Writings: The Wind Blows

By: Dr. Gregory S. Neal

When I was in graduate school in North Carolina I had an opportunity to learn how to operate a sailboat. Motorboats are great: you just point them in the direction you want to go, push the throttle forward, and you go. Sailboats take a lot more work; most especially if you’re trying to go against the wind! You just can’t point your boat in the direction you want to go and go … you’ve got to finesse it. You’ve got to tack, back and forth, left and right, starboard and port, angling yourself against the direction of the wind so that your sails can act like a wing to propel you in something similar to the direction you want to go. You’ll chart a zigzaggy pathway, back and forth, across the surface of the water, and thereby make your way in a wobbly course toward your destination. It’s laborious, but it works. I learned sail boating on Lake Norman, just north of Charlotte, and then I did it several times one summer out on the Atlantic Ocean, chopping across the waves, running back and forth from one side of the boat to the other, helping to swing the mast around, raising and lowering sails, crisscrossing our course, catching the wind and sailing toward our destination. It was exhausting, but fulfilling, work, and between throwing up my guts from motion sickness, and enjoying the wind in my face, I had a marvelous time doing it.

The study of theology can be very similar: it is often a zig-zag course of confusing gibberish. That was true for me when I studied our faith as a kid, it was true when I studied formal theology in undergraduate and graduate school, and it’s still true today. I remember the first time I heard about the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: how confused I was about it, and how much like gibberish it sounded. Keep in mind, it’s not those religious things were foreign to me; I grew up in the Church. As a kid, I loved listening as stories from the Bible were read to me: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, and Jacob’s cheating his brother for the birthright; Joseph’s coat of many colors, his bratty attitude toward his brothers, his being sold into slavery in Egypt, and his interpreting dreams while in prison there; Moses and the burning bush, the plagues in Egypt, the crossing of the red sea, and the giving of the 10 Commandments; the battle of Jericho, David and Goliath, Yael’s victory over Sisera when she hammered a tent peg into his head, Solomon getting into trouble with Bathsheba, the curing of Naaman’s leprosy, and Daniel in the lion’s den; the story of Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednego in the fiery furnace; Jonah and the great fish, Ezekiel and his wheel; the birth of Jesus, the story of the prodigal son, Jesus walking on the water, Jesus feeding the five thousand, Jesus healing the man born blind, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead; Jesus’ arrest, Peter denying Jesus three times, Jesus’ death and resurrection; Paul’s journey and shipwreck at sea. I know, I’m just scratching the surface; there are so many wonderful stories in the Bible, some thrilling, some chilling, some happy, some sad, but they’re all engaging stories. Some are not ready for prime time, many are challenging to our modern ways of thinking, but you can still usually get your brain around them – you can visualize them as they’re being read – they live and breathe.

But then, there are those parts of the Bible that are tough to read; things happen in them that are very weird, or scarry, or filled with symbols that don’t make much sense to us today: end-of-times stuff, mysterious images, teachings that seem to go in circles: ideas like the Trinity.

Keep in mind that the word “Trinity” isn’t found in the Bible. True, God being referenced as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can be found in many places within the Bible, sometimes in the same paragraph or sentence, but the doctrine of the Trinity – as a Christian belief-system about God – isn’t there; it was fashioned by church councils across a couple of centuries to explain those passages of Scripture that seem to indicate to us that God functions in at least three different ways toward us. Sometimes we encounter God as Creator: as a Parent, as a Father or Mother, as the rule maker, as boss, as the one in charge. Sometimes we encounter God as Redeemer: as our friend, our brother, and our companion along the way; as the one who steps in when we fumble the ball, scoops it and us up, and helps us finish the game; as the one who finds us when we’re lost, forgives us when we’ve failed, and delivers us when we’ve gone astray. Sometimes we encounter God as our Sustainer: as a comforter, an advocate, a guide; as our source of strength and God’s abiding, never-leaving, never-failing presence. The Doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt – a feeble attempt, but an attempt – to combine all these approaches and experiences of the Divine together into one. This Deity, whom we encounter in multiple ways, is both distinct in each of these ways, yet also inseparable in all of them. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer – and, at the same time, the Father is also Redeemer and Sustainer, the Son is also Creator and Sustainer, and the Holy Spirit is also Creator and Redeemer. Or, at least, that is what the Bible seems to claim.

I’ll never forget when my dad tried to explain the doctrine of the Trinity to me when I was young. He likened it to how he
was three different people relative to his dad, my mother, and me: he was the son of his dad, the husband of my mother, and my dad …all at the same time, wrapped up in one being. How he related and acted, however, differed according to the relationship. When dealing with his dad, he was a son; when dealing with his wife, he was a husband; when dealing with me, he was a dad. He was Father, Husband, and Son, all wrapped up in one human being named: Charles Mayo Neal. It was brilliant!

As an analogy, this description is a good attempt at relating God’s three-ness in one-ness in human terms, but it fails if we presume that that such analogies convey the true depth of Gods’ amazing dynamic mystery. I learned in graduate school that my dad’s analogy recreated an historic heresy of the church called Modalism: the claim that the persons of the Trinity are only different based upon their function. God is far beyond that limited view. Humans will often try to pigeon-hole or identify God by God’s functions – by what God does – and each of the persons of the Trinity is so-labeled in that way. When we try to do that, we stumble into error because God’s infinite nature will never be encompassed by the finitude of our minds.

That’s what was being said in today’s reading about Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus and their midnight conversation about being born from above. I love how Jesus builds an experiential image for understanding just one aspect of God’s nature:

“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.” (John 3:8)

Trying to grasp God, trying to comprehend the Deity, trying to control God – because that’s what we’re doing when we try to fashion labels for the un-labelable – is like trying to grasp the wind. Wind can cause a sail to billow and propel a boat across the surface of the water; wind can blow your hair, and you can feel it and see its effects; wind can cause a flag to flutter, and you can see the result; but trying to comprehend God is like trying to see, grasp, and control the wind. We’ve made up lots of words and ideas to try and do so, but in the end, those words and ideas fumble … they become like whisps of smoke through our fingers. One can articulate the Doctrine of the Trinity in all its classical terms, but true wisdom comes when we accept that we cannot fully understand it because it cannot be fully understood …and the instant that we think we’ve understood it, that’s the instant we demonstrate that we don’t.

That’s how it will always be when something finite, like the human mind, attempts to encompass and comprehend something infinite, like God. We can fleetingly grasp limited pieces of the idea for a moment, but then it flutters and changes like a whisp of smoke, and we lose our grasp. In the end, we must recognize that we serve an amazing God who is beyond our finite ability to grasp, and certainly beyond our ability to control. We may think we can control God with our words or with rules and regulations, but that’s an illusion. God doesn’t play by our rules; we must learn to play by God’s rules. And Jesus told us God’s rules: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.

My prayer for us is that we may come to realize that things don’t always turn out the way we want; that we must tack, or zigzag, back-and-forth across the surface of our lives, repeatedly changing our course and leaning into the wind, always pressing on. While we may never fully comprehend why some things are the way they are, in the end the wind blowing on our faces is God’s amazing grace, breathing new life into us if only we will breathe it in.

© 2021 Dr. Gregory S. Neal
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