Yours, Mine, & Ours
If you have been in the church for a while, then you recognize that today is Pentecost Sunday.
Pentecost is the 50th day following Easter. The normal Pentecost reading is one where we have all those names that nobody wants to get stuck with. All those names that nobody can pronounce and be ashamed of fumbling through them.
Then we have this experience of tongues of fire and wind. But, my sense is that most of us probably have not experienced tongues of fire and wind that way. That’s not how we’ve experienced the Holy Spirit. In talking with the Worship Commission in preparation for this Sunday, what they said to me was, “you know, it seems like the Holy Spirit is really hard to understand. We’re really not sure that we know that much about it.”
So I put this graphic here because the Holy Spirit is confusing. Just in Scripture alone, all of those things represent the Holy Spirit. It is represented in wind and in fire, but it’s also represented by the hand of Jesus, by a dove that descends, by anointing oil. Sometimes it’s a cloud, sometimes it’s a seal, sometimes it’s in water at baptism. There’s so many different images for the spirit, that the spirit is confusing.
I thought rather than sit with the Pentecost and what happened, where we give credit for the church being created, I thought it might be worthwhile to just try to unpack a little bit about the Spirit.
In these readings that we had today, John 15:26-27 & 16:4b-15, we heard some things about the Spirit. The Greek word is paraclete, which in the NRSV gets translated as advocate. But the word comforter is a lot closer to what it really means. It’s not just one who goes before you, although the Spirit does help us intercede in our prayers with God. But it also said that the Spirit comes to us in our weakness, The Spirit pleads our case, like the advocate, but the Spirit also convinces the world of its sin. And it explains or brings the availability of God’s goodness. It brings deliverance from judgment. It guides us into all truth, and it tells us about the future. The Spirit praises Christ.
All of those things are just in the scriptures that we read this morning about the Spirit. The Spirit really is like a first responder that’s coming to us, that is with us whenever we need it.
All we need to do is ask for the Spirit’s guidance, for the Spirit’s comfort and help in whatever situation we’re in.
Then, it’s up to us to listen. That’s where I think, probably more than anything, we miss out. Because, I think, the Spirit even comes to us in ways that we didn’t ask, in ways that we miss, because we’re so focused on our own agendas and what we’ve got to do. It comes in gentle ways.
So, there’s a lot of ways to experience the Spirit. But the Spirit is there to help guide us to remember that Jesus is our helper. That Jesus is there for us to help us with our sin. In fact, sin here, in this scripture that I read, means not abiding in Jesus. It’s a theological understanding of sin rather than a moral one, right?
Sin can also be the injustices that we allow within our communities, within the bigger county, state and world. When we allow people to be hurt, that is not of God. Actually, that’s the challenge with listening to the spirit is that we have to determine what is spirit and what is ego.
For me one of the big ways in which I tell the difference is that spirit will always lead us towards life, towards wholeness and peace, love and joy.
It is an expansive peace. It is not about retracting. It’s not about dividing us. The Spirit doesn’t want us, like the disciples, to be hold up in a room, shuttered from the world.
That’s why the Spirit breaks in that way comes to them and says, “it’s okay.” In that Pentecost story from Acts 2 that we didn’t read, the Spirit comes to all of these people. People that would have been from Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan, and says, “you need to work together. Stop dividing. Come together.” They were able o come together and agree. That’s the beauty of the Spirit.
But when we hear things within us that encourage us towards mean spiritedness or violence, that is not of God. That is of our egos. So telling the difference is something that’s the most important thing. Because the Spirit does come in different ways. We might be like Samuel, who actually hears the voice calling him. Or it might be like Elijah, where the Spirit is not in the wind or the fire, or the Earthquake. But the, Spirit is in that still small voice within.
That’s the one that I particularly relate to because I find that the spirit more like nudges me. I’ll be walking along and all of a sudden somebody’s name will come into my mind. Like, “Yep, you haven’t talked to that person in a while.” So often when I do that and I’m thinking, I’m late, I should have called them last week. I should have gone yesterday. But, I get there and they look at me and they say, this is the perfect time for you to be here because we put all that other stuff on ourselves.
But the spirit is there, if we’re just paying attention to those little nudgings.
If you feel called to call somebody, if they’re coming to your mind, do it. Pick up the phone. Give them a call. They may need to hear from you right now. There may be something going on that you don’t know. Or maybe, you may be like Mary and actually see a vision of an angel.
There’s so many ways to experience the spirit. I heard a colleague speak this week and was talking about the spirit in a very prescribed way. I think the church has tried to control the spirit. The church has tried, just like we’ve tried to control God. Instead of thinking and remembering that we are made in the likeness of God, we try to make God in the likeness of us. We try to control what the Spirit does and we say, “this is Spirit, but this isn’t.” Maybe I’m doing that too with this mean spiritedness versus wholeness and love, but I think there are so many times we want to put a frame around what the Spirit is, who God is or who Christ is, and the answer is actually yes and much more.
Our versions of God and the Spirit and Christ are too small. We can’t comprehend all of God. We can’t comprehend all of the Spirit or even all of Christ. Jesus was our best way to know God and it gave us an understanding of who God was as one of us. But that was just a piece and there is so much more.
So I hope that you think about the Spirit and I put this picture because it’s a transformation. It’s striking because usually a caterpillar will go into a cocoon or a chrysalis in order to transform and it appears to be doing that without it. It’s going right from caterpillar to finding wings.