What
do you want me to tell you about the Holy Spirit today?
Every
year, seven weeks after we have celebrated Easter, we celebrate this day called
Pentecost – we all know it has something to do with the Holy Spirit, but
somehow, when we are reminded of that story in Acts of the Holy Spirit coming
in such a dramatic fashion, most of us look around the church as we know it and
say “So What?”
Do
these kinds of things ever happen here at St Matthews? I’m a visitor, so I really don’t know, but my
guess is not.
Some
of you may have Christian friends who belong to Pentecostal churches, or you may
even have journeyed in such a church yourselves, but that experience of
the Holy Spirit is quiet foreign to the experience of many in the church and so
we generally dismiss it as something that is all too hard to understand.
Some
of you may even look rather longingly at the enthusiasm for the faith that your
friends in such churches have and wonder why you have missed out – weren’t you
good enough? Or faithful enough?
This
situation generally leads to one of two responses:-
1. We might be
inclined to relegate all this signs and wonders stuff to the past – that God
used them to get the church started but God doesn’t need them now! OR
2. We get very
defensive and go down the line of saying that all this Pentecostal stuff is
wrong; its fake; or even its evil!
If
I was to objectively describe my experience of the Holy Spirit in the Church, I
would have to say that what I see is two very different pictures.
One
is built around signs and wonders – like the Acts story. I have colleagues for whom this experience of
the Holy Spirit is congruent with their own – they see signs and wonders such as healings, words of wisdom or insight, the
ecstatic utterances in what seem to be foreign languages which are then
translated into a prophetic word from God.
I have a cousin who is a pastor of a small country church and regularly
I am told of miraculous healings in which the blind see and tumours vanish from
MRI images.
The
other is built around images of quiet unassuming people whose lives manifest
those fruit of the Spirit that the Apostle Paul talks about – people who are
growing in grace and wisdom as they walk day by day with God and guided by this
Advocate or Helper. Sometimes these
faithful souls, these wonderful “salt of the earth” type people, are wracked
with anxiety that they have missed out on something or guilt that their lives
have failed to measure up somehow.
Which
of these is right?
DIFFERENT WAYS
Despite
my four-year theological degree and years of pastoral ministry in which I must
have preached more than a few Pentecost sermons, it has only been recently that
I realised that there are two very distinct Holy Spirit Traditions in the New
Testament – and funnily enough they seem to match very closely the observations
I have just made about my experience of the Holy Spirit in the Church.
Let
me share with you some insights into these traditions.
In
the same way that media observers of politics seem only to notice the
flamboyant, or outrageous, so when most of us have thought about the Holy
Spirit in the Bible and the Church we have only noticed the Signs
and Wonders tradition.
The Signs & Wonders Tradition
This
is the tradition that Luke records for us and which took root in various places
in the earliest church and in the church as we know it today.
Signs
and Wonders are said to be things that call us to faith – and for many people
they do. The way Luke tells this story
is a very deliberate strategy by which we are drawn into an understanding of
what God was doing through these amazing events.
For
the early church, these stories were inextricably linked to a very ancient
Hebrew story about God’s plans for the world.
Way,
way back in the mists of time, the story is told, everyone spoke the same
language. People were essentially
nomadic, so this was a good thing. They
settled for a while in the river country of Mesopotamia and decided to build
there a great city, as well as a tower – a huge tower – that reached up to
heaven where they could meet with God and make themselves famous.
For
some reason or another, the Lord God didn’t particularly like this idea, and as
a solution decides to mix up everyone’s speech so that they can no longer
co-operate in this tower-building enterprise and will be scattered all over the
world.
We
all know the Tower of Babel story, and we all understand that at the heart of
it was the idea of punishment for wanting or doing something wrong. Whether we regard this story historically or
as a kind of parable – we know that in it we were supposed to learn something
very true.
The
Lukan tradition of the Holy Spirit is grounded in this story as it brings
together people from all over the world with their different languages – all
gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate this wonderful festival.
And
an amazing miracle happens!
The
language about it is a bit ambiguous. We
generally understand it to mean that the Apostles were miraculously able to
speak in so many other languages that all the visitors in Jerusalem were able
to hear the stories of Jesus in their own language.
But
it is possible to understand the words as meaning that the miracle was more in
the hearing than in the speaking – that the Disciples were telling the stories
and even though people might not have been able to understand Aramaic in normal
circumstances, by some miracle they were able to understand the stories.
Either
way a miracle happened – signs and wonders – that was clearly undoing the act
of God on Babel; reversing that punishment and ushering in a new season or era
of life empowered by the Holy Spirit.
The Breath of Life Tradition
But
there is another tradition of the Holy Spirit in the Bible, and the Gospel we
read today gave us a hint at it – and it is quite different from the Signs
and Wonders tradition of Luke in Acts.
John
uses quite different language about the nature and work of the Holy
Spirit. In the passage we read today the
Spirit is referred to as THE ADVOCATE or The
Helper and in another place THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH.
There
are no great miracles here about the work of the Spirit. In a very intense conversation Jesus is
having with his Disciples at the last supper he tells them that he must leave
them and that the Holy Spirit will, in a sense stand in his place – a
continuation of the Incarnation of God in the world.
The
image of the Advocate is a legal one – for someone who speaks on our
behalf. There are hints here of the way
in which the Spirit might give us the wisdom to say the right thing and so be
speaking through us in a sense, but I wonder, too, if there could be a sense
here of the Spirit speaking on our behalf before God Almighty – saying things
for us that could not possibly say.
There
is another sense of Advocate that some translators pick up and that is of the
Helper. When we unpack this idea we come
up with a sense of God that is very real and present for us in our day to day
living.
That
other phrase Jesus uses here is the term The Spirit of Truth. In some senses because God is Truth, this
term is just a different way of saying The Spirit of God, but it also embodies a
whole lot of great ideas about the work of the Spirit being involved in helping
us know what is true and being transformed by what is true.
This
sits closely with the ideas of Paul about the Fruit of the Spirit becoming
increasingly evident in our lives.
Now
some of you are already jumping ahead of me and thinking – where does all of
this link into the Old Testament like the other one did?
Well,
to do that we have to go on a bit further in John’s gospel to something that
happened in the second story John tells us right after he has told us about
Jesus Resurrection and the empty tomb – in chapter 20. You will remember this.
“It
was late that Sunday evening,” the story begins. All the disciples were terrified that the
Romans or the Jewish religious leaders would be coming to get them. They were hidden away in a locked room and
suddenly, Jesus appears right there in the room.
As
you might imagine, fear and amazement gives way to joy when they realise who it
is, and then Jesus does something totally unexpected which harks back to a much
older Hebrew story. He breathed on them
and said “Receive the Holy Spirit. If
you forgive people’s sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive people’s
sins they are not forgiven.”
What
a powerful image, and it is an image that has carried on in the life of the
church – how many of you have ever been to a Chrism Eucharist just before
Easter when the Holy Oils are blessed?
When Archbishop Roger blesses the Chrism Oil – the oil we use for
Baptisms and Confirmations – he stoops down and blows over the oil; a very
powerful symbolic gesture.
There
is another story in which breath is used in an amazing way. Again in the mists of time, God was playing
around with clay and fashioned himself a man – not like those Chinese warriors
that have all been turned into immovable terracotta – this was till soft,
pliable wet clay – and God breathed breath into his nostrils and the man began
to live. It is there in the Ezekiel
story we read today, too.
This
life-giving breath of God that John calls the Spirit of God is showing us that
in the Spirit we are new Creations; this story of Adam is set before sin enters
into our experience, so there is a sense in which this work of the Spirit is
about creating us fully into God’s original plan for humans.
So,
we have these two great Holy Spirit traditions in the Bible and in the Church
and they both can teach us stuff, not least to be respectful of those whose
experience of the Holy Spirit is different from our own.
On
this Pentecost Sunday let us give thanks for both the quiet and the spectacular,
but most of all for the fruits of the Spirit, and especially for that most
important gift of the Spirit that Paul tells us about – love.
