The Thursday After

Today at WMB we celebrated God and talked about the Holy Spirit (video, notes).

We spent time reading Ezekiel 47, the same guy as the “valley of dry bones“. I live pretty much in the middle of the great lakes, which together hold 20% of the earth’s fresh surface water. So I’m pretty much in the opposite setting to Ezekiel and it takes a bit of work to imagine how important water was to him and his folk. Right after God puts his ruakh (breath) into people, Genesis 2 talks about a river flowing out from the garden of Eden (the place where heaven and earth overlap), splitting into four rivers to nurture the nations. Now, many, many years after humans decided they knew better than God (Genesis 3), Ezekiel sees a future state vision where water flows out from the temple (the place where heaven and earth overlap) which not only nurtures the nations, but brings life to the deadest place on earth, the Dead Sea. There’s a really great Bible Project podcast (45 minutes) which explores Ezekiel’s vision. In it you’ll learn about the link to Sodom & Gomorrah and some recent archeological finds. I’ll never read Ezekiel 47 the same again.

Its easy to see how this promise of future water and life in a parched land would be something to hang onto. In Ezekiel’s time it would have been even more so because most of the Israelites were kicked out of the land. In Jesus time, it was different, but still bad: they lived in a parched land under enemy occupiers. No wonder Israelites had rituals to symbolically act out the hope of Ezekiel’s vision – these rituals would constantly remind them to look beyond their present circumstance to a future hope. And then, how audacious for Jesus (John 7) to break into their ritual to call himself the water of life. Jesus was pointing out that his listeners had incorrectly imagined what Ezekiel’s visions meant and invited them to open their hearts and minds to see God’s unexpected way of showing up.

The Bible often links Water (Bible project video here) and the Spirit, with the Spirit often described as “being poured out”. So Eden and Ezekiel’s vision are linked by this Water of Life and God’s ruakh bringing life, something we explored last week in this blog. Watch the Spirit video referenced there, you’ll find it will “ruakh” (“breath life into”) some of the things we talked about this morning.

Through most of the Bible narrative, the Spirit is given to a few people, or in a few circumstances. So it must have been mind-blowing that there were prophetic visions that God’s spirit would be poured out on all people (radical and crazy). In Acts 1 and 2 we actually see this happen. And when the Spirit is poured out (Acts 2), notice how unusually multi-cultural and multi-ethnic the group is (they’re in town from all over for a festival)!

If you’ve been tracking with the 180 Challenge, then you have been reading how Jesus is teaching, using parables and using the phrase “for those who have ears to hear”. That’s not a bad phrase to describe being “open to the Spirit”. For a good example of being open, go back to April 13 (Luke 1) and see how young, (likely) poor, female Mary, has the openness to see what God is doing, even though what she is told sounds just crazy. (As a meditation, contrast Mary to old, respected, male Zechariah who has a very skeptical response to the very same messenger — how would you want to show up?). For a good example of not being open, tomorrow (April 24, Mark 6) tells the story of Jesus going to Nazareth. The people who saw him grow up think he’s a crazy fraud. They simply can’t wrap their heads around the Spirit of God being on him and transforming him.

It seems that a key requirement to seeing the Spirit is humility and openness to seeing things in new ways. Carol Dweck’s “Mindset” (mediocre video summary here) is a well-known book which has impacted me. She argues that a growth mindset (vs a fixed mindset) is important for success. The book is good in its own right (very business focused) and I can see a parallel between a growth mindset and being open to the Spirit. I doubt the Nazareth-ites of Mark 6 had a growth mindset. I suspect Mary had a growth mindset. I suspect that having a growth mindset pre-disposes you to curiosity and “having ears to hear”. So, I like Carol Dweck’s book because it gives me very practical understandings and perspectives to develop a growth mindset, which in turn, should help me see and be open to the Spirit.

Finally, I’d like to connect three thoughts: yes, God knows what we need better than we do, yes, we desire to see the Spirit at work around us and in us. Be careful what you ask for — the biblical narrative says its unlikely to look like anything you imagine.