The Wind Blows Where It Chooses

“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 Spirit.” (John 3:8)

Saturday night, I was having a bit of a time questioning my faith.  I was awake a lot of the night – which seems to happen more frequently as I age – and was wondering why God seems to be most difficult to connect with at times when it would be most beneficial to make that connection.  To put it more clearly – where the heck is God when you need Him?  I could put it in non-gendered language but it feels rather right to give God a masculine pronoun in this instance.  

I certainly haven’t suffered like Job but I can certainly understand Job’s demand to make his case face-to-face with God.  In any case, as it so often happens, things seemed much more positive in the light of day.  As the dessert fathers and mothers discovered, the night does bring demons and challenges in many different forms.

Being Sunday morning, Lorna and I were off to St. James Anglican Church to ring the bell at 9:00 and attend the Morning Prayer service following.  As I have written about previously, we started ringing the bell at church on Easter Sunday morning at the request of our Primate, Archbishop Linda Nicholls, who had asked that all Anglican churches ring their bells to let people know that Jesus Christ has risen even in the midst of Corona Pandemic when churches were not open for public worship .  We decided that we would continue to do that every Sunday morning during the Corona shutdown until we were able to worship together again. 

Some time after Easter Sunday, our priest-in-charge, Rev. Sherry De Jonge, decided to hold Morning Prayer services of the Word to be recorded and broadcast on Facebook following the ringing of the bell.  These followed the Diocesan guidelines and were not open to the public.  Following the bell ringing the doors would be closed.  Yesterday was rather humid and the church was on rather stuffy so when I was closing the front doors, I decided to leave them open as a very nice breeze was blowing into the church.

As the service progressed, I went up to the lectern to lead the prayers of the people and was surprized to see a man I didn’t know sitting at the back of the church.  One of the regular attendees was absent so fortunately we did not exceed the permitted number of attendees in this time of Corona-19 which is five.  I’m not sure what the protocol would have been if we did but, in any case, all was well on that front.  Following the service, we engaged in a discussion with the visitor with all attendees including the guest wearing masks.  It turned out that he was interested in having some members of his family baptized in the church and was passing by and saw the open door so decided to join us and was able to discuss the baptismal process when public worship services resume – hopefully in September. 

Now St. James is a very small congregation and this doesn’t usually happen even in non-corona times.  So, I have to ask myself if the convergence of unusual events had something or someone directing things behind the scene.  All the circumstances coming together can, of course, be put down to coincidence, however, I must ask myself if there wasn’t a connection with my questions of the night before.  I’m not saying there is cause and effect at work here but you have to wonder.  The Spirit blows where it chooses as we are told. 

Blessings on your journey and watch out for those coincidences. 

Let the Mystery Be

This morning I am following up on yesterday’s sermon and pondering the mystery of life.  I based my sermon (which is posted seperately) attached) on the reading from the book of Job.  It is something of a mystery why the book of Job was included in the canon of the bible as it puts God in a less than favourable light.  Job becomes the pawn in a celestial wager between God and Satan with dire consequences for Job and his family.  However, the story does have a happy ending for Job. All that Job loses is restored to him and he lives happily ever after and dies at a ripe old age of biblical proportions.

In the course of the story Job demands an audience before God and demands justice.  However, God is less than sympathetic to Job’s plight and states that God and God’s works are beyond Job’s comprehension.  Job humbles himself and admits to God that it is beyond his comprehension:

Then Job answered the Lord: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; ⁶therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”     

It is hard for us human being to live in the mystery of life.  We can deny it as some people with a scientific bent try and believe that we will solve the mystery of creation.  Or, as religious people, we can try and put God in a nice box that we define and tie up with a bright bow.  However, if we are honest and humble enough, as Job was, we can try and live in the mystery of life.  In my sermon I quote Helen Luke, one of my favourite authors who is one of the great explorers of this mystery:

true mystery is the eternal paradox at the root of life itself—it is that which, instead of hiding truth, reveals the whole not the part.  So when, after having made every effort to understand, we are ready to take upon ourselves the mystery of things, then the most trivial of happenings is touched by wonder, and there may come to us by grace, a moment of unclouded vision. 

True paradox can be difficult to understand and to live with but it is in paradox that we can discover God.  I believe that we are called to let the mystery be in all its wonder and respond to God with praise and thanksgiving.  I will close with a verse from my favourite song on this mystery; Let the Mystery Be by Iris Dement:

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they all came from. Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done.
But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me.
I think I'll just let the mystery be.

Taming the Wild God

²⁶Surely God is great, and we do not know him; the number of his years is unsearchable. ²⁷For he draws up the drops of water; he distills his mist in rain, ²⁸which the skies pour down and drop upon mortals abundantly. ²⁹Can anyone understand the spreading of the clouds, the thunderings of his pavilion? ³⁰See, he scatters his lightning around him and covers the roots of the sea. ³¹For by these he governs peoples; he gives food in abundance. ³²He covers his hands with the lightning, and commands it to strike the mark. ³³Its crashing tells about him; he is jealous with anger against iniquity. “At this also my heart trembles, and leaps out of its place. ²Listen, listen to the thunder of his voice and the rumbling that comes from his mouth. ³Under the whole heaven he lets it loose, and his lightning to the corners of the earth. ⁴After it his voice roars; he thunders with his majestic voice and he does not restrain the lightnings when his voice is heard. ⁵God thunders wondrously with his voice; he does great things that we cannot comprehend.  (Job 26: 24-27:5)

Last week I heard someone on the radio (I don’t remember the context) speaking about taming the wild God.  My thought on this was that this is exactly what religion attempts to do—tame God.  Religious doctrine must, perhaps of necessity, define God.  For most Christian denominations it is the Trinity of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Whenever we fallible human mortals try to define God we are in effect trying to tame him or her or it and make it in some respects a house pet.  In that respect we do create God in our image or at least in an image we can get our minds around and define God as something which we approve of.  When we say God is this God is that we are saying that God is not something else. 

One of the dangers in doing that is that is that we will want to have God at our beck and call.  That has been called ‘God the Butler’.  We keep ‘Him’ downstairs conveniently out of the way when it doesn’t suit us or is inconvenient to have Him around.  Then we ring for Him (or even Her) when we want something.  God is then at our beck and call.  God help God if God doesn’t live up to our demands or even expectations.  Then we say, “Well if God can’t do what I want or need Him to do then what kind of a God is that?”  The conclusion to that can be, “There is no God”. 

One of my favourite books of the Old Testament, if not the whole Christian Bible is the Book of Job.  It is also one of the more controversial and I am surprized that it made it into the canon.  It puts God/YHWH into less than a shining light.  God and Satan (before he was thrown out of Heaven) have a bargain that allows Satan to do pretty much what he wants to Job — who is described as “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”   The object of this little bet is to see if Satan can get Job to curse God.  Satan does his best (or worst from Job and our perspective) and yet Job is faithful.  However, he demands a hearing before God.  God justifies his actions by saying that Job is a mere mortal and cannot know the ways of God:

6Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: 7“Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you declare to me. 8Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be justified? 9Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?

This is a hard truth but truth none-the-less.  We can’t comprehend why God acts the way we believe God does.  Jesus presented God the Father as a God of love but this world of God’s creation is unfathomable.  God is unknowable and as much as we would like to tame Him/Her and explain why good things happen to bad people and vice versa there is mystery in life that is beyond us.  We have scientific understanding for those things that the opening quote from Job that credited God.  However, that does not take away any of the mystery of creation and the wonder which is still there if we are open to it; “At this also my heart trembles, and leaps out of its place”.

All we have left is the eternal why—why is there evil in the world of God’s creating; why doesn’t God answer prayer the way we want God to; why isn’t God behaving like God should?  Beyond all these questions we have Job’s response:

25For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; 26and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God,

Thanks be to God.