Another double-deal this week. Text and video. Maybe this is a thing for a while...
Pentecost, Year B
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
What is the Holy Spirit?
Today the church celebrates the Day of Pentecost - the commemoration
of the church having received the gift of the Holy Spirit - but we don’t
usually spend a lot of time thinking about it.
What does it mean to have the gift of the Holy Spirit? What does that gift look like? What do we do with it?
We talk about the Spirit a lot in passing. We talk about the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit. Just a couple of weeks ago
we celebrated a baptism, and in it, I announced that Shaina had been “sealed by
the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Every week we say the creed, and in it we
proclaim that we believe in the Holy Spirit.
But what is that “Holy Spirit”? What does it look like? Feel like?
Sound like?
Today we heard three very different explanations of the Holy
Spirit.
In the reading from Acts we heard the most iconic version of
the story of the Holy Spirit. The
disciples are gathered together, still living in fear from the horrors that
they had witnessed in the crucifixion. Through
it they had forged an even tighter community - if that could have been
possible. And in an ironic affront to
their fear, suddenly they were engulfed in a violent rush of wind. The spirit descended on each of them in
tongues as of fire, and inexplicably they each began to speak in other
languages.
They knew things that they hadn’t before known. They understood new languages.
It’s a shocking image.
But then we turn the page.
We hear from Paul about the “first fruits of the Spirit”.
For Paul those “first fruits” are not so much about
understanding or knowledge as they are about intercession. The Holy Spirit is the helper that makes up
for our own weakness. The Spirit
provides a conduit - almost a transmitter or a path - for clearer communication
with God. For Paul the Holy Spirit is
not that “violent rush of wind”, but instead, is the one who intercedes for us
to God with “sighs too deep for words”.
They’re very different images: a violent wind and a deep
sigh.
Then we come to Jesus.
As he prepares to leave the disciples - and perhaps more importantly, as
he prepares the disciples for his leaving - we hear yet another image of this
gift: this Spirit.
Jesus describes an “Advocate” - a “Spirit of truth”, he
says, who will come to reveal all of the things that had been left unsaid. As he said, “I have many things to say to
you, but you cannot bear them now.” As
our ability to bear the truth grows, so, too, will the truth that will be
revealed.
Truth, it seems, was too much for one lifetime - even the
lifetime of the Christ.
So just in the context of this one Sunday we hear three
different understandings of the Holy Spirit: the violent rush of wind that
brings knowledge and understanding, the sigh too deep for words that intercedes
on our behalf, and the Advocate bringing truth we cannot yet bear.
If we were to look elsewhere in the Bible, we would hear
other images still. Most notably I
remember the story of the giving of the Holy Spirit from John’s Gospel that we
hear every year on the Second Sunday of Easter - it’s not just the story of
“Doubting Thomas” - but a story about the Holy Spirit - when Jesus gives the
Spirit of peace to the disciples through no more than a breath.
So the question remains - what is the Holy Spirit?
I think there are so many different descriptions of the Holy
Spirit, because we all have so many different understandings and experiences of
it. Though most of us don’t spend a lot
of time thinking about the Holy Spirit, nearly all of us have had experiences of
the power of the Spirit at different times in our lives.
We all have different needs and experiences - we all are
God’s creations, each in our own unique ways - so the Spirit meets us in
different ways and at different times.
As I was preparing to preach today, I thought I’d be telling
you about some of mine - some of the times that I believe that I’ve been in the
presence of the Holy Spirit. One of my
favorite stories about that was about six years ago when I heard about the
election of our current Presiding Bishop.
I’ve often preached about that moment: sitting in the House of Deputies
of the Episcopal Church, and hearing the collective gasp of hundreds of
surprised Episcopalians as an experience similar to that “violent rush of wind”
that we hear about in Acts. Or, I
thought I might tell you about feeling the presence of the Holy Spirit at my
two ordinations - how we prayed that God would send the Holy Spirit, and how I
felt that rush of peace and understanding and intercession that the biblical
stories promise.
I even thought I might tell you some of the simpler stories:
about how every time I sit down to prepare a sermon, or stand up to deliver
one, I invoke the Holy Spirit, and how even I am surprised at how often my
prayers are answered. Or about how every
time I approach a meeting that I don’t want to go to, or feel uncertain of its
outcome, how I turn to the Holy Spirit for guidance. Or about how every time I find myself in a
difficult or frightening pastoral situation, how my first step is to pray for
the Holy Spirit to intercede - to give me the strength that I wouldn’t have
simply on my own.
I think those are all important stories. They all reveal a bit of what the Holy Spirit
is and does and looks like and feels like.
At least for me.
But the common thread is that each of those stories - each
of those experiences of the Holy Spirit - is preceded by openness; asking;
making room for what’s already there.
The Holy Spirit is our gift: the gifts of understanding,
peace, intercession, and truth. Gifts
that are available to us if only we could be more open to receiving them.
We celebrate Pentecost to remember that those gifts are
there for us. We celebrate Pentecost to
remember to make room.
So what is the Holy Spirit?
The Holy Spirit is what we need, when we need it.
It may look different in your life than it does in
mine. I would expect that it would. The real question is, will we see it? Amen.
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