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February 20, 2005 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Winded

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 121
John 3:1–17
Romans 4:1–5

As I have often said, the basic confusion in Christianity has been to make it a doctrine.
With a doctrine one has to take care first of all to master it all.
Just the opposite with the New Testament;
it wants you simply to begin with some particular—
but then to see that you do it.

Søren Kierkegaard

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I had a few personal firsts last weekend. Let me share a couple of them with you this morning.

I found myself for the first time in the great state of Mississippi. I was in Mississippi preaching at a service at the home church of my colleague Dana Ferguson—Batesville Presbyterian Church in Batesville, Mississippi. Another first was that I was preaching during a service that is being held more and more often in different Presbyterian churches around the country. It’s a service called the Kirking of the Tartans, where people with Scottish heritage bring a little piece of the tartan with them to church. It’s lovely. It’s kind of a Scottish heritage service, and the stories abound that the service has its roots in the ill-fated Jacobite rebellion of 1745, after which the wearing of tartan was banned. In actual fact the Kirking of the Tartans goes back to 1941 and Washington, D.C., where the famous Scottish preacher Peter Marshall introduced the service as a Scottish heritage service.

There was some concern in Mississippi from Dana and others that it wasn’t going to be very successful because no one in the congregation would understand anything I was to say. There was some concern on the other side as well that I wouldn’t understand what the good folks of Batesville were saying. But I think we got along alright.

This reminded me of an episode—this is a true story—when I had just arrived at Fourth Church some seven years ago. I was speaking to a group of the younger children in Children’s Chapel on a Sunday morning and having started the story and reached the point where I was going to involve the children, I asked a question. This was followed by a stunned silence, only to be broken by a wee boy of about five who turned to his Sunday school teacher and said, “Is he speaking Spanish?”

Interestingly when I am around younger children now I tend to get a different reaction. I don’t think that it’s because I’ve developed some Midwestern accent or that people are just more used to me, because it happens even with children whom I’ve not met before. I think that it is because of the pervasive presence in our culture of who really has become the most famous Scotsman in the world. I’m talking here about someone who’s quite an unusual person in that he is green and he lives in a swamp. I’m talking about Shrek!

Now even if you’ve not seen the movie—the two animated movies—you will have seen Shrek in supermarkets, on food labels, and on bus shelters. Anywhere where advertisement boards are, you’ll see this gross-looking ugly green creature. In the movies Shrek speaks with a distinctly Scottish accent done by the actor Mike Meyers. So what happens now when I come across children is they say, “He sounds like Shrek! Can you say ‘donkey’ for us?” And I say, “Donkey!” (Donkey is Shrek’s best—and worst—friend). You should understand that I don’t mind—as long as they don’t say I look like Shrek I’m OK. I don’t mind it because I am a fan of Shrek, because Shrek is not only an animated ogre who is green and has bad toileting habits, but is something, I think, of a spiritual giant and one to be a figure for us to think about as we are in the season of Lent.

Let me just explain a little bit, in case you don’t know the story. Shrek is an ogre who lives on his own and finds himself caught up in going on a journey, a quest. But like all good journeys, this develops into not just a physical pilgrimage, not just about distance, but about how Shrek himself journeys in his being from one place to another. Shrek lives on his own in the swamp; he doesn’t like company. He’s a radical individualist who, by the end of the movie, has become not only community-minded but cares most for the weakest and most marginalized in the fairy-tale society. Shrek moves from a place of almost stubborn certainty to openness to change, from superiority to vulnerability. There’s a transformation that happens to Shrek, and in the end, of course, he gets the girl.

But not just in the simple Disney happy ending. I’m not going to waste it for you—I know you’re all going to go to Blockbuster after the service and try and rent it to see what on earth Macleod was talking about. What’s interesting is that by the end of the movie, the first movie, Shrek has seen the world differently, and in his seeing the world differently, he transforms the world for those around him. Put Shrek in mind as we reflect on our text from John’s Gospel this morning. John, chapter 3, those first verses—one of the most familiar texts in our Bible, up there probably with the Twenty-third Psalm and with the Ten Commandments from Exodus. Perhaps we should say that it is not the whole text but a particular verse that is one of the most familiar pieces in the Bible. You might know it from Sunday school or from seeing it held up at World Cup soccer matches or other sports occasions where some guy is at the front with a banner that says, “John 3:16.”

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”

We were always warned about the danger of lifting a sentence or a verse out of the Bible and simply laying it out without any context to help understand it. That’s sometimes what has happened to this verse of scripture, this beautiful, complex statement about the fullness of God’s love for the world. And yet too often it’s used as a weapon: it’s used by people in the church to bludgeon others or to exclude those who are outside of the church. One person I was reading said that she believed wherever there’s a banner that says “John 3:16” it should be followed by one that says “John 3:17”: “Indeed God did not send the Son into the world to condemn but in order that the world might be saved.”

Interesting how a verse becomes used as what in the business is called a proof text—it’s lifted and used to justify a particular stance or position or even prejudice of the person who offers it. A very wise lecturer of mine who was a great lover of the Bible once said in a class, “Whenever the Bible is used as a weapon against someone or a group of people—particularly a minority, people who do not look or act like us—whenever the Bible is used as a weapon, it ceases to be the word of God.”

Indeed we do a disservice to the morning’s Gospel text and to ourselves if we don’t look at the rich and complex story that leads up to this important crescendo at the end. I think that in exploring more deeply, we’ll find that this story is full of irony and oppositions, words that have double, even triple meanings. It’s almost as if Jesus and Nicodemus are talking past each other; they’re on different planes of thought and conversation. It’s important for us to consider Nicodemus—presented to us as a leader of the people—as a Pharisee, meaning one of that group of religious people who made it their task in life to live out most fully the intricacies of the law of Judaism. So Nicodemus is a religious exemplar. You might say he’s curious as well. He comes by night asking questions. That Nicodemus would come by night has intrigued painters and poets and commentators alike. For Henry Vaughn, the sixteenth-century poet, in his great religious poem “Night” based on this story, he describes Nicodemus as blessed:

Most blessed believer he,
who in that land of darkness and blind eyes
thy long expected healing wings could see.

Others, like William Barclay in his popular Daily Study Bible commentary, argue that it’s night because it actually was night and that’s when rabbis studied and this was a meeting between two rabbis. I particularly like this suggestion from Catholic theologian Sandra Schneider. She talks about the importance of night as an image because it brings us into the opposition of light and darkness that’s inherent in the conversation that happens. She says, “Nicodemus is the very type of the religious person who is on the one hand utterly sincere and on the other complacent about his or her knowledge of God and God’s will.” In other words, Nicodemus is like most of us. We’re religious—we come to church, we seek to be sincere—but often we’re comfortable where we are and there’s a bit of complacency. Now this may be one of the reasons why Nicodemus is such a sympathetic character for so many people.

One of the things that we learn as we read through the Gospel is that Nicodemus appears again. He becomes a kind of a defender for Jesus before the council of the people, and he’s there with Joseph of Arimathea right at the end when Christ’s body is taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb. Indeed we might characterize Nicodemus as a journeyer, and not only meaning his journey in the Gospel but in this one meeting with Jesus. Here he embarks on a journey, and his starting-off point is a particular kind of knowledge. The first thing that Nicodemus says to Jesus is “Rabbi, we know” (verse 2)—“Rabbi, we know.” These are dangerous words in the hands of complacent religious people. “We know,” said the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa before the end of apartheid, “we know that black people were created as less than white people and therefore apartheid is justified by God and scripture.” “We know,” said the Presbyterian Church for 300 years until about 1956, “we know that women are less able than men to take on positions of leadership in the church as Deacon or Elder or Minister of Word and Sacrament.” “We know,” said the Protestants of Northern Ireland, “we know that Catholics are second-class citizens and do not deserve the same rights we have.” “We know,” the church still too often says, “that people who are different—people who are gay and lesbian—are not to be in positions of leadership in our churches.” “We know who’s in and who’s out.” Beware the religious person who says “we know.”

Nicodemus learns this in his encounter with Jesus from his opening statement. Note that anytime Nicodemus speaks after, he’s asking a question. He engages in trying to understand this shifting space, this wordplay, these riddles that Jesus comes up with—oppositions of day and night, of flesh and spirit—words that are the same word but with different meanings: “Wind and Spirit,” the same word; “to be born from above, to be born anew, to be born again,” same word. And as Jesus weaves this riddle, it culminates in these words of Jesus: “The wind blows where it chooses.” And the wind of the Spirit eventually causes Nicodemus to be winded as he almost exasperatedly cries, “How can this be?”

“How can this be?” Nicodemus has moved from saying “We know” to “I don’t know.” Ellen Charry of Princeton Theological Seminary writes about this in a piece called “Knowing and Loving.” She says, “Knowing the story of God’s dealing with us in creation we are given spiritual knowledge of the wisdom, the goodness, the truth and the moral beauty that is the very being of God.” The very being of God. And then she goes on to say, “St. Augustine understood that wisdom is spiritually superior to correct information.” Nicodemus’ knowledge was more like that of “correct information” than it was about “spiritual wisdom.”

This journey had taken him from a place of certainty to an openness to the wind that blows where it chooses. Sandra Schneider, whom I mentioned earlier, goes on in her very interesting piece on this text to reference it to church communities: “It is only after they”—we—“have been reduced to the futility of their own ignorance that they can begin the process of coming to the light—not by argument or reasoning but by doing the truth.”

There are echoes here of Soren Kierkegaard. I copied a little quote of his on the front of your bulletin this morning. Kierkegaard was very suspicious of doctrine, of tightly reasoned arguments that seemed to have God all wrapped up in systematic and rational reasoning. There needs to be space for the Spirit to lead us to do the truth.

And so, this morning, on this Second Sunday of Lent, let us continue our journey to the cross, and as we do so, let us hope that we might be like Shrek and Nicodemus—people who are open to the wind, to the Spirit, to take us to places where we perhaps least expect.

In the words of English writer Graham Cook, let us pray:
Wind of God keep on blowing.
Sail over the barriers that we build
to divide ourselves from each other.
Pick up your seeds of freedom and truth wherever they flourish,
carry them across frontiers to be planted in other soil,
to begin fresh growth and new forms.
Blow from the South
to the ears of Northern peoples.
Blow away the blinkers
which keep our eyes focused only on the past,
repeating its violence, deepening its divisions
and adding to its despair.
Reveal the new future you have in mind for us. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church