Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: John 3:1-8, Acts 2:1-4
August 8, 2004
It seems about once a week, someone will say to me: “Who do we call to schedule an appointment with you?” Like I have people who do that for me. Which I could, I suppose. But if you want an appointment with me, you call me. Or you take your chances and drop in on me. Which carries no assurance. But you never know.
When I started out in ministry, every minister carried a little black book. I mean a “really little black book.” Smaller than a pack of cigarettes, you could put it in your shirt pocket. Where there would be room for it, of course, given that preachers weren’t supposed to carry cigarettes. Or smoke them. Though some did.
My appointment calendar, by contrast, is huge. It is bound in leather. It has big pages and lots of lines to fill. I have used versions of this book for thirty years, having missed all of the revolutionary improvements since. I slept through the Franklin Planner stage. I didn’t buy a Palm Pilot. And if it weren’t for my daughter, I wouldn’t have even heard of BlackBerries. What are BlackBerries, you ask? They are the latest computerized wrinkle by which one does messaging and personal scheduling. You wear them on your hip rather than eat them on your cereal. Word has it that Lance Armstrong and Sheryl Crow first flirted with each other via their BlackBerries. Which, of course, assumes you know who Lance Armstrong and Sheryl Crow are. Thanks to my daughter, I am able to keep up.
It might surprise you to know that I get more invitations to seminars on organization and time management than to workshops on spiritual formation and preaching. We clergy are encouraged to plan our day….our week….our month….even our career. The problem with career planning when you’re a Methodist preacher is that when your plan and the bishop’s whim go head to head, the bishop’s whim is going to win every time.
Don’t get mewrong. I like words like “organization” and “planning.” I have a friend whose personal stationary carries the motto: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Yet when Rachel Billups (our recently-departed Duke intern) asked me, “So how do you deal with all the interruptions in your ministry?”, I told her that when I looked more closely, I discovered that many of the interruptions were my ministry.
All of which calls to mind a line from Margaret Valade’s favorite theologian, Caroline Myss, who writes: “So you want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.” All of which suggest that both life and God are full of surprises.
Start with life. I am talking ordinary life….daily life….get up, go through the routines and go to bed life. You know the life I mean. I am talking about your life….most days. That is until life blindsides you.
You take an at-home pregnancy test
and the results either delight or dismay you.
You hear from your friendly federal government
and it’s either a tax refund or a call-up notice.
You learn that the oncologist has read the CAT scan of your liver
and it’s either clear or cloudy.
Your kid comes home from a party after midnight
and either sits on the edge of your bed to talk or kneels by the edge of the toilet to throw up.
All of those are big departures from routine that happen occasionally. But there are also little departures from routine that happen daily. Ten days ago, my plan was to round out the afternoon with a pair of calls….one in Pontiac, followed by one in Birmingham. Both calls, pastoral. The first in a hospital. The second in a home. “Visit the sick,” the Bible says. So I try.
Tight schedule. But right on schedule. Leave patient. Exit Pontiac. Travel southbound on Wide Track. Suddenly four lanes of traffic come to a screeching halt. A roadblock before us. Multiple police cars behind us. Seven officers with guns drawn race to a car located one ahead of me (and just to the right of me). They extract the driver physically….bounce him on the pavement unceremoniously….corral him….cuff him….lead him away….and on we go. All of which makes me late, throwing off my day. Only later does it occur to me that if the guy in the car had possessed a gun….well, you never know. And there I was, so intent on watching this happen (as if this was NYPD Blue and I was sitting on my sofa on a Tuesday night), that it never occurred to me that I should have hit the floor.
Or, simpler still, consider the lady who gets up in the morning and says: “Boy, this looks like a nice day.” Then one of her children tells her that there’s something wrong with the dog. But before she can pile the dog in the car, another kid says: “Momma, I have a red throat. My throat is sore.”
“Okay, I’ll take you and the dog.” She puts the sick child and the dog in the car, goes first to the doctor, then to the vet. But at the second stop, her car stalls. Something about the battery. So she calls home and tells yet another kid that she is going to be late. Which is when she hears (from the voice on the other end of the phone): “One of the commodes is backed up.” Calling a plumber from her cell phone, she learns that there is no way he can get there today.
“But I’m all backed up and I have company coming.” To which he responds: “Lady, you’re not the only one backed up. I am backed up a week. I can’t get there.”
She goes home, thinking about how the day started. Such a beautiful day. What happened? Life happened. If you’re going to have any joy, any purpose, any peace, you are going to have to put it together out of fragments, because you are not going to get 24 smooth hours in a row.
But the Bible understands that. The Bible was not written by some relaxed person, all lathered up with sunscreen under an umbrella, drinking lemonade beside the pool. The Bible was written by people who had to put life together with short pieces of string.
Life is unpredictable. Full of surprises. Often enjoyable. Usually endurable. Most all of them accidental. But here and there, providential. That’s because God, too, is full of surprises. Ellsworth Kalas (one of the geniuses behind the Disciple Bible Study movement), writes: “I have lived in the world of religion since before I was born, and in this long period of observation (seventy years and counting), I have learned two things for sure. First, you can’t box God in. And second, we are always trying to do so.”
My father….who wasn’t majorly religious, or even minorly religious, for that matter…. occasionally used to say: “God’s ways are not our ways.” All he really meant by that was that there is always going to be a certain unpredictability to life, and whenever we get too settled in our ways (thinking we have life pretty well figured out), it is very much in the nature of God to say: “Refigure.”
When Abraham said, “You know, Sarah and I are well into our retirement and have gotten pretty comfortable here in Ur,” God said: “Refigure.”
When Moses said, “This job I’ve got in Midian, working for my father-in-law, is one cushy deal,” God said: “Refigure.”
When Jonah told the lady at the AAA office, “The last place in the world I’d ever want to go is Nineveh,” God said: “Refigure.”
Enter Nicodemus. I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for Nicodemus, given that I picture him as a man who is getting looser, not harder, as he gets older….even as I picture myself getting looser rather than harder as I get older. We see him coming to Jesus, privately, for a little nocturnal session of “Question and Answer.” Much has been made of the fact that Nicodemus approaches Jesus by night, as if to suggest that Nicodemus would rather not be seen in the company of Jesus. Perhaps he viewed such an encounter as potentially harmful to his reputation, like a preacher’s sneaking into a strip show. It is hard for us to remember that there were once circles in which Jesus was not exactly respectable. So maybe Nick did go nocturnally, the better to go anonymously. But the text doesn’t say that. So for all we know, this little episode of “Nick at Nite” could have taken place after dark because that’s when Nick got off work…..or when Jesus did.
We know a little about Nicodemus. He’s a Jew….a well-along-in-years Jew….a well-born and moderately-wealthy Jew. He is also a Pharisaic Jew, one of a number which most likely never exceeded six thousand. These were always men….always devout….and always good (if you define “good” as living as close as humanly possible to God’s law). What’s more, he is a ruler of the Pharisees (of which there were never more than seventy). Color him the “goodest of the good.”
Anyway, Nicodemus comes to Jesus after dark and launches a conversation about “signs and wonders.” In short, Nick has seen what Jesus has done to the point of being impressed. “I am impressed,” he says. “And I don’t impress easily.” Following which he adds: “Which is why I am willing to consider the preposterous claim that you (Jesus) might have more than a passing relationship with God. Because I can’t imagine anybody doing what you have done, unless God be in you.”
To which Jesus says (loose translation): “I am glad you’re impressed. But anybody can be impressed. What’s more, you didn’t come here tonight to tell me how impressed you were. You came looking for something else. Something more. So here is my word to you. You need to be born from above.” If you want to translate this as “you need to be born again,” be my guest. But “born from above” is closer and better. To which Nick says: “You want I should crawl back into the belly of my mommy?” And Jesus says: “Don’t be stupid. Instead, listen to the wind (which blows where it wants to…..when it wants to….to the degree that it wants to….for as long as it wants to). You don’t control it. You just receive it. You move with it. You go with it.”
I have been in a hurricane (South Carolina) where you could actually see the wind whipping lawn chairs out to sea, with a sheriff driving up and down the road shouting (through a bullhorn attached to his car): “If you choose not to evacuate this island immediately, we can no longer guarantee your safety.” That’s one kind of wind.
But I have also been on the golf course when a golfer, far better than me (sufficiently “better” so as to worry about conditions), bent over….picked a few blades of grass….threw them up into the air….and discerned by their movement that there was a breeze blowing ever so softly from east to west, meaning that (if he went with it and adjusted to it) it would carry his wedge to the green within six feet four inches of the pin. That’s another kind of wind.
My friends, don’t make this harder than it needs to be. If rebirth is really from above (and if it really is like the wind), there is not one way that it happens….nor is there one day that it happens. It can happen to anybody, any way, at any time.
For some ridiculous reason, I once read a 350-page biography of televangelist Jimmy Swaggert. And he lamented that in the family in which he was raised (which included both Mickey Gilley and Jerry Lee Lewis…..“There’s a whole lot of shaking going on”), and in the church where he was raised (Pentecostal), and in the part of the South where he was raised (Faraday, Louisiana), the only way anybody accepted that you had received the Spirit (or were born of the Spirit) was if you were slain in the Spirit, preferable while speaking in tongues. And Jimmy hadn’t been. Yet he wanted to be. Because he wanted it to happen to him like it had happened to everybody else, so they wouldn’t look at him like an outsider.
Here, nobody has ever been “slain in the Spirit.” Occasionally a groomsman or bridesmaid will faint in the middle of the ceremony. Given that I have great peripheral vision, I usually see them go before they hit the ground. Sometimes I even catch them. But were it Sunday morning and someone were to be slain in the Spirit (falling over backwards to be caught by a deacon or a nurse-in-waiting), they would look like the outsider. Because that never happens here. So does that mean this is not a Spirit-filled church? I once got a letter from someone who was leaving our church, explaining that they had found a Spirit-filled church. I appreciated the letter. I mean, I was glad to know why she left. People don’t always tell me. But as to this not being a Spirit-filled church, don’t sell me that crap.
Experiencing the Spirit can be so very different for so very many. I want you to understand that because there are all kinds of people out there who will swear on a stack of Bibles that what I just said isn’t true. They will swear that the rebirth experience is always the same experience…. describable in the same words….and felt in the same way. And maybe the night you were “reborn” was pretty much like those people described….something you experienced with a rush and answered with a “Yes.” Maybe it truly was a night that you can date with precision….a night so dramatic in the claim it made upon your life (and so dramatic in the about-face you made in response to its claim on your life) that, to this day, you can still feel the residual twinges of spiritual whiplash.
But for others of you, there was no one night….no dramatic moment….no dateable encounter…. and no spiritual rush. Instead, it was like a gentle leading over a long journey, marked by a “pull” here, a “push” there, or perhaps a simmering, smoldering warming, largely unrecognized at the time, but which (over time) pushed you in a direction you never planned to go, or led you to do something with your life that you never (in a million years) thought you’d do.
Or consider it another way. When, pray tell, did you first know you were in love? Or when did you first become aware that someone loved you? The answers will be as diverse as the people in this room. Some of you will know exactly when it happened….where it happened….what you were wearing….where you were standing….what he said….what she said….how each of you looked…how both of you felt….what music was playing….and how the weather was. Ah, yes….you remember it well. You are part of the Maurice Chevalier/Enzio Pinza school of “Love by Thunderbolt.” Some enchanted evening…..across a crowded room….seeing a stranger…. hearing violins in the woodwork….flying to his side/her side….as if by electromagnetism. Ecstasy! Rapture! Good for you. That’s nice. Not for a moment would I diminish the power of your memories.
But others of you can’t pinpoint it at all. You don’t know when it happened…..where it happened….how it happened….why it happened….didn’t plan for it to happen….fought tooth and nail against it happening….because it was the wrong time….wrong place….maybe even the wrong face. I suppose we could term this the Rex Harrison/Henry Higgins school of “Love by Delightful Accident.” How did they put it? “I was serenely independent and content before we met. Surely I could always be that way again and yet….I’ve grown accustomed to your face.”
But however it was that you fell in love….whether you discovered it, or it discovered you….whether you ran toward it, or away from it….sooner or later you had to respond to it. Sooner or later you had to say: “Yes, I’m open to this….to what’s happening to me….to what’s stirring in me….to what’s simmering and smoldering in me. I see my life being changed. And although it turns my knees to jelly one minute and scares me half-to-death the next, I am ready for it. I’ll go with it. And I will try to trust what comes as a result of it.”
* * * * *
Oh, and one more thing that is common to both falling in love and feeling the Spirit. It has to do with temperature. Whenever you fall in love or feel the Spirit,
it warms the soul,
it takes the chill off the universe,
it fires the faint of heart.
Now you can go ahead and tell me (at the door) that I am full of hot air. To which I will say: “Precisely.”
Note: I am indebted to Ellsworth Kalas for his treatment of this same text in a book called New Testament Parables from the Backside. I am also indebted to Fred Craddock for his story of the woman whose day unravels (especially Fred’s wonderful line about the Bible not being written by some relaxed person, all lathered up with sunscreen under an umbrella by the pool drinking lemonade.) Fred is right. The Bible was written by people “who had to put life together with short pieces of string.”
As concerns the three paragraphs about falling in love, I lifted them from a sermon I previously preached in September of 1994. While plagiarism is always sinful, I suppose it becomes less so when you are ripping off your own material.
It is perhaps important to note that both the title and text for this morning’s sermon were connected to First Church’s Choir Camp theme, “Catch the Wind.” The morning included a number of musical presentations tied to the issue of wind in general and th
