Blowin' in the Wind

Blowin’ in the Wind

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

March 12, 2017

Scripture: John 3:1-8

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t much like the wind. At least when it’s not really hot out I don’t. The wind makes you cold. You know, wind chill factor. The temperature you actually experience when its windy. That temperature is significantly lower than the temperature on a thermometer. Sone of you know that I live in Sultan. You may or may not know how windy it often is out there. We’re just west of what I’ve heard called “the Index gap.” That’s a gap through the Cascade Mountains. When there is a strong low pressure system off the coast and higher pressure east of the mountains the wind comes howling through the Index gap right at Gold Bar and Sultan. It can blow a real gale at us. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve laid in bed listening to the howling of that wind and praying that my roof holds together. I sure don’t like being out in that wind for any length of time. It’s cold. It can even be hard to walk into. So no, I don’t like the wind.

I don’t like the wind, but here’s Jesus talking about the wind and about the Spirit in the verses we just heard from the Gospel of John. Now, there’s an odd thing about the two primary languages in which our Bible is written, ancient Hebrew and what’s called koine Greek. In both of those languages the same word can have three different meanings. In Hebrew that word is ruach. In Greek it’s pneuma. Both of those words can mean breath, or they can mean wind, or they can mean spirit. The English translation we just heard, and as far as I know every English translation, uses both the word wind and the word spirit in its translation. The Greek original uses only one word for both meanings, the word pneuma. The pneuma blows where it pleases, and so it is with everyone born of the pneuma. In the original language of these verses there is somehow some kind of intimate connection between wind and spirit. We lose that sense in English because we use those two different words, not one word as in the original. That’s unfortunate, for it makes it harder for us to figure out what in heaven’s name Jesus is talking about here. Nicodemus, whom the text calls a leader of the Jewish people and to whom Jesus is talking here, can’t figure it out either. So Jesus explains it to him, and to us.

In his explanation John’s Jesus takes the wind to be something quite mysterious. He says we hear it, but we can’t tell where it is coming from or where it is going. Now please understand. The ancient world that produced this text had little or none of the meteorological science that we take for granted. I just gave you a more or less scientific explanation of the strong easterly winds we get out in Sultan. I mentioned areas of higher and lower barometric pressure. No one in the ancient, pre-scientific world of the Bible could have given you that explanation or understood one if they heard it. Sometimes it seems to us like the weather remains a mystery to our meteorologists even with all their science, they seem to get it wrong so often. Still, our world knows a whole lot more about weather science than the ancient world did. To them the weather was surely a greater mystery than it is to us. That’s why Jesus can say quite correctly to Nicodemus that you cannot tell where the wind comes from or where it’s going.

But of course Jesus isn’t really concerned with the weather here. He’s concerned with the other meaning of the word pneuma, namely, spirit. He says that a person “born of the Spirit” is like that wind. He apparently means that just as you can tell that the wind is blowing but can’t tell where it comes from or where it’s going, so you can perhaps tell that a person is Spirit-filled, but you can’t tell where he or she comes from or where she or he is going. That is, you can’t really tell how that person came to be Spirit-filled, neither can you tell where the Spirit is taking that person. I hear Jesus saying that a Spirit-filled person is a mystery just like the wind was a mystery to the ancient world.

So OK, much about Spirit-filled people is a mystery. But just as you can tell that the wind is blowing by its sound, so you can tell when a person is Spirit-filled. Perhaps the implication is that you can tell a Spirit-filled person by her sound, or maybe not. It seems at least that he means you can tell when a person is Spirit-filled even if you can’t tell what he going to do next. That’s part of what Jesus means here, I think.

Yet I think there is a broader meaning here than that that is more important for this church. The Spirit is like the wind. That’s a meaning that comes through more clearly when we remember that in the Greek original of these verses wind and spirit are the same word. I hear Jesus saying that the Spirit blows like the wind, and the wind blows on everyone. The Holy Spirit seeks to move everyone. So like the wind the Spirit, God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit blows on everyone. God the Holy Spirit wants everyone to be a person “born of the Spirit.” The wind doesn’t blow everywhere all the time, but the Holy Spirit does. We may not know where it comes from or where it’s going, but it’s there. It’s present. It’s active. It’s blowing on us. It’s trying to push us, to make us move, to get us active. The Holy Spirit has always been active like that, and as long as there is an earth it will be active like that.

The Holy Spirit blows like the wind, but it doesn’t always blow like that east wind out in Sultan blows. It doesn’t always blow strong like that. Maybe we wish it would, but the blowing of the Holy Spirit is almost always more gentle than that. It is quieter than that. It is softer than that. That easterly gale out in Sultan is impossible to miss. It’s almost always not just possible but really easy to miss the blowing of the Holy Spirit. Yet sort of like the wind the Holy Spirit is always there. Always blowing. Always not so much pushing us as nudging us. Not so much yelling at us as whispering to us. We so often miss it. We don’t hear it, but we don’t hear it mostly because we’re not listening for it. It’s really easy to drown out the sound of the Spirit. Keep talking about yourself. Keep talking about worldly things. Keep talking about trivial things, and you’ll never hear the soft, gentle sound of the Holy Spirit. To hear the Spirit, you have to listen for the Spirit.

To be honest with you, that’s where I think this church is today. Whether with me or without me you really need to listen for and to the call of the Holy Spirit. Last Thursday evening some of us talked about how God is real in our lives. We shared experiences in which it sure seems like the God the Holy Spirit broke through our defenses and into our lives. Sometimes the Spirit did that by arranging events in our lives that we can only see as providential. Sometimes the Spirit did it through sensations that felt physical but couldn’t possibly have been only physical. In the little group I was part of it sounded like almost everyone had had some kind of powerful experience of God being present and active in their lives. God is in the life of this church too. We—you—just have to listen. You have to pay attention. God will break through, but you have to be ready to hear and respond when God does.

I have no doubt that God the Holy Spirit is alive and working in this congregation, but you need ask some things about how God the Holy Spirit is working here. The wind of the Spirit of blowing. We may know that it comes from God, but where is it going? Where is it calling this church to go? Is it blowing you forward into new life and new ways of being the Church? Or is it blowing sideways, not moving you forward but not moving you backward either? Or is it blowing you back toward what this church used to be rather than what it will be? I believe the wind of the Holy Spirit is always blowing us forward. God is always blowing us toward new life, toward new and more faithful ways of being church, new and more faithful ways of being disciples of Christ. I can’t say if you believe that or not. If you do I am confident that you will find your way forward. But if you don’t you can just stay the way you are—for a while. The hard truth is that institutions, including churches, are never really static. They are either moving into new life, or they are dying. Dying slowly perhaps. Maybe even imperceptibly. But dying none the less.

I don’t think this church is dying. We don’t always notice it, but we’ve had something like a 30% increase in new people attending this church in the two plus years that I have been your pastor. You are in reasonably good financial shape. Yes, this is a very small church; but God the Holy Spirit doesn’t care about size. God cares about faithfulness and commitment to Christian discipleship. The world in which we are called to Christian discipleship has changed from what it was when people my age or older were young, and God is calling the church to respond to those changes. The wind of the Holy Spirit is blowing the church toward those changes. Can you feel it? Will you listen for it? I hope and pray that you will. Amen.