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Communion Meditation aon ' John M. Buchanan
Av PRIVATE AND PUBLIC .FATTH Broad Street Presbyterian Church
Aets 2:1-13 Columbus, Ohio

May 25, 1980

Whenever the subject of the Holy Spirit or the Trinity came up the late Cardinal
Cushing used to tell a story about the idea of the Trinity which is one of my favorites.
Walking down the street one day, the man immediately in front of the Cardinal, fell to
the sidewalk, stricken with a heart attack. The good Cardinal fell to his knees beside
the man and said - "My son, are you a Catholic? Do you believe in God the Father, God
the Son and God the Holy Spirit?" The man, according to Cushing - opened one eye - and
to the crowd which had gathered said, "Here I am dying and he's asking me riddles."

The trouble is that Christianity has more to say about God than it is easy to
say simply. And sometimes, the more we talk, the more vague we become until everyone
stops listening.

About God, we wish to say that..,

L. He is Creator - of everything that exists, that He is timeless, that
He is more than we can understand, that all of human history is
played out within His attention and providence,

2, ..and we wish to say that He was present in a very particular way in
the life of Jesus who lived nearly two thousand years ago: that He
revealed himself in that life,

3. ..and we wish to say that He is also here - now - in our time, and
our world - not in a particular life, but a presence. Leslie
Newbegin uses the phrase "The Power at work among us..."

What we mean is that God is experienced on occasion, in healing, reconciling, joy,
peace and love: that when these things happen in lives we know it is God at work
among us. Historically all of that has been held together in the doctrine of the
Trinity. But there are problems. In fact, the idea of the Trinity seems sometimes to
create as many problems for twentieth century people as it apparently resolved for
the early Ghristians. We do well, it seems, so long as faith can remain private. But
when it becomes public, whenever we have to discuss it, document it, point to it, or
in any way bring it out in the open we begin to fumble, and stumble, and mutter something
about Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The late Episcopal Bishop James Pike thought the doctrine of the Trinity was no
longer helpful and should be abandoned. Many would agree. I wish there were new ways
to describe what we mean by God: ways which had some possibility of being heard and
understood by people no longer comfortable with the idea of a spirit, let alone
Holy Ghost,

And yet, the most influential theologian of our century, Karl Barth, said that
“the critical theme for modern theology will be the doctrine of the Holy Spirit". God's
relationship to His creation, Barth, suggested, would be critical. And why? The
reason, I think, is that the modern world, very simply, no longer provides daily
evidence that God is even around, In another age Robert Browning could write that
"God's in his heaven and all's right with the world”. And the inference is that you
know God's in his heaven precisely because all is right with the world. But all is not
right with our world. In fact, some would suggest that there is very little right. How
do you believe in God after all, "after Auschwitz"? How do you believe in God's
sovereignty or providence in the midst of an insane arms race, or a demonic inter-~
national dilemma, or the injustice which caused- Miami and results from it? How to

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believe in God in a world that seems, frankly, God forsaken? That's why Barth said
if was a critical matter, It always has been, but our world has made it even more
difficult.

In addition, it is no easy thing to talk intelligently about intense personal
experience. It is a different matter altogether to feel God's existence, His love and
His will, in my heart, and to be able to tell you about it in a way that means anything
at all to you. My leve for my family may be a consuming passion to me, After a
minute or so of describing it, however, you may find it rather boring, Only the poets
and musicians are much good at putting intense feeling into a medium that communicates,

Well, one day, a long time ago something happened to a group of people that was so
important itt had to be communicated. It had to do with God and themselves and the
relationship between them. It was intensely private - but also public. Tt had to be
told and celebrated because the experience was critical. In fact the more they thought
about that day the more convinced they were that they had played a small role in a
major drama, In fact, they had been part of a miracle,

There they were, hiding in a room in Jerusalem fifty or so days after the
crucifixion of their leader. Tt was Pentecost, and with nervous glances over their
shoulders they ventured out into the streets and mingled with the crowd of religious
pilgrims. And all of a sudden something happened. All of a sudden frightened
Galileans became strong and courageous advocates of the Gospel. Suddenly people who
had been cowering behind a locked door were willing to die for their convictions.
Suddenly people who didn't seem to understand what was happening to them became
articulate, persuasive, eloquent.

When they remembered the experience much later what seemed most miraculous to them
was the energy and vitality and the faith - the ability to believe which before had
eluded them but now was overwhelming, and the ability to communicate, And when they tald
this intense story to others they used symbol language, drawing on images their people
understood to be loaded with power and divine content - wind and fire - and as at that
Tower of Babel centuries before, when the inability to communicate had scattered them
across the earth, so now the ability to speak and be understood was drawing them
together.

it was the Holy Spirit, they said, and what they meant was a shorthand metaphor for
God; God here, God giving life and courage and power, God so real that unbelief was
out of the question. Reformed theologian James Smart wrote, in a classic on the subject,
"The Holy Spirit is God. That needs to be said plainly and grasped firmly, because the
failure to take it fully in earnest leads to many false conceptions..." (The Creed
in Christian Teaching, p.183).

The Holy Spirit is "God here't someone has said. And the theological problem has
always been that we seem to end up with three Gods. In fact, as soon as we talk about
the Holy Spirit - with a personal pronoun "he", we can't seem to resist stage managing
the experience itself and, for the life of me, some of my friends sound like they are
embracing a divine troika - three deities, separate, different in essence, instead of
@ Trinity, which has always meant no more or no less than one God whom we perceive in
three ways.

That's our problem, however, not the Bible's. The New Testament knows who the
Holy Spirit is. It is God doing some very visible things - in the world, among His
people. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." (II Corinthians 3:17).

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St. Paul once said. And on another occasion, in the midst of a full-blown discussion
of the subject he defined it clearly: "The fruit (or harvest) of the Spirit is Love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
(Galatians 5:22),

That's the Holy Spirit in New Testament terms. Whenever you experience love, joy,
peace - whenever you receive or express kindness, patience, goodness - whenever someone
has been faithful in marriage, in religion, in life, in work - it's a gift of God: it's
evidence that He is present and active. And when you believe; when into the ambiguity
of your heart a glorious moment of certainty bursts, the Holy Spirit has been there -
God here, God at work.

Sometimes it's dramatic, Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's complex and confusing
and full of ambiguity. I've always doubted that the Biblical miracles occurred with all
the straight forward clarity which adorns them in the text. I'm willing to guess that
not everyone saw the tongues of fire with the same detail. In any event God works with
the ambiguous stuff of life to bring peace and joy and love...And I think of gentle
Detrich Bonhoeffer, pastor, theologian, near-pacifist ~ being pulled inexorably into the
conflict with Nazism and helping, finally, to plan an assassination attempt on Adolf
Hitler. And I want to say ~ "That's what the Holy Spirit is."

And I think of the World Council of Churches granting money to the guerillas in
what was bloody Rhodesia, and those controversial American dollars ‘paying the way for
negotiators to sit down and talk in London - and the fact that for the moment it's
working and people aren't killing each other in Zimbabwe. That's the Holy Spirit.

And f think of our brother Donald Fraser doggedly working in Belfast, Presbyterian
Church of Ireland, and a communique I received just this week which indicated that
incredibly, in one Belfast area, Catholics and Protestants are worshipping together.
That's God here - Holy Spirit.

I think about the "dark night of the soul” and the fact that even there you and 1
are given the gift of faith.

Ganse Little, former pastor of this church wrote once that "One of the glories
of human life is the demonstrated evidence of the presence of the (Holy Spirit)
Comforter in the lives of imperfect, faltering, failing men and women who ‘out of
weakness' were made strong." (Beliefs that Matter, p.135).

The privilege of the ministry is to witness that - daily.

God, we dare to believe, is creator, source of all that is, giver of life. In that,
our faith corresponds with many other religions. God, we dare to believe, became one
of us, lived our life, died our death. In that, our faith differs radically. God, we
dare to believe ~ the same God who created and who lived in the life of Jesus, still
comes among us. He still gives life and hope and joy and peace. He uses the ordinary
to do His will - your life, for instance, and mine. He lives in you and works in you
and loves and saves the world through you. He takes the ordinary - bread and wine and
makes of it a blessed sacrament, and joins us to one another ~ and to Him as we eat and
drink together,

So let us come to table - in the name of the Father and the Son and the

Holy Spirit.
Amen,