Can You Hear It?

A Texas preacher told this story of his childhood in the South.  He grew up in cotton country, in days before air conditioning became something almost every home had.  Several of those summers, he spent working on his uncle's cotton farm, down in the Mississippi delta. It was hot work… hard work… dirty work… bringing in a cotton crop. It still is, though technology has made it much easier than it was back then.  

In those long, hot summers… when the crop had been tended for another day… when the weeds had been chopped from between the cotton plants… folks would gather, in the evening, on the front porch. They would rock… and talk… and laugh… in a futile attempt to escape the ever-present heat and humidity of those summer evenings.   Sometimes… on a really good day, according to this preacher… the leaves of the trees would begin to rustle… and the conversation would die down… and everyone would just sit back and enjoy the summer breeze… the gift of the summer breeze.  They didn't know where it came from… they didn't know where it was going… but they knew it was there, because they could hear it… and they could feel it.

In the weeks that follow Pentecost, we look at biblical texts that deal with the work of the Holy Spirit… the Breath of God that moves across the face of the earth… the Advocate sent by Jesus to the new church to teach and to guide… the totally unpredictable and predictable person of the Trinity who remains the most mysterious of all… and yet the results of his work seen… heard… felt… by all who are touched by his action.   The story of Nicodemus tells it all… for in this story, Jesus tries to explain how a person is saved… and leaves Nicodemus… and us… more confused than ever.  Of all the persons Jesus encounters in his ministry, Nicodemus is the least likely to seek him out.  Wealthy… successful… educated… religious… a leader in the Jewish community… Nicodemus seems to have it all… being at the pinnacle of both the sacred and the secular worlds of his day.  So, why is this exemplary person sneaking out at night to find the itinerant preacher?  Ninety-nine percent of the stories we have of Jesus’ ministry point to his life and work among the hundreds and even thousands of the poor and disenfranchised.  So, why is he taking the time to patiently teach this single, solitary man who is not willing to even acknowledge or approach him during the daylight hours?   It is because this man has already had an encounter with one of the persons of the Trinity, even if he does not know it or recognize it.  It was the Wind of Heaven… the Breath of God… the Power of the Holy Spirit… that pulled him from his bed and sent him into the night to find Jesus.

I like the illustration of the Trinity as the three intersecting circles that you see on the cover of your bulletin today.  Each person of the Trinity is represented by a single circle… each distinct in its aspect… and yet, the three circles intersect in such a way to illustrate that one does not exist apart from the others… just as the three persons of the Godhead are one entity.  Each of us may have a different encounter with one of the persons of the Trinity, but… like the varied individuals in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” who all had different stories to tell of how it all began… we are all pulled toward the same goal… a connection with something that is beyond our knowledge.  The marvelous unpredictability of it is that you and I cannot predict whose life will be touched by this mysterious triumvirate… and we are often left with our mouths hanging open in amazement when we see the power of God at work in the life of someone we put ‘beyond the pale.’  What a great and awesome God we worship!

Among the hundreds of laws and corollaries that have been written since aerospace engineer Edward Murphy first attempted to document the predictability of unpredictable events, there is a law called “Deal’s First Law of Sailing.” It states that “The amount of wind will vary inversely with the number and experience of the people you have onboard the sailboat.”  When we examine the Wind of God and the history of the church, we see that this law is often in effect.  While there are times when the Breath of God blows through thousands of persons simultaneously, bringing them to a saving knowledge of God during a single event… like the preaching of Peter at Pentecost… it is more often the stories of individuals like Nicodemus… or the Garasene demoniac… the Apostle Paul… the blind Bartimaeus… the Syro-Phoenician woman… the Centurion at the foot of the cross… the Ethiopian eunuch... and others that form the foundation of the church’s ministry in this world.  And what a diverse collection of individuals they are!  As diverse as the twelve disciples Jesus gathered around him as his inner circle of confidants.  Yet it is to such as these that God has entrusted the work of his Kingdom in this world.  And look what they have managed to do:  Fully one-third of the people who populate this planet… 2.1 billion people… claim Christianity as their religion.  Not bad for a motley collection of clueless individuals who had nothing but a story to tell… nothing but a story and the wild workings of this third person of the Trinity!

You have all heard my story… my own ‘close encounter’ with God in the fortieth year of my life… but you may not know that Methodism's John Wesley was already thirty-five years old when he came in contact with Moravian missionaries in London. Many years earlier, he had finished his studies. He had studied history… and philosophy… and several languages. He had even been ordained a priest many years earlier. But now, at the age of thirty-five, he first discovered his heart being "strangely warmed." The message of God's love had penetrated his mind in such a way that… with a third of his earthly life already over… he became a changed person. That personal experience shaped the remaining two-thirds of his years upon this earth… and it did not come about through something that he did… it was the wonderfully unpredictable Spirit of God that found him… that blew that glowing ember in his heart to flame… and sent him on a wild adventure that took him even into the New World.   No, it was not anything that John Wesley did that effected that change.  It was the action of the Holy Spirit that changed him.  Look at the story of Nicodemus again and see how Jesus describes the work of that Spirit.  The analogy that he uses is the analogy of childbirth… and every verb associated with it is passive.  It is an event over which the child… the one being born… has no control at all.  The timing… the process… all of it… is beyond the control of the one being born.  So it is with the work of the Holy Spirit.   You can feel it… you can hear it… like the unique sound of the wind blowing through the pine trees in my yard… but the work of the Spirit is entirely beyond our control.

I would share two more brief thoughts with you.  A story is told of a little boy who was cooped up inside his home on a rainy Sunday afternoon.  He was bored and his father was sleepy. The father decided to create an activity to keep the child busy. So, he found in the morning newspaper a large map of the world. He took a pair of scissors and cut the map into many irregular shapes, like a jigsaw puzzle. Then he said to his son, "See if you can put this puzzle together… and don't disturb me until you're finished." The father turned over on the couch, convinced that this activity would keep his son occupied for at least an hour. To his amazement, the boy was tapping on his shoulder barely ten minutes later, telling him that the job was done. The father saw that every piece of the map had been fitted together perfectly. "How did you do that?" he asked. "It was easy, Dad. There was a picture of a man on the other side. When I got him together right, the world was right."

Many of us lament the current state of our world… and we wish that God would send his Holy Spirit to fix it.  As the story illustrates, our world will never be right, until each person in it is right.  We have a work to do… right here… right now… to further the Kingdom of God in our world.  And it must be done, one person at a time, trusting that the Holy Spirit will transform each person just as Nicodemus was transformed.

And as we go about our work, there is one thing that is predictable.  Perhaps, it is best captured by Deal’s Second Law of Sailing, which states “No matter how strong the breeze is when you leave the dock, once you have reached the farthest point from the port from which you started, the wind will die.”  The closer we remain to our harbor… our port… Jesus Christ… the stronger the Wind of the Spirit will blow in our lives.  When Nicodemus came to Jesus in the middle of the night, it was not just the sky that was dark.  Nicodemus’ life was lived in the dark.  It was his encounter with Jesus that brought light… as well as new life… to him.  We have seen movies of mysterious spaceships that isolate individuals in a ray of light and pull those individuals up into the center of that beam. For Nicodemus, the light that flowed from Jesus that night, pulled him into the center of this glowing triangle of light… into a relationship with the three persons of the Trinity… so that he could draw on the power and presence of each aspect of the three persons of God… all the knowledge he already possessed of God the Father… the saving grace of Jesus the Son… and the incredible power of the Holy Spirit.  For a man who went out with the desire to have a few questions answered, he returned a changed man… a man filled with the Spirit of God.

As you come to the table today to renew your covenant with God, may you too experience the mystical presence of the three persons of God in this simple feast.  May you celebrate the boundless love of our Creator… the saving grace of our Savior… and the holy wind of the Spirit in the bread and the wine.  May they empower you to do God’s will today and always.  Amen.

John 3:1-17