The Winds of Change
- Rev Robert Moses
- Mar 1
- 5 min read
Lessons of the Day (Lent 2, Year A): Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17
Many of us tend to believe that our faith journey is about becoming certain of our beliefs, knowing unequivocally who God is and what He expects from us. But is that really the case? Does it mean that when we wrestle with our understanding of God or our purpose as disciples, we are somehow unfaithful to our beliefs? I don’t think so.
You know, when I finished seminary, there were people that assumed that I then knew everything about faith, everything about the Bible, everything about God. Well, sadly, or I don’t think so sadly, seminary does not give you all the answers. It teaches you how to ask the questions. That’s our faith journey. The opposite of faith, the detriment to faith, is NOT doubt; it is certainty. It is the questions that leave us desiring more, the questions that will not allow us to rest on the laurels of what we have figured out God is about or what we have figured out God is calling us to do. Faith, believing IN Christ, is what reminds us that there is always something more, always something up ahead, always a faint road that God calls us to walk not so that we will know the way, but so that we will follow The Way to God.
See, we’re not called to “get our hands around it all” and hold onto it. We’re called to let it move us. Listen again: “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.” The wind is an interesting thing. It can be refreshing, cooling, even invigorating. As we witnessed almost a month ago, the winds of a tornado are destructive. Whatever image of wind you have, it’s not predictable, it changes you. The Hebrew word for the “Spirit of God” is ruah. Our very complicated and, yet, limited English language translates that as “wind” or “breath”, depending on the passage. But it really means more. It is the very essence of God.
So, being “born again” means putting yourself into the path of that ruah, that breath, that wind, and allowing it to move you as it will. Think of windchimes. There is something about them. Recently, I was hearing a windchime and I began to watch it. There was something about that windchime on that day that I aspired toward. See, I thought, if I was just one single post or a rod handing down, the wind would still blow, but it would blow through. That post or hanging rod would remain unnoticed, never move – it would stay stalwart in being there. But, if you’re a windchime, you allow the winds to move through you and you move and reflect who they are and there’s a new song that comes to be. Being “born again” is sort of like being a windchime.
And so we read the passage of God sending Abram on a journey toward becoming who he was called to be, toward putting himself in the path of the wind. It’s only 3 ½ verses, but it’s a huge Scripture. Basically, God is saying, “GO”, leave what is familiar, leave what is holding you back, leave what is comfortable. Go forward whether or not you know the road. And Abram goes. He would become Abraham, the patriarch of three world religions. What if he had held back? What if he had held onto what was familiar and comfortable?
God told Abram, “go to the land that I will show you.” God doesn’t just throw us out there to bend and turn with the winds. God leads us to something new. God leads us to being born again, if we will only yield to the winds that blow around us. This story doesn’t mean much until it becomes ours.
So, have you been born again? Have you jumped into the chalk drawing into a brave new world? Have you imagined yourself as windchime that moves with that which is unpredictable and unplanned. Have your left what was familiar so that God can show you something new, so that God can show you what was always meant to be?
The end of this Gospel passage is the most familiar: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” This is not a declaration; it is a beginning. God calls us into newness, into things we have never seen before. God calls us to put ourselves in the path of the wind, in the path of the Spirit that will show us the way home—not a way that we prescribe, but a new journey into something we don’t even know.
That’s what Nicodemus did not get in the Gospel passage that we read. Even though he was a learned leader and, therefore, a teacher, of the Jews, He was a rabbi, a teacher of all things Scriptural and all things faith. He knew what questions to ask and we should probably give him the benefit of the doubt that he was continuing to probe and explore. Maybe he wasn’t as sure of his own certainty when it came to beliefs. Maybe he wasn’t ready to admit that to himself. He wasn’t really ready to go there yet. So he goes to Jesus in the dark of night, cloaked in mystery and secrets and probably trying to hide the fact that he was having trouble understanding it all from the rest of the community. He wanted Jesus to get rid of all the doubts that Nicodemus had. He wanted Jesus to make it all perfectly clear for him so that he could go on imparting that knowledge to the rest of the community. He wanted Jesus to give him the answers.
In an essay on this passage, Nurya Parish says she thinks that “every baptism or confirmation class should include a showing of the movie Mary Poppins. Not for the suffragettes or the magic carpetbag [but for] the scene where Mary, Bert, and the children take hands and jump straight into the middle of a sidewalk chalk painting, emerging in an entirely new, much more colorful world. That’s what becoming a disciple does…you leave an old, dreary world behind and enter a world where the unexpected becomes commonplace. It’s not enough simply to say you are a disciple; you actually have to jump.”
“How can this be?” Those are Nicodemus’ last words in this passage, which sort of makes him a patron saint for all of us who from time to time get stuck at the foot of the mountain, weighed down by our own understandings of who God is, without the faintest idea of how to begin to ascend. But there’s Jesus. “Watch me. Put your hand here. Now your foot. Don’t think about it so hard. Just do as I do. Just jump! Believe in me. And follow me….this way!
In this season of Lent, the winds of change are swirling all about. We hear the sounds, but we do not know its path. We must give ourselves to the wind, must enter the darkness, and walk, trusting that we will find ourselves in the place where we belong. We are not always called to understand, but only to know.
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