HOLY SPIRIT, ENERGY OF GOD

May 18, 1986, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan

"And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind,
and it filled all the house..." --Acts 2:2 (RSV)

Scripture
Acts 2:1-8, 43-47

In the fourth and fifth centuries there emerged in Ireland and then
Scotland a variety of Christianity uniquely different from the religion
whose heart was in Rome. The Celtic Church contained within it much of the
particularity of Celtic culture: independence, no tittle beligerency,
enormous creativity, and vitality and energy. Celtic Christianity never
quite accommodated itself to the centralization of the faith in Southern
Europe. Irish monks argued with the rest of the church about the date of
Easter, the style of monastic tonsure to be worn, and celibacy. They also
created a unique art, borrowing from their Celtic culture. The intricately
carved Celtic Crosses, often the symbol of Presbyterianism,. are their gift
to us. The richly ornamented Bibles they lovingly copied and decorated,
like the Book of Kells, are among the artistic treasures of the world.

They constitute a fascinating and often different chapter in our story.

I was intrigued to learn from Ronald Ferguson, leader of the Iona
Community, on the Island of Iona, off the West Coast of Scotland, that the
favorite ancient Celtic symbol for the Holy Spirit was the Wild Goose.
Ferguson thinks we ought to pay attention to that provocative image and so
do I.

The rest of the church, of course, regards the dove as the symbol of
the Holy Spirit...from that incident, early in the story, when Jesus
experienced the Spirit of God descending on him, as a dove, at his baptism.

The new logo of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on our plaque on |
Michigan Avenue contains that symbol, although that twentieth century dove
seems considerably stronger, more intentional than most of its fluttering,
cooing ancestors.

I confess I've always had trouble with doves. I've never seen one
that looks like the ones in Sunday School pictures. In fact I never saw a
dove at all until I lived in Ohio, and there they are celebrities of sorts
because every year the hunters of the State try to convince the State
Legislators that doves are actually game birds. There are a lot of doves:
in Ohio, in any event, and the ones I saw seemed rather docile and fat and
I always wished for another image for the Spirit of God, so was delighted
with the Celtic alternative.

Py ;

Besides, the spirit that came to Jesus when he was baptized may have
been gentle, comforting and reassuring, but what it accomplished was to
stir up within him such strength and determination and holy obedience that
he was dead in thirty-six months, executed - not as a gentile spirital guru
~ but as a political troublemaker. And that Spirit which came to the
friends of Jesus on Pentecost wasn't gentle and comforting at all, but
upsetting, disturbing, enlivening, energizing. The Celts I conclude, offer
us a necessary corrective...Spirit as Wild Goose - soaring on the wind,
unpredictable, strong, energetic.That's a little more consistent with the
event the church remembers on this day.

The scene is Jerusalem, 33 A.D., late spring - on the Jewish Feast Day
called Pentecost a group of bewildered and frightened friends of Jesus were
still in the city several weeks after those monumental events of arrest and
crucifixion. They were hiding, I believe: not eagerly waiting for futher
instructions from God about what to do next, but in the simplest sense,
lying Tow from the authorities who would have arrested them for their
association with Jesus, waiting for an opportunity to sneak out of town and
head back to Galilee where the old life beckoned. And then, on Pentecost,
something happened to them that they couldn't begin to explain. The
description Luke wrote in the Acts of the Apostles is wonderful poetry.

God came very close to them. The Spirit of God, the breath, wind, essence
of God, a Holy Spirit - came to them - as in tongues of burning, powerful
fire and the insistent strength of a rushing wind, and they knew, together
and as individuals, as they had not known before, the reality of God's love
in Jesus Christ, and they were able to communicate it - were compelled to
communicate it, as they had not been able to before.

It is an experience of such enormous energy and immediacy that we must
remain a respectful distance from it. It is a mistake to focus on those
poetic images alone: it is not possible to recreate it. What is important
is the experience of God coming close.

At the Last Supper Jesus had told the disciples that something like
this would happen. They would not be alone after he died. God would come
to them. The old King James Version translated a very ambigious Greek word
“comforter" and so several centuries of English speaking Christians have
concluded that God's Spirit essentially comforts his people. What Jesus
really said, God would send us an advocate, a counselor, a helper. The
point is that God could be counted on not to abandon his people: he would
be close - as comforter in their distress and grief but as a power and
energy source and as disturber, perhaps, when they became too comfortable.

Long before, in the ancient stories of Israel, God is characterized,
kneeling in the mud of a river bank, lovingly fashioning a human being out
of the clay and breathing life into it. And that closeness - that
incredible intimacy is what the Bible wants to affirm in the idea of the
Holy Spirit. That breath of God - that divine energy - which is human life
- is "Ruah" in Hebrew - the Spirit of God.

Distinguished theologian Hans Kung acknowledges the problems we have
with the notion, and is helpful in teaching that "The Spirit is no other
than God himself. The Holy Spirit is not a third party, not a thing
between God and us, but God's personal closeness to us." The old formula

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is God in three persons: persons - from the Latin Persona -. the masks
actors used to wear in Greek drama - the masks God wears - the
personalities God adopts. God the Father - or Creator, God the Son -
present in history in Jesus, God the Spirit - God's closeness, nearness,
presence in the world and our lives.

Now, there are problems with that, obviously as anyone knows who has
had to explain to a child that the Holy Ghost is not really a Ghost. Worse
yet, Trinitarian language sometimes fosters a confusing belief system which
includes not one God - but three. Traditional language about the Trinity -
God in three persons, and traditional prayers addressed to Christ - Holy
Spirit - as well as God - make it virtually impossible for non-Christians
to understand that we are monotheists, that we really only have one God.

In the rash of attempts at dialogue with Muslims, following the Iranian
hostage crises, many of us were chagrined to discover that Muslim students,
strongly monotheistic, observing us and taking our vocabulary literally,
had concluded that Christians believe in three dieties.

Hans Kung writes: "the Spirit still remains, for many, theologically
absolutely unintelligible... Are we not imposing on modern (men and women)
a burden of faith that many are no longer prepared to bear?" [Does God
Exist, p. 696] My favorite story about the matter used to be told by fhe
late Cardinal Cushing. The Cardinal was walking in downtown Boston one day
when a man in front of him fell suddenly, the victim of a heart attack
apparently. The Cardinal knelt beside him immediately, leaned over and
said, "My Son, are you a Catholic?" There was no response. “Are you a
Chrsitian?" Again, nothing. "Do you believe in God the Father, God the
Son, and God the Holy Spirit?" At this the man opened one eye, and to the
crowd that had gathered, said: "Here I am dying and he's asking me
riddles."

It is helpful to recall that the doctrine, the idea of the Holy
Spirit, like all doctrine, originally was intended to describe human
expertence. The Bible is very short on intellectual speculation. There
are no philosophic or theological arguments in the Bible about the
existence of God. Rather there are stories about people and how they
experienced God. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit was not created bya
convocation of learned scholars. Rather it was forced on the church by an
experience people kept having.

And that experience can be characterized primarily by two words:
God's closeness - and God's energy... And that thrusts us suddenly into
the 20th century.

The issue that hangs over this exercise, after all, is very simply one
of basic integrity. Is there a God? Is there a God who in anyway matters
to me in this life I must live in the world?

We are Christians in a time and place that is radically secular. The
context for this or any sermon, after ali, is a world which doesn't regard
esoteric dogmas with even passing interest. Christendom - the part of the
world in which Christianity prevails is no longer with us. And it has
happened in our life-time.

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In the Western Pennsylvania town of my childhood, the theological
-assumptions of the community were expressed in the fact that there was no
commercial activity on Sunday: no stores were Open, no public
entertainment, movies, bowling alleys and, of course, no bars or
restaurants. The assumption beyond that expression of Christendom was that
God wanted things to be like that on Sunday, or at least that the majority
of people didn't want their church - going interfered with. I sometimes
muse about what my grandmother, who believed there was a moral and
theological principle worth defending in the struggle to keep the stores
closed on Sunday, would think if she could see what transpires in front of
her grandson's manse on the Sabbath afternoon and evening...

We no-longer see ourselves as actors in a drama which has something to
do. fundamentally with God. The problem is atheism - that is to say. Not
the heavy handed, state sponsored atheism - which is itself a religion, a
kind of reverse negative image of Christendom. That is dead too. Some of -
the most hopeful developments for religion are in nations where the
official position is atheism. Madalyne Murray O'Hare's variety of
belligerency is not the problem. The problem is the practical atheism of
our culture: the irrelevance of God on Michigan Avenue. It is simply the
environment in which we find ourselves, descriptively characterized by
Harry Cox. as “The Secular City."

Wallace Stevens got it in a haunting poem - "Sunday Morning" - the
reflections of a woman who used to go to church but now spends her Sunday
mornings at home:

“Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice..."

Gentle, unintentional atheism is the problem; a world view that simply
has no. room in it for God. The secularity of our culture was anticipated
and proclaimed abrasively by Frederick Nietzsche, in the last century. In
a novel, a madman announces to a startled crowd of people: “Where is God
gone? We have killed him...you and I! God is dead... There never was a
greater event... What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs
and monuments of God?" [The Gay Science, see Radical Theotogy and The
Death of God, T.J.J. Altizer, W- Hamilton, pp. 25, 26]

Donald Benedict, Chicago Churchman, caught the essence of the dilemma
in a widely quoted vignette to the effect that "the task of the church in
the city ts very simply to keep alive the rumor that there is a God."

The simple fact is that what you did this morning by getting up,

getting dressed and coming to church, made you part of a minority, a
counter culture, if you will. The problem is benign atheism.

It is not helpful to pretend that Christendom is alive and well... or
to assume that if we just insist on our prerogatives in this friendly
culture and either shout loud enough - or worse yet - draw our

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ecclesiastical robes around us in isolated splendor - all will be well.
All will not be well. ee

We must, I propose, acknowledge that our world is different... that in
many ways we do have answers to questions no one is asking any longer - and
that our first responsibility ~ as church and as individuals - is to hear
the questions and respond to them... “Is there anything here? Is there a
God who matters?" In saying our "yes" to that, may I propose two images of
God which are different - but Biblical. God's closeness and God's energy
to supplement that older symbol of a heavenly dove... God as creative
energy... God as the force that organizes chaos into order... God as the
power that takes primal matter and makes universes and solar systems and
DNA and photosynthesis and lettuce. God as that incredible force which has
moved through time with ever renewing energy, in evolutionary magnificence,
from single cell amoebas to sharks and Mountain Gorillas, pausing for this
moment in time in Homo Sapiens. God as that energy which makes us alive...
God as that which drives us - God as that which calls music out of Mozart
even when he doesn't acknowledge it - and a world-record effort out of the
lonely marathoner, and the vital passion out of VanGogh - and the
unflagging devotion to the task of the research chemist. God as energy -
God as that in us that makes us want and need each other - that compels us
toward each other in love... God as the energy in us to continue création,
in both our sexuality but also our revulstion at the thought of nuclear
suicide. God as the creative agitation to change - in the world - in the
church - and in our lives. God as energy...

It is God's Spirit, I submit, that makes the church always a little
dissatisfied with itself; incapable in its better moments - of resting on
its laurels and living off its past. It is God's Spirit that raises up
reformers when things are getting stagnant - Luther - Calvin - Jane Adams -

// Bonkoette - Dorothy Day - Martin Luther King, Jr., John 23 - Coretta King
- Desmond Tuto - Alan Boesek... It is God's Spirit, I submit, that causes
the church to be embarrassed by its own brokenness; God's agitating Spirit
that forces the issue of ecumenicism and judges us for settling into our
provincialism and hiding behind our comfortable parochialism.

God's presence is known - is available to us - but, unfortunately we
have been persuaded that the ecstatic part of Pentecost, the intoxication
with the spirit and speaking in tongues is the only evidence. I submit,
however, that it is in a sense of God's closeness, a sense of vitality and
life and energy that God comes to us. When we know we are not alone, but
are in the presence of one who cares about us, accepts us, loves us - that
is the Holy Spirit. When life calls us to walk through the Valley of the
Shadow of Death and we discover, personally, the truth of the beloved
promise: "I will fear no evil, for thou art with me," that is the Holy

pirit.

And when life depletes us - when we have given and given and given -
to family, job, community, church... When we are emotionally and
spiritually winded and we discover that we are fed and renewed somehow and
strengthened to go on - that is the Holy Spirit.

And that pressure to change ourselves and our world - that too is the
Spirit of that energetic God who came at Pentecost. God, I believe, makes

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us dissatisfied with anything in ourselves that is less than we could be.
God, I believe, makes us impatient and dissatisfied with a world that is
_less just and whole and good and clean and pure than it could be.

I believe the urgency for peace and justice in the world is of God:
that. the outside agitator for racial justice and economic justice is always
God's Spirit.

"Veni Spiritus Sanctus." "Come Holy Spirit" the early church
prayed... "Come with quickening power..." It is the experience of 20
centuries of Christian history that God does come to comfort, heal and
forgive... and also to stir up, agitate and energize. so let us add our
voices. to that ancient prayer - in our day -

“Come Holy Spirit" - or - using words of a lovely American Appalachian
hymn:

"The lone, wild bird in lofty flight

Is still with thee, nor leave thy sight.
And I am thine! I rest in thee.

Great Spirit, come, and rest in me."

Amen.

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