A Gracious Breeze

first page of Genesis, 1611 KJV Bible (Replica Edition) photo by jch

Sermon Series “Through the Bible,” № 1, Genesis 1:1-5

. . . a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. –Genesis 1:2

Therese and I purchased our first home in Wichita, Kansas.  It was located in a venerable neighborhood known as College Hill.  College Hill’s large trees and mature gardens flanked 1920s-era brick homes of varying sizes and styles.

We loved to walk, jog, and ride through our neighborhood.  Certain streets had Spanish-style stucco and tile homes that had a southwestern appearance.  Several streets contained rows of Tudor-style mansions that had the feel of neighborhoods we had known in the East. There was one thing about College Hill that never let you forget this gentle rise had once been a Tallgrass prairie, where the buffalo roamed, and that one thing was the wind.

The wind was such a constant feature of life that I might forget how strong it was. Then, stepping off a plane in another state, I would realize how different it was not to hear it or feel it.  The constant wind had enough of an impact on my psyche that more than a year after moving from Kansas, it emerged as the topic for a piece I composed during a writer’s workshop at Ghost Ranch, our Presbyterian Conference Center in New Mexico.

Styled after lyrics by Judy Collins, I wrote,

Blowing. 

Blowing fresh-mown grass along the sidewalk,

    whirls of redbud petals herald my newborn daughter’s homecoming

      like puffs of pink butterflies.

Blowing.

  Blowing hot breath across hills and prairie, 

    tall grass ripples and breaks

      like waves on a golden ocean.

 Blowing.

  Blowing through twisted shrubs

    leaves crackle,

      caught in woody stalks of faded mums.

Blowing.

  Blowing ice crystals tinkle against the windowpanes

    with the timbre of tiny chimes,

      and pierce my cheeks like bits of glass.

Blowing, blowing in the morning,

  blowing in the afternoon,

    blowing in the evening,

      blowing through the night.

If the world were reversed,

  if the pilgrims had sailed east,

    and czars had conquered the west,

      Kansas would be Siberia.

If you listened to all that, then surely you sensed my ambiguous feelings about the Kansas wind. A springtime puff wafting flower petals was a rare pleasure. More often, the wind seemed to spread the scorching heat of summer or the biting cold of winter. In a committal service at a Kansas grave, the wind accentuated the sense of abandonment that a mourner felt, a howl of grief for which there was no easy answer.

The howling wind can be a symbol and expression of abandonment, and it seems a fitting image for the time in which the Pentateuch was written.  Scholars tell us that the first five books of the bible took their form during the time of the Exile in Babylon. Israel’s political and military power had reached a low point, and its hope for a prosperous and peaceful future seemed lost. In that period, sacred history and stories stretching back over a thousand years were collected and joined together into a cohesive whole. In the process, there was a “howl of grief” never far from the thoughts of the editors, a pain that might be summed up in the question, “How will God save us?”

For the priestly editors who put Genesis into its final form, today’s Creation Story carried special meaning. They had experienced the world to be chaotic, something of a “formless void.”  But they also had experienced enough divine mercy to sustain their faith in the goodness of God. The text they chose to open their story is written in a simple but majestic poetic fashion. It says that out of the formless void and darkness, God comes like a gracious breeze to speak the word that calls the world into being. As each piece of the creation takes its place, the text says, God saw that it was good. 

For 2,500 years, each new generation of God’s people has heard the two-fold message in this text. It’s a message about a world that is simultaneously dangerous but also beautiful, in which God is at work to bring order from chaos. It’s a text that challenges us to believe, even when faced with the darkness of pain and grief, that we can trust in the goodness of God. 

Sometimes the darkness can be unbearable, like it was in December 1996 for the people of Northminster Presbyterian Church, Indianapolis. Pastor Fred Mathias and his wife Cleta returned home from an evening worship service and confronted burglars in their home.  Two young men bound the couple with ropes, clubbed them to death with an ax, and set their house on fire.

For the next several days, Northminster Church became a large crisis-counseling center.  The brutality of the crime was so shocking, and the couple killed was so loved and respected, that people found the situation almost impossible to believe.  The people of the congregation experienced their own Exile.  Just as in the days of the Babylonians, their priest was savagely killed, and their temple engulfed by the formless void of chaos.

In March 1999, the legal process reached its first conclusion.  One young man pled guilty to two counts of murder, but was expected to be eligible for parole after 32 years.   The other young man, a former youth group member named Sean, was convicted of burglary, but avoided a conviction of murder because four jurors were unable to reach agreement on what constituted “felony murder” under Indiana law. 

Upon hearing the verdict, the session of Northminster Presbyterian Church issued a statement born out of their two-year experience of looking at the formless void and darkness:  “Although we are saddened - no, we are bewildered - by the verdicts the jury failed to reach on Wednesday night, we must accept them. In large measure, we will come to accept them because Sean … taught those of us at Northminster Church something terribly valuable for a time like this - that nothing in life or in death, nothing in all creation, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. As Christians, we must pray that Sean will learn the valuable lesson …. We will pray that Sean will begin to feel God's healing grace. We, too, need to feel that healing.”[1]

Sometimes the darkness of pain and grief can be unbearably strong. In this regard, I speak not so much to you, but with you, feeling the heaviness of pain and grief reflected in something as common as our weekly prayer concerns list.  Still, the witness of scripture is that the goodness and love of God are stronger. 

When we turn our focus away from others, and look inward, we recognize our own losses, our need to be rescued from abandonment in the “formless void,” in the frightening, lonely places through which life’s journey sometimes leads us. The good news of the gospel is that Someone has swept across the water to transform loneliness with divine presence. It is the Spirit of the living God, who blows into our lives, a Gracious Breeze who picks us up in swirling currents and eddies of healing and hope, then sweeps us out to share the message, to engage in ministry, to be Christ for the world today.

NOTES

[1] As reported by the Presbyterian News Service.

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