The Holy Spirit isn't usually fire

The back-story to Pentecost

As promised implicitly in No Sermons, here’s … er … a sermon. I delivered it for Pentecost IV at church today. It makes the point that we don’t have to expect spectacular things to move in concert with God. In fact, most of the time God’s pretty stealthy.

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Pentecost is a time of irruption. That’s irruption with an ‘I’. A disruptive, unexpected, almost violent intrusion into our reality by Divinity. Kaboom! What a day that must have been, when the wind and fire of the Holy Spirit arrived. The world still talks about it.

But there was a time before that remarkable day, when the world was just being readied for this irruption. Jesus was positioning us for it. He’d begun his ministry quietly, almost privately. He spoke in small groups. He worked his miracles and asked people to stay quiet about them. He spoke of restraint, of forgiveness, and of awareness of God and covenant. But gradually, by degrees, he also commissioned. He asked us to begin spreading the word about him. The Holy Spirit may have arrived in Acts with a crash and wallop … but the Holy Spirit was also there in the quiet ministry, already active.

We like the Pentecost version. We like to imagine that our lives as Christians in the world are powered by the Holy Spirit like a sort of turbocharger. And it’s a loud, fiery picture we get. And it’s true – that Fire has done remarkable things in the world. Look at those Apostles: they knew better, with the flames on their heads and the tongues speaking all languages, than to book a church hall on Wednesday nights and have Spirit Evenings for themselves. They knew – they couldn’t help but know – that now was the time to stream out into the world and DO things … to carry that flame. And boy, did they.

But let’s go back before that, to the quiet time. Let’s go to a time of subtler conviction and commission. The moment in today’s Gospel. It was the commissioning of the 70. The Holy Spirit was in that too.

This was a less dramatic moment than the big Pentecost one. But that, if you think about it, is actually how the Holy Spirit has usually been, for most of history. At the River Jordan he came as a dove. Before time, before any of us were here to know about him, he moved by himself across the waters of Creation, doing creative things. He’s been around always. And only on Pentecost did he ever go Kaboom!

Most of our lives are like the lives those 70 knew, not the lucky Apostles who got flames and tongues. Most of us are called on to go kind of normally, into a world that’s kind of normal, most of the time. Most of us have to enter our own private spirituality in a pretty normal, not dramatic or startling way. Our lives are more like the lives of the 70 than the people who experienced Pentecost. And that means, if we read today’s little Gospel passage closely, about the commissioning of the 70, we get a kind of mission manual, that we can use – yes, in the company of the Holy Spirit … just quietly.

It's a template, for our own mission, as regular Joes and regular Jills, as individuals and as groups of faithful people. And it’s a very detailed template. It’s kind of procedural. Broken down into bullet-points, it’s very practical. So much so, that it’s startling in its understated way: Today’s remarkable reading tells us that when the Holy Spirit moves through us, it’s generally in a very quiet way. It’s gentle, and we’re expected to be gentle. It tells us that our action in the Spirit out in the world is mandatory, too. We have to do it. And it tells us that for this mission we will be well prepared, even if we don’t feel prepared when we start. It also tells us that we are led to it – that we don’t need to decide what we’re supposed to do next. And it tells us – and this is something we overlook, or don’t believe – that we are authorised to be part of this astonishing partnership.

It's a quiet irruption.

Let’s look at that Gospel passage a minute, and keep track of the salient guidance, to see that this is true:

The Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, `Peace to this house!' And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, `The kingdom of God has come near to you.' But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, `Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.'

"Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me." [And do you remember him saying elsewhere, ‘The Spirit will take from what is mine, and will disclose it to you’?]

The seventy returned with joy, saying, "Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!" He said to them, "I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven."

We’re supposed to walk in the Spirit, in other words. This one passage, which is echoed in other readings from today, tells us that explicitly, and it details, it seems to me, about 6 things: (i) that we are supposed to go into the world and do things, (ii) that we’re supposed to go as we are, right now, (iii) that we’ll not go alone, (iv) that some will accept the Spirit and others will not, (v) that people’s acceptance of the Spirit isn’t our responsibility, and (vi) that we are authorised to come to them this way.

To say it differently … our walk with the Holy Spirit into people’s lives, which is ours to do, is quiet and gentle; and we needn’t necessarily know what it is in people’s lives that we’re there to address – we are led there, more or less blindly; we probably will know a lot about the situation once we’re there, because in the Spirit there is discernment; and we can assume that the tools and the means we need to do our part will be given to us when we need them (and if they don’t seem to come, then the Spirit isn’t choosing to tell us why we’re there, or what he's doing at that moment … but he’s doing something). And again, we are authorised to be there. We’re deputised. We’ve got tin stars and warrants. We can boss around the very demons.

And demons there will be, behind the scenes. We go into the world in the shadow of the prince of this world (for now), the father of lies, the adversary, the murderer from the beginning … Jesus is explicit in this passage about this … we’re authorised in the company of the Holy Spirit to sabotage the work of him whom Jesus remembered falling from heaven. That’s what we’re up against. That’s the actual job description.

We’re sabotaging the work of spirits.

What does ‘sabotage’ mean? What are we authorised and empowered to do, exactly?

· We can speak truth to lies, for one thing.

· We can refuse to obey worldly exhortations to malice, for another.

· And we can invoke the very name of him who sent us, for yet another.

And what will the worldly situations look like when we arrive? What are we parachuting into? It can look like anything. It’ll be places where there are are insurmountable amounts of things like …

· Grief

· Despair

· Distortion

· Cruelty

· Ignorance (that is, ignorance of our true state as created beings)

I suppose in some Hollywood way there can be unmasked evil, which you do hear about … outright paranormal harrassment. But that’s pretty rare. And it’s easy to counter. It’s actually pretty pathetic when the forces of darkness show their hand like that. They did this to Jesus, because to him they couldn’t lie, or conceal themselves in situations of cruelty or distortion.

But most of the time, almost always, in fact, what we’ll be led to is awful situations that appear human-created. Which, largely, they are. If the devil that Jesus speaks about is doing his job right, most people in crisis won’t even be aware of his presence. They might even deny his very existence.

Well, we know better. We know what we’re facing. And there’s where our authority comes in. We’re more like the 70 than the people who experienced the one and only Pentecost moment. We’re quiet, but we see things, and we speak things, in the company of the Holy Spirit. And we act, if we’re rightly following, in the power of the Holy Spirit. That’s our job, and we’re prepared for it, even if we don’t speak in tongues or have flames on our heads.

I like to think of the commissioning of the 70 as the back-story to Pentecost. Its lesson is that wherever the Spirit chooses to go, it’s our honor to go too, and to help.