In the wind
God’s Holy Spirit is always on the move, but not always in ways we can see or understand.
In Chapter 3 of the gospel of John, a religious leader named Nicodemus visits Jesus at night. In honor of the Nickelodeon TV series, this scene (John 3:1-8) has long been known as “Nick at Nite.”
Why does Nicodemus approach Jesus at night?
It’s not because he’s afraid to be seen with Jesus in public in the daytime. That’s a sad bit of antisemitism poorly disguised as biblical commentary.
Nicodemus is a Pharisee, and Jesus often differs with Pharisees sharply, but they get along well enough that Jesus dines with them frequently, and in Luke 13:31 we read that Pharisees warn him when Herod plots to kill him.
No, Nicodemus visits Jesus at night because he’s a genuine seeker.
He simply wants to have an extended conversation with this exciting new teacher. Evening is the traditional time for such conversation. Work’s done for the day. Everyone’s tired physically but eager to engage mentally, so they get together and talk about God.
Nick is no slouch. He goes directly to the source – and he gets a lot more than he bargained for.
I’m going to skip over the part about his confusion over what it means to be “born again” or “born from above.” That’s a whole other conversation. I want to focus on Jesus’ statement about the work of the Holy Spirit.
He says: “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."
You live in Kansas, so you know about wind, don’t you?
A couple of weeks ago, I was driving south to Paola from my home in Spring Hill. I drove into a stiff and sometimes nasty south wind all the way. By the time I left town, the wind had shifted. Now it was blowing from the north. I drove into a stiff and sometimes nasty north wind coming home.
In our spiritual lives, it sometimes seems like we are moving with the wind of the Spirit, and sometimes it feels like we are driving against it.
This morning I want to talk about a couple of ways that United Methodists in Kansas are trying to move with the Spirit and are sometimes buffeted by a wind from somewhere – from where we may not be sure.
The first topic is Spring Hill United Methodist Church. It’s only a few minutes from our home, and Linda and I have become active there over the last year and a half.
In February, the church voted to close so we can become the seventh location of Church of the Resurrection. While some renovation is done on the main building this summer, services are conducted in the education wing. Linda and I and two others are leading worship until we reopen in the fall as Resurrection Spring Hill.
Angie McCarty, who has been our part-time pastor, will become full-time pastor and provide pastoral care and leadership. Resurrection pastor Adam Hamilton will preach most of the time via video screen.
This is a difficult transition for a church that’s 165 years old, but it offers great hope for a United Methodist presence in southern Johnson County, and Linda and I are happy and excited to be part of it. I’ll say much more about this in coming days, so stay tuned.
The second topic is redistricting in the Great Plains Conference. Several years ago we formed the Great Plains Annual Conference. We did it by combining three smaller conferences – Kansas East and Kansas West and Nebraska – into one huge conference. Since then we’ve had this administrative nightmare involving too many districts and too many district superintendents.
When our annual conference meets later this week, lay and clergy delegates will be asked to reduce the number of districts from 17 to 10. That’s still a lot of districts, but we’re covering a huge amount of territory here.
The Five Rivers District, where I have served for nearly 20 years, gets split in half. The northern half, where I live, is combined with what is now the Kansas City District and part of the Topeka District. The southern half is combined with what is now the Parsons District.
The new district lines mean that a couple of longstanding charges are split. Parker, Beagle & Fontana is no more. Beagle and Fontana stay with Paola in the northeastern district, but Parker goes into the southeastern district. Similarly, the New Lancaster-LyCygne charge divides, New Lancaster moving to the northeastern district and LyCygne to the southeastern.
The proposal also calls for an annual District Conference. That’s just what we all need, isn’t it? Another church meeting.
However you look at it, change is ahead. We have to trust the Spirit that good things are in the wind, even if it takes awhile for them to become apparent.
Understand, I’m not endorsing this new district map as the work of the Spirit. I’m just saying that however good or bad it is, the Spirit will be working for good in it. Whether a church structure is new or old, the Spirit is always working for good in it. Sometimes the new makes the Spirit’s work easier. Sometimes it makes it harder.
The next topic I want to mention is the General Conference of the United Methodist Church.
It concluded several weeks ago. Though it occurred in 2024, it’s technically the 2020 conference, but it was long delayed by covid and the related problems of overseas delegates having trouble getting visas so they could attend.
I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about General Conference, and I guarantee you that much of what you have heard is a lie. The biggest lie you’ve probably heard is that the church is now turning gay, and that thousands, perhaps millions, of gay people are going to start flooding our doors to get in.
What actually happened is that the church is no longer violently anti-gay. But it is not now even remotely pro-gay. Rather, it is now more or less neutral. Our status is now a kind of a theological beige.
And for that change in direction do you really think gay people are going to come streaming into the church? Gimme a break.
For the last 52 years, the United Methodist Church has told gay people that they are dirt. We did it in 1972, when the first bit of anti-gay language was slipped into the Book of Discipline by a last-minute gambit at the end of our first General Conference after the merger that created the church in 1968. At every general conference since then, anti-gay forces have tightened the screws. It happened in 1976, and 1980, and 1984, and 1988, and 1992, and 1996, and 2000, and 2004 and 2008 and 2012 and 2016.
Given that track record, why would any gay person want to be United Methodist? Remarkably, a few stayed with us the whole time. Even more remarkably, a few who were kicked out of the church have decided to come back. Most will not.
After giving you a little background, I’ll tell you what I think really happened at General Conference. In what follows, I will use the terms “conservative” and “progressive” only for convenience, because I think both terms are very misleading.
At the 2016 General Conference, conservatives prevailed yet again. This time they passed what they called the Traditional Plan. It’s traditional only if your tradition includes the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition.
One example: Under this plan, If I as a pastor were to give a cup of cool water to a gay person and someone filed a complaint against me, I would immediately be hustled out of my job and out of the church without trial, without right of appeal, without any form of recourse.
There’d be no talk of my faith in Jesus Christ because that would be irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was that I violated someone’s standard of purity regarding gay people.
Having passed this awful Traditional Plan, conservatives allowed churches that disagreed a way out: a path of disaffiliation. Then there occurred a seismic event that they did not anticipate. It was a wave of reaction so intense that it was obvious that progressives were going to undo all this garbage at the 2020 General Conference.
So conservatives bailed. They took the exit plan they’d devised for progressives, and they left the church in droves. Many of them went to the new Global Methodist Church.
That 2020 General Conference finally happened this year, in 2024, and progressives undid a lot of the damage conservatives had done over the previous 50 years. Time will tell whether it is enough to keep the church alive and healthy.
One thing the conference did is allow the ordination of all qualified candidates for ministry, regardless of their sexuality. This means that gay and lesbian pastors may soon be appointed to serve in our churches. But they will not be appointed to churches that might reject them because of their sexual identity.
This is longstanding practice. The bishop and the cabinet always work for a good match in appointments. They are not going to deliberately create a situation where church and pastor are at odds.
In fact, gay and lesbian pastors have been serving in our churches for years, and you haven’t heard much about it because the churches they serve have accepted them for who they are, whatever their sexuality.
The conference also removed a ban on clergy from officiating at homosexual unions and churches from hosting such events. However, clergy are not required to perform such services, and churches are not required to host them.
Again, this is just good practice. You cannot tell people to do something that goes against their conscience; you must allow everyone the opportunity to act on their conscience.
A lot of other things happened at General Conference. Not everything had anything to do with human sexuality. But the church has been stuck arguing over this stuff for more than 50 years, and it has greatly distracted us from doing genuine ministry.
(If I believed in conspiracy theories, I would argue that distracting us from our task was the whole point all along. )
We’re supposed to keep the main thing the main thing, but we’ve been sidetracked for a long time. Now finally we have cleared the deck (pardon the mixed metaphor), and we should be able to focus on what we’re supposed to be about, which is becoming and making disciples of Jesus Christ.
Change is always hard. As I said earlier, however good or bad a change proves to be, the Holy Spirit is always working for good in it.
And the Holy Spirit is always working for good in you as well. The question is how much you are cooperating.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, frequently asked his followers: “How is it with your soul?” Are you at peace with God and at peace with your neighbor? What is your relationship with God? What is your relationship with others? Is your heart filled with love, or has it been tainted by other things?
These are key questions in our spiritual life. They are far more important than our opinions about human sexuality. If you want to focus your spiritual life on the sex life of others, that’s your concern. But kindly keep Jesus out of it.
(Parts of this post come from a message delivered June 2, 2024, at Paola United Methodist Church.)