No, the Holy Spirit is not our deputy
Let's not get God and Us backwards
Holy Spirit? Whazzat?
People who go to church, and you’re not a bad person if this isn’t you, got a big bolus of readings today, it being the second week in Pentecost and also Trinity Sunday, about the Holy Spirit. Pentecost is the day this Holy Spirit came to the disciples, as Jesus said He* would. The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, comprised of God the Father, God the Son, and God in this eponymous spirit form. This is the 3-in-1 God formula you hear Christians talking about. Sometimes it’s called the ‘Godhead’. The running theme of these readings was about interacting with God directly, but in a strange, new way, and about what you do when you haven’t the foggiest idea how to do this, or even know what ‘interacting’ with God is supposed to mean.
Poor Job, who came long before the original Pentecost, had in his famously miserable travails, a way of apprehending God that was to him new and strange. (You can read about it in the Old Testament Book of Job.) To God he wails, ‘I’m sorry I’ve been complaining and querying, but I’ve only been asking [you] about things I didn’t understand! I’d heard of you, but now I see you … and so I’m going to keep trying to understand, I guess, in this new way.’
John the Baptist, so called because he purified Jesus early in His ministry by water, in the manner of contemporary Jews, was lucky enough to see a dove descending on Jesus’ head. That’s how he knew the Spirit had come, and that he had the right guy. He says, ‘I didn’t know who the Lamb of God was until I was shown!’ And like Job, he says, ‘Now I’ve seen.’
Who on earth is this Holy Spirit? What’s He supposed to do?
We know He has things to teach. This is why the medievals spoke of the necessity of reading scripture in the mystical company of this wispy, ill-defined form of Godhood to understand the meaning of the words. This is also why Baptists evaluate the quality of a church service by saying it is, or isn’t, ‘Spirit-filled’. Paul tells us it’s a good thing when the Spirit arrives, and that ‘communion with each other’ in Him brings peace. The difficulty for us Christians is in knowing when He’s here and figuring out what He’s doing.
Most of us don’t get to see doves on anyone’s head. When He came to the disciples, there was fire, and wind, and a lot of people acting as though they were drunk. That’s unusual for the Spirit. That particular moment was so dramatic, and so out of character for Him, that we still talk about the event and have a whole Trinity Sunday to commemorate it. Most of the time, to judge by what’s on record in the Bible, the Spirit works quietly.
But what is this Spirit like, and how do you interact with Him? What’s He supposed to teach? And how do you even know He’s there? Scripture doesn’t tell us much. So let’s look at it.
Well-meaning Christians can get it wrong
There are subcultures in the Christian commonweal that make much of the Holy Spirit, and behave as though they know everything about Him. They declare that they can tell when He’s upon us, and that in those situations they know right away what He wants. They say things like, ‘Come, Holy Spirit’; they start conversations with you by telling you the Spirit moved them to address you; they have Words of Prophecy for you; sometimes they ascertain the depth of the Spirit’s presence in your heart, either by feeling it in their hearts or by observing that you do, or don’t do, particular things. They might not be satisfied of your sanctity until you speak in tongues. (That’s another ill-defined concept by itself. It’s for another sermon.)
I have no doubt that there is a place for discernment, for knowing things and being guided, and that discernment does indeed come through the Holy Spirit. There is scriptural warrant for this.
But I want to make some observations – two, really – about the general notion of apprehending God the Holy Spirit, and the notion of understanding things by Him. Because I think we tend to feel like we own the Spirit, and understand Him, more than we do. We feel we can summon Him, if we’re nice about it, and that the righteous always know when He arrives.
This is actually the reverse of what we know about God.
Point 1: No, we do not have a vending machine in the Holy Spirit
My job when I was younger was to go through life doing things, and ask for guidance and assistance along the way. Naturally, the Holy Spirit was my perfect assistant. Confused? Beleaguered? Get on the radio and call for intelligence and air strikes.
I was wrong.
‘The wind blows wherever it pleases’, goes the famous passage about this. ‘You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.’
This is the passage that means that you can’t, and shouldn’t, second-guess God (a good thing, because that God would be frighteningly small).
Now match this with what you know of your own experience.
In the times of your life when you really do perceive that God acted, and did come, you’ll notice, by my count, 4 things that are true about that moment. This, by the way, obtains not just with God, but with other supernatural irruptions into our experience – the dark kind. They kinda work like this too. I don’t pretend to know exactly what happens outside time and space, in that spiritual warfare that we’re told is going on around us. But when something truly supernatural does intervene in our personal histories, there are always these 4, very telling, features, and this is absolutely true of the Holy Spirit:
Number one, we won’t have been able to summon it ourselves. It won’t arrive just because we prayed or lit candles. It will happen in its own time, presumably for its own reasons. And it will arrive, most typically, when we least expect it.
Number two, it will not be what we wanted. In fact, it will most often be something we hadn’t considered, probably from an entire quarter we’d not even known about.
Number three, it will change something foundational. It will disrupt, even if it smooths eventually and comforts (language of ‘Paraclete’, which you can look up, isn’t used for no reason). What happens, situationally and within you, will probably be uncomfortable at first, because it’s strange.
And number four, we won’t understand what the Spirit’s intervention did, or maybe even know that it happened at all, until later. We’ll need to unpack it. Only retrospectively, possibly much, much later, will we be saying, ‘Y’know, I think that was God speaking!’
These seem to be the pattern. And this is consistent with scripture. Most of the time we have no idea that God is acting when He’s acting. I have a metaphor for this. I imagine us now, still in the early Church, being prepped for our births into our real lives. We’re neonates, if not still embryos. And like children who are just being started, not only do we not understand very well when God speaks, we often don’t even know we’re being addressed. We understand next to nothing. And we squall about it, like babies.
When our heavenly parentage does things, therefore, it’ll take us by surprise, it won’t necessarily come just because we’re squalling, something will change because of it, and we’ll grow by getting used to it over time. We’re on the planet to learn, after all, and what is learning but internalising new things.
We don’t own the Holy Spirit, any more than we own our parents. He owns us.
Point 2: No, we don’t persuade the Holy Spirit to come to us
Every time we say, ‘Come, Holy Spirit’, we imply that we think He isn’t here already. I think we imagine, without noticing it, that when we’re bad, or mad, which is like being bad, He goes away somewhere and will only return when we’re behaving again.
It’s not a bad thing to say ‘Come, Holy Spirit’. But it’s more appropriate to mean this phrase as a welcome than a petition.
We don’t have to set up a pleasant sort of ambience, so that He’ll deign to return.
The reality is that God is here now, and never went away. How do we know? Because Jesus said so, in so many words. Let’s recite them:
The. Kingdom. Of. God. Is. At. Hand.
My pal Larry asked me at brunch once, ‘So, do you believe in an afterlife?’ I said, I believe in Life. Is there some continuity between this present dispensation and whatever comes later? Sure. I don’t know what all that is going to mean. But God is Life, and we’re in it – in Him – now. The Kingdom, to say it again, is here.
To say it differently, God is present. All of God. All the time. After that Thursday afternoon in Jerusalem, where there was fire and wind and tongues, and all that, the Holy Spirit didn’t regard his job as done and go off to an appointment. I tend to think He was always with us. We just didn’t know this until we saw it. We do kinda need to see things, like poor Job, and John the Baptist.
We’re the babies in this house, to keep pushing the metaphor. Good parents are always in the house too. They don’t leave their babies unattended just because they’re being impossible sometimes. Good parents don’t cease to function, either, just because their children shriek, or cry, or talk about running away from home. Mom and Dad are still there. And they’re doing things the whole time. And we don’t need to know, and probably wouldn’t even understand, exactly what they’re doing all the time, or why.
These two points, it seems to me, are worth remembering, when we consider the work (whatever that is) of the Holy Spirit (whoever that is).
The punchline, then
Good for Job, good for John … good for the prophets, good for the saints … they’re given things to see that we don’t see. They probably do know more about the Spirit than we do. But for us, let’s just let God be God, and be happy with the truth that God is already, and forever, here, and this being true, things are okay even when they’re not, and also, even if we don’t know it, or don’t feel it, we are okay in the Spirit.
*Yes, I know. Ruach (רוּחַ) is grammatically feminine.