May 23, 2010

Have you got the spirit? Do you feel the Spirit? What’s your reaction when you hear the verses of Acts read on Pentecost, where Luke describes the coming of the Holy Spirit? When I’m in my most cynical mood—one of my character traits I’ve tried to suppress becoming a priest—I get a perverse pleasure from comparing life in a typical Episcopal congregation with Luke’s description of the early Christian community in Acts. Throughout his history of the first generations of Christianity, Luke stresses the amazing things that were accomplished—the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome, the miracles that leaders performed, the rich prayer life, and the close community. But of all the things Luke mentions about that early community, the biggest difference may lie here, right at the beginning.

In Acts, we read of the Holy Spirit coming down like tongues of fire onto the gathered disciples. They were filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in tongues. According to Luke, these tongues were ordinary human languages. The twelve were miraculously able to preach the gospel to people in their own languages. Their behavior seemed to bystanders to be less than decorous and they were accused of having started the party a little early in the day.

Compare that experience with what’s happening today at Grace. We are all pretty well-dressed, well-behaved. The only movement we make is kneeling and standing, and there is certainly no one shouting out in strange languages. Of course Christians do those things, in the Pentecostal tradition, but not we Episcopalians. That’s just not quite right.

But of course, we believe the Holy Spirit is among us today. In a few minutes, when I baptize Charlotte, I will say the words, “you are sealed with the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Now, she may be shouting and crying, and squirming when I do that, but none of us believe that’s because she’s being slain in the spirit. Our Holy Spirit is much better behaved than that.

So we have in contemporary Christianity, two very different manifestations of the Holy Spirit. There’s the exuberant worship of Pentecostal churches, where the Holy Spirit seems to break loose every Sunday, and there’s what happens here, when we invoke the Holy Spirit in baptism, confirmation, and even during the Eucharistic prayer.

If you listened closely, you heard in this morning’s lessons, from three different New Testament texts, three very different descriptions of the Holy Spirit, too.

The reading from Romans is a very brief excerpt from a lengthy discussion by Paul that includes interesting comments on prayer. What seems to be most important here is the way Paul connects God’s spirit with our own. Baptism makes us God’s children by adoption. But that’s not all. For Paul, the Holy Spirit herself begins to cooperate with us in our relationship with God. Elsewhere in this chapter, Paul suggests that there are times when we can’t pray, when words fail us. At that point, the spirit intervenes for us, praying on our behalf, in “sighs to deep for words.” Paul may not be speaking about the external manifestation of the spirit. Rather, his focus here is on the Spirit’s internal workings, its effect on us.

The gospel is again drawn from Jesus farewell discourses with the disciples in John’s gospel. We heard one Jesus’ references in John to the Holy Spirit. Jesus calls the Holy Spirit the Paraclete, which our translation renders as Advocate. In fact, Paraclete has several connotations. Advocate, in the sense of defense attorney is one. The paraclete is someone who pleads on our behalf. There are other ways of translating that word: Comforter, Guide.

For John, the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit is Jesus’ representative among his followers after his death and resurrection. The paraclete teaches. In chapter 16, Jesus suggests that it is to the community’s benefit that he go away, because when he goes away, the Paraclete will come and “guide you into all truth.” So for John, the Holy Spirit has primarily a teaching function, remembering who Jesus was, interpreting Jesus in light of the community’s faith, and reinterpreting Jesus for new situations.

We have here three slightly different understandings of the work of the Holy Spirit. They are complementary, not competitive, one isn’t right and the others wrong, but in fact, that’s often how Christians present it. Throughout history, we have sought to define the Holy Spirit, to declare that this or that phenomenon is the work of the holy spirit, and that other things are not. We still do it. Part of the noisy debate within Pentecostalism in general has to do with what constitutes the signs of the Holy Spirit. In Pentecostalism, if you haven’t been “baptized with the Holy Spirit” you’re not really a good Christian.

Of course other Christians, Episcopalians among them, look at the exuberant worship of Pentecostal churches with critical eyes. We tend to wonder whether Christians should do things like cluck like chickens in the middle of worship, or fall on the floor, or shake and dance around. We suspect that much of this behavior, if not all, is not the product of the Holy Spirit but of human effort. And so we try to channel the Holy Spirit, to force it to work in decorous channels like the hands of a bishop or a priest.

What close attention to our three lessons this morning should teach us is that every attempt we make to channel the Holy Spirit, to make it work in a certain way, is bound to fail. Pentecostals may demand that Christians demonstrate baptism in the Holy Spirit by speaking in tongues. We Episcopalians may want to force the Holy Spirit to work through, and only through, the hands of the Bishop. Either attempt, or any other attempt to limit the work of the Holy Spirit, is bound to fail.

Indeed, what is most important to remember about the Holy Spirit is that it isn’t going to stay within the limits we try to make for it. There’s another image of the Spirit in the Gospel of John, one that I think bears keeping in mind. In Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, he says, “The Spirit, or wind, blows where it chooses.”

We should keep that in mind, both as individuals and as a community. We are a spirit-filled people, whether we act like it or not, whether we feel it or not. The Spirit is blowing in our lives, leading us in new directions.

The Spirit is not subject to human manipulation, it is not subject to our desires and the limits we place on it. And it’s not just a warm fuzzy feeling we might get inside of ourselves, or an emotional high we might get during worship. The Holy Spirit is more than that. It is more than us. And because of that it can be kind of scary. It can loosen us from our safe moorings. It can leave us hanging over a precipice, because the Spirit leads us into the future. But as Jesus tells his disciples in John, the Spirit is our Guide and Comforter, it is leading us forward into the future, into the truth.

That should be all the reassurance we need. In these uncertain times, we need to remember Jesus’ promise, God’s gift of the Holy Spirit. We may not always be clear on how it is working, where it is leading us, but that it is leading us, we need not doubt. Jesus assures us in today’s Gospel that the Spirit will abide in us.