Have You Seen the Wind?: Comfort in the unpredictable
Matthew 14: 22-33
As Emily and the children have reminded us, we last heard the sound of wind chimes here on Pentecost Sunday when we used them to symbolize the wind that entered the room where Jesus’ followers were praying and waiting for the Spirit of Jesus to comfort them. But it didn’t just comfort them, it gave them power: strange power. We had a very “full” service on Pentecost Sunday, with a baptism and communion. It was also unusual because we have not always, at TUMC or at other Mennonite Churches I’ve observed, made a really big deal out of Pentecost. And I don’t recall any other year in which we continued to celebrate Pentecost past Pentecost Sunday, let alone into the summer with a theme like “Have you seen the wind?”
This isn’t surprising: our movement was born in the 16th century reformation in which the burning debates centered on the interpretation and even the right contents of the bible. Our movement was born with the birth of the German bible and the printing press. So we have always considered ourselves people of the book. There it is, after all, in black and white: how to live a Godly life by trusting in Jesus and following His example. What more guidance would a Christian need than that?
Sure, the first followers would need all the help they could get: so enormous, so crazy, was their mission – to tell the whole known world that restoration to God had come by an executed and resurrected man. Besides, they had no bible for at least 70 years after Jesus left them. They would need special power from God, a Spirit to walk beside them – a “comforter” as Jesus put it.
But we modern, literate, orderly Christians: what interest would we have in some disruptive force that blows in unannounced to do wonders or wreak havoc with new inspirations (revelations?) that often seem anything but comforting? I must confess some personal hesitation about giving such a force, such a Spirit, too much rein. As a teenage convert to Christ and to Mennonitism, I was acculturated to the book as well: so much so that I thought myself a pretty thorough-going Biblicist, seeking to do all that the scriptures command – sort of my “years of living biblically.” Of course I didn’t really follow all the commands of the bible; just as A.J. Jacobs found it impossible to keep the Torah completely as he recounts in the book I just referenced. Though so committed was I to doing Christianity by the book, that for about a year I read only the KJV, having been persuaded by radio preachers of the apostasy of the translators and editors of the RSV.
The leaders of my Mennonite Brethren congregation did not encourage these biblicist excesses. In fact – in keeping with the pietism of that movement – there were charismatic elements in our church. Some of my friends in that youth group, some now Mennonite leaders, were very much nourished by a strong Holy Spirit movement afoot in the mid 1970s. There were prayer meetings where people were “in the Spirit,” where there were “slayings in the spirit,” and where there was speaking in tongues of angels (no, no one translated). These phenomena were taken by some as manifestations of the presence of God’s spirit. Just a few years later, as a modernist theology student, I developed quite a lot of resentment about some of those charismatic and biblicist excesses to which I had been exposed, leaving me unsure how to trust either the bible or the Spirit. That was some years ago and I have, in good measure, made peace with both bible and Spirit. But I have had reasons to be wary of Spirit talk; perhaps some of you have as well.
None-the-less, we can’t escape the Spirit talk — the Spirit/breath/wind language permeating the bible from the first chapter of Genesis where God breathed life into the nostrils of our first mothers and fathers, right up to the last gospel, perhaps the last book of the bible, John, in which Jesus uses the pneumatic analogy, telling Nicodemus, “The wind* 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.” (3:8)
Is this the comforter Jesus speaks of?
How is the unpredictable comforting?
That’s exactly what I find most unnerving about wind: there is no telling what it will do next. What IS wind anyway? Yes, I know that temperature variation make molecules move faster and slower and somehow wind patterns (sort of) emerge. But do you really, deep in your gut, get that? We humans are pretty dependent on our vision, the majority of us who have it. We tend to trust what we see. Compared to the other creatures of the earth, all of our senses are actually quite feeble; but of all our poor senses, we do see fairly well – we notice movement and judge distance very decently; and we see colour spectacularly well. Our visual dependence is, at least in English, even revealed in our idioms of speech: “I see your point;” “Let’s look at that idea further;” “That music is spectacular!” So when it comes to wind, I’m with film maker Woody Allen who famously said, “I never trust any air I can’t see.” He of course was joking about how much more at home he is in the city than in the outdoors. But I have felt suspicious of air. After one roller coaster ride at 35,000 feet coming into Chicago a number of years ago, I became a bit of a nervous flyer. I couldn’t teach myself out of my anxiety. I understood how the airfoil shape of the wing keeps a plane aloft and that they don’t just fall out of the sky e
ven if the air they fly in becomes unpredictable. But knowing this didn’t completely put me at ease in turbulence. What eventually made me more relaxed was when I discovered that some airlines had a channel on the audio system that let you listen in to the cockpit-to-tower communication. The utter calm in the voices of the pilots in the face of “moderate chop” helped me recognize I had nothing to fear. The comfort displayed by trusted pilots comforted me. After all, they are in the same boat I’m in, right?
In this week’s story from Matthew, Jesus’ disciples found themselves in a boat in turbulence without their pilot. Yes, it was water that would either keep them aloft or pull them under; but it was the wind that would either propel them forward on calm waters or stir up the waves against them and blow against sail and oar-stroke. And they were crossing without Jesus, at his insistence.
You will remember from Richard’s sermon last week that Jesus has just fed 5000 people – miraculously, starting with just five buns and two fish. You may recall that Jesus was actually trying to get away from the crowds, having just learned of the execution of his relative and forerunner, John, the one who takes people under the water. Jesus had tried to escape up into the hills, but was pulled down towards the water by the needs of the crowd. Now, at the end of a long day of teaching and hosting a huge meal, Jesus stays behind to dismiss his thousands of guests. There is no mention of any discussion about how Jesus was to catch up to his disciples. Crossing a lake is obviously a shorter distance than going around half its circumference, and boat travel is faster than walking or even riding an animal. We don’t know how they were supposed to be reunited. But Jesus was determined to have some time alone: to pray; surely to mourn John; and perhaps to rest. The disciples set off across the Sea of Galilee – really a freshwater lake only 13 by 8 miles across, but the lowest freshwater lake in the world at 700 feet below sea level. They departed from Bethsaida on the northeast shore of the lake. It isn’t clear where the disciples were supposed to go, but they ended up on the plains of Gennesaret, on the northwest side of the lake. Google Earth calculates this as a 12 minute car ride covering 14 km by land. It took the disciples most of the night by boat. In Mark’s account of this story, the one from which Matthew borrows, Jesus is said to have dismissed the crowds, gone up to the mountains to pray, and then, sometime very late at night or early the next morning, SAW that they were having trouble crossing – he could still see them after hours of trying to cross. They had gotten almost nowhere! I guess we can offer the disciples the excuse that their boat, if it was like the first century fishing boat discovered at the Sea of Galilee in the late 1980s, was not a racing boat. It would have had a very flat bottom with a shallow draft so they could get close to shore. It would have had a single square sail that worked fine for going in the direction the wind was blowing, but would have been useless against the wind. So now they must have been rowing and apparently were up against a very powerful wind. Jesus probably could have walked the land route that night and beat them to where they eventually landed. But he chose a different path – across the water, on the water. In Mark’s version of the story Jesus didn’t even intend to join them in the boat: he was just going to walk on past – you know, just, “See you guys over at Gennesaret when you get there.” It was only their fear that caused him to join them and calm the storm. Mathew adds to Mark’s story the part about Peter wanting to walk on the water too.
Look, many have tried to explain how Jesus or Peter could have appeared to have walked on water. The text says Jesus and Peter walked on water. Sure, the gospel writers (3 out of 4 in this case) tell this story for their own specific theological purposes to their specific believing communities, and so some of the details are recalled differently. Matthew borrowed Mark’s version almost word for word until he adds the Peter scene and then also changes Mark’s ending dramatically. And if you would say that the gospel writers included this story to teach a certain truth, but that you don’t actually believe Jesus could literally have walked on the surface of the water – I understand your scepticism. My personal response would be that I don’t see much point in believing in any deity if she or he can’t do anything deific. If one is going to posit a superior being, then one might expect an occasional show of superiority – that probably shouldn’t surprise us. Still, your scepticism is understandable. But when “scholars” make these silly attempts to show how it might have appeared to the disciples that Jesus was walking on water if he was standing in a very low boat and the waves obscured their vision just so – that is just pointless. The story, whether you accept it as literal or not, is pointless if Jesus isn’t walking on the water, just as he did as the creator spirit who “brooded over the deep” in Genesis 1. Jesus had previously been pulled under the water in the baptism of John whose life he now remembers; but now Jesus is again Lord over the deep. The story has no power if he is not on the water.
The disciples should not have been surprised to see Jesus walking on water; they had just witnessed him multiply someone’s lunch into enough food to feed thousands. Didn’t that blow their minds already? Should anything really surprise them now? None-the-less, in Mark’s telling, the disciples appear to be unable to understand any of this. Even after Jesus gets in the boat and the wind ceases, they are said to have been “utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.” In Matthew’s version the disciples do understand and they worship Jesus.
But when they first see Jesus catching up to them on the water, they are afraid that they are seeing a ghost. Just a word about words here: the disciples think they have seen a scary ghost, not the Holy Ghost: the word is Phanatos in Greek, from which we get Phantom, so cue the scary organ music and you’ve got the idea. And while we’re coming clean on language: I should explain that we are dealing here with two Greek words which may not be directly related to each other – at least not in Greek, though maybe in some proto-Indo-European tongue they are. Both words mean both wind
and spirit. One is pnuema (from which we get pneumatic and pneumonia). This is the word used by Jesus when he tells Nicodemus, “You can not see the wind (pnuema) . . . and so it is with everyone born of the Spirit (pneuma). The other word, anemos (from which we get animated – to move or be alive) is the one used to describe the wind the disciples encounter on the lake here in Matthew. So if I say that the wind that thwarted the disciples (the anemos) is like the Spirit of God, it is because these two Greek words are synonyms – they each mean the same two things: wind and Spirit.
The disciples thought they saw a ghost, but Jesus tried to comfort them. Now Matthew has Peter jump into the story and into the water. Peter wants to test this apparition’s power, believing, it seems, that the real Jesus would have the power to give him the power to walk on water. He remembers what he just saw that evening, the miracle of the fish and loaves. But when he sees the wind, he looses faith and has to be rescued. It turns out, it isn’t just all on Jesus to give our faith-intentions success; there is some sort of symbiosis at work. This was Peter’s idea and it worked as long as Peter believed it would. Btw, it was not the water that scared him, it was the wind. The water he can see, but the water is controlled by a wind he can not see coming. Are we not, like Peter, most frightened by what we can not see, cannot predict, cannot grab onto and control? Is this what the Spirit of Christ feels like to you at times? Do you have trouble trusting it? I do!
One thing more about this little road test being Peter’s idea: we see this a lot in the bible, don’t we – God taking us up on our ideas? Cain persuading God to give him some sort of protection against all who would kill him, and God agreeing even though Cain might well have deserved death; Abraham bartering with God over the lives of the people in Sodom and Gomorrah, and God relenting; Moses negotiating to have someone else do the public speaking in the liberation of the Hebrew slaves, and God conceding that Aaron could do the talking; the prosecutor before God’s bench asking that Job be tested, and God confidently putting Job to the test? I’m sure you can think of other instances when God reasoned together with righteous people. Here God hears and honours Peter’s need to put Jesus to the test and offers comfort where he needs it.
I was sailing with a good and generous friend last week and tried to learn a bit more about how to work with the wind; what that symbiosis is. It turns out it helps to have triangular rather than square sails. With triangular sails, there is much greater opportunity to capture wind from a wider range of angles. No, you still can’t sail directly into the wind. But you can sail at an angle to the wind, tacking back and forth across it with a resulting vector that is against the wind’s flow. We don’t want to carry this so far so as to say it is fine to trick the Holy Spirit and go opposite to the Spirit’s direction. But does not God still deal with us? Does he not know our frame and remember that we are but dust? If the Spirit of God is so agile – so swift to turn one direction or the other, will not that Spirit, sometimes, flex and shift with us as individuals and as the church? Like the church meeting in Jerusalem to figure out how to be followers of Jesus without first being Jewish, can we not sometimes say, “it seems good to us and to the Holy Spirit” to do such and so?
If the Spirit of God can be unpredictable, powerful, and destructively rejuvenating; is not the Spirit also flexible and sympathetic, speaking comfort to us in the howl of the wind or beneath the howl of other winds? Christ has sent an advocate in a freshening breeze, a breath that animates us, coming from the very breast of God. The Lord of all depths comes to us – as the gale, in the gale, or in stillness – saying, “Courage! It is I.”