Ruah: Breath, Wind, Spirit Lent 2A

 Ruah: Breath, Wind, Spirit

As one listens to the final moments of Gustav Mahler’s 9^th Symphony, there is only the sound of a few string instruments. And it is easy to overlook which strings play the essence of what is left of melody. A few violins are playing a sort of long, drawn-out ostinato. But they almost distract from the viola – yet it is a lone viola that is given the final say, almost the final breath as all sound is extinguished into an utter silence. Like the blowing out of a candle’s flame, with a mere wreathe of vapor extending upwards.

 

Something similar seems to be going on at the beginning of evangelist John’s third chapter and the all too familiar story of Nicodemus’s visit with Jesus in the dark of night. Familiar, since it is the only passage of all Holy Writ that has given us so many end-zones in football stadia, and in the seats behind the catchers and plate umpires at so many baseball games: a poster simply emblazoned with “John 3:16.” More on that later. For such familiarity with John 3:16 and the philosophical-theological conversation between Nick and Jesus, and the misunderstandings of a word with more than one meaning, we almost overlook the main character on the stage: one of the first characters in the whole Bible; one that plays a central role in creation itself: Ruah.

 

Ruah. Ruah can mean breath, wind, and spirit. And not just any breath, wind, and spirit, but the Ruah is the power, purpose, and agent of God, YWHW’s, will. If one has ruah, one has life. If one has no more ruah, one is dead. “29 When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. 30 When you send forth your breath, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.” [Psalm 104]

 

Nicodemus comes in the dark of night (which for John is the darkness the world) to visit what evangelist John has identified as the Light and Life of the World: Jesus. He has witnessed, or at least heard about, things Jesus has done: turning water into wine, and overturning the money-changer’s tables at the Temple. “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” This is where we and Nick get hung up. The text, which is in a sort of patois of Greek, uses a word, anothen, which like ruah, can mean several things: ‘above,’ but also ‘anew,’ or ‘again.’ Jesus, no doubt, speaks in Aramaic, and neither we nor the translators have any idea what word he really spoke to Nick. What we do know is that John has intentionally chosen a word that carries a certain amount of ambiguity – because Jesus speaks, and John writes, in metaphor; really a kind of poetry, often leaving interpretation to the one who hears what is being said.

 

Nick thinking Jesus says he must be “born again,” a phrase, unfortunately, heavily freighted with specific meaning among some Christian communities in our own day. “How can this be,” says Nick. “I cannot crawl back into my mother’s womb!” Thus, introducing the challenges and problems of biblical “literalism.” Despite all the poetry of his tradition, the poetry of the Psalms and the Prophets, Nick is mired in a literalism that misses the very meaning of what Jesus had come to proclaim. Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit (ruah). What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind (ruah)  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.”

 

Enter, the central character, not only of this conversation, but the essence of Biblical Religion itself: the Spirit, capital “S,” the agent of the very purpose and will of God, is like “the wind!” The late Water Brueggemann offers the following: “Categorizing the various uses of ruah is a mistake, for in Hebrew it connotes any and all of them in a more wholistic sense that refers to an invasive power at work in the world, deeply linked to YHWH’s will and purpose, capable of disrupting and transforming earthly reality. Thus, the Godness of ruah is attested to assert that God finally orders and wills lived reality, for good or for ill, beyond the ken and control of human capacity. In short, God’s Holy Spirit-Breath-Wind cannot be placed in a flow chart, let alone easily “understood” that due to something beyond our every-day existence new possibilities open to us!  [Brueggemann, Reverberations of Faith, p.200]

 

Nicodemus asks, “How can these things be?” And who can blame him? Jesus continues, “Our tradition suggests that as Moses lifted up the Serpent to heal the people in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, i.e. crucified … that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 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. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Enter, the essence of the Message that has been turned into a slogan, a poster, without context and without nuance. For Jesus, and John the evangelist, “eternal life” is not some sort of magical immortality, nor is it a future life in “heaven,” but is itself a metaphor for living here and now in the unending (eternal) presence and love of God. Eternal life is John’s way of speaking of the “kingdom of God,” which Jesus inaugurates, and commissions his followers to continue down to this very day. One can only begin to understand what “new life” is, says John, when the crucifixion is in full view.

 

These verses at the heart of this story help us to see how Jesus’s death and God’s love are related. God gives Jesus in love to all the world, and whoever accepts this gift will receive, and enter into, eternal life here and now. Jesus gives his love to all the world. Not to the Church, nor to any particular expression of his gathered community of Love, but to and for the Life and Light of the world. As John repeats “eternal life” twice in two verses, Jesus gives God’s Love to all the world.

 

We may as well admit, as a slogan, all notions of ruah, Spirit, have been cheapened. We have exported it to School Spirit, American Spirit, Christmas Spirit, the Spirit of ’76 – leaving the wholeness of the breath, wind, and spirit of YHWH’s will, purpose, and Love pointing to something you know is supposed to get you to your feet cheering but which you somehow cannot rise to. God’ ruah is far more elemental to life in the Spirit.

 

Like the viola in the Mahler 9^th, the central and last word in this meeting between Jesus and Nicodemus, is God’s ruah, God’s Spirit, which is the gift of Life. Which is Light. Which is Love. Life, Light, and Love which the darkness cannot and has not overcome. Embrace God’s gift of Spirit Love and enter into eternal life here and now. Choose not to embrace the gift of God’s  Love, and one might never know the grace that such love brings and offers to the whole world and everything therein. May God’s Holy Breath, God’s Holy Wind, God’s Holy Spirit move us to embrace God’s gift of Love, in Christ Jesus, who is present and with us now until the end of the age. Amen.

To Become the Love that is All Around! Lent 1A

 

To Become the Love that is All Around!

We come from Love; we return to Love; and Love is all around. God is Love.

 

The Reverend Pierre Wolf would visit our congregation at Saint Peter’s on the Green, Monroe, Connecticut. And each time he was with us he would remind us of the fundamental truth of who we are and whose we are: We come from Love; we return to Love; and Love is all around. Because God is Love. We are created in the image of God, male and female created in the image of God, meaning we are to reflect the true nature of God’s love for each of us, for all of us, for all of our neighbors, and for all creation itself.

 

God’s love is not the love of “I want to hold your hand;” not teenage love; not the love of Halmark movies. It is not the love of Valentine’s Day. Rather, it is a love that the Bible repeatedly describes as the fundamental character of God who is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment,” as the reluctant prophet Jonah found out when the people of Ninevah repented and returned to the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It seems as if Jonah might have been happier if just this once God would zap Ninevah, that great city “in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many much cattle.”

 

Perhaps no episode in all the Bible has been as misunderstood as the story of the man and the woman in the garden who are given permission to eat the fruit from every tree in the orchard but the one in the very middle of the Garden. Seems easy enough. But we know ourselves well enough to know that our curiosity is greater than that of all the cats in all of creation! We know they were already looking at the tree with great covetousness in their hearts and minds when along comes a serpent, something like the Iguanas and Nile Monitors currently plaguing Florida like Egypt and all those frogs, gnats, and flies! “Go ahead,” says the serpent. “Eat from the fruit of that one tree. You won’t die. God doesn’t want you to become like God. Go ahead, eat! Enjoy! Become like God!” This was the First Great Lie – from which many others have echoed down throughout human history right down to our own day. The Lie? That they would become like God. We all know that near the end of the previous chapter in Genesis God had already created them in God’s own image. They forgot they were already like God, which is love. And it was out of God’s love for the two of them, the first of his own children, that God wanted to protect them from the consequences of the full knowledge of good and evil. God was acting like our parents warning us to look both ways before crossing a street when saying to stay away from the tree.

 

And look at the result. Look at the consequences. They immediately try to hide their own true nature from one another. Then, as the story goes on, they try to hide from God, for heavens sake! And finally, the rupture begins: the man says, “She made me do it.” Then she says, “The serpent made me do it!” Thus, was born Flip Wilson: “The Devil Made me do it!” Despite the fact that  we have free will, and no one makes us do anything. We choose to do these things on our own. We allow others to misguide us. To mislead us into making bad decisions.

 

Which brings us to the story of Jesus as “The Breath,” the Spirit of God, leads him into the wilderness immediately after he learns that he is God’s Beloved Son. The story intentionally echoes the wilderness sojourn of the people of God who escaped Pharaoh’s Egypt where they experienced 40 years of testing after receiving Ten Commandments, which some rabbis refer to as the Ten Suggestions – Ten Suggestions on how we can best get along with one another, and with God. It does not take a biblical scholar to notice that Jesus undergoes precisely the same tests, and in the same sequence, as those refugees did in the wilderness: the first regards hunger, the second means to put God to the test, and the third regards false worship, or what the Bible often calls idolatry. One might also notice that the child Jesus follows the journey of Israel into Egypt to escape Herod’s murderous slaughter, and now the adult Jesus retraces his ancestor’s experiences in the wilderness. Matthew’s first audiences would notice this.

 

For Jesus the tester is no serpent. He is a character from earlier in Hebrew Scriptures known as sah-tanh – not to be confused with the medieval Chrisitan personification of evil, Satan, or the Devil. This sahtanh works for God, not against him. For reference re-read the story of Job. From time-to-time God sends sah-tan to text the faithfulness of certain individuals. This time it is God’s Beloved Son to see if he is up to the tasks that lie ahead in healing the many ruptures that have accumulated between God and God’s people. The world is broken and has been turned upside down. Will God’s Beloved Son be up to the task of Tikkun Olam – repair of the world?

 

Hunger We read he is famished. Of course he is. Jesus has fasted for forty days! “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread, says Sah-tanh. Jesus knows his scripture and answers from Deuteronomy, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Jesus is called to a ministry to the whole world, not just to perform carnival tricks and assuage his own hunger. That would be to narrow the scope of what lies ahead.

 

Sah-tanh then says, “OK, so you know scripture. So do I! Let’s go to the tippity-top of the Temple. If you are the Son of God, why don’t you jump off, since it is written that His angels will bear you up and not let you dash even your foot upon a stone!” The Son of God replies, “It is also written you shall not test the Lord your God.” To test the promises of God is not a sign of faith but of fundamental doubt. It is to make ourselves God as if we know not only what God will do, but how, when and where God will act. Putting God to the test dramatically reverses our relationship with God, putting us in charge and God serving us! Nope.  Jesus again answers from Deuteronomy. Jesus is a shrewdie and wins round two.

 

Round three: If you just worship me, says Sah-tanh, you can have all the kingdoms of the world all to your very own self. “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” Once again, from Deuteronomy. Jesus will become Lord of all the kingdoms of the world, not by worshipping Sah-tanh, but by being nailed to a cross. By speaking truth to power. By healing the woundedness of all the world. By welcoming all people, no matter what. By extending God’s bountiful love to everyone, everywhere, all the time. Because we come from Love; we return to Love; and Love is all around. Join me, says Jesus, and become the Love that is all around. Jesus passes all three tests. Immediately, Sah-tan leaves, his job done, and angels come to wait upon Jesus!

 

To engage Lent and to be engaged by it is to render oneself vulnerable to the reality of who we are as human beings. It is also to open ourselves to the nature of God as Redeemer, the One who will not abide the space that sin has created, and who insists on spanning that abyss with Love.

The moral of the story: for us to pass the test as Jesus does, and to understand what it means to become the Love that is all around, as he did, we might do well to use these days of Lent to carefully read Deuteronomy! Deuteronomy! Deuteronomy!

We The People of God Ash Wednesday 2026

 

Ash Wednesday 2026

Nearly everything in our lessons and in the Ash Wednesday liturgy addresses the fact that a rupture has occurred in the relationship between God and the people. A relationship grounded in a covenant – a series of promises on just how we are to relate to one another in this world God has created to sustain creatures like us. This rupture is corporate in nature – that is, God is not at all like Santa Clause keeping track of every single one of us as to whether or not we are naughty or nice. God sees a bigger picture, a more serious situation. Thus, we hear the prophet Joel and the psalmist who wrote Psalm 103 declaring that it is time, once again, to sound a trumpet, to call the entire Community of God’s Love together to once again acknowledge that we are not doing such a terrific job loving one another as Christ loves us. Everyone is to assemble, from the wisest of elders to children still at their mother’s breast. It is time to review the nature of covenant and our responsibilities to one another, to total strangers, and to those passing through or seeking refuge in our land to escape life elsewhere, having heard what an extraordinary Community of Love the God of Jacob, aka Israel, has established. And the larger Community of Love his Son Jesus extended.

 

We don’t know much about Joel – there is no consensus as to when and where this Prophet-Poet lived. But we do know when Paul was traveling throughout the Middle East founding Communities of God’s Love. Paul, who had grown up and lived in the Community of the God of Jacob spent a lifetime extending that community to others – to Gentiles. People who were not descended from the tribes of Jacob, but people who yearned to live in a Community of God’s Love in a world that was otherwise dog-eat-dog, one more authoritarian despot after another stripping the resources of a conquered land, leaving the people helpless, desperate, and generally land-poor and over-taxed.

 

Writing to an early Christian Community of God’s Love in Corinth which had already become a rat’s-nest of factions who fought and scrapped at one another, and who treated strangers, aliens, and newcomers with disdain, if even that. To them Paul makes his plea: “We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” That is, it is time to remember who we are and whose we are – a Community of God’s Love in Christ. We need to become more God-like once again. We need to become more Christ-like once again. We are only as strong and righteous as the least of those among us. For how we treat those who live at the very margins is how we show our love and respect for the God who is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” as Psalm 103 sings about our God, and by association God’s Beloved Son, and by further association, We the people of God. There is a rupture in this series of relationships, writes Paul, and it is time for reconciliation – it is time to put these relationships back together.

 

Which is what Jesus is really talking about in this day’s portion from the Sermon on the Mount: performative acts of piety like prayer, alms giving, and fasting, are not meant for public displays which only seek to cover up where we fail love our neighbors who are poor, naked, in debtor’s prison, hungry and thirsting for relief. Save all the performative piety for yourself, He says, and get back to being the Community of God’s Love that seeks to reach out beyond itself and its own needs and get involved in the life of those both in and beyond our community who are aching day-by-day for someone to reach out to relieve them and gather them into the Community of God’s Love.

 

The operant word for Ash Wednesday is “We.” The ashes are meant to remind us that “no man is an island,” we are all a part of a larger reality, a larger community that represents God’s intentions for this world. There are those who intentionally want to destroy such a Community of God’s Love. Ash Wednesday asks us: Do we accept our responsibilities as people of the Covenant? Or, do we side with those who wish to divide and destroy God’s Community of Love? Ash Wednesday issues a clarion call like that which was heard in the 1960s: Either you are on the bus or off the bus. Jesus issues that call every day. The Risen Christ each and every day means to sound the trumpet and call us to return. Not as individuals. That is Santa’s business. He calls us as constituent members of His Community of Love.

 

Earlier this week I ran across a prayer my father wrote for Layman’s Sunday in the church where I grew up, and in which he served as a Deacon and an Usher on Sundays. This was sixty-five years ago, 1961, and yet it sounds as if he is addressing the realities of life we face it today:

 

“We gather today, O Lord, to seek your help…Your wisdom and Your Love. We come to you as lay persons of our church, believing in it, working in it, and seeking to live a Christian life. And so, we pray for Guidance.

 

“As we stumble, help us to find Your path, that we may walk in it. Teach us Your ways that we will be better able to live with our family and fellow man. Teach us to pray, though cynics may mock us or deride us. Help us to understand and meet adversities that without warning may suddenly change our life. Keep us from panic in moments like these.

 

“Give us wisdom that we may reject foolish offers from men of perverted speech. Let us find lasting faith in the House of the God of Jacob.

 

“Remind us that faith is not just attending Church. Or, building a chapel of stone and mortar. That it is not just a group of committees and meetings, or singing or prayers. But that faith is a way of life to be lived each day in our houses, with our children, and with our friends.

 

“Since we are all frail, and easily turned by many distractions and temptations, remind us that Your teachings can be woven into our day-to-day business and commerce. Give us courage to say we are wrong when we are wrong. Give us firmness to do the right thing, although it may not be popular.

 

“Help us to show our children the wonders You have created around us, the beauties of the trees now changing their colors, the flowers bringing joy and comfort to ill ones for whom we offer special prayers today. Help us also to show our children the deep mysteries of the oceans and the challenge of the skies.

 

“And finally, O Lord, help us strengthen our faith, that we can preserve these beauties and protect them and our way of life from those seeking to destroy everything. This we ask in thy name. Amen.”