Sunday
May 31
Sweet Spirit
By Marsh Chapel
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Strange Spirit
The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes. So it is with every one who is born of the spirit.
Scripture and tradition depend on reason and experience. Spirit involves reason and experience. A question for you, day by day as mortality approaches, is whether you can find the courage to trust your own experience and whether you can find the capacity to rely on your own reason. Opportunities to subcontract both are amply available. But in order to live a life that is yours not almost yours, Spirit is needed.
We feel a measure of this spirit every year at Commencement. Especially in one of the latest and very smallest of graduation exercises each year. Monday last week, May 18, was a gracious sun kissed beautiful Boston day. The morning was cool and bright, gracious and breezy, with more than a hint of salt in the sea air. Gracious and salty, as the Bible says our speaking ought to be: ‘let your speech be gracious, yet seasoned with salt’.
19 young women and men stood up, in Faneuil Hall here in Boston, the cradle of liberty. They stood to take a vow, to make an oath. And though their numbers and their simple ceremony were not as large as the great winds of pageantry on Nickerson field, or traditional liturgy in Marsh Chapel, or hooding and hand shaking in the 17 schools and colleges in the days preceding, there is something in this spirited moment, small and modest, that takes the measure of all the others. As if, with these 19, the question is posed for all the rest, whether what we are doing is worthy, and worthy of these few.
With their loved ones all around, they promise to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States—if need be, with their lives. In the quiet, among families and friends, there are waves of tears, waves like those lapping at the shoreline a few hundred feet away. With reason, and in their experience, they are bearing witness to a hard decision. So tears flow. ‘Different are the languages of prayer, but the tears are all the same’ (A Heschel). Every year this is the smallest but the finest moment in all the graduation ceremonies at BU. Stumbling in tears and emotion, loved ones place shoulder boards upon the newly minted Army second lieutenants. It is awkward to figure out how to button these shoulder boards–but the fumbling is more about water and eyes and a spirit moment. Water and spirit. And then the photos of the 19—male and female, black and white, short and tall, gay and straight. It is an induction utterly and fully inclusive. And a prayer and song and a salute. And it is beautiful, and powerful.
Nicodemus finds himself, at night, in such a spirited moment.
The Jesus of John counsels Nicodemus to be born of spirit and water, to be born from above, to be like the wind.
Wind at midnight. Wind from the sea. Summer wind came blowing in. The wind blows where it wills. Wind of God.
Nicodemus appears two other times in the Fourth Gospel, two tantalizing entries into the flow of the Gospel. He is there to remind us of our growth in spirit. Our understanding of Jesus’ teaching with Nicodemus, his later appearances remind us, requires the whole gospel. Especially when it comes to spirit, strange spirit, John Spirit, Night Spirit, Sweet Spirit.
The strangest of strange outcroppings of Spirit in all of Scripture is located on the windswept steppe of John 14, the ice covered snow peak of the Bible, the haunted moonscape of planet Gospel. Once you have ascended John to the last discourse, John 14ff, you are clearly in a strange, strange land and landscape. The venerable preacher who originally spoke to the late first century community in Ephesus (say) if nothing else had absolute confidence in his own experience. It lead him, and thus his church, to establish a different religion, what became later emerging Christianity. He did not let the door hit him as he swung out. Here, Nicodemus. Here, a Samaritan Woman. Here, blind man healed. Here, Lazarus—raised. Here, Beloved Disciple. Here, Thomas. Here, Logos. Here, especially, Spirit, by another name.
If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him or knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you…These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.
Spirit in John
John had the courage to face the awful disappointment behind the New Testament: Jesus did not return, not on schedule, not as expected, not soon and very soon, not maranatha, not yet. But John looked at his own experience, and in biblical measure, with traditional tools, reasoned. In place of apocalypse, he celebrated the artistry of the everyday, and in place of the speculation about the end, he celebrated the Spirit of truth, and in place of parousia, the coming of the Lord, he nominated Paraclete, the presence of the Lord. He sang: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. One way to solve problems is to face them, to name them, to admit them. No parousia. Paraclete.
The stark strangeness, the utter difference of John from the rest of the Bible we have yet to admit. My beloved advisor, perhaps the greatest John scholar of our era, Fr. Raymond Brown, got only as far as saying that John is best understood as ‘an embraceable variant’ emphasis on embraceable less emphasis on variant. But when we get to the summit, John 14 and following, we see chiseled there in ice and covered fully with wind snow, an enigmatic, mysterious riddle: Spirit, sweet Spirit, Paraclete. The endless enemy of conformity. The lasting foe of the nearly lived life. The champion of the quixotic. The standard bearer of liberty. The one true spirit of spirited truth. Yet we cannot even give the history of the term, nor fully define its meaning, nor aptly place it in context, nor finally determine its translation. Paraclete eludes us. Paraclete evades us. Paraclete outpaces us. Paraclete escapes us.
Notice that the Spirit is given to all, not just to a few or to the twelve, definitely not. Notice that it is Spirit not structure on which John relies. Notice it is Spirit not memory which we shall trust (good news for those whose memory may slip a little). Notice that Spirit stands over against what John calls ‘world’ here—another dark mystery in meaning. Notice that the community around John’s Jesus is amply conveyed a powerful trust in Spirit.
Other parts of the New Testament take another trail. The Book of Acts offers confidence by way of hagiographical memories of Peter and Paul, and of false but loving assertions of the utter agreement of Peter and Paul. Trust your memory and when you cannot create a new memory. The Pastoral Epistles—and to some degree 1 John in opposition to his gospel namesake—rely not on memory or memories and not on Spirit, but on structure: presbyters, faith once delivered to saints, deacons, codes of conduct, stylized memories of orderly transmission of tradition. We need memory. We need structure. Neither can hold a candle to Spirit. That is, for John, what Moses, the Law, the historical Jesus, the Sacraments or anything else can not ever fully offer, Paraclete provides. By Spirit we hear the word God. God reveals by Spirit. God self-reveals by Spirit. Here the stakes are very high.
Again, Raymond Brown: This is the ultimate self-revelation of how the word of God gets translated as God. To a community living in time and space, the Spirit of Jesus is proving the world wrong. People who live by the spirit is the only way others will be convinced of the victory of Jesus (Hill, Courageous, 82).
Night Spirit
When we come to Nicodemus, we come with our own reason and experience, like that of the great poet Henry Vaughn.
Henry Vaughn lived from 1622 to 1695. He fought on the Royalist side during the great war. (Vaughn is known as one of the best followers and imitators of George Herbert.) In 1649, Charles I executed Oliver Cromwell. The Church of England was disestablished and the Book of Common Prayer was outlawed. Vaughn lived during a dark time, and his poetry evokes his time. He recalls the great Pseudo-Dionysus and the Cloud of Unknowing. He celebrates night and the darkness of God, in a way that connects truly to our time as well. It is no accident that he bases this poem on Nicodemus at night.
The Night
Through that pure Virgin Shrine
That sacred veil drawn o’er thy glorious noon
That men might look and live as glow-worms shine
And face the moon:
Wise Nicodemus saw such light
As made him know his God by night.
Most blest believer he!
Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes
Thy long expected healing wings could see,
When thou didst rise,
And what can nevermore be done,
Did at mid-night speak with the Sun!
O who will tell me, where
He found thee at that dead and silent hour!
What hallowed solitary ground did bear
So rare a flower,
Within whose sacred leaves did live
The fullness of the Deity
No mercy seat of gold,
No dead and dusty Cherub, nor carved stone,
But his own living works did my Lord hold
And lodge alone;
Where trees and herbs did watch and peep
And wonder, while the Jews did sleep.
Dear night! This world’s defeat;
The stop to busy fools; care’s check and curb;
The day of Spirits; my soul’s calm retreat
Which none disturb!
Christ’s progress and his prayer time;
The hours to which high Heaven doth chime.
God’s silent, searching flight:
When my Lord’s head is filled with dew, and all
His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;
His still, soft call;
His knocking time; the soul’s dumb watch,
When Spirits their fair kindred catch.
Were all my loud evil days
Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark Tent,
Whose peace but by some Angel’s wing or voice
Is seldom rent;
Then I in Heaven all the long year
Would keep, and never wander here.
But living where the sun
Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tire
Themselves and others, I consent and run
To every mire,
And by this world’s guiding light,
Err more than I can do by night.
There is in God (some say)
A deep but dazzling darkness; as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear;
O for that night! Where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.
The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes. So it is with every one who is born of the spirit.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
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