An excerpt from Jim Perkinson’s sermon on John 6 during the Summer of 2018 called “I Am Wind.”

“God” in Hebrew writ, as we have it from Genesis to Malachi, is double-named, a hyphen-Deity, Elohim of the cool, wet coastal mountains, YHWH of the hot sands south and east. And this is likely because Israel was a hyphen-people, a mixed lot, a creole crowd, partly composed of pastoral nomads following Moses and Joshua, coming into Canaan from the forty years of desert wandering, once crossing the Jordan from the east, joining with rebelling Canaanite peasants, going feral up in the central highlands from seaboard cities on the Mediterranean to the west. A motley crew, each group bringing their God into the stewpot, a Midianite-Canaanite mix, worshipping a YHWH-Elohim amalgam of deities. YHWH is a dust-storm deity encountered by a renegade herder horde on a Sinai desert mountain in lightning and thunder. Elohim is a rain-storm deity encountered by an outlaw peasant crowd on a Canaanite coastal mountain in lightning and thunder. One flashes over the vastness of sand; the other over the expanse of sea. And though the name YHWH comes to predominate, Elohim remains in use more than 2500 times in the Hebrew text.

We could go on if there were time. The word for Wind in Hebrew is “ruach,” which also means “Air,” “Breath,” “Spirit.” Gendered female.   These are not fully separable ideas. For many indigenous and antique peoples, the Spirit-World is the Natural World, especially in its fluidity as Air, Wind, Breath. It is not so much the case that the Spirit is in us, as it is we are in the Spirit. It moves through and among us all the time.

Everything is breathing Spirit, in and out, every second. And the bodies that navigate the realm of air, the bodies exquisitely attuned to sense every nuance of wind wafting, whispering, upwelling, down-blowing, scudding or sheering—birds—are quintessentially Spirit-Messengers in culture after culture. We, in the biblical tradition, just freeze-frame them and call them “angels”—winged creatures that sing, and bring messages from heaven!

It is the Wind-Spirit that hovers, Dove-like, over the Great Waters of Chaos in Creation in Genesis 1. It is that same hovering Spirit-Wind-Dove that blows back the Red Sea waters for the escaping slaves. It is the Wind-Cruising-Dove that Noah sends forth from the water-bound ark to find land. It is that Dove-Bodied-One who falls on Jesus coming up from Jordan waters, as the Holy Spirit incarnate, says Luke. God as Dove-Animal, shaped by Wind-Air-Breath, tutoring the Messiah in his wilderness vision-quest and then accompanying him at every step along the way as that Spirit-Bird-Familiar by which he confronts demons and exposes Principalities. Spirit-Wind, if you want, as the Third Person of the Trinity, moving in and out of us and of every other living thing on the planet, at every millisecond!