Genesis 1:1-5; Acts 2:1-13; John 3:1-8
Unboxing the Wind
James Sledge May
24, 2015
There’s
an old joke about the UCC. The United Church of Christ is a close theological
cousin of Presbyterians, so the joke could probably be told about us or a
number of other “liberal” denominations… expect the joke only works with those
letters, UCC. Anyway, the joke goes like this. “What does UCC stand for? – Unitarians
considering Christ.”
The
joke refers to modern day Unitarians who believe in God but not the Trinity or
the notion that Jesus was divine. Of course that also describes Nicodemus. He
believes in God. He knows a lot about God. He is well versed in the Scriptures,
what we would call the Old Testament, and he is a deeply religious man.
All
this has helped him to conclude that Jesus is someone special. He calls Jesus a
teacher who has come from God. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, under
the cover of darkness, hoping to make some sense of Jesus, but he never really
gets the chance. Jesus befuddles him before he can ask his first question, and
Nicodemus never really recovers. If you read a little further in John’s gospel,
Nicodemus simply fades from view, never grasping what Jesus says.
His
confusion turns on a word play that can’t be done in English. Jesus speaks of
being born “anothen” (a/)nwqen), a Greek word that can refer to
location, meaning “from above,” or to timing, meaning “again” or “anew.” English
translations must go with one way or the other, and so some have born
again, which is what Nicodemus hears, while others, including our pew
Bibles, have born from above, which is what Jesus means.
No
doubt Nicodemus hears again because from above is even harder
for him to comprehend. He can understand what again means, even if it
seems impossible. But to be born from above, of the Spirit, caught in a divine
wind whose source is unseen. What on earth is that about?
The
notion of being transformed and reanimated by the Spirit is as puzzling to many
modern Christians as it was to Nicodemus, yet clearly this experience was a
hallmark of the early Church. In the letters of Paul, the gospels, and the book
of Acts, the Spirit births the Church, propels it, and sustains it. The Church
doesn’t burst into being and spread like wildfire over the Mediterranean world
simply because followers of Jesus share his teachings, but because the power of
God, the presence of the risen Christ, is palpably present in those followers.
Not
that it was the easiest thing to explain or describe. Paul speaks of being “in
Christ” through the Spirit. The Pentecost story in Acts tells of a violent
wind and of divided tongues, as of fire. At Jesus’ own baptism the Spirit
is described as a dove, and in the gospel of John the Spirit is received by the
disciples when Jesus breathed on them. In both Hebrew and
Greek, the word for Spirit is also the word for wind and for breath. And like
the wind/Spirit/breath of God that moves over the waters at creation, the
Spirit moves in the lives of Jesus’ followers, and everything gets stirred up
and changed and made new.
But as the years and centuries go by,
slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the dynamism of the
wind/breath/fire/Spirit gets tamed. As the Church becomes more and more an
institution, less and less an uprising, the Spirit gets talked about more than
experienced. Writes Brian McLaren, “In the millennia since Christ walked with
us on this Earth, we’ve often tried to box up the “wind” in manageable
doctrines. We’ve exchanged the fire of the Spirit for the ice of religious
pride. We’ve turned the wine back into water, and then let the water go
stagnant and lukewarm. We’ve traded the gentle dove of peace for the predatory
hawk or eagle of empire. When we have done so, we have ended up with just
another religious system, as problematic as any other: too often petty,
argumentative, judgmental, cold, hostile, bureaucratic, self-seeking, an enemy
of aliveness.”[1]
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