What is the Spirit?
M12
Acts 2:1-21
Ps. 104:25-35,37
Rom. 8:22-27
Jn. 15:26-7, 16:4b-15
“No, this is what was spoke through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will send my Spirit upon all flesh…” (Acts 2).
Today we celebrate one of the four most important feasts of the year – Pentecost. It is the birthday of the church when we remember how the spirit descended upon the apostles. We wear red as a symbol of the Holy Spirit’s love and to represent the tongues of fire that were signs of its presence.
This morning I want to think with you about a question that is easy to articulate and difficult to answer. What is the spirit? Part of what makes this a difficult question is that we share this word and this idea with people outside and inside the church who misunderstand it. We know what Pentecost means because the group of people who use this word is restricted to a relatively small group who have largely shared values. But everyone uses the word spirit and spiritual to describe anything from cheerleading squads to business strategies to a sense of our own interior depth. Fortunately our readings give us strong direction in this question.
1. Imagine the birth of the church, when there was only a small group of scared people who had already shared everything together, who had sacrificed their families and work, who had found miraculous new life in Jesus. Their friend entered triumphantly into Jerusalem and only a few days later was executed as a political and religious criminal. These first followers felt no security. They had no plan, only a shared sense of disappointment.
Suddenly the spirit came down on them like fire and filled them. When they spoke, others heard their own native language. Even in our time we recognize that it is a miracle when we meet someone who really understands us. The puritan Jonathan Edwards emphasized that it is God’s nature to communicate (“God is a communicative being”). God has something to say to every person, to every living being. To us, God says, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh.” This does not mean all ministers, or all Episcopalians or all Christians but all of living reality will show the presence of God.
Other very different depictions of the spirit and the church exist. One example is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which sold 40 million copies and recently came out as a movie. To summarize the story very briefly a Harvard symbologist named Robert Langdon and a French cryptologist Sophie Neveu work together to solve mysteries related to the murder of the Louvre Museum curator. These involve secret religious societies, codes in famous paintings and buildings and ultimately the search for the holy grail. The institutional church seems fiendishly intent on subverting any effort to discover the truth.
The novel is fun to read and it may make some people more curious about God. But there are two kinds of problems with it. The first concerns facts. The Christian Century magazine uses the word “truthiness” to account for the appeal of The Da Vinci Code. Truthiness describes the way that people insist what they want or feel to be true should be treated as true. Politicians and public figures constantly do this. This isn’t totally different than recent scandals around the question of how true a memoir must be to make it nonfiction. Brown’s novel fits in perfectly with this cultural climate.
We like to feel that we are learning something even as we read a novel and this is what The Da Vinci Code implicitly promises. The book cover describes the novel as “intricately layered with remarkable research and detail.” Immediately following the title page Brown includes something that looks like a dictionary entry which says, “Fact:… All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”
According to the novel “the greatest cover-up in human history” was that, “not only was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father… Mary Magdalene was the Holy Vessel… that bore the bloodline of Jesus Christ” (249). Also I should let you know that, “Walt Disney made it his quiet life’s work to pass on the Grail story to future generations” (261). Biblical scholars may sometimes say odd things but they have to offer some support for their findings and no one I have heard of has made suggestions like these.
Crazy statements and treating Christ as some kind of last name rather than as a messianic title made me completely distracted as I read this book. Being a serious student of religion and reading The Da Vinci Code is like someone who knows about baseball reading a novel about how the Chicago White Sox won the 1967 world series… by strategically running the bases the wrong way round.
The second problem with The Da Vinci code has more to do with the spirit of its depiction of Christianity rather than particular facts. Secret rituals, hidden symbols, bloodlines and magical powers are not at the heart of Christian faith and practice. As I said earlier, God is a communicative being. God pours out the Holy Spirit on all flesh. Christians have always made their claims in public where their ideas can be confirmed or rejected. Jesus says his followers will be distinguished by what they do in public not by secret beliefs. I saw a bumper sticker yesterday that says, “God wants spiritual fruits not religious nuts.” The fruit of the spirit is love.
2. The second thing that scripture reminds us about the spirit concerns its connection to prayer. The apostle Paul suffered for his faith. Through prayer the spirit gave him great strength. In a letter to his friends he writes, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8). This week I met another Paul who helped me to understand this.
It all started with a magic carpet ride. On Wednesday night I flew with Will Price over the snow-covered Rockies to Montana in a small plane for one day of fly-fishing on the Blackfoot River. Growing up I played a lot of sports and worked outside in lumberyards, doing landscaping and out in the fields. In college I continued with sports and lived in a residence hall with 200 men. Although since my ordination I am almost never in all-male environments, I miss this. I enjoy spending time with men like our fishing guide Paul.
Paul is a powerful man in his sixties. He’s intelligent and strong, with a beard and piercing eyes that cut right through the surface of things. He tells the truth simply and humorously without exaggeration. You could depend on him in an emergency.
We pulled our boat out for lunch twenty yards away from a nest with two immature bald eagles and their mother. Will’s father was talking about the way that our failures can more powerfully shape our character than our successes. This led Paul to express his own regrets about his divorce from his wife of forty-one years. He also talked about marrying a woman who had never been married before and who was four years older than himself. “This time I am doing things differently,” Paul said. “My wife and I begin each day looking each other in the eyes and praying.”
If you pray you will become acquainted with the spirit. You’ll know yourself better too. Prayer is when I begin to be honest with myself about what I really want. I face my weaknesses and the narrowness of my vision. And the spirit takes our badly articulated prayers and “with sighs too deep for words,” makes God’s love known to us.
3. My last observation about the Holy Spirit comes from Jesus. This is the hardest part to explain. At the Last Supper Jesus reassures his disciples that even though he will die he will never abandon them. The Greek word that he uses for spirit is paraclete. The dictionary says that this is literally the person you call to for help - like a doctor if you have chest pains or a lawyer if you find yourself in jail or a river guide if you are drowning. Jesus says, this “Advocate… will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment… he will guide you for he will not speak on his own…” (Jn. 15).
Earlier I approvingly quoted a Montana bumper sticker about religious nuts and spiritual fruits. The one thing that bothers me is the way that it suggests an opposition between bad institutional religion and good private spirituality. I want to say something about my friends who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.
I think what they mean by this is an inner experience of depth, a “true self,” an authentic self free of all the roles we play, a self independent of how others perceive us. For them this is what spirituality is and because this idea is very powerful in our age Christians begin to mistake this idea of spirituality for the Holy Spirit.
The archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams believes that this idea of the self comes out of a fantasy of perfect communication. We imagine “an ideal other,” “a listener to whom I am making perfect sense,” a sympathetic hearer who always gives us the benefit of the doubt and understands our often less-than-clear good intentions. Williams says that the problem with this is that the world is not filled with people who understand us perfectly.
One may go further and note that often we do not even understand ourselves very well. We lie to ourselves in order to justify our bad intentions. A private spirituality based on the idea of a true self may be a very deeply seated way of avoiding how God is drawing us to the holy.
When I am in an argument with my wife Heidi and I find myself saying, “that’s just the way that I am,” I know that I am on shaky ground. The spirit is not a deeply interior matter of being stubbornly true to yourself. The spirit works through other people, through all flesh. Our spouses and neighbors and colleagues and church family are the way that the spirit brings the world to God. They are the way that the “Advocate… will prove the world wrong about sin” (Jn. 15).
In conclusion, the late Roman Catholic professor Ralph Kiefer used to say, “The Bible is not the Word of God. The Word of God is what God says to the church when the Bible is being read.” Real people, not words on a page are the way that God calls to you.
This church has no secrets. It exists in and is constituted by the Holy Spirit revealing itself in all flesh. Like my friend Paul, in our weakness the spirit calls us into new strength through prayer “too deep for words.” The spirit working in others “proves the world wrong about sin,” not through an ideal imaginary true self but in the real people in our lives. On this Pentecost morning, I invite you to celebrate God’s spirit in all of us together.
____________________
The American Dialect Society named the word “truthiness” as the word of the year in 2005. Although Stephen Colbert reinvented the word as part of his political satire, this idea has been around since the nineteenth century. Rodney Clapp, “Dan Brown’s Truthiness: The Appeal of the Da Vinci Code,” The Christian Century, May 16, 2006, 22. See also Wikipedia “Truthiness” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness. In this last source Colbert in character says, "The Oxford English Dictionary has a definition for 'truthy' dating back to the 1800s....'The fact that they looked it up in a book just shows that they don't get the idea of truthiness at all,' Stephen Colbert said Thursday. 'You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut.’”
Page numbers from Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (NY: Doubleday, 2005).
“paraklesis” in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1958)
Rowan Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament Ethics,” On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 239-241.
Richard Fabian from an unpublished lecture delivered at Sewanee on St. Gregory Nyssen Church in San Francisco
Acts 2:1-21
Ps. 104:25-35,37
Rom. 8:22-27
Jn. 15:26-7, 16:4b-15
“No, this is what was spoke through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will send my Spirit upon all flesh…” (Acts 2).
Today we celebrate one of the four most important feasts of the year – Pentecost. It is the birthday of the church when we remember how the spirit descended upon the apostles. We wear red as a symbol of the Holy Spirit’s love and to represent the tongues of fire that were signs of its presence.
This morning I want to think with you about a question that is easy to articulate and difficult to answer. What is the spirit? Part of what makes this a difficult question is that we share this word and this idea with people outside and inside the church who misunderstand it. We know what Pentecost means because the group of people who use this word is restricted to a relatively small group who have largely shared values. But everyone uses the word spirit and spiritual to describe anything from cheerleading squads to business strategies to a sense of our own interior depth. Fortunately our readings give us strong direction in this question.
1. Imagine the birth of the church, when there was only a small group of scared people who had already shared everything together, who had sacrificed their families and work, who had found miraculous new life in Jesus. Their friend entered triumphantly into Jerusalem and only a few days later was executed as a political and religious criminal. These first followers felt no security. They had no plan, only a shared sense of disappointment.
Suddenly the spirit came down on them like fire and filled them. When they spoke, others heard their own native language. Even in our time we recognize that it is a miracle when we meet someone who really understands us. The puritan Jonathan Edwards emphasized that it is God’s nature to communicate (“God is a communicative being”). God has something to say to every person, to every living being. To us, God says, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh.” This does not mean all ministers, or all Episcopalians or all Christians but all of living reality will show the presence of God.
Other very different depictions of the spirit and the church exist. One example is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which sold 40 million copies and recently came out as a movie. To summarize the story very briefly a Harvard symbologist named Robert Langdon and a French cryptologist Sophie Neveu work together to solve mysteries related to the murder of the Louvre Museum curator. These involve secret religious societies, codes in famous paintings and buildings and ultimately the search for the holy grail. The institutional church seems fiendishly intent on subverting any effort to discover the truth.
The novel is fun to read and it may make some people more curious about God. But there are two kinds of problems with it. The first concerns facts. The Christian Century magazine uses the word “truthiness” to account for the appeal of The Da Vinci Code. Truthiness describes the way that people insist what they want or feel to be true should be treated as true. Politicians and public figures constantly do this. This isn’t totally different than recent scandals around the question of how true a memoir must be to make it nonfiction. Brown’s novel fits in perfectly with this cultural climate.
We like to feel that we are learning something even as we read a novel and this is what The Da Vinci Code implicitly promises. The book cover describes the novel as “intricately layered with remarkable research and detail.” Immediately following the title page Brown includes something that looks like a dictionary entry which says, “Fact:… All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”
According to the novel “the greatest cover-up in human history” was that, “not only was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father… Mary Magdalene was the Holy Vessel… that bore the bloodline of Jesus Christ” (249). Also I should let you know that, “Walt Disney made it his quiet life’s work to pass on the Grail story to future generations” (261). Biblical scholars may sometimes say odd things but they have to offer some support for their findings and no one I have heard of has made suggestions like these.
Crazy statements and treating Christ as some kind of last name rather than as a messianic title made me completely distracted as I read this book. Being a serious student of religion and reading The Da Vinci Code is like someone who knows about baseball reading a novel about how the Chicago White Sox won the 1967 world series… by strategically running the bases the wrong way round.
The second problem with The Da Vinci code has more to do with the spirit of its depiction of Christianity rather than particular facts. Secret rituals, hidden symbols, bloodlines and magical powers are not at the heart of Christian faith and practice. As I said earlier, God is a communicative being. God pours out the Holy Spirit on all flesh. Christians have always made their claims in public where their ideas can be confirmed or rejected. Jesus says his followers will be distinguished by what they do in public not by secret beliefs. I saw a bumper sticker yesterday that says, “God wants spiritual fruits not religious nuts.” The fruit of the spirit is love.
2. The second thing that scripture reminds us about the spirit concerns its connection to prayer. The apostle Paul suffered for his faith. Through prayer the spirit gave him great strength. In a letter to his friends he writes, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8). This week I met another Paul who helped me to understand this.
It all started with a magic carpet ride. On Wednesday night I flew with Will Price over the snow-covered Rockies to Montana in a small plane for one day of fly-fishing on the Blackfoot River. Growing up I played a lot of sports and worked outside in lumberyards, doing landscaping and out in the fields. In college I continued with sports and lived in a residence hall with 200 men. Although since my ordination I am almost never in all-male environments, I miss this. I enjoy spending time with men like our fishing guide Paul.
Paul is a powerful man in his sixties. He’s intelligent and strong, with a beard and piercing eyes that cut right through the surface of things. He tells the truth simply and humorously without exaggeration. You could depend on him in an emergency.
We pulled our boat out for lunch twenty yards away from a nest with two immature bald eagles and their mother. Will’s father was talking about the way that our failures can more powerfully shape our character than our successes. This led Paul to express his own regrets about his divorce from his wife of forty-one years. He also talked about marrying a woman who had never been married before and who was four years older than himself. “This time I am doing things differently,” Paul said. “My wife and I begin each day looking each other in the eyes and praying.”
If you pray you will become acquainted with the spirit. You’ll know yourself better too. Prayer is when I begin to be honest with myself about what I really want. I face my weaknesses and the narrowness of my vision. And the spirit takes our badly articulated prayers and “with sighs too deep for words,” makes God’s love known to us.
3. My last observation about the Holy Spirit comes from Jesus. This is the hardest part to explain. At the Last Supper Jesus reassures his disciples that even though he will die he will never abandon them. The Greek word that he uses for spirit is paraclete. The dictionary says that this is literally the person you call to for help - like a doctor if you have chest pains or a lawyer if you find yourself in jail or a river guide if you are drowning. Jesus says, this “Advocate… will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment… he will guide you for he will not speak on his own…” (Jn. 15).
Earlier I approvingly quoted a Montana bumper sticker about religious nuts and spiritual fruits. The one thing that bothers me is the way that it suggests an opposition between bad institutional religion and good private spirituality. I want to say something about my friends who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.
I think what they mean by this is an inner experience of depth, a “true self,” an authentic self free of all the roles we play, a self independent of how others perceive us. For them this is what spirituality is and because this idea is very powerful in our age Christians begin to mistake this idea of spirituality for the Holy Spirit.
The archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams believes that this idea of the self comes out of a fantasy of perfect communication. We imagine “an ideal other,” “a listener to whom I am making perfect sense,” a sympathetic hearer who always gives us the benefit of the doubt and understands our often less-than-clear good intentions. Williams says that the problem with this is that the world is not filled with people who understand us perfectly.
One may go further and note that often we do not even understand ourselves very well. We lie to ourselves in order to justify our bad intentions. A private spirituality based on the idea of a true self may be a very deeply seated way of avoiding how God is drawing us to the holy.
When I am in an argument with my wife Heidi and I find myself saying, “that’s just the way that I am,” I know that I am on shaky ground. The spirit is not a deeply interior matter of being stubbornly true to yourself. The spirit works through other people, through all flesh. Our spouses and neighbors and colleagues and church family are the way that the spirit brings the world to God. They are the way that the “Advocate… will prove the world wrong about sin” (Jn. 15).
In conclusion, the late Roman Catholic professor Ralph Kiefer used to say, “The Bible is not the Word of God. The Word of God is what God says to the church when the Bible is being read.” Real people, not words on a page are the way that God calls to you.
This church has no secrets. It exists in and is constituted by the Holy Spirit revealing itself in all flesh. Like my friend Paul, in our weakness the spirit calls us into new strength through prayer “too deep for words.” The spirit working in others “proves the world wrong about sin,” not through an ideal imaginary true self but in the real people in our lives. On this Pentecost morning, I invite you to celebrate God’s spirit in all of us together.
____________________
The American Dialect Society named the word “truthiness” as the word of the year in 2005. Although Stephen Colbert reinvented the word as part of his political satire, this idea has been around since the nineteenth century. Rodney Clapp, “Dan Brown’s Truthiness: The Appeal of the Da Vinci Code,” The Christian Century, May 16, 2006, 22. See also Wikipedia “Truthiness” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness. In this last source Colbert in character says, "The Oxford English Dictionary has a definition for 'truthy' dating back to the 1800s....'The fact that they looked it up in a book just shows that they don't get the idea of truthiness at all,' Stephen Colbert said Thursday. 'You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut.’”
Page numbers from Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (NY: Doubleday, 2005).
“paraklesis” in Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1958)
Rowan Williams, “Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament Ethics,” On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 239-241.
Richard Fabian from an unpublished lecture delivered at Sewanee on St. Gregory Nyssen Church in San Francisco
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