Greater Works than These

Dorothy Sayers, the mystery writer, scholar, and Christian apologist tells the story of a Japanese man. He is politely listening to a Christian who is trying to explain of the concept of the Trinity. The Japanese man is puzzled: "Honorable Father, very good. Honorable Son, very good. Honorable Bird I do not understand at all." He was referring, of course, to the descent of the Holy Spirit on Jesus at his baptism, where the Spirit was compared to a dove. Well, if the truth be told, most of us don’t understand the Honorable Bird any more than the Japanese man did, even though every year at Pentecost we celebrate God’s gift of the Holy Spirit to us, and even though every year we too try to wrap our minds around the doctrine of the Trinity, as we’ll do again next Sunday.

And truth be told again, getting a clear idea of the identity and work of the Holy Spirit isn’t easy either, partly because our Scripture readings give us different ways of thinking about the Spirit. In our reading from Acts, we can discern that the Holy Spirit is that aspect of God that powerfully fills a community of believers. Here we have 120 or so disciples, who have come together in Jerusalem. They are there ostensibly to celebrate the Jewish harvest festival of Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost in Greek, which occurs fifty days after Passover. This is also the festival that commemorates the giving of the law at Sinai, the gift of God that made the Jews into a distinctive community. However, these disciples are also in Jerusalem in response to Jesus’ command that they wait there for the promised Holy Spirit to empower them. In our account in Acts, the coming of the Spirit is a very public event. Jews of every ethnicity can feel the “Holy Gust” and see the tongues of flame and know that God is powerfully present in their midst.

In our reading from Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians, we have a different way of understanding the Holy Spirit. Here, the Spirit is God working in us, in the “cellar of our hearts,” to draw us closer to Godself. What’s more important, the Holy Spirit dwells within us to remind us and reassure us that we are God’s beloved children, that we are part of a new and distinctive family, greater and more important to our lives than our blood family, and that all the members of that new family are our siblings.

The Gospel according to John gives us yet another vivid picture of the Holy Spirit, although it is a different picture from the one in Acts. In John, the Holy Spirit also comes to empower a community of believers, but not with a “holy gust” or tongues of flame. Go back in your mind to what the disciples were doing on Easter evening in John’s account. They were huddled together in fear in a locked upper room, when suddenly they discovered Jesus standing among them. He had come to reinvigorate them and to fulfill the promise that he had made to them at his last meal with them, the promise that we heard in today’s reading. He had promised to give them another Advocate. Who is this Advocate? The Greek word is parakletos, translated also as comforter or helper, literally the “guide by your side.” In John’s Gospel, when Jesus came back to actually give the disciples this guide, he didn’t shake the upper room with great gusts of wind. Nor did he shoot flames of fire at the disciples. No, he did something very simple. He breathed on them, saying “Receive the Holy Spirit.” He filled them with his very own life breath. Think about that for a moment. What would that feel like to have Jesus’ very own life breath filling your lungs?

So we have different ways of picturing the Holy Spirit. We can think of it as “holy gust,” shaking everything up, we can think of it as that which draws us closer to God and other Christians, and we can think of it as life breath, filling us inwardly with something new, something from Jesus himself. Different as they may seem, these ways of picturing the Holy Spirit have something in common. In all cases, the Holy Spirit comes to us a for a purpose. We are not given the gift of the Holy Spirit so that we might have personal ecstatic experiences, as wonderful as they might be. There’s nothing new about that – the Greeks knew all about ecstatic experience. Nor are we given the gift of the Holy Spirit so that we might speak in unintelligible languages, even though many of our Pentecostal brothers and sisters equate baptism in the Holy Spirit with “speaking in tongues.” No, the gift of the Holy Spirit, which God gives us in our first and only baptism, is always given to individuals and communities for the purpose of advancing the mission of the church. Through the Holy Spirit we are empowered by God in order to extend God’s reign in the world. In the account in Acts, the holy gust and fire enable the disciples to communicate clearly with a wide variety of people, with “devout Jews from every nation under heaven,” to communicate clearly that in Jesus God had fulfilled God’s promises to humanity. And note that, although Peter was empowered to become the spokesperson for the disciples, all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and empowered to speak. So too are we empowered by the Holy Spirit to proclaim the good news. So too does the Holy Spirit give us the words and language we need to enable others to understand what God has done for us through Jesus.

In John’s account, Jesus promises the Holy Spirit to the disciples so that they will be empowered to do Jesus’ works and, what is more important, so that they may do “greater works than these.” So too for us. With the promised guide by our side, with Jesus’ breath of life within us, we too will be enabled to do what Jesus did: to serve the poor, to heal the sick, to feed the hungry, to reconcile those in conflict, and to forgive those who hurt us. And not only what Jesus did. But “greater works than these.” What might those be, I wonder? With the promised guide by our side, with Jesus’ breath within us, we too may also be led into an ever deepening relationship with God. By God’s grace, we may eventually be like Jesus, and everything we do will be God working through us, God incarnate in us. When we pray for the Holy Spirit to be at work in the Church and in our lives, this is what we seek: that God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, may work through us to accomplish God’s will in the world.

Is the Holy Spirit at work in our parish? I pray so. Perhaps the Spirit will come among us as “holy gust,” blowing away the cobwebs of the way we’ve always done things, leading us into new ways of doing and being, of worshipping and doing mission. Perhaps the “holy gust” will empower all of us to speak of our faith to others, to lead others to see themselves as God’s adopted, beloved children.

Is the Holy Spirit working in your life and mine? I pray so. Perhaps you’ve had an experience of the Spirit as “holy gust.” Some of us have. Experiences where all we thought we knew and were are swept away. Suddenly we see ourselves completely differently. Suddenly we know that God has new and different plans for us, and that God is empowering us for a new work. Most likely, though, your experience of the Spirit’s empowerment has been gentler, more gradual, perhaps something more like Jesus gently breathing on and in you. Perhaps your experience of the Spirit’s empowerment has been more like that “still, small voice” gently encouraging and strengthening you for God’s work in the world. Perhaps your experience of the Spirit, perhaps in prayer, has been like that of 13th century mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg, who knew herself through the Spirit to be “One in body and soul,/ Though outwardly separate in form” from God.

In my former life I was a scholar of the literature of India. I was also a flutist. When I think of the Holy Spirit working through me, I resonate especially with John’s image of Jesus breathing on and in me. I also resonate with a poem by the early 20th century Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore. This poem comes from his collection Gitanjali, “song offering,” published in 1913. As you hear it, think of the Spirit blowing through you, making the most beautiful music possible filling you, and enabling you to do the “greater works than these,” that God desires.

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.