Two weeks ago, at the start of our current sermon series, we attempted to speak of God the Creator, or more properly to un-speak of God, for we had to admit that we are at one end of three thousand years of God-talk going back at least to the earliest psalms, and that we humans have always struggled, when we try to make God accessible, with the risk of turning God into a false God, a version of ourselves writ cosmic, but at least we can locate ourselves on a theological trajectory, there is an ample body of scripture and tradition we can use to frame the conversation.
Last week we encountered God in the person of Jesus, and while we’ve done a good job of trying to make Jesus into the messiah we’d prefer him to be, rather than the messiah he actually is, at least there is a concrete context in which to place him. Jesus as God incarnate was incarnate in a place and time, and so, seeing his ministry not in a vacuum, but in the Judahite countryside, allows us to hear his voice. That Jesus speaks eternal truths, but also speaks specifically against other beings, those who oppress through religion power, those who oppress through economic advantage, those who oppress through military might. This Jesus, demanding that we stop the insanity and follow God’s law, this is accessible. And it is well within our abilities to imagine that Jesus’ courage and God-consciousness allowed him, in some way we might not fully understand, to defeat death itself. And so while we must un-speak God, we can speak Jesus, our savior through freedom from bondage.
This week we turn to the Holy Spirit, and I must confess that we are on shaky ground. The scriptural warrants are vague, the cultural context isn’t always clear. In fact, it was the divinity of the Holy Spirit and an early heresy involving the work of the Spirit that lead to the development of a theology of the Trinity in the first place. The ancients were able to wrap their heads around Jesus as God/Son of God, but the whole Spirit is God and is with us but isn’t the same as God the Creator, who had already been present as Spirit… well, as our sisters and brothers in the Abrahamic lineage might say, oy vey!
So a quick review… if we dig into the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible traditionally attributed to Moses, we discover that we have basically four sets of texts all jumbled together. The two earliest sets appear to have come from the Northern and Southern Kingdoms in the years after the reign of King Solomon. One set of texts imagined God as a super-sized human. You can see traces of this in Genesis when God blows life into Adam, or slams closed the door of the Ark. In the parallel text, God is spirit, an embodied natural force, but not a giant human. This God is fire and cloud, does not wrestle with Jacob. Both understandings of God co-exist in the Exodus narrative, but we don’t really encounter God as a huge human again after that. To be sure, we encounter messengers from God, divine beings in human form, and the texts sometimes speak of God as if embodied, hand of God etc., but God is more spirit in most of the latter texts. It is God as Spirit that leaves the Temple mount and Jerusalem through the Eastern Gate during the first destruction of the Holy City, and it was to prevent the re-entry of Elijah and subsequently the Messiah that lead the medieval Muslim rulers to wall up the gate and to place a cemetery in front of it.
The ancient Hebrew word for spirit was ruach, and it meant spirit, wind, and breath, and so it also meant life. So when God says through the prophet that God will put God’s spirit within us, it means to fill us with God-life, with God-breath, making us into holy transplant recipients! When Ezekiel is shown the Valley of Dry Bones, as we will encounter in our visual liturgy, new life comes from the Spirit of God.
Late in the period that produced the Hebrew scriptures we start to see Wisdom literature, texts that give practical advice on how to live in the world from day-to-day, a sort of BCE self-help section. And in those texts, Wisdom is described as an embodied spirit, feminine and the first created in the order of being. And this free-floating feminine wisdom spirit, plus countless embodied divine agents, and the Spirit of God as ruach, or breath of life, are where we find ourselves when Jesus lands on the scene.
The Spirit of God descends on Jesus at baptism, then Jesus breathes it into his disciples. It is the divine power that animates the apostles after Jesus is gone, allowing them to perform miracles, to overcome countless obstacles in sharing the good news that we have been redeemed through Christ, for through Christ death has been defeated and all are invited to experience God’s realm right now, breaking through into our world. This Spirit is what it means to be a Christian if Pauline theology is to be believed, for it is the Spirit in us that sanctifies us, that transforms us in holiness as beings in community.
Unfortunately, when the last tau is crossed and the last iota not dotted, and the period of forming scripture ends, we’re still not very clear on the Spirit, or for that matter, the Trinity. And nothing I can say or write is going to make the scripture or theology that much clearer. We pretty much have to leave it where the ancients did. The Spirit of God is divine and with us and in us all at once, is ruach, God-breath as promised, transforming us in holiness. And we can leave that whole “proceeds from the Creator and the Son,†the ancient formulation known as the filioque that created a rift between Western and Eastern Christianity, for another day.
As if it were not enough that we don’t know how to speak about the Spirit, we also don’t know how to judge claims of the Spirit’s actions in the church. One of the earliest heresies involved individuals who were introducing innovations, an innovation being anything those in charge didn’t think of themselves. In fact, the Protestant Mainline, of which we are a part, has a particularly difficult time with the Spirit. We came into being in the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and we still find emotions suspect. Spirit as wisdom is fine, Spirit as breath, life, wind, beyond our control… not so much. And if someone falls to the ground in spiritual ecstasy speaking in tongues, well that’s just not on…
Yet we keep speaking of Spirit, and I think we are right to do so. Jesus promised that the Spirit would be with us. Scripture tells us that Spirit is the life in the church. So lets’ take a leap, engage in a little soul poetry trying to sketch out the contours of a pneumatology, that is a theology of Spirit.
Spirit is… the experience of the divine, or “God-nessâ€- that is, from the perspective of the human, the Holy Spirit is experiential… completely present but manifest only through us. Just as I reject those dualist systems of belief that frame human existence as a battle between the body and the soul, I reject those theologies that emphasize the otherness of God and our separation from the divine. God is. God is. God is pouring forth in creation and life. God is God-with-us in Jesus and the amazing impact one man in the rural outskirts of a conquered city on the edge of an ancient empire had on human existence. God is freedom through Christ in the person of Jesus, transcending and triumphant. And God is, as Spirit, right here, right now, ruach, breathing life and yet also, the winds of change. Throw open the windows and doors and let in some air!
What can we believe about the Holy Spirit? The Spirit of God is upon us, within us, acting through us, the God that is Spirit at work to create a new you, no matter how old, how sick, how tired. The Spirit of God puts the best science fiction to shame, for its works are real in the lives of real people, and they are made new, and you can be too… and so can this community of believers, if you want it. Like the philosopher’s stone of ancient alchemy, Spirit is the source of eternal life, it changes lead into gold.
The Spirit of God could be described, not if I stacked sermons from here to eternity. The Spirit can only be experienced. It is our job to create a community that is filled with that Spirit, that uncontrollable Spirit, that brings that Spirit, felt, experienced, into real lives. You are not consumers of Christianity. You are the producers of Christianity. You create the environment and context where we can encounter Spirit, in itself and in one another.
We are a people of God, amazing creator who called the world into being, who invites us into fulness of life. We are a people who follow Jesus, God-with-us in the form of a human, broken and victorious. We are a people of Spirit, moved and challenged, shaken and stirred. If we are to embrace this God, this triune mystery, we must stop trying to be in charge, we must let go of our control, and learn to really trust God, not to just give God lip service. To really trust God, and not yourself, is to ride the cosmic holy chaos of Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is here, now. Breathe in, breathe deep. Ruach, life, miracle.