eTheHolySpiritMay8 - feelings
Very often I hear from people who sense a disconnect from God because “I don’t feel anything.” When did feelings become the litmus test of whether the Spirit is a reality? or even whether our faith in God is meaningful? Jesus came into the world, not so we might feel different, but so we could be different.
Among many Christians, the presence of the Holy Spirit is confused with having emotions about God, as if the Spirit is an experience. But the Spirit is bigger than any feeling, and the Spirit is present whether you feel anything or not.
What is the Holy Spirit? or Who is the Holy Spirit? The first answer is: I am not! The Holy Spirit is not me and my spiritual self. The Holy Spirit is not the same as the profoundest, most wonderful feeling I have ever had about God. The Spirit may stir a feeling and the Spirit may not, the Spirit will instill new attitudes and behaviors in me, or even cure some troubling feelings I harbor.
But the Holy Spirit isn’t the same as my spirituality or anything in you at all. Those whose knees buckle with some titanic experience of God cannot claim they have the Spirit but you and I who are less intuitive about such things don’t. Anyone who boasts that “We have the Spirit,” or “The Spirit is here but not there” are just plain wrong. For the Spirit is too big, too marvelous, too treacherous, to be boxed inside me or you or even the most spiritual person or Church on this planet.
The Spirit isn’t a neatly wrapped little package God gives to you, or to me, or to some select group of people. The Spirit is everywhere, or the Spirit is nowhere at all; the Spirit isn’t something you grab hold of. And the reason is: the Spirit is God – and, as Jesus said, “God is Spirit” (John 4:24).
James
eTheHolySpiritMay10 - truth
If the Spirit isn’t a religious emotion I happen to have (or to lack), then what is it about? After supper on the night before his crucifixion, Jesus made a pledge to his friends that the Spirit would tell the truth about God, sin, judgment, and hope. “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). For readers in the twenty-first century, Jesus would underline that word “truth,” for we live in a world where truth does not seem to matter much. Everywhere we turn, we bump into what’s known rather indelicately as “
BS” (on which Harry Frankfurt of Princeton has written so shrewdly), or “truthiness” (the phenomenon we see in politicians when they insist that what they wish were true must be treated as true, while throwing facts to the wind!).
But above the racket, the Holy Spirit cries that there still is such a thing as truth, that truth matters everywhere, that truth about God can be known. St. Basil called the Spirit “the source of spiritual light, who gives illumination to everyone using His powers to search for the truth.”
Mind you, some people talk about truth as if it were a blunt instrument, or a barbed wire fence isolating anybody who disagrees with them. But the Spirit ranges widely – even outside Christianity. Can’t the Spirit unveil truth even through non-Christian religions? “It would be strange if the Spirit excused himself from the very arena of culture where people search for meaning. If God is reaching out to sinners, it is hard to comprehend why he would not do so in the sphere of religion… Though Jesus it not named in other faiths, Spirit is present and may be experienced” (Clark Pinnock). Not that other religions are therefore the full truth…
…but the Spirit zeroes in on truth, and urges us toward a life that is true to God. Truth doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t issue in allegiance to what is true, if it doesn’t connect me with other people in the search for truth, the treasuring of truth, the living out of truth. The Spirit wants to dispel loneliness – and its favorite instrument is the Church, as we will see on Monday.
James
eTheHolySpiritMay14 – church
Our relationship with God is personal, but it is not private.
Stanley Hauer wascomplains that when someone says “I have a personal relationship with God,” it sounds like having a personal trainer or a personal tailor. I have the same savior as everybody else, and I am saved in order to be saved with you, all of us together.
Increasingly, people feel they can be closer to God without the Church, liberated from the dead weight of the Church. People feel disenfranchised from the Church for decent reasons: we fritter away our energy on trivialities, and you find people there who are just plain annoying, or hypocritical. But where better for hypocrites and annoying people to wind up? Don’t they remind me how I can be annoying? and smugly self-righteous? Isn’t the challenge of connecting with other people who don’t merely mirror my narrow biases precisely what I need to grow toward God?
Where else will I find people who care about subjects like we are covering in these emails? Can you scare up a good conversation at work or a party about your struggles to find meaning in life, to deal with your foibles, your fear of death or your nagging sense of hollowness? not to mention your craving for God?
Send your kids, and go yourself to church, this time, the next time, to this service, to that class, for this mission project, go again, and again, keep showing up, make it the priority. The net results over time are magnificent, and you discover the Spirit you otherwise would swoop right by in your life so busy with other things.
The Spirit draws us together so we can have friends to explore God together, so we can be stretched, so we can join hands and reach out to the world. The Spirit even delights in the Church’s flawedness. What if it were otherwise? What would God do with a Church that was fully righteous and vibrantly “alive” (as so many congregations now boast)? We will never know. In a bumbling Church, it is God who is glorified, it is God who gets the credit for survival – and there is room for a bumbler like me, and you. This is the Spirit’s great gift to us, together.
James
eTheHolySpiritMay15 – mystery
We will continue to explore the Spirit for a few more emails. But you may already be saying “Look, the Spirit just isn’t something I grasp. God? I get that. Jesus? Real guy, I get that. But the Spirit?
I suspect the Spirit isn’t miffed if you don’t have clarity about, or a tangible sense of the Spirit. For even the most brilliant theologians through history, the Spirit is elusive, mysterious – and not merely from our perspective, due to our inability to understand. The Spirit seems to prefer to stand in the shadows, eager to draw attention to others. If we look for the Spirit, the Spirit defers, directing our attention to Jesus, or to the God to whom Jesus prayed.
The Holy Spirit stands in the background of our lives, yet never far away, always right over our shoulders, pointing us toward the grandeur of God, and the story of Christ, nudging us lovingly to discover our lives in God’s story. If we have a sense of God, if we fathom the reality of Jesus across the centuries, the Spirit is satisfied, and feels its work as a matchmaker is done: trying to draw us into love with God, into a relationship with Jesus, and to embody our destiny.
“The Spirit does not wish to be focused upon but to remain anonymous, a servant… The Spirit of love effaces himself in order to bless others. The flame of love is humble. Like a mother in the service of life, the Spirit does not look to personal advantage” (
Clark Pinnock). So the Spirit may teach us to be humble, to be self-effacing, to point away from ourselves and toward God, toward Jesus.
James
eTheHolySpiritMay17 – inspired
The Holy Spirit plays a special role in the Bible. Not only does the Bible portray the Spirit’s activities; the Bible itself is the Spirit’s achievement. We have the Bible as the Spirit’s eloquent gift to us so we might know God and how to live.
But to say the Bible is “inspired” need not mean the Bible conveys the literal, dictated words of God. The Bible is not the Quran (the Koran), which claims to be the actual words of God, repeated verbatim by Muhammad. The Bible claims to be human words about human interactions with God. The Spirit enabled people to “get it” when God was acting before their very eyes, and the Spirit nudged somebody to write it down, and the Spirit guided the long process by which the Bible came together as a unified
This is precisely why the Bible is relevant! We discover in its pages the human element, an utterly realistic, believable, accessible story about God and human life. “In-spired” means “breathed in.” The Holy Spirit, the living breath of God, breathes into these stories, poems, and letters the life of God, so that the Bible might live with us, so that we might grasp the universe from God’s perspective, so that we might understand what living with and for God is all about.
So we perceive a double kind of inspiration: the very Spirit that nursed the process of the Bible’s formation is the same Spirit which inspires you and me when we read. The Holy Spirit opens our minds and teaches us, interprets, gives flashes of insight. The Holy Spirit rescues the Bible from the museum of religious relics, and makes it real, vital today.
So “inspiration” isn’t some radioactive property emanating from this book. Rather, “inspiration” is how God uses this book in our lives. “All scripture is inspired by God, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that you may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16). If you read it, expect to be educated, reprimanded, disciplined, readied by the Spirit to charge out and do good in the world.
James
eTheHolySpiritMay21 - Trinity
A few months back, I met with Jewish teens, preparing for either their
bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah – and one asked me to explain the Trinity. The whole notion of God as three in one, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but still just one God may befuddle us, and makes virtually no sense to non-Christians.
But the Trinity is not a mathematical riddle to test our faith. The Trinity is a mystery, but we need not therefore regard the Trinity is irrational. The earliest Christians tried to name their experience of God.
Think of the dynamics of the Bible’s unfolding story. When Jesus is baptized in the Jordan, God (whom he called Father) was overheard speaking from heaven saying “This is my beloved Son.” At that moment, the Spirit “descended on him, like a dove” (Matthew 3:13-17). Jesus, who is viewed as God in the flesh according to the Gospel of John, spends much time talking about his intimate relationship with his Father in heaven (John 14:10, 16:15, 17:24). Yet he also encourages the forlorn disciples by promising to send the Spirit once he has gone (John 14:26, 15:26, 16:7).
History’s most clever minds have contemplated this mystery, and have authored thousands of thick books analyzing this three-in-one-ness in God. But for us, what matters is that the Bible suggests that there is an immense, marvelous love within God that spills over into our lives. The Holy Spirit is the outpouring of the love God the Father has for his only Son onto us. The Holy Spirit is the invitation to us to join in the profound love Jesus had (and has) for his Father.
The Russian painter, Anton Rublev, painted an intriguing icon, picturing Father, Son and Holy Spirit sitting around a four-sided table, enjoying each other, with the clear implication that you, the one looking at the painting, you are invited to join their circle. My destiny, your purpose for being, our reason to live: life is about the privilege, the delight, of being invited into the eternal love of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
James
eTheHolySpiritMay22 – our weakness
If asked to enumerate our strengths and weaknesses, not many of us would list “prayer” as a strength. We may believe in its strength, but in a wishful, distant way. Prayer, we think, ought to be our strength, and we may envy people whose spiritual we exaggerate. But most of our readers would pencil in “prayer” as a weakness.
Prayer is hard; nobody is a master of prayer. Our feeble efforts at prayer feel laughably insufficient. But our very inability to pray is the whole point of prayer: we come before God as beggars, as toddlers who stumble and bump our heads, as strangers in a foreign land hoping somebody will take us in. Embrace your weakness: it is the empty space God needs to fill our lives. “The Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. He searches our hearts…” (Romans 8:26).
If you are anxious about prayer, if you fear you will miss the Spirit, then relax: prayer is already happening. Words fail – and the exasperated sigh is the prayer. Prayer is your deepest wish, your most fervent longing, your craving for love, your dream of a full life – and even if you have forgotten to speak openly with God about these things, God is listening, God is in tune. The conversation just goes better when you take the time to talk with God about it, and then listen, speaking, then listening, then resonating with the silence.
So don’t grit your teeth and try so hard to pray; don’t beat yourself up for failing to pray. The Spirit helps us in our weakness. The Spirit isn’t waiting for you to become a titan of spirituality. Is your praying weak and seemingly insufficient? Good! – for God said, “My grace is sufficient, my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
James
eTheHolySpiritMay24 - intimacy
St. Basil wrote, “Through the Spirit we become intimate with God.” Onlookers were struck by the unparalleled intimacy Jesus enjoyed with God, a closeness that glowed when he called God “Abba” – an Aramaic word young children and even grownups used to speak lovingly to their “daddy.” The God who hurled the galaxies across the darkness, who fashioned mountains and oceans, this same God was like a loving “daddy” to Jesus. No wonder the disciples pleaded with Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1).
Jesus’ intimacy with God isn’t something you just decide to have one day. No, we ask for, we wait for, we long for the Spirit: “God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba! Father!’” (Galatians 4:6). We open ourselves to the Spirit who speaks in us, in spite of ourselves, stretching and winding between us and God like an umbilical cord, giving life – and we ask that it never be cut.
Paul suggested that “when we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit bearing witness that we are children of God, and if children then heirs of God, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8:16-17). We are “children of God,” but not in some generalized humanitarian sense. Imagine the best, wisest, most affectionate, strong and passionately tender parent in history, holding his child in his lap, reading together, hugging, she strokes his hair and points out the window to an eagle soaring toward a distant mountain. Multiply this love by ninety seven and you have a glimpse of what the Spirit is working overtime right now to give to you, to me, to all of us.
But Paul adds “provided we suffer with him.” Maybe we don’t get the Spirit, maybe we miss the intimacy, maybe we are puzzled by or feel aloof from the very idea of the Spirit because we are unprepared for sacrifice, we prefer to cling to all that is ours, we don’t want to part with our old two-bit life… but that’s another day and another email.
James
eTheHolySpiritMay28 – memorial day
We joke about failing memory, we wonder why we can’t remember a name we heard four seconds ago, and we may be dogged by the memory of something we said or did forty years ago. Is memory just a biological event in the brain? Does the Spirit play a role in memory?
Jesus told his disciples the Spirit would remind them about him, and what is true. We might say “Forgive and forget” – but part of the humbled joy of forgiveness is when we remember what’s been forgiven, and we are grateful. We remember people who have loved us, sacrificed for us, set a heroic example for us. And the Spirit labors diligently to apply the holy medicine that will heal lingering memories that hang like an albatross over us.
No one has written more eloquently of memory than
Frederick Buechner, and I believe in this passage he is portraying the Spirit’s work: In one sense the past is dead and gone, but in another sense, it is not done with at all, or at least not done with us. Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – it all lives and breathes deep in us somewhere. A scrap of some song, a book we read as a child, a stretch of road we used to travel, an old photograph. Suddenly there it all is. Old failures, old hurts. Times too beautiful to tell.
We are all such escape artists. We are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except what really matters, except for what is going on inside our own skin. We chatter. We turn on television, or find some chore that could easily wait. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. We cling to the surface out of fear of what lies beneath the surface.
But there is a deeper need, to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on, where the dead are alive again, to the long journeys of our lives. So much has happened. Remembering means a deeper, slow kind of remembering, a searching and finding. ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’ goes the old spiritual – but we know it. We are to remember it. And the happiness we have seen, too – precious times, precious people, moments when we were better than we know how to be.
And then, we will find beyond any feelings of joy or regret, a profound and undergirding peace, a sense that in some unfathomable way, all is well. We have survived. There were times we never thought we would and nearly didn’t. Many times I have chosen the wrong road, or the right road for the wrong reason. Many times I have loved people too much for their good or mine, and others I might have loved I have missed loving and lost. I remember times I might have given up, but I didn’t. Weak as we are, a strength beyond our strength has pulled us through at least this far. A love beyond our power to love has kept our hearts alive. We are never really alone.
James
eTheHolySpiritMay30 – whatever happened to “sin”?
Once upon a time, Christians fretted over whether God would have mercy on them; they probed the inner recesses of the soul and pleaded with God to forgive, to purify, to grant a fresh start. Nowadays, even religious people don’t think of “sin” as the primary dilemma we face. Either we have lost the sense of our grievous separation from God – or is it that our standards have sunk so low that sin is just being normal, that my wants and habits must mysteriously be good somehow? Or is it that we presume upon God’s mercy, so I can do whatever I feel like, and an indulgent, utterly careless God won’t mind?
If you never blush, if you can’t think of much to ask forgiveness for, you are out of touch with the Spirit, which “searches everything” (1 Corinthians 2:10). We may wish the Spirit were not so nosy. Read Jesus’ words in Matthew 5: never dare to say “I am not guilty of murder, or adultery,” for at the heart of murder and adultery are anger and lust. Picky picky, this probing, humbling Spirit.
The Spirit is thorough, casting a searchlight not just on our big, obvious sins, but on small, subtle, seemingly trivial ways in which we rebel against God, hidden sins, even unintentional sins. The Spirit fingers some dark corner of my soul, and I cry out defensively, “But I never thought about that!”
But this convicting work is nothing but love. Aristotle said that the opposite of a friend is a flatterer. The Holy Spirit never flatters us; the Spirit loves us too much! My friend the Spirit wants the best for me. The Spirit’s passion is for us to love the true God, and to lead true lives, growing ever closer into holiness, fleeing from the tempters who glitter but are most assuredly not gold.
The Spirit not only exposes our sin. The Spirit weeps, grieving over our sinfulness (Ephesians 4:30). For the Spirit could never stop at merely pointing the finger. The Spirit begins a long, loving labor of changing us… as we will see on Thursday.
James
eTheHolySpiritMay31 - holiness
“You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). The Spirit exposes and then bridges the impassable chasm between God and our lack of goodness, our unholy, sinful existence – which is the truth about us, no matter how much fun we’re having or how much we’re coddled or admired by the world.
Christianity is not merely about getting saved, nabbing our ticket into heaven. Christianity is more than God helping me when I’m in a pickle. The Christian desires to please God, to be holy. Nothing less than an altered life can be our thank-you note to God, the gratitude of a clean life, the praise of a life consecrated to God.
Holiness, though, is not my gritty determination to be pious. I try very hard, as I must, but I am not able to do what God wants of me. A changed life is the gift of God’s Spirit. As a humble believer, I know that any good that I manage is “not I, but Christ in me” (Galatians 2:20). The Spirit labors for nothing less than “the reproduction of the life of Christ in the believer” (
Gordon Fee). Paul described this new life as “the fruit of the Spirit.” Not “the fruit of my good intentions,” but “the fruit of the Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23).
Why should I have to be so intentional about every little thing? Does God care what I do every four seconds? Yes - because God made you and me in God’s own image. We are the way God is imaged in this world, so we must be holy. Paul said that my body is “the temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19). I am to be, and you and I together are to be the kind of temple our splendidly wonderful God would need? But this is the point of life, the delight of the impossible challenge, the privilege of an existence that matters. “The Lord commands… the Spirit strengthens. What kind of strengthening is this? Perfection in holiness, which expresses itself in an unyielding, unchangeable commitment to goodness. Such holiness is impossible without the Spirit” (St. Basil).
James
eTheHolySpiritJune4 – decision making
“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1). We come to a major crossroads in life and must decide, “Do I move to Des Moines?” “Do I marry Kevin?” “Should I change careers?” “Do we try the chemotherapy?” – and we pray for the Spirit to guide us. The Spirit, so loving, so eager for our good, leaps at the opportunity and mercifully kneads and shapes our thinking.
But not just on the big decisions! We have a thousand little turning points every day when we decide to go here or there, to buy this or the other thing (or to save or contribute our money), to watch TV or turn it off, to go to the lake or visit grandma, to bring up a difficult subject in conversation or just avoid it, to walk out and wave to the garbage collector or to hurry on to work. Discernment is not just making a decision, but how we view the world. What do I value? What drives me? What are my thousand little decisions turning me into?
How do I know if I’m being nudged by the Spirit? or some sinister compulsion? We test whatever we think is the Spirit’s leading against the Scriptures, for the Spirit will not lure us toward anything contrary to the Spirit’s own written testimony. We talk openly with Christian friends, the kinds of friends who know God, who love us too much to flatter us, who dare to ask hard questions and prick us with challenging words. We practice making Spirit-led decisions, and we get better at it over time.
We will not have anything resembling a perfect record when it comes to discerning the spirits, and so we lean heavily, always on forgiveness, and even on the bizarre hope that God will even use our missteps for good.
James
eTheHolySpiritJune5 – use me
In my
bookon the Holy Spirit, I wrote (somewhat playfully) that “the Holy Spirit must have terrific fun while working in that secret factory where people are created, smiling over yet one more unique individual, creasing each fingerprint at a never before seen curvature, devising a maddeningly new personality, even between so-called identical twins. A passion for Mozart, mixed in with a head for numbers, sobered by a mental block with foreign languages, yet a flair for pastry crusts, a smile no one has ever anticipated, laughably surprising permutations, the Spirit strewing gifts and talents all over like that sower Jesus told us about (Mark 4).”
Whenever we notice good in me, in you, in any and all people, we notice the clever planning of the Holy Spirit. To be close to God, to discover meaning and satisfaction, we look first to whatever little or big skill we have, say “Thanks” to the Spirit, and then confess “My life is not my own. Use me as you will.”
The Spirit may use us for something grand, like figuring out how to house people who don’t have houses, or something small and tender, like wiping your bedridden mother’s forehead with a cool cloth.
Failure to let the Spirit use the very gifts the Spirit has put in me is the dumbest futility. We let the Spirit use us – and not only our strengths! The most lovely surprises come when I let the Spirit use my inability, my awkwardness. Jürgen Moltmannwrote that believers “put their natural gifts and powers at the service of the Church. But in the service of the Church they make out of their gifts something different from what they were in other contexts. And then new powers develop in them, powers which they were unaware of previously.”
James
eTheHolySpiritJune7 – comfort
On the night before Jesus was executed, he lingered over dinner with his closest friends – sensing their anxious foreboding, their puzzled confusion, and certainly anticipating the terrible grief they would suffer the following day, and perhaps even preparing them for the continuing sorrows they would face over the next thirty years, Jesus loved them, speaking tender words, saying he would not leave them desolate, that he would send a Counselor, a Comforter, the Holy Spirit whose comfort is not just a sigh and a hug, but the rock-solid truth of reality, the resurrection of Jesus, the hope that whatever sorrow we face will be turned into joy (John 14-16).
The Holy Spirit bears our anguish, our pain, our darkness, feeling its awful intensity even before we notice it. We may not have even wanted to ask for the Spirit’s help in our ache or rage, but the Spirit is already busy weaving a warm blanket of comfort, to wrap us in God’s unfailing love.
St. Basilwrote that through the Spirit “hearts are lifted up, the infirm are held by the hand.”
The Spirit’s comfort is like no other. My husband may try to listen and grasp my inner turmoil; my wife might hug and kiss me and offer words of support. My friend might shed a tear and stammer in an effort to ease my pain. My pastor may read a Psalm, or my Sunday School class might deliver a casserole.
But the Spirit (who certainly relies heavily upon my spouse, my friend, and my pastor) can go where no person can go, not even the wisest, most affectionate and sympathetic spouse or friend. The Spirit cuts into the marrow of my soul and understands my darkness even better than I do, feels it more profoundly than I do – and then the Spirit brings a comfort more powerful, more gentle, than any combination of hugs, words or casseroles. The Spirit is love, the Spirit is God, the Spirit is Comfort.
James
eTheHolySpiritJune11 - joy
Americans work hard to have fun. We identify happiness with having fun. But we all harbor a hunch that all our rounds of fun, our diversions, our pursuit of happiness prove to be nothing more than trivial circling around a gaping hole in our souls. God made us for joy, which is deeper than happiness, or maybe different entirely from happiness and fun. Joy isn’t an extra dose of happiness, or fun multiplied by some high number.
Joy is counter-cultural in our superficial world dogged by cynicism. Joy is a defiant smile in the face of the worst bad luck. Joy is the secret that you are gripped quite securely in God’s loving hands. Joy bears up under unhappiness. In fact, joy is frequently discovered in the middle of sorrow. Sometimes we don’t realize joy has taken up residence in our souls until we are knocked down by a tragic loss.
In a sense, we choose joy. At a perilous fork in the road, we can choose joy, or choose to be resentful. Yet when I choose, that choice is itself a gift of the Spirit, who never rests from coaxing me toward joy. I can’t muster joy by myself. Sin, pride, and my steely determination to go it on my own block my access to joy. So we confess our sin, we look in the mirror and admit our vulnerability, we practice gratitude – and joy springs up like the wildflower a child finds in the back yard.
Age, seasoning, and experience may be the fields in which joy blossoms. Joy is consistency in the spiritual life. Since joy is not the same as the flitting emotions of fun or happiness, then joy does not evaporate even if God seems absent. Oscar Romero, a great saint murdered for standing up for Christ in harsh circumstances, said “God is not failing us when we don’t feel his presence. God exists, and he exists even more, the farther you feel from him. When you feel the anguished desire for God to come near because you don’t feel him present, then God is very close to your anguish. God is always our Father and never forsakes us, and that we are closer to him than we think.”
James
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