Spirit blow you into a different place? Is Jesus inviting you to see your life from a different perspective? Would your life be different if you believed with absolutely certainty that God loved you so deeply that God was willing to demonstrate that love on the Cross?

What would it mean on the parish level to be reborn, to be blown by the Spirit to a different place? Is St. Peter’s a warm, comfortable place, a womb from which God is straining with all God’s might to push us out? Or, to put the question differently, supposing we were to re-found this parish? Would it look as it did in 1841? Would it look as it did in 1964? Would it look and feel as it does now? Would we build a building like this one? Would we have a building at all? How might this parish be different if we were truly to accept Jesus’ invitation to grow up differently, to accept God’s deep love for all people, including those on the other side of the red doors?

Do you find the prospect of change daunting? When we take the long view, we know that the church has been changing, growing, and evolving since its very beginning. The church’s understanding of the way to carry forward Jesus’ mission changed between the writing of Paul’s first letters in the late ‘40s and the writing of John’s Gospel in the ‘90s. The contents of the New Testament and the statements of the various creeds were not fully determined for three more centuries. The early church slowly evolved into the church that blossomed in the Middle Ages. Out of the medieval church came the church of the Reformation, which in turn gave way to the church of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today we are in another time of profound change in the church, as our denominations struggle to reborn into yet a different world and to create new and different communities in which to experience God’s transformative powers. As we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century, we continue to change, we continue to grow into what we hope will be renewed faith and closer relationships with Christians of other denominations and members of other faith communities. And we continue to ponder what these new and evolving Christian communities might look like.

And here is the good news. God continues to birth us. God continues to invite us to walk with the wind, to let ourselves be blown away by the Spirit. Especially during this season of Lent God invites us to be attentive to the movements of the Spirit, the gales and the puffs. God continues to push, pull, call, and lead us. God continues to challenge us to leave our comfort zones, to change and grow, even when we aren’t sure why we have been called or where exactly we are headed. God does not ask of us certainty. God only asks of us trust.

Christ, your summons echoes true
when you but call my name.
Let me turn and follow you
and never be the same.
In your company I’ll go
where your love and footsteps show,
Thus I’ll move and live and grow in you and you in me.

1. The story is told by Patricia Templeton in Synthesis for March 20, 2011 (Boyds, MD: Brunson Publishing Co.).