John 15:9-17
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”
Acts 10:44-48
While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days.
Sermon
There’s something you should know up front: I have something of a love affair going on with the Holy Spirit. It’s been going on for quite some time now and at the ripe old age of 28, I find that when I look back I can’t pinpoint where it all began. Yet, as I was thinking about the passages above, and the Spirit, and my own fascination with this particular member of the Trinity, I found that there was one moment when my love for the Spirit became crystal clear.
It was the fall of my senior year in college and I was a little stressed out. I had signed on for an honors project studying youth ministry and spirituality and I was behind. Over the summer my one task had been to define spirituality so I could use it consistently in my project. And, it was not for lack of trying that I was behind. I can’t even tell you how many books on spirituality I had read, but to no avail for they all defined spirituality differently and I could find no common denominator. So, if I tell you that I am a perfectionist, and always prepared, you can begin to imagine the stress I was feeling as I walked towards my advisor’s office, convinced I had failed already. Rather than telling me I was a complete failure, which was nice of him, my advisor sympathized gave me a another book to read, suggesting it might help with my search for a definition.
At first I was confused because this was not a book on spirituality, it was a book on theology, and not just theology, but feminist theology, which I had never read before. But I was nothing if not a diligent student and so I proceed to read Elizabeth Johnson’s book, She Who Is, and about 80 pages in, Johnson defines the Holy Spirit. She writes, the Spirit is “She-Who-Dwells-Within, divine presence in compassionate engagement with the world.”
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That, for me, was the moment. You hear people tell stories about love at first sight—when they glimpse a stranger and know that person is the one for them. Or, stories about conversions when someone steps into a church for the first time, or for the first in a long time, and everything changes for them. I’ve never had either of those experiences, but I know what they’re talking about, because that was the feeling I had when I read this definition of the Spirit. It was as if all that I had learned about faith and religion and God, and all that I had experienced of God, suddenly came together and formed a complete whole. It was, perhaps, not quite as life-changing as a conversion experience or love at first sight, but it completely changed the way I look at the world and at faith.
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When you start looking for the Spirit, in the world or in the Bible, the Spirit ends up being everywhere. In the very first verses of Genesis, in that first cosmic creation story, the Spirit hovers, or vibrates, over the face of the deep, imbuing creation with Her energy and Spirit. There’s a beautiful scene in the movie Phenomenon where all you see is the wind moving through the trees with this lilting melody in the background. It’s a scene that plays during pivotal points throughout the movie, as characters look for comfort and meaning in a world that seems chaotic. For me, when I see, or hear, the wind moving through the trees, I have this image of the Spirit gently swaying through creation, stirring up breezes and life, rocking the world in comfort, and brushing her hand gently across our faces.
In the second chapter of Genesis, in the second creation story, God forms humanity out of the dust of the earth and breathes the Spirit into our bodies, filling us with life. The Spirit then becomes not only outside, in creation, but in us as well. I have the image of our breath being a gossamer thread that connects us to God—as we breathe in and out we remember that our breath, our life, is not our own. The Spirit becomes that in which we live and move and have our being.
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If the Spirit gives breath to creation in Genesis, by the time we get to the prophet Ezekiel, later in the Old Testament, we see the Spirit as a forceful wind recreating life. In the book of Ezekiel the Spirit becomes the stormy north wind that conveys God’s judgment against Israel. The Spirit is rough and challenging, pushing the community to be who they were created to be.
Perhaps the most well-known passage in Ezekiel is that of the dry bones from the 37th chapter. The Prophet Ezekiel is taken to a desolate valley filled with dry bones signifying the community of Israel in their exile. God comes to Ezekiel and has him prophesy to the four winds, calling upon them to knit back together this broken community. And as bones clatters against bones and sinews and muscle and skin begin to cover them, a lifeless army is brought together before Ezekiel’s very eyes. But it requires a second calling to the Spirit in the wind to bring breath and life back into this community. And so the Spirit comes from the wind, bringing together those who thought they were lost, those who have felt the harsh judgment of God’s disfavor. And the Spirit brings new life.
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In the New Testament, the images of Spirit as breath and wind expand to include fire. Earlier in the book of Acts, where the second reading above comes from, the Spirit descends on the believers gathered in Jerusalem and lands on their heads as tongues of fire so that each understands the message of the gospel in their own language. The image of God in fire brings back memories of Moses standing before the burning bush, encountering God for the very first time. When asked who Moses should say is sending him God replies, I am who I am—or—I will be who I will be.
It is in fire that God first identifies God’s self to Moses who will lead the Israelites out of slavery. And it is in fire that the Spirit lands on the heads of those who lead the church. The vibrant, purifying, and consuming fire of the Spirit conveys the energy and empowerment we need to go forth into the world, sharing the message of who we are and who God is. In the book of Joel, from the Old Testament, God says “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” At Pentecost we see God pouring out God’s Spirit into the church so that our sons and daughters may prophesy and our elders dream dreams and the young people see visions.
In tenth century Rome, when the day of Pentecost was celebrated the church attempted to dramatize the mystery of the Holy Spirit. According to one author, there were “‘Holy Spirit holes’ in the ceilings of the churches, opening them to the sky, dramatizing architecturally the openness of the church to God and the fabulous fact that the Spirit cannot be contained within the church” (Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras, 130). This is the image of the Spirit we encounter in our text from Acts for today.
If the Spirit is traditionally imaged as breath, wind, and fire, it is also equally imaged as a bird. Indeed, the traditional icon for the Spirit in the church is that of the dove. When Jesus is baptized at the beginning of his ministry, the gospel writer Mark reports that “just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like dove on him. And a voice came from heaven [saying], ‘You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased’” (Mark 1:10-11). There are a lot of counter-cultural elements in the Bible. But, this is one of my favorites. Jesus is identified, blessed, and told God is pleased with him before he starts his ministry. So frequently in our culture we are blessed only after we have achieved something, but God chooses to bless us first.
Yet, this is not the end of the role of the Spirit in Jesus’ baptism. Immediately after God announces God’s pleasure with Jesus, Mark writes, “And the Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness” where he was tempted for forty days and forty nights. The Spirit not only comes upon us to mark us as God’s own and reveal God’s pleasure with us, the Spirit also comes to push into places we might not choose to go on our own.
In Celtic Christianity, the Spirit is not imaged as a peaceful dove, but rather as a wild goose. Rather than a passive bird, the goose is a wild one – turbulent and abrasive in its honking, it seems to have a will of its own. This, I must admit, is the image of the Spirit I see in the Acts passage: “while Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.” This is not a polite Holy Spirit; it interrupts Peter in the midst of his sermon. Moreover, this is not a passive dove descending but a Spirit falling.
If you were to read the story that preceded these verses you would see even more clearly the way in which this Spirit is pushing the boundaries of the Church in uncomfortable and inconvenient ways. According to one commentator, the question the book of Acts is trying to answer is “will the Gentiles be saved?” For this new community that would become the church, the gospel was always intended for the Jewish community. Jesus, after all, was a Jew and his message, so the early church thought, was for the Jews. But, here they are in the book of Acts with the Jewish community rejecting them, persecuting them, and the Gentiles accepting this message, which wasn’t even intended for them. The book of Acts, then, records this struggle of the early church community to figure out who is in and who is out.
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Peter, in our passage, is speaking to the circumcised, Jewish believers, to explain why he thinks the gospel ought to be extended even to the Roman military officers who are occupying Israel. You can imagine that this is a hard argument to have to make; indeed, even Peter came to this belief rather unwillingly. Yet, in the middle of his sermon the Spirit interrupts, falling onto the Gentiles who are present identifying them as God’s own.
The Spirit pushes this early community into places and relationships they might not have chosen on their own. This is no comforting Spirit sent to make these early believers feel good. This is a Spirit leading and guiding an at-times-unwilling-Church into the vision of the future God has laid out for them.
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There is no one image of the Spirit that dominates our tradition. No single, unified story to tell that explains who the Spirit is and what the Spirit does. And this is not an oversight. The Spirit is the breath and life of creation – of the natural world and of you and I – the Divine Breath that sustains the universe. The Spirit is the Go-Between God – that of God which dwells within us. But the Spirit is also the harsh north wind that challenges us – continually blowing – turning us and again, often against our will, back to God. And the Spirit is the fire – the energy and inspiration we need to bear witness – to who we are, to who God is, and to the vision of the world God has given us. And finally, the Spirit is the wild goose, always flying in front of us creating Holy Spirit holes in the most inconvenient of places … hoping we will follow.
The call for the church, for you and for me, and for all of us together is not to be perfect, not to get it right every single time, but to follow. To be open enough to remember that the Spirit is never where we expect Her to be. To be flexible enough to trust the Spirit even when it feels uncomfortable and She takes us places we would rather not go. To remember that the Spirit is She-Who-Dwells-Within, divine presence in compassionate engagement with the world.
Amen.
Charge & Benediction
Storyteller Brian Andreas writes that, “Most people don’t know there are angels whose only job is to make sure you don’t get too comfortable & fall asleep & miss your life.”
So, with that in mind …
May the breath of the Holy Spirit comfort you,
May the winds of the Spirit change you,
May the fire of the Spirit empower you,
And may the Wild Goose lead you places you would never have found on your own.
Amen.
