Why are you here? What blew you in through the red doors? Are you here because coming to church is what one does on Sunday? Are you here because you think that God expects you to come, and you want to please and serve God? Do you seek weekly nourishment in the Eucharist? Do you hope that, if you take in Christ’s Body and Blood, you will become more like him? Do you seek strength for the journey, the sustenance you need to keep going in life? Or are you perhaps hoping to satisfy some deeply-felt need for authentic community?
My friends, you are not here for any of these reasons. You are here because the Holy Spirit brought you here. You may even be here against your will. Certainly you have every good reason not to be here. No one will look down on you for not being here, and no one will pat you on the back for rousing yourself and actually getting here. You are here, because the Holy Spirit blew you in through the red doors – for a reason.
Jesus has left us. We obeyed Jesus’ command. We prayed together, and we waited for him to make good on his promises. And then it happened! We crossed over the threshold, and discovered that God’s Spirit is now rampant in the world. But the Holy Spirit is wily and changeable, and she has many ways of making herself known.
Some of us resonate with the violent, life-changing experiences of the disciples in the Book of Acts. We know that in Scripture a powerful wind is often a signal for God’s presence. Remember the opening of the creation story in Genesis. “The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” Remember how Jesus tried to describe the Spirit to Nicodemus. “The wind blows where it chooses,” he said, “and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” For some of us, the Holy Spirit does feel like a great rushing wind, coming into our lives, carrying us along, even pushing us in unexpected directions.
Others of us resonate with the disciples’ experience of being on fire. Fire, too, in Scripture is a signal for God’s presence. Remember the Pillar of Fire that followed the Israelites in their journey through the Sinai. When the prophet Jeremiah felt so compelled to speak God’s word that he could no longer keep silent, he said that God’s urging felt “like fire in the bones.” And when John Wesley felt himself come alive again spiritually at the Aldersgate meeting, he said his heart “felt strangely warmed.”
To others of us, the Holy Spirit comes as a gentle breath, a quickening and an enlivening, a sense of being invisibly, yet inexorably, transformed. Although Elijah had expected God to come in thunder and fire, God spoke to Elijah in a whisper. After Jesus’ resurrection, the disciples in John’s Gospel felt Jesus breathe the Holy Spirit into them. “Breathe on me, breath of God,” says one of our hymns. Gentle, easy, yet life-giving and utterly life-changing.
Yet others of us feel the Spirit’s presence in a rush of deep emotion. Ricardo Avila lay prostrate on the floor of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, waiting to be ordained a priest. As the congregation began to chant the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, the traditional invocation of the Holy Spirit at ordinations, he felt tears gush from his eyes, and then he began to sob.1 Others of us experience that emotion as deep joy, joy that makes us so giddy that those around us may be sure that we are drunk – and we are, with the “new wine” that old wineskins cannot contain.
For yet others, the Holy Spirit comes in extraordinary, inexplicable experiences. The fractious members of the Christian community at Corinth suddenly had the ability to speak ecstatically in another language. St. Francis of Assisi heard the crucifix in a country church calling to him. A woman knelt at the altar rail of a strange church and suddenly knew that she was home. Back in his pew after taking Christ into his body, a man knew that God’s Spirit was lodged deep in his own heart. A student sang in a church choir, and all his resistance to the workings of the Holy Spirit melted away.
However the Spirit brought you here, as a strong but invisible force, as a gentle tug on the sleeve, or through a moment in your life you still can’t explain, you are here because the Spirit has brought you here. We are all here because the Spirit has brought us here. As Paul told the Corinthians who thought their ability to speak in tongues made them special, “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Spirit.” We are all here, because the Spirit needs us to be here. Paul reminded the Corinthian Christians that the Spirit had brought them together, because the community needed the abilities, talents, and gifts of many different people. All their various gifts had come from the same Spirit, and all were needed and important. Whatever the gifts were, whether they were teaching, administration, preaching, devotion, healing, or working miracles, all these gifts had been given to the community by the Spirit, distributed by the Spirit as the Spirit saw fit. Most important, the Spirit had given these gifts to the Corinthian Christians for a reason: “for the common good,” i.e. to build up the church in that place.
As with the Christian community at Corinth, the Spirit has given the church of our day diverse gifts and talents, all of which the Spirit needs the church to exercise. From a lofty perspective, you might even say that the Spirit has given diverse gifts to the churches. Perhaps the Spirit has intentionally scattered her gifts around. Perhaps every denomination, maybe even every faith community, has diverse God-given gifts and talents, and no denomination or community has all the gifts needed to bring God’s reign nearer. I love the Episcopal Church. I have spent almost all my adult life drinking from its deep well. Even so, I know that we can partner with and learn from Lutherans and Roman Catholics, even Baptists and Pentecostals. In the same way, I believe that the Spirit has scattered her gifts around the various parishes in our diocese. All of our parishes have God-given gifts, but perhaps none of them has all the gifts that are needed to bring the reign of God nearer. And the Spirit has certainly scattered her gifts here at St. Peter’s. All of us have different God-given gifts that this parish needs, and none of us, whatever our age, station, or life situation, is without gifts. The Spirit brought us here, the Spirit has distributed gifts and talents among us, and the Spirit calls on us to use our gifts.
My friends, there is both a mystery and a paradox here. The mystery is this: we don’t know the Holy Spirit works. We acknowledge the Spirit as the third person of the Trinity, with God the Creator and God the Redeemer. We reaffirm our faith in the existence of the Spirit every time we say the Nicene Creed: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life ….” But we don’t know how the Spirit enables us to let go of old, destructive ways of life, helping us forgive and be forgiven, helping us to put on new ways of living. We don’t know how the Spirit transforms our lives and enables us to do more and more of what Jesus did. We don’t know how we allow the Spirit to grab our hand and take us down a path of ministry we had never before contemplated. We only know that, something has changed, that we have experienced transforming grace, and that we have discovered gifts within ourselves that we never knew we possessed.
And here is the paradox. The Spirit has not given us these gifts for our own spiritual self-aggrandizement, nor so that we may feel at peace within ourselves, nor even as strength for the journey. As one writer has observed, the truth is that the Spirit has given us gifts and talents that create problems for us. In fact, the Spirit may make us profoundly uncomfortable. After the disciples were blown over by the Spirit, they could not go back to their old lives. In the very last chapter of John’s Gospel, Peter, James, and John tried to return to fishing. Jesus caught up with them, and told Peter to “Feed my sheep.” Celtic Christians still use the image of the wild goose as a symbol for the unfettered Spirit. They know that the Spirit, like a noisy and bothersome wild goose, often shakes us out of our complacency and leads us in new directions.
We too are living in this paradox. Having been blown here by the Spirit, perhaps having been blown over by the Spirit, we know there is no going back to what our lives were before, no going back to a life focused solely on ourselves and our own narrow needs. The Spirit calls each of to use our gifts to reach out to people of every language, ethnicity, and social station. The Spirit calls all of us, young and old, women and men, to prophesy. The Spirit calls all of us to use our gifts to bring the reign of God nearer, to partner with God in God’s work, wherever we discern it. The Spirit calls all of us to ask, “Who needs us?” and “How can this parish use its diverse gifts and talents to share God’s love in this community?”
We are here, because the Spirit has brought us here. Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove: descend on us, reveal your love. Word of God and inward light, wake our spirits; clear our sight. Surround us now with all your glory; speak through us that sacred story. Take our lips and make them bold. Take hearts and minds and make them whole. Stir in us that sacred flame, then send us forth to spread your name. Amen.
1. Pentecostal Praise,” Journey with Jesus, http://www.journeywithjesus.net/index.shtml , June 8, 2014.
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