Psalm 33, Ezekiel 11:14-21, 1 Corinthians 12:4-13, John 14:8-23
Hearing the still, small voice
Today we note two birthdays, both of them mentioned in the bulletin. One birthday belongs to Emile M---, who is Donna Y---’s father. The other birthday isn’t mentioned with that term – birthday – but it is a birthday nevertheless and has often been referred to with that label. It is the birthday of the Church, when on the day of Pentecost – as Jesus had promised – the Holy Spirit descended from heaven and indwelt the disciples gathered in Jerusalem. And, from that moment, the preaching of the good news began in earnest, and, as St. Luke put it in the book of Acts, “the Lord added to the Church those who were to be saved.”
There is something profoundly fitting that the member of the Holy Trinity who is responsible for the generation of the body of our Lord in the womb of the Virgin Mary is also the one who generates the body of our Lord in the world, that body known as the Church. It is also typical of the Holy Spirit – that our knowledge of Him is almost exclusively tied to a knowledge of the things which he does. In the creed, he is the giver of life, he speaks through the Prophets, he is the one who baptizes us into Christ, thus forming and expanding the One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, he effects forgiveness of our sins, and as He was instrumental in raising Jesus Christ from the dead, so he will also one day call each of us from the grave into everlasting life in a body like our Lord’s.
It is no wonder, then, that the Holy Spirit Himself has posed something of a puzzle for Christians down through the ages. This week, I happened upon a testimony about life with the Holy Spirit written by Frederica Mathews-Greene for Beliefnet, an web site for Christians [“From Clapping Hands to Still Small Voice” Her testimony crystallizes this Holy puzzle quite nicely. Let me quote, first of all, from her earliest understandings of the Holy Spirit: [http://www.beliefnet.com/story/166/story_16665_1.html].
“When I was a kid, I had no clear idea of what the Holy Ghost was for. He seemed boring and dowdy, a leftover appendage to the Trinity. Maybe it was because the Holy Ghost was described as the Love between the Father and Son. Love is great, but it isn’t a Person. The Father and Son came first, united and powerful, and then the Holy Ghost dawdled after, “proceeding” (whatever that means) from both, as if he were an afterthought. Pretty ghostly. I went to my Catholic Confirmation at the age of 12 prepared to receive this vague presence, feeling tensely expectant and – nothing happened. Bummer.”
This pretty well sums up MY earliest Christian remembrances of the Holy Spirit. Except my cradle faith was Southern Baptist, not Roman Catholic. So I even lost out on that “tensely expectant feeling prior to confirmation.” For me, the Holy Ghost was more ghostly than the ghosts in the ghost stories my friends and I would tell each other around a camp fire at night.
What came next for Frederica? Well, for her and her husband, it was involvement in the charismatic movement. I remember that too, at least the distant appeal of it. My college peers were pretty well divided between those who got caught up in all the excitement of 1970’s charismatic enthusiasm and those who weren’t having any of that. Frederica and her husband took a heaping double-handful of it. Here’s how she describes it:
“I wish I could summarize the next decade or so in a couple of words, but it was too full of upheaval. … We saw healings and miracles; we experienced many “words” from the Lord. By now, I was the one strumming guitar, and as we finished seminary and began to serve in Episcopal parishes we always kept a midweek Prayer and Praise service going. It was terrific.”
And, I believe her – that it was, from her point of view, terrific. I never questioned this particular judgment of those I knew who were caught up in the charismatic enthusiasms of the 1970s. What I did question is the thing which Frederica herself began to question. Here’s how she puts it:
“It was terrific. For a while, anyway. Then it began to get tedious. We felt like it was a chore to crank everyone up to a fever pitch of spiritual excitement every week. As the person leading the music, I was uncomfortably aware that much of what people were feeling was guided by my prodding. I wanted the music to serve and underscore religious experience, but there was a thin line between that and manipulating it.”
This is what always kept me from the charismatic movement of the Seventies: It wasn’t the flamboyance. The events of the first Pentecost recorded in the Book of Acts were certainly flamboyant. No, it wasn’t the flamboyance that was off-putting: it was the unmistakable sense that the flamboyance was coming from something other than the Holy Spirit. Or, to put it more accurately, it was easy to see that the flamboyance, the excitement, the giddiness – none of it needed any Holy Spirit to generate it. The leaders of the rallies, the musicians, the stage crew, if you will – they did that job quite nicely, thank you very much.
Frederica describes the end of her sojourn among Christian enthusiasts this way:
“ … eventually it just became a grind. We came home on Tuesday nights frustrated and irritated. The whole thing seemed like a superficial, happy-face charade. As far as our own spiritual growth went, we seemed to be going in circles, but as leaders we felt constrained to maintain a forced cheerfulness about everything. The gap between façade and reality widened, and we were miserable.”
And, so Frederica and her husband set out on yet another journey which took them, eventually, to Eastern Orthodoxy. I greatly sympathize with their journey, and for the purposes of that journey, they ended up in a place where Christian belief and Christian life, as far as the Holy Spirit is concerned, is normal. But, as my wife once remarked, it should not be necessary for 21st Century Christians in North America to travel another continent away and another millennium back in time to find what Frederica found. If one will have it, it is present in Western Christianity, here on this continent, in the little-c catholic Christianity of the Reformation. I’ll have something more to say about that in a moment.
However, I would like first of all to point to something Jesus was telling his disciples in the gospel appointed for today, for in those words he tells the disciples that after he departs for heaven, he will ask the Father, and the Father will send the Holy Spirit.
Jesus says the Holy Spirit will another helper. Teachers have always noted that “another” here means “another of the same kind.” The Father has sent Jesus, and when Jesus returns to heaven, the Father will send another Comforter, not a different Comforter. The one the Father will send will be a comforter like Jesus.
Teachers have also pointed out the range of meaning of that word translated “comforter” in our translations. It has the sense of one who comforts, or a friend, or an advocate, or helper, or intercessor. Of course, in the later writings of the Apostles, we can find all these features of the Holy Spirit’s ministry to the Church and to individual members of it.
Jesus makes plain that the Holy Spirit will be with them and within them. Christian teaching from the beginning – here with the words of Christ, and onward through the Apostles and Fathers of the Church – understand this to mean that the Holy Spirit’s ministry to us is in our hearts, in our inner, unobserved, interior consciousness.
Jesus calls him the Spirit of truth, linking his ministry to our capacity to know and to understand what the world cannot know or understand. Paul tells us, many years later, something very much of the same sort: “These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. 14But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” [1 Cor. 2:13-15]. [[9:15]]
But, the most important thing Jesus tells his disciples in the gospel is that their obedience to what the Holy Spirit teaches them is THE thing that leads to their receiving the greatest blessing of all – communion with Jesus and with the Father. “"If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.”
I have often wondered if I could ever keep Jesus’ commandments well enough so that this blessing would come to me. I still wonder that! And, I used to wonder what it would be like if this promise were fulfilled in my life. Certainly, Jesus isn’t talking about God the Father and God the Son taking one of the bedrooms in our house for their own use.
The best I can figure out is an example of what happened when God actually – in a very literal and concrete sense – made his home with someone like you or me. It happened when David was bringing the ark up to Jerusalem, as recorded in 1 Samuel chapter 6. Along the way, a man named Uzzah did something impious with the Ark and God struck him dead for it. Here’s what we read next in that chapter:
9David was afraid of the LORD that day; and he said, "How can the ark of the LORD come to me?" 10So David would not move the ark of the LORD with him into the City of David; but David took it aside into the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite. 11The ark of the LORD remained in the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite three months. And the LORD blessed Obed-Edom and all his household. 12Now it was told King David, saying, "The LORD has blessed the house of Obed-Edom and all that belongs to him, because of the ark of God."
When the Father and the Son come and make their home with the one who loves Jesus and for the love of Jesus keeps his commandments – whatever that is talking about, surely it cannot be less than what happened with Obed-Edom when the presence of God dwelt in his house for three months. The Lord blessed Obed-Edom and all his house. And, so if you see a Christian greatly blessed, and all his house greatly blessed, mark him or her as one with whom God the Father and God the Son have made their home.
Finally, Let us be clear that receiving the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives depends on our exposure to the Word of Christ – or to make the point as concrete as possible – the WORDS of Christ, that is the words of the Bible. It is finally the WORDS of God the father, from Genesis to Revelation, mediated to us by the Holy Spirit which effect the promises Jesus made to us, promises to be fulfilled by that Spirit’s ministry in our lives. And obedience to those words is the next thing for which we must strive. Frederica Mathews-Greene and many many like her (at that time in her life) were seeking for something good, but they supposed it was to be found in something where it is not to be found – in the flashy, the flamboyant, in the spectacular, in the overtly supernatural and miraculous. At various times – and they are very few – the work of the Holy Spirit may be characterized in this way. But, ordinarily? No.
It has always been as the Prophet Elijah learned – the Lord is in the still small voice. What is needed for us is not to find some spectacular experience, but rather to practice hearing that still small voice.
How do you suppose we can do that best? I suggest that one way – a very useful, ordinary, and routine way – is by what we are doing here right now. We are gathered together for the express purpose of worshipping God the Father, through his Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit. We hear, read, and sing the words of the Father from the Bible. We hear that word preached. We respond to those words in the confession of our sins, the confession of our faith, the offering of our gifts, the singing of our praises, by submitting our prayers and thanksgivings to the one whose Words envelope everything we do here. If ever there were a dependable way to practice hearing and responding rightly to that still small voice, it is here in this sanctuary as we worship. This is not the only way, but I submit to you that it is an ordinary and dependable way for us to practice the acceptance of the Spirit’s ministry, the ministry which Jesus said he was to have in our lives.
God grant that we may become more sensitive hearers of God’s words, and that we may grow in our love of Christ, which manifests itself in obeying the words we have heard. And, through this, may God the Father and God the Son find in us a home in which he is pleased to dwell.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
