The Power of the Spirit

The scriptures referred to are John 4:5-42.

I just read of a woman who died on a plane due to severe turbulence. It was a small corporate jet with only 5 people on board and she wasn't wearing her seatbelt. Still, while I've experienced turbulence on planes, including one time when it felt like a rollercoaster ride, and I could see if you were walking about, you might get hurt, I never realized you could get killed. And the cause was basically wind.

Of course, down here we've seen what wind in the form of waterspouts and hurricanes can do. Especially when combined with water. Unfortunately this lets the insurance companies argue that any damage you report was not covered by your wind policy because of the water, or that it's not covered by your flood policy because of the wind.

Still it's sobering to think of the power of things that are not solid. Wind isn't even visible. You can see its effects, but you can't see the thing itself. Jesus said in last week's passage from John's gospel, the Spirit is like the wind. “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you don't know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)

This week he compares the Spirit to living, or as we would say, running water, such as you would find in a spring. While water can be seen, it is translucent. And like the wind it is both formless and powerful. We've seen the damage floods can do but even smaller streams of water can cut a path through rock over time. So both water and wind are good pictures of the power of the Spirit.

In John's gospel the word light appears 16 times, 6 in the first chapter alone. Light is something else that is formless but powerful. Unlike water and wind, we don't feel its power physically but it allows us to see the world and navigate through it. Light allows us to be aware of things we can't otherwise perceive because we can't hear or smell or touch them. You can see clouds rolling in and so know a storm is coming. And light travels faster than sound. You see lightning before you hear thunder, especially when it is distant.

In Jesus' day you had 3 sources of light to see by: the sun, the moon and fire from a torch or lamp. Fire is basically formless and it is immensely powerful. It not only gives illumination, it gives warmth, it can cook food, it can refine metals—and it can burn and destroy if you are not careful. At Pentecost when the Spirit comes upon the disciples, tongues of flame appear to rest upon each of them. (Acts 2:3)

All of these things are powerful but without a fixed shape or form. And so it is with the Holy Spirit. Of the persons of the Trinity, the Spirit is the hardest to grasp, just as wind, water and light are impossible to grasp. But like all 3, the Spirit is essential to us.

In both Hebrew and Greek the word for spirit also means wind and breath. Breath is essential for life. Indeed, while you can survive about 3 weeks without food and 3 days without water, after 3 minutes without oxygen, brain damage starts to set in. After 12 minutes without breathing, a person is usually unable to be revived. (Which is why everyone should learn CPR.)

Water, as we've seen, is even more necessary to life than food. In fact one of the reasons that the US is more densely populated in the east than in the west is the availability of water. You just have to look at a precipitation map of the US to see that the plain states and those farther west get on average between a quarter and a half of the precipitation that the states from the Midwest on to the east do. And a precipitation map of Israel shows that while the north and middle of the land is green, the west and far south of that country is desert. Hence the importance of wells.

In the era before indoor plumbing, women usually went to the village well early in the day and late in the afternoon to avoid the sun's heat. So seeing a woman coming at noon to draw water would have been surprising. The Samaritan woman may have been coming at noon to avoid the other women commenting about her life. Despite what the Jews thought of them, the Samaritans also would have looked askance at a woman with 5 husbands in the past and a live-in lover at present. So Jesus' offer of a different source of living water would be very attractive to her. But Jesus senses that what this woman really needs is not so much physical refreshment as the presence of the Spirit in her life.

When the discussion progresses from physical water to her life, the woman pivots from this personally uncomfortable subject to a discussion about religious differences between Jews and Samaritans. The Samaritans were the descendants of the poor Jews left behind when the Assyrians took the upper classes into exile in 722 BC. The Assyrians then moved other conquered peoples into Israel. (2 Kings 17) The two groups intermarried. They had their own version of the Torah and rejected the rest of the Old Testament. Their temple was located on Mount Gerizim rather than on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. The Jews viewed the Samaritans as heretic half-breeds while the Samaritans viewed themselves as the true heirs of the Mosaic tradition. The bad blood between the two groups was only further fueled by the destruction of the temple on Mount Gerizim and the enslavement of the Samaritans by the Jews during the Maccabean revolt.

Jesus doesn't let the differences between the two groups get in the way of his message about the Spirit. Though he holds to the primacy of Mount Zion, he says, “Woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem....But the hour is coming, and is here now, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

Even today people get caught up in denominational distinctives to the point that they obscure the truth about God. They either don't know or forget that our forms of worship, our liturgies and how we are organized are not the same as they were in Jesus' day. There are some who try to recover the exact way the New Testament church did everything but that is impossible. And unnecessary. In the first century Christians met not in churches but in homes. During times of persecution, the church had to meet in secret. In Rome they met in the catacombs, the underground maze of burial chambers. Their only Bible was the Old Testament. For the first 60 years their knowledge of Jesus came directly from the mouths of the apostles. After the apostles were martyred, people collected Paul's letters and wrote down the stories of Jesus which were compiled into the gospels.

And even the early church had to adapt to changes caused by the Spirit. The first Christians were Jews. When Gentiles began to convert the church had to decide whether to make them become Jews, getting circumcised and observing all the Jewish laws, or simply accept them as fellow Christians saved by God's grace through their faith in the same incarnate, crucified and risen Lord Jesus. At the council of Jerusalem they came to see that, just as water takes the shape of whatever it encounters and yet maintains its essential nature, the Spirit can take the shape of whatever vessel God choses. (Acts 15:1-31) Water only stays in one form if you freeze it, and then it is no longer living water.

Still the church has never felt all that easy about the Spirit's freedom to adopt other forms. As soon as the church became official, it started codifying things. Now some of this was necessary. After all water has but one formula: H2O, two hydrogen atoms to one oxygen atom. Double the number of hydrogen atoms and you get deuterium oxide which is great for nuclear reactions but not entirely safe to drink. Add another oxygen atom to water and you get hydrogen peroxide, which is an antiseptic and bleaching agent. You can gargle with it but it would be harmful to swallow. In the same way the church did have to define who God is and who Jesus is. It's essential to agree that God and not some lesser being created everything and that Jesus is both divine and human so that we know that when we are dealing with Jesus we are dealing with God. As a professor of mine once said, in your house you need some things nailed down, like the roof and the walls and the floors. But you don't want everything nailed down. When I first came home from the nursing home, we had to rearrange the back room to accommodate a hospital bed. We couldn't do that if the furniture was nailed in place.

But as time went on, the church expanded the things that were codified, like whether clergy could marry, or whether baptism had to be by immersion, or the exact words of baptism. You may have heard of the Arizona priest who was using the words “We baptize you...” instead of “I baptize you...” The Catholic church considers all the baptisms he performed over 26 years, estimated in the thousands, invalid. Which means that all the subsequent sacraments received by those he baptized, like confirmations and marriages and being ordained, were also invalid. Because, apparently, the Spirit can only work when we use exact wording. Yet when the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, it uses not the original Hebrew but the Septuagint, a Greek translation. To me this decision about a single word makes baptism sound like it's a magic ritual rather than the action of an intelligent and loving God, who wants all to be saved and whose Spirit is not limited by language but who “intercedes for us with inexpressible groanings.” (Romans 8:26)

And as we see, Jesus says that the time has come when what is essential is not about exactly where or exactly how God is worshiped. What is vital is that we worship God in spirit and truth.

What does he mean by that? By spirit he obviously means the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus calls the Spirit of truth. That's appropriate because the Spirit guides us into the truth (John 16:13) Which means he testifies to us about Jesus, who said, “I am the way, the truth and the life...” (John 15:26; John 14:6, emphasis mine) The Spirit leads us to Jesus Christ, the God who is Love Incarnate, the ultimate truth in the universe. (1 John 4:8)

We can see the action of the Spirit in us because it produces “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23) As opposed to those things that unredeemed human nature results in, like “sexual immorality, impurity, depravity, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish rivalries, dissensions, factions, envying, murder, drunkenness, carousing and similar things.” (Galatians 5:19-21, emphasis mine) Notices how many of the things Paul lists divide people. And they can divide churches. And sometimes because people feel that there is only one way the Spirit can express or communicate the truth.

Yet in Acts 2 the Spirit accommodates people in dozens of languages so the gospel can be understood. And think of the differences in idioms the Spirit would have to use. In college I met a student who was an MK, or missionary kid. His parents worked with a tribe in the Amazon. When translating the gospel of John, they realized that there was no word in the tribe's language for lamb. There are no sheep in the Amazon jungle. So they settled on an animal the tribe used for sacrifice: the monkey. In their translation Jesus was called the “Monkey of God.” It may sound funny to us or even blasphemous but that's how they were able to communicate the good news that Jesus was the sacrifice for the whole world's sins. They preserved the essential truth though the form was changed.

When God manifested himself to Elijah, we read, “A very powerful wind went before the Lord, digging into the mountain and causing landslides, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the windstorm, there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire, there was a soft whisper.” (1 Kings 19:11-12) These spectacular events alerted Elijah to the fact that God was present so he would listen to what God was telling him. Too often we confuse the physical forms God uses to communicate with us with God himself. But God is Spirit. As Luther pointed out, washing someone with water without the appropriate word of God is not baptism; it's just washing. Eating bread and drinking wine without the words of Jesus, God's living Word, is not communion; it's just eating. The water, wine and bread are the physical forms through which the Spirit communicates God's grace to us. But that power is not inherent in water, wine or bread. It is the Spirit that gives these physical forms their meaning and power.

And as we see, even the Samaritans understood the concept of the Messiah. And while Jesus brings up the woman's multiple marriages, he doesn't do it to shame her, despite the fact that Jesus on other occasions expressed his displeasure with divorce and remarriage. (Matthew 5:32) No, it was to convince her that he was telling the truth when he admitted to being the Messiah. And when she leaves her water jar behind and runs to the village, she says, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” Not even Sherlock Holmes could have deduced that the woman was married exactly 5 times and was currently living with someone she wasn't married to. That this Jewish stranger to their little village whom she just happened to come across knew all of this about her made her a believer. And yet despite seeing Jesus' mastery over disease and his masterful understanding of scripture, the Jewish religious leaders could not even entertain the idea that he was the Messiah. Jesus didn't fit the picture of the Messiah they had formed in their minds and so they couldn't even see God's Spirit at work in him. (Mark 3:28-30)

Like wind, you cannot see the Spirit but the discerning can see the Spirit in gracious actions that heal and help people in their specific situations. Like water, the Spirit can take the shape of whatever vessel God chooses without losing its essential nature. Like light, the Spirit can reveal things we otherwise couldn't perceive. The Spirit's power is not found in the forms used. And like wind, water and fire, if we arrogantly try stand in the way of the power and the movement of the Spirit, it can spell disaster. So let us instead open our sails as Jesus' disciples did and go where the Spirit wants to take us. Let us quench our spiritual thirst with the living water Jesus offers. Let the Spirit illuminate the darkness of this world and lead us to the truth we find in Jesus.