The Second Sunday in Lent, March 1, 2026

The Gospel readings for the Second through the Fourth Sundays in Lent are taken from the Gospel of John. In John, Jesus is frequently shown teaching by means of word-play. That is, Jesus uses a word or phrase that can be understood in more than one way. The person Jesus is speaking with takes the word in the easy and obvious sense; but then Jesus comes back with the other, more unexpected sense. The conceptual gap between those two senses creates what in process thought is called a “proposition”: a novel combination of experiential elements, a “tale that might perhaps be told,” a “lure for feeling.” The proposition invites the learner to make a leap of imagination between meanings – and in that creative act of imagination, the Spirit can join to co-create in the learner a new wisdom, a new consciousness, a direct experience of God’s presence and God’s gift. In these Lenten Gospel readings, Jesus interacts with four different characters, in each case using a word-play to bring them into a deeper, more life-giving relationship with himself.

Speaking to Nicodemus in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus 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” (John 3:8).

The key teaching element in this verse is a play on the word “spirit.”

Jesus has already tried to get through to Nicodemus with a word-play, when he told Nicodemus that he had to be “born anothen,” using a Greek preposition that basically means “over.” Nicodemus heard “You must be born over again,” which confuses him: “How can anyone be born a second time?” he asks. But Jesus invites him to make the leap to understanding “You must be born over and above mere physical life by a regeneration in the Spirit.” This is a start.

But Nicodemus seems to be having a hard time processing this, so Jesus tries again with a further play on “spirit.”

In the original Greek of the Gospel, the word pneuma can mean “spirit” or “wind” or “breath”; moreover, it can be used as a noun or as a verb. So what English renders as “the wind blows” could also be “the breath breathes” or “the breeze breezes” or “the Spirit spirits.” The teaching in this verse lies in the fact that what Nicodemus takes at first as a commonplace observation about the weather is at the same time an invitation to make the leap toward a deeper understanding of the Way of God.

What the wind and the Spirit have in common is that they move in the world without being contained and controlled by human intentionalities. The wind blows where it chooses, not where we would choose for it; we can feel its motion around us, we can see how it is moving things around us (even if we can’t see the wind itself), but we can’t do anything about how the wind has gathered on its way toward us, or where it is going to go after it blows past us.

We might try to secure things beforehand, if we know a strong wind is coming.

We might try to move with the wind by using a sail or a windmill or a glider; sometimes I will plot a route for a bicycle ride so that I will have the wind at my back, helping me speed home, for the final leg.

With contemporary doppler radars and weather satellites we can tell an awful lot about how the wind is moving around the state and the continent and the globe.

But even with all this information, we never really know what causes the wind to blow, or how it is going to affect us, or where it will blow next. The wind blows where it chooses, and we hear the sound of it, but we do not know where it comes from or where it goes.

And that, Jesus invites Nicodemus to imagine, is how the Spirit works in the world as well. The Spirit moves in a freedom that transcends our human ambitions and intentions and fears and greeds and needs. The Spirit arises from the depths of God’s love, an infinitude of grace and generosity that the human mind can never encompass. The Spirit moves to bring love to our hearts, and wisdom to our minds, and actions to our hands, and an overflowing creativity in which every creature, human and non-human, co-creates its peculiar reflection of God’s own goodness.

And then the Spirit moves on, carrying the fruits of our love and our wisdom and our action and our co-creativity into new expressions of God’s goodness that will be more than we can ask or imagine. We do not know where Spirit comes from or where Spirit goes, because Spirit is the free movement of God beyond all efforts at human coercion and control.

And, Jesus says, “so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

The free movement of creating love that arises from a source beyond our knowing and moves into fruitions beyond our expectations not only passes by us in its freedom, but takes us up and includes us and makes us free as well. While the Spirit is a creativity that can never be coerced or controlled, the Spirit is also a gift that can be received and embraced and trusted, the way an eagle rides the rising wind, as our creativity rises to meet divine creativity in co-creating good. The Spirit moves freely in the world, and so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

My favorite way of parsing the Christian virtue of Love is to say that loving the way Jesus loves means “receiving and offering freely and graciously.” God creates us to receive from God and from each other all that we need, and to offer to each other and to God all that we are. This divine aim is planted deeply in our souls; but we also live in a world and a society where needs go unmet and goods go unoffered. Our ability to love is often disordered, and our relationships are often distorted, by forces from within our own psyches and from social structures that surround us.

Because of this disorder and distortion – what Christians traditionally call “sin” – we do not receive freely and offer generously, but instead fall into patterns of taking and keeping, hoarding and doling, manipulating and bargaining and controlling. Instead of offering our gifts with no strings attached, we try to make deals with lots of strings attached. Instead of receiving others’ gifts with gratitude and delight, we layer our exchanges with guilt and envy and obligation.

It is to free us from this trap of disordered love that Jesus comes to us. In his life and ministry, his death and resurrection, Jesus himself practiced the Way of Love, Jesus himself practiced receiving and offering freely and graciously. He thereby gives us the example of the kind of loving that can break through disorder and distortion to freedom and grace.

But he does more than just give us the example. By offering to us his own acts of love, Jesus draws us into receiving and offering with him. And, as he does in this teaching to Nicodemus, Jesus offers an opening to the Spirit, to the free movement of God’s love that can enter into us and inspire and empower us to return love with greater freedom and grace than we ourselves could attain.

God’s love rises from a depth and reaches to a height we cannot understand or control – we do not know where it comes from or where it goes – and by the gift of the Spirit we can join with that love, we can be freer than we know ourselves to be, we can receive and offer freely and graciously in the Way that Jesus shows. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

Lent is a time for us to attend to this freedom. The disciplines of Lent remind us of the ways in which we distort love and disorder relationship, the ways we take and keep and coerce and manipulate. They do this not to induce guilt, not to make us feel bad about ourselves, but to point us beyond distortions, toward the freedom and beauty of receiving and offering wholeheartedly with God and with all those God gives us to relate. Fasting and self-denial and alms-giving and prayer and meditation and self-examination and repentance are all means to become more aware of where we are distorted, and where the Spirit is present to help us become more free. Lent is a time for us to observe the way the world works, and to make the imaginative leap to the way the Spirit moves.

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The Rev. Dr. Paul Nancarrow is an Episcopal priest, whose theological work has focused on process-relational interpretations of religion and science, spirituality and liturgy, and especially on the co-acting of divine action and human action and natural action in sacramental work and worship. He is a co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World, and contributed essays to Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God and Renewing Faith: Reigniting Faith and Ministry Through Process and Open & Relational Theologies. Other reflections and sermons can be found at paulsnancarrow.wordpress.com. He can often be found contemplating the Adventure of the Universe as One from the saddle of his bicycle on back roads and rail-trails in the Midwest.