So it’s been an interesting week around the church office. Adding to the list of “things I didn’t know I needed to know,” I learned that we are a three-phase building, and Wednesday’s wind storm knocked out two of them. This meant we had power in some, but not all of the building. And in weird ways. So, for example, half of my office lights worked. The choir room had heat, but no light. Co-op had working computers, but no internet, heat, or phones, and only one light. The microwave tray spun around, but the microwave didn’t heat anything. The refrigerator light came on, but it didn’t keep anything cold. When, adding insult to injury and totally unrelated to the wind, the office printer, which has been acting finicky for some time, finally decided to just quit trying, I actually just physically slid out of the chair and under the desk. Doug and Eileen, when you walked in Wednesday evening, I had just pulled myself out from underneath the desk. It was just one of those weeks where nothing seemed to go right or to make sense.
On Thursday, as I was walking around with the guy from Sims Electric trying to figure out what was wrong with the power, which, by the way, turned out was a problem on Consumers end, I started thinking about how weird wind is. It’s just air, the stuff we breathe, the stuff we move through all the time. I can wave my hands around and make a breeze; I can blow it out, but good for nothing more than ushering a cotton ball across the floor or snuffing a candle.
And yet, it can also be this incredibly powerful and destructive force. From inside my office, Wednesday looked like a beautiful, sunny day, but this powerful thing downed power lines, toppled the tree across the street, and scattered bits of the roof across the back lawn.
In our Gospel reading for this morning, Jesus remarked, “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. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” What’s interesting about this sentence is that in both Greek and Hebrew, the word for wind and the word for spirit are the same. The word is pneuma in Greek and ruach in Hebrew, both mean wind, spirit, breath. “The wind-spirit blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the wind-spirit.” What the Greek and Hebrew tells us is that the Spirit, like the wind, is a force both mysterious and powerful. At times gentle, the whisper of a breeze on a warm day, at times creative, we can harness it to drive windmills and generate electricity, and at times destructive enough to topple trees and bring down entire city blocks, but it is always moving, always shifting. We cannot see it, but we can feel its force against our skin, we can see the effects it leaves behind.
This play on words with wind and spirit is one of a host of double meanings in this reading. If you’re a fan of word play, this is a great Gospel for you. In addition to the wind/spirit combo, there is another one with what the NRSV translated “born from above” but is often translated as “born again.” The word in Greek is anochen, and it means both born again and born from above. So it means both a physical, time-bound experience of being born, and a radical generative new creation. I know we’re doing a lot of Greek in the sermon this week, but seriously team, how cool is that. With the word anochen, Jesus challenged Nicodemus to consider a truth bigger than he had imagined. Those born into the kingdom of heaven are born both again and from above, both physically present and beyond the universe, both timeless and time-bound, into a kingdom that is both already present in the person of Jesus, and not yet complete, there is still more to be done in the unveiling of the fullness of God.
But Nicodemus, like so often happens, missed the point Jesus was making. When presented with this word that invited him to consider this rich, deep, developing new thing, Nicodemus focused in on the physical thing right in front of him. He picked a meaning, like our English translators were forced to do, because there isn’t such a double-meaninged word in English. Unlike our English translators, Nicodemus could have had both, but both was beyond his capacity for wonder, so he picked one. He picked again. “How,” Nicodemus asked Jesus, “can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” No, right, that can’t be. Once the process of being born has begun, once the water has broken, there’s no turning back. You cannot put your little brother back, no matter how much you might ask your mother to do so, and you cannot be born again.
But choosing one or the other was not Jesus’ point, so Jesus leaned into him with still more wordplay. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” The verb translated lifted up, is the Greek hypsoo or the Hebrew nasa. It means both to be physically lifted up, like I’m lifting up my arms. But it also means to be exalted, to be given a place of highest honor. The lifting up Jesus was referring to here was his crucifixion. Jesus was saying, when I am lifted up on a cross, like a common criminal, that will be the moment of my greatest exaltation. It is the seeming foolishness of the cross Paul wrote about in Corinthians, that in dying Jesus Christ destroyed death, and the cross, not the resurrection, but the cross was the moment of Jesus’ greatest glory. That’s not to say the resurrection wasn’t important, but that it was more for us than for Jesus. We needed him to come back from the dead, so that we could see that his defeat of death had worked, we could see the reflection of his glory. Here in John chapter three, Jesus gave Nicodemus a preview of all that was to come, but even for us who have read the whole story and know how it turns out, it all seems kind of fantastical, so you cannot really blame Nicodemus for missing the moment.
But he will not miss it forever. Nicodemus is one of my favorite characters in John, because while he fades from this scene, this is not the only time he will appear. In chapter seven he’ll show up again, when some other Pharisees are questioning Jesus and give an admittedly rather half-hearted defense of Jesus. Then after Jesus’ crucifixion, he along with Joseph of Aramethia are the only two with the courage to approach Pilate for permission to bury the body of Jesus. Nicodemus didn’t get Jesus’ message all at once, his imagination, his capacity for wonder, was not yet great enough in chapter three, but it will grow and he will get there. And it will give him a courage he may not have thought possible, when he was skulking through Jerusalem streets to come to Jesus by night.
The thing I found myself pondering all week as I reflected on the Nicodemus story was what is my own capacity for wonder? What marvelous things have I missed because, like Nicodemus, Jesus laid out the whole world in front of me, and I chose to see only part of it. So often, I think, Jesus offers us this incredible new thing, and our imaginations are not yet great enough, so we settle for the restrictive familiar.
So the challenge I am taking on this Lent, and I invite you to take it on with me, is to increase our imaginations, our capacity for wonder. To look at what seems like a fixed point, and wonder if there might be a third way. To not be restricted by how things have been, but to see where the Spirit might be blowing through like wind, and while we may not know where it comes from or where it goes, we see the effect, the potential energy stored up within it. Maybe the broken printer is just a broken printer, or maybe it is an opportunity to change some of our office structure. Maybe the power outage was inconvenient, but maybe knowing we’re a three-phase building will be helpful in some way. Maybe our budget is small and our building is crumbling, and it is in fact an opportunity for us to discover what it means to be church in a radical new way. I don’t know, but this Lent I am going to take Nicodemus as my model, and see if I can’t lean into this potential, and maybe it will give us courage to do things we never thought possible. Thanks be to God, who blows through our lives in spirit-wind, never showing where it comes from or where it goes, but remaking us in God’s image. Amen.
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