Good morning friends! It is good to
gather in worship with all of you. We gather this morning on
Pentecost, to remember the moment when the Holy Spirit descended on
the disciples, and the third member of the trinity made herself known
to them, empowering them to preach and teach and spread the gospel.
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The Holy Spirit is usually the least
understood and least talked about part of the Trinity. When we talk
about God as father, son, and Holy Ghost, we generally have a better
sense about God and Jesus than the Spirit. After all, we have a
sense of who God is- the creator, the one who made the universe, the
one who we pray to, Abba, father, the main character of the Old
Testament. And we know Jesus, the son, the one who came to earth, the
man who taught and preached and lived and died and lived again, the
main character of the New Testament. We may not always know quite
what it means to call Jesus God, but we know who he is.
The Holy Spirit, though, she is more of
a mystery, without an easy hat to wear or easy description to keep in
our pocket. God present with us is not as satisfying as the other two
more obvious aspects of the divine. Even our prayers leave her
out-God almighty...in the name of your son Jesus we pray, amen.
Now, this is not an issue for all
Christians-in Pentecostal traditions, the Holy Spirit is ever
present, shaking the service each Sunday, as people are filled by the
Spirit and respond in visible literal ways. But in our more staid
worship, it is harder to say that we are swept up by tongues of fire.
So
what do we do with this Pentecost image? If my sermon is not going to
be translated miraculously into the various languages of our
neighborhood, who is the Holy Spirit, and what does she mean for us?
Well,
instead of this image of the Holy Spirit as primarily a physical or
emotional experience, what I'd like to play with this morning is the
Holy Spirit is God in the church. It is in the claim that the Holy
Spirit is with us that we claim our authority to work in the name of
God in the world.
Consider some of the classic
texts of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. It is the presence of
the Holy Spirit that marks a relationship with God-at Jesus' baptism,
at the beginning of each of the Gospels, the Holy Spirit descends
upon Jesus, like a dove, and says something like “This is my son,
the beloved. In him I am well pleased. And at the end of his
ministry, Jesus passes this Holy Spirit on to the disicples. In John
20, Jesus tells his disciples: Receive
the Holy Spirit. “If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are
forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” It is
the Spirit with us that gives us authority. Later in Romans 8, verse
23: the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought
to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through
wordless groans.” It is the Spirit that connects us with God. In
Galatians 5:22, we learn the fruit of the spirit, the love, joy,
peace, and patience, the virtues that
reveal to the world that we are connected to the divine power in the
world, and are willing to follow faithfully wherever God's creative
vision calls.
These
are images of the Spirit of God, guiding and leading and inspiring
the church to become something new and something more than just a
collection of individuals. And what I notice is how this invitation
to tell God's good news and work on God's mission is somewhat in
contrast to some other significant Biblical motifs.
One of the reoccurring themes in the
first half of the book of Genesis, at the very beginning of the
Bible, is as a morality tale about the huge differences between God
and humanity. The story of the garden of Eden is about humans not
being able to handle the authority to know good from evil, to be like
God. The story of the tower of Babel is about humanity being
prevented from doing great things, to protect the prerogative of the
divine. The story of Noah is about God being able and willing and
justified in wiping out all humanity to start over fresh. The story
of Abraham and Isaac at it's core is one insisting that God's rules
are both capricious and arbitrary and also must be followed
unerringly and without question. There is room for human initiative
and agenda, but the overwhelming issue is obedience.
In
contrast, in many ways, looking at the story of the church after
Easter, what we have is a story of God's Holy Spirit, or Christ's
Holy Spirit, or the Holy Spirit, inhabiting the church, and
encouraging the Apostles and leaders of the new Christian movement to
take on the mantle of leadership, and pick up where Jesus left
things.
Here God enters into partnership with
the church, to allow us to be the body of Christ, the presence of God
in the world, the ones who may bind and loose, who have the authority
to speak the good news and discern God's will for the world.
You can probably see this most
obviously in the Pentecost story -all at once, Peter goes from being
a bumbling fisherman to telling the story of how God led the people
of Israel though history, from the Exodus to prophetic invitation to
care for the poor, and how Jesus opened up wide the gates to
salvation and eternal life, a transformation dramatic enough that
people thought he was drunk at 9:00 in the morning. He goes from a
recipient of Christ's teaching, a sometimes foolish foil for the Son
of God, to a power in his own right, one who can tell the gospel
story so convincingly that thousands would hear and believe.
But this theme runs through the rest of
the New Testament, that it is human beings who are filled with the
presence of God and tasked with doing God's work.
At the Jerusalem council, the early
church gathered together to discuss circumcision and keeping kosher,
deciding for God and the church decided what the will of the Holy
Spirit truly was. Paul had seen Gentiles converting, and Peter had
seen a sheet filled with unclean foods descend from the clouds, and
they knew what God was calling them to do. Really, you can just look
to Paul's constant fight with those who wanted to put the Spirit in a
box, who were not willing to shake the world on behalf of the living
God and listen to the voice of the Spirit, who wanted a relationship
with God where human authority was low, and obedience was the primary
task.
And you can see this theme here in our
Romans 8 passage this morning. Paul wants the Roman Christians to
know that the Holy Spirit is not a spirit of fear-it is not extra
guilt or the sense that we aren't doing everything we're supposed to
in order to make the world a better place, it is not a new set of
threats and carrots, designed to get us to jump through the right set
of hoops. No, the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of adoption. To be a
Christian means to be family, to be in God's family. We have been
grafted in to the divine relationship, and we have all the rights and
privledges that come with being a child of the most high. We can
celebrate our right to call God abba-father-to claim a relationship
with the divine much more intimate than what we might imagine from
the creator of the universe. That is already a remarkable promise,
but Paul doesn't leave it there.
The
Apostle Paul loved to take images and metaphors and stretch them as
far as they would go, and here is no different. We're pretty
comfortable with the language of God as father-the incredible
intimacy of that relationship is so expected it's hard to appreciate
how radical it is. And one way that I notice this is that I am
perfectly capable of saying God is my father, Jesus is God's son, but
it feels really weird to say that means Jesus is my brother. But that
is where Paul goes here-we are children of God, which means we are
brothers of Jesus, which means that we must be heirs of God, indeed
co-heirs with Christ. That is pretty lofty company.
Consider it-heir is sort of a strange word in our society-it's not something we think about very much. Rachel and I are expecting our first 'heir' but I don't really think of his arrival in the sense of 'passing on a legacy' or a 'family name', and there is certainly no family fortune he's going to get to inherit.
But in the ancient world, heir didn't
just mean a child, someone to love and care for. No an heir spoke to
an institution, authority passed through the generations. It speaks
to Downtown Abbey, where Matthew Crawley, some random lawyer from the
city became the heir of a great estate, a small village of servants
and the title of Lord Grantham.
To be an heir is to have a claim of
authority that at the appropriate time, you will be in charge, you
will shape the destiny of the family, the business, the great things
of this world.
That
is a pretty wild promise that Paul is laying out here, based on the
presence of the Holy Spirit with us, but it continues the theme of
the disciples taking over the New Testament Church.
If
you play with this notion of heir, pushing the boundaries of the
concept to its logical conclusion, you can get to some strange
places- if we are co-heirs with Christ we inherit with him all the
privileges of Messianic authority, to proclaim the good news, to
offer forgiveness and salvation, to sit on the throne along side the
lamb who was slain and rose again to life.
I
don't want to take this to far-it is tempting to use the Holy Spirit,
living with us, breathing on us, as an excuse to ignore the text, to
dismiss the past, to weed out all the stuff we don't like in
Christianity. I don't think that's a fair reading of the story
either-after all, discipleship is about listening, being the heir of
Downton is not all about parties and power-it's about learning the
tasks and obligations of the position, adapting one's self to the
mantel of authority, and for us as well, it's no good to be an heir
who doesn't know the responsibilities of the position.
And
I don't want to ignore the differences between humans and God-God is
with us, but God is different from us.
But
I do think on Pentecost, we can claim the action of God in the world
in the Christian people around us we see doing God's work in the
world-we see the Holy Spirit alive and well in the partnerships
between God and humanity.
The Vision Statement of Mennonite
Church USA is “God calls us to be followers of Jesus Christ, and by
the power of the Holy Spirit to grow as communities of grace, joy and
peace, so that God's healing and hope flow through us to the world.
When God's healing and hope are at
work, where the hungry are fed, where the sick are cared for, where
the grieving are comforted, where the powers and principalities, the
forces of racism and injustice are fought, there God is present,
there the Holy Spirit is at work, there are Christians, heirs of God,
and brothers and sisters of Christ, doing God's work in the world.
May we be those people always.
Amen.
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