Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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As a child I pictured the Holy Spirit as something spooky. It probably didn’t help that we referred to it, in those days, as the “Holy Ghost.” (Why not the “Holy Goblin,” from a child’s perspective?) I wasn’t comfortable with it. Later I decided the Holy Spirit was some kind of rogue power, which visited only certain people, and caused them to behave like Mad Hatters. They would speak gibberish, roll around on the floor, and act possessed, -- and always (with some kind of misguided pride) they would give credit for their oddities to (Guess what!) the Holy Spirit. I wasn’t comfortable with that.

I’ve learned, more recently, to separate the Holy Spirit itself from all its alleged manifestations, and to understand it in its simplest terms: God living and working among us. As such, the Holy Spirit is everything. The Father’s splendor is too great for us to take in, the Son, Jesus, (God seen) is gone for a time. What we have, what Jesus promised we would have, is the Holy Spirit. And that is no small gift. In words that still astound me, Jesus told his sorrowing disciples that had to die but they would be better off without him – because they would have the Holy Spirit.

No doubt, the Holy Spirit gives ecstatic and dramatic spiritual experiences – not to every faithful person, I think, but definitely to some. Pentecost, today’s celebration, is the supreme example of that ------------- read the story. Seven weeks after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Holy Spirit came with great power upon the disciples who were waiting, per Jesus’ instructions, in Jerusalem. It came, the Bible says, “like the rush of a violent wind,” and with “tongues of fire,” and it empowered these plain men to speak and be understood in foreign languages, and to preach, and to heal, and to convert. (It made them crazy. Their behavior that day was so bazaar that onlookers thought them drunk.) But the experiencing is secondary to the empowering. I cannot, today, from a distance, validate their experience. I must simply accept their testimony that they heard a wind and saw fire. But I can validate their empowering. For the record is clear that, after Pentecost, this handful of people, none rich, none educated, non high-born, changed the world. The Holy Spirit empowers, keeps us from spinning our wheels, makes our good work efficacious.

America is a nation of good people trying to accomplish good things, but too often without God. We want to raise up the poor and make our society more equitable; we want to break down the walls of racism, we want to end violence and war; we want to care for planet earth. May I express a forbidden belief, which I have come to over many years of disappointment: we don’t have it in us to accomplish these things. In fact, whenever we try to accomplish them without the power of God’s Holy Spirit, we only make the problems worse.
In our lifetimes, for example, we’ve seen dozens of well-meaning programs introduced to help the poor, and billions of dollars spent, and so many of the programs have turned into boondoggles. The rich and the poor are still with us, further apart than ever. Efforts to fight poverty must be energized by the Holy Spirit, which (unlike government) can reach the hearts of men, and force upon us the understanding that all things belong to God and, therefore, greed (either in a rich man or in a poor man) is a sin against God. Racism will disappear only when the Holy Spirit gets too us and persuades us that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ. The power of God can end violence – but we certainly haven’t accomplished it on our own. And God, through the Holy Spirit, can teach us to love the world he created, and to care for it. (I have not said one word against government programs and human efforts in these regards, but only that without God’s power, which we understand as being available through the Holy Spirit, such programs and efforts are bound to fail.) The Holy Spirit empowers.

And the Holy Spirit revives. This year is the 300th anniversary of John Wesley’s birth. John and Charles Wesley, brothers, in their early thirties, both Oxford educated, both Anglican priests (but not all that good at it) are converted three days apart, in May of 1738 -- first Charles then John. God revived these two through the power of the Holy Spirit. They weren’t bad men, but (as one historian put it) they were devotees of “a sincere but lifeless religion.” We don’t know all we might like to know about their conversions, their experiencing, but we can say for certain that, in that one three-day period, both men were enormously changed, their empowering. Before his conversion, Charles had never written a hymn. Now he would write six thousand, beginning, the day after his conversion with
Where shall my wandering soul begin?
How shall I all to heaven aspire?
A slave redeemed from death and sin,
A brand plucked from eternal fire!
How shall I equal triumphs raise
Or sing my great Deliverer’s praise?

John, after his conversion, would (literally) get on his horse and (before he died) would ride 250,000 miles around England – the equivalent of ten times around the earth -- to every village and hamlet, preaching with great power to minors, for example, who could never get to church, and to whom the established church would not come. (Wesley said, as he preached he could see the white streaks of their tears running down their blackened faces.) And he preached to the poor, and to others forgotten by the church, “offering them Christ,” as he put it. John and Charles Wesley changed England, played a major role in ending child labor and outlawing the slave trade, provoked the Anglican Church into reforming itself, established hundreds of churches in England and thousands in America. God, through his Holy Spirit, took two men who were going nowhere, revived them, empowered them, and sent them forth.
When we are dead in the Spirit, God performs CPR on us, mouth to mouth he re-breathes into us the breath of life. He massages our hearts until they beat with a new intensity. He shocks us with his Word until we rise and walk. He revives us (makes us live again) in his Spirit.

I have read today’s scripture lesson (from Romans) many times (“…the whole creation is groaning in labor pains…), but never really caught Paul’s meaning until I read it this week in Peterson’s paraphrase: “All around us we observe a pregnant creation (pregnant with the Holy Spirit), in pain until the time of deliverance comes. We wait expectantly, like a pregnant woman, and are not diminished by the waiting. In fact we are enlarged by the waiting. Like a pregnant woman, we suffer pain, but soon the pain will turn to great joy. God is right alongside us, helping us endure labor and aiding in the birth process. He prays with us, Paul says, “making prayers out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans.” That’s exactly how Paul saw his world: excited in expectation of new birth, waiting and growing in our faith, suffering pain but only in the service of a new creation which was about to be born.

The Spirit, Jesus says, goes where it will. Because the Holy Spirit is God himself, we cannot order up the Spirit from a menu, as we might order a steak in a restaurant. But we need to be in the restaurant to receive the food when the time is right for it to be served. The Spirit is everywhere all the time, and we are sustained every day by it. But sometimes we must wait for the Spirit’s special call. (The disciples had to wait!) We wait for him, sometimes in pain, always in expectancy. And we prepare, we make ourselves ready for his coming. We worship, we pray, we read and study the scriptures, we surrender ourselves to the Spirit. John Wesley had his followers pray this prayer at mid-night every New Year’s Eve, a covenant prayer, he called it, a prayer of release and surrender (and a jewel of Methodism):
I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me
with whom thou wilt...
Let me be employed by thee, or laid aside for thee…
Let me have all things, let me have nothing,
I freely and heartily yield all things
to thy pleasure and disposal…
…thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.