Come Holy Spirit

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S NORTH OAMARU

PENTECOST (June 5^th) 2022

 

 

READINGS:

 

Acts 2: 1-21    

Psalm 104

Romans 8: 14-17

John 14: 8-17

If we were to ask a Muslim convert to Christianity to express the fundamental difference in his or her new relationship to the creator God, they would almost certainly point to the doctrine, and more importantly the experience of the Holy Spirit. This of course is inseparably connected to the doctrine of the Trinity, but we will explore the intricacies of that complex next week. For now let’s focus on the language of the Spirit, which is language of the heart rather than the mind, but is far from trivial for all that.

Who is she? What does she do – what is her job description as I often put it? And why am I calling her “she”? We will come to that last question in two ways, one of which I still put on hold for a little while.
But first let me sing you, or at least read you, a song. Perhaps you know it?

She sits like a bird, brooding on the waters,

hovering on the chaos of the world’s first day;

she sighs and she sings, mothering creation,

waiting to give birth to all the Word will say.

 

She wings over earth, resting where she wishes,

lighting close at hand or soaring through the skies;

she nests in the womb, welcoming each wonder,

nourishing potential hidden to our eyes.

 

She dances in fire, startling her spectators,

waking tongues of ecstasy where dumbness reigned;

She weans and inspires all whose hearts are open,

nor can she be captured, silenced or restrained.

 

For she is the Spirit, one with God in essence,

gifted by the Saviour in eternal love;

she is the key opening the scriptures,

enemy of apathy and heavenly dove.

John L. Bell and Graham Maule

The task of the Holy Spirit is to release the work of Jesus Christ through space and time. More than that, her task is to release the resurrected presence of Jesus Christ through space and time. Jesus Christ was, and through the Holy Spirit is, the enemy of injustice, including the injustice of apathy, but including too the injustices of loneliness, despair, emptiness: all those dark works of death, and even the injustice of death itself.

“Silence in the face of evil,” famously said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German martyr, “is evil itself. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

And let me say I stand as much as most of us do in the comfort zone churches, deeply challenged if not roundly condemned by the German martyr’s words.

But let's pause from that thought. So much idiocy has been proclaimed about the work of the Holy Spirit. In the early days of the charismatic movement she was indeed a powerful wind of change blowing through the fusty corridors of mainline Christianity. But she generally limits herself to our readiness to cooperate in her redeeming, sanctifying, holy-making work. “She weans and inspires all whose hearts are open,” says John Bell in his now famous hymn. But we can close our hearts not just by hardness, by fusty corridors, but by a fixation on that which is entertaining and exhilarating. Comfortable Christianity, with its expectation of the sensational, soon turned the experience of the Holy Spirit into a form of entertainment. “More power, Lord,” yelled the late John Wimber from a floodlit stage as he performed some act or other of entertainment dressed up as Christian ministry. 

So how do we tell where and when the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, for the terms are interchangeable, the Holy Spirit is at work?

The answer is to look back into the deep places of our texts, our sacred texts. Her task – and perhaps now I should explain that in Hebrew and Greek alike “spirit” is a feminine noun – her task is to make known the presence and the work of Christ throughout time and space. Does Jesus entertain? He reveals from time to time  perhaps a wry sense of humour but the luxury of idiocy not so much, or in reality, not at all. No. He drives forward in works of justice, drives forward in, as I have said here before, such a way that there is no dissonance between word and action, drives forward to counter loneliness, hypocrisy, hopelessness, untruth, and dullness, to name just some works of  the demonic. He drives forward both to proclaim and be present as the opposite of these darknesses in human experience, in our lives. The work of the Spirit is to fill our lives with fellowship, integrity, hope, truth, and holy exhilaration, the opposite of dark demons.

Today is the feast of Pentecost. We are called simply to immerse ourselves in the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, so that we can experience and spread justice and resurrection hope, the fullness of the resurrected presence of Christ, in our lives in our world, no matter what is going on around us. 

But we are not mere passive recipients of this gift of God. Our task is through discipline, prayer, worship, and fellowship to be co-creators of the holiness that God seeks to midwife in your life and mine and the world's. The strange truth of the Spirit, Truth that is so fundamentally trintarian, is that she works, if we let her, from within us: God in us.

Come Holy Spirit, renew us in the likeness of Jesus.