June 30, Proper 8: Departures

2 Kings 2:1-2,6-14, Psalm 77, Gal 5:1,13-25, Luke 9:51-62

I’m thinking about departures—four of them. The departure of John Dyck for Auburn, Alabama, the departure of Karen Bulthuis for Seattle, the departure of Elijah into heaven, and the departure of the Lord Jesus into heaven by way first of Jerusalem. Not that Alabama and Seattle are up there with heaven, but in every case the rest of us are left behind to carry on, disconnected and detached.

Elisha does not want to detach from Elijah, and so he disobeys him every time he’s ordered to stay behind. “Oh no, I will not leave you.” How does he even know? How does Elijah know? I guess it’s a prophet’s business to know such things. Elisha is tested as a prophet—whether he can see the invisible army of the Kingdom of God. That he can see it means that he surely has that double share of Elijah’s spirit—to be the prophet in his place, and to do greater things than Elijah did, even if he is a milder man. The departure of Elijah does not mean the departure of Elijah’s God.

Elijah is the only person in the Old Testament to be taken alive into heaven. Even Moses had to die, on a mountain alone with God, and God buried him. There’s a tradition that Enoch was taken alive, but Genesis does not actually say that. Anyway it was not an Old Testament belief that heaven is our ultimate destiny. So for a man to be taken up into heaven was absurd, or wonderful, or both, and for what purpose? Does he live among the angels, eating angels’ food? The tradition developed that Elijah would return some day, and he would prepare the way for the Messiah.

Elijah is behind our Gospel today. It’s an Elijah story that James and John have in mind when they want to call down fire on the Samaritans, as Elijah had done with the ancestors of these Samaritans. And James and John had just witnessed Elijah on the Mount of the Transfiguration, only 21 verses earlier in this same chapter, talking with Jesus and Moses. St. Luke is specific that what Elijah and Moses talked about with Jesus was his departure, eventually to heaven but by way of Jerusalem. And the final journey of Our Lord to Jerusalem is what he sets out on in our Gospel today.

People want to go with him, like the other prophets with Elijah, but Our Lord brushes them off. With one-liners, with non-sequiturs. Our Lord is being provocative. Off-putting. Unreasonable. If you are plowing, you do have to look back to check your alignment. And it’s impossible for the dead to bury the dead. Not only that, if your father just died, then you should honor your father with an immediate burial. Does Jesus mean that he should break the Fifth Commandment? And, the Son of Man does have places to lay his head, like at the home of Mary and Martha. And finally, no one is fit for the Kingdom of God anyway.

What’s he doing with these non-sequiturs, with this verbal sparring that puts you off-balance? He casts his words like an offensive lineman throwing blocks to let the fullback through, is to clear his way to Jerusalem. He’s like Julius Caesar, crossing the Rubicon, or more like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the march across the Edmund Pettus bridge. Our Lord is talking about himself here and the deadly road he’s on—that he will not rest, and not look back, that he leaves his parents to others, and he himself is as good as dead and buried.

He is disconnecting and detaching. He has no enemies and no real allies. He fights no one but challenges everyone. If people oppose him he lets them be, because who can understand him! He must accept his doom, because no one is fit for the Kingdom of God. Yet unfit as you are, because of his death and resurrection and ascension, he gives it to you as a gift.

We do not build the Kingdom of God, despite what well-meaning Christians say. We receive it as a gift. The Kingdom of God does not belong to us. Neither does Jesus belong to us, or to the church. We call ourselves a community of Jesus, and we are, but not that we possess him. On Tuesday morning, as I meditated on these passages, that’s what hit me, and I don’t know if you can call it a take-home, or an application, but I felt the message that the Lord Jesus does not belong to us.

You know that I belong to Melody, my wife, and she belongs to me, and yet profoundly she does not belong to me. It’s only slaves that belong to someone else. Our children belong to us in many ways but finally we have to let them go for their own journeys. Karen has her journey and she does not belong to us, and John has his journey and he does not belong to us. Departures.

We will bless them and set them free from us. Just as the Lord Jesus is free from us and we have to get out of his way sometimes. We have to let him do his awful thing in Jerusalem. We have to let him die, and die alone, without us, detached from us and disconnected.

He must be free of us that he can set us free from the world, the flesh, and the devil—in which we are so thoroughly enmeshed that we could not otherwise be free of it. Call it slavery, or servitude, or merely attachment—it holds us and determines our choices and behaviors. But he detaches us and sets us free.

With this freedom comes uncertainty—so many free choices and options wide open. But freedom can mean chaos and anarchy and then new tyranny. When the Children of Israel were liberated from slavery in Egypt, the Lord God quickly gave them a full set of commandments to keep their liberty in order. It’s a task of all religions to control and limit human behavior. And Christianity has acted like any another religion by putting all kinds of rules on its believers.

Against St. Paul! His strategy is a whole new departure in human social organization. He doesn’t mean it just for the church, he means it for humanity in general. But it’s so radical that the church keeps failing it. He proposes that you channel your freedom not by new rules but by voluntary love, that you channel your social relations by voluntary service to each other, and that you control your own behavior by faithfulness and self-control. He says that against such things there is no law, so that this new way of human behavior is possible within any culture or legal system on the earth.

Human relations in his time were based on the obligations of class and race and ownership. It still is true. His radical departure is to base your relations on the freedom of the Spirit and the fruits of the Spirit. I call it the nine-fold test. With all your free choices and all your wide open options, how do you determine what to do? You base your choice on the nine-fold test. Three by three.

Will your choice of action tend toward love and peace and joy? Then go ahead.

Will your social relations exhibit patience and kindness and generosity? Then be my guest.

Will your personal behavior exhibit faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Then knock yourself out.

Experiment. Freely choose.

The church has ever doubted St. Paul at his word, and we keep falling back into legalisms. And yet his radical departure in human social organization has had its slow and simmering influence on global civilization. Just two examples are the liberation of women from property to partners and the liberation of LGBTQ persons to commit to faithful relationships. St. Paul says that if you are led by the Spirit you are not subject to the law. Your guide is not the Law of Nature but the Fruit of the Spirit.

The Gospel is on a long journey in world history like the journey of the Lord Jesus to Jerusalem. The Gospel clears away from its path all other competing connections and attachments, no matter how noble and even reasonable they might be, and all of our laws are judged by the message of the Cross. And where the path is free and clear the Holy Spirit enters in take you along on God’s own journey, and like Elisha you can see the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God does not belong to us but we receive it as a gift. The Lord Jesus does not belong to us but we love him because he first loved us. Karen and John have loved us and they will depart from us and disconnect and detach from us and be free of us. And their freedom is the opportunity for nothing else than love, and may our love for them increase with the length of their journeys until we all come home. We will love them as ourselves.

Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 23, Proper 7: The Still, Small Voice and the Legion of Demons

I Kings 19:1-15a, Psalm 42, Galatians 3:23-29, Luke 8:26-39

On the subway you see men like him, women too. You step into the car and the stench assaults you, from that silent mound of filthy rags and bulky bags in which there lives a human being. Going nowhere, no home but there, alone, unloved, dehumanized by a legion of demons or mental illnesses or both.

If he were naked like the man in the tombs they’d arrest him, but as long as he’s covered we tolerate his misery. We have somewhere to get to, things to do, money to make, a herd of swine to manage. Some social worker maybe could help him out, as long as that does not delay my train!

The Lord Jesus steps on shore and the man opposes him. His demons sense the power of Jesus and they are scared. These demons are not from hell (our English translation is misleading), they’ve never been there and they don’t want to go there. These are the natural spirits of the landscape (the natural spirituality to which we moderns are now insensitive), but natural spirits corrupted, spirits diseased, terrified, vicious like mad dogs, violent, destructive. And not smart. It was their own very bad idea to be released into the herd of swine. Self-destructive spirituality.

After that the opposition to Jesus moves to the local population. He’s delayed their train. Their pigs are gone. The misery of that man was tolerable but now what about them? Jesus, mind your own business. We have to live with chaos every day and keep it at bay—what little we can control. We live so close to disaster, an accident, a fall, we miss a payment. We know that our attempts at order keep some people out, but we’d rather you’d leave us alone to manage our own business.

How much do you want the Savior in your life? How much do you want the Kingdom of God to come into your space? It might upset things. What about business as usual? But yes, you do want what Jesus offers in this story, the healing and humanizing of the man, clothed, and in his right mind. 

You wish you could do it for the lost soul on the subway. You want this kind of Jesus in your life, you want his kind of healing and humanizing in the world. Forgiving sins, reconciling lost souls back among their homes and families—why can’t it be more frequent, more constant, more familiar, why so rare? Jesus, where are you? We want you, we do believe in you—where are you?

Psalm 42: All day long my enemies mock me and say to me, “Where now is your God?” Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me? This heaviness of soul, you know what that is, that’s depression. It’s more than that, but at least it’s that. It’s what you see in Elijah in our first lesson. He’s depressed, and depression usually means a combination of anger and grief.

He sees the Kingdom of God as a lost cause, as hopeless, despite his recent triumph over the prophets of Baal. The Baals were the same kind of corrupted natural spirits of the landscape that Jesus would face eight hundred years later. But after Elijah’s great win, one word from Jezebel casts him down. He’s got that notorious let-down after a triumph, the slump after success. He runs away, he mopes, he says he might as well be dead. Kill me now.

When I was in my second parish, in Ontario, Canada, I suffered four years of insomnia. I could not sleep. I was high-strung and hyper-vigilant, and productive, so I did not think I was depressed. My doctor put me on Ambien to get me through it. One day my doctor said to me, “Pardon me for saying this, but isn’t your real problem that you’re mad at God?” A wise woman. I was mad at God. I was aggrieved at God. For all kinds of reasons. And it was making me unhealthy, although not mentally ill or demon possessed. But this why I say that Elijah here is mad at God.

He’s a mighty prophet. He’s been jealous for God. But here he’s jealous of God, of God’s prerogatives. “I’m knocking myself out for you, God, and what are you doing? Where are you God?” Absent? Inactive? He doesn’t criticize God directly, but you can read between the lines.

The story is marvelously strange and it passes into paranormal. The prophet is like a wizard here, sustained by just those morsels of angelic food for his forty-day hike into the desert. He leaves the world of ordinary life for the wild world where humans die and spirits haunt, to the barren peak where God spoke to Moses. Whose idea was this? Does God even want him here? It is ambiguous. What else should we expect in this strange Marvel-Comics-world that Elijah has put himself into?

When he climbs Mount Sinai God questions him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” How do you hear that—as an open question or a challenge to a guy God knows is mad at him? Twice the question, and twice Elijah’s answer of despair. But God doesn’t comfort him. Prophets don’t get that kind of indulgence. God just commissions him again. “Go return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus.” And then in the next verses, unfortunately cut off by the lectionary: “Get going, I’ve got a job for you there. And by the way, you’re not the only one left. I’ve got 7,000 loyal Israelites whose quiet service has been unnoticed by you in all your jealousy for me.”

So Elijah makes the long journey back and I wonder what he ate. Is he muttering, “Jeez, you don’t get much appreciation around here!” He’s got the lesson of the mountain, that God was not in the storm nor the earthquake nor the fire but the still, small voice. He has to learn God’s strategy.

Yes, we like the mighty acts of God, the mighty power of God, that God can do great miracles of vindication and liberation, but the way God chooses to assert the Kingdom of God is by means of the small and quiet voices who give their witness. Like the man that Jesus healed. Jesus commissioned him: “Go tell how much God has done for you.” That’s the power of God—your witness; not the wind or earthquake or fire but your quiet testimony, by what you tell and how you do what you do. In your witness comes the Kingdom of God. What you say about God and why you live your life.

In a few minutes you’re going to hear such a testimony, from our own Joanna Franchini. She will tell you of her still, small deeds of service to refugee mothers and children opposed by the hostility and intentional chaos of our current government. And she will ask for your support. Let her encourage you to endorse this strategy of God. It may delay your train. But here’s a take-home for today: your own testimony is everything, no matter how small and weak your voice may be.

Do you see the world as positive or negative, or even hostile and chaotic? Does your worldview run Marvel-Comics or mystical-spiritual or rationalist-scientific? (Mine runs Calvinist and Tolkien and I try to hold them together.) No matter what, in the middle is humanity, and the common trend of our two stories today is humanization: the Kingdom of God in small, quiet human voices and typically unnoticed service, and also the humanization of the man called Legion, now quietly sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind. A proper human being, a member of that new humanity that St. Luke has made a theme in both his Gospel and The Acts, the new humanity that is brought into the world by the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Look at the change. It might upset our business, but is this not what you want to see and to hope for?

Not Humanism as independent of God, but humanization because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, human beings as the image of God and object of God’s love, humanizing those who are dehumanized because they are sacred to the Lord. Whenever we encounter dehumanization we are judged with a judgment against idolatry, a judgment against demonization. You are not judged as an individual when you can do nothing for that person on the train, but is not our system judged and our way of life, that we tolerate such misery, and children in cages, and families cut apart?

What God does for us doesn’t always feel like love. God was hard with Elijah, and the Lord Jesus refused the begging of the liberated man to stay with him. God challenges us when God commissions us, and often when we’d rather be just held. But in the challenge is the larger love. You know how it works. In the challenge is the larger love. Your commission is to declare how much the love of God has done for you. 

Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 16: Holy Trinity; Questions 1: How Can God Be One and Three?

Proverbs 8:1-4, Psalm 8, Romans 5:1-5, John 16:12-15

One God in three persons. Yet not three gods, but One God. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, a difficult doctrine. And the doctrine is not taught as such in the Bible, and the word “Trinity” never appears in the Bible. But the doctrine is how the church has accounted for the evident behavior of God in the Bible.

Especially right after Easter. On that first Easter, when the Lord Jesus rose from the dead, the disciples still had God in heaven and Jesus as only an exalted man. But the next Sunday, when the Lord Jesus showed himself, it was Thomas who first recognized Jesus as “his Lord and his God.” He called Jesus the names reserved for the One God, the God that Jesus prayed to as his Father. And yet Thomas knew him by the marks in his hands where the nails had been as a person distinct from the Father. So here we have two persons as One God!

Then on Pentecost God opened up further as the Holy Spirit, coming down upon God’s people, and not just an energy, but a person, but also not Jesus. So now we have three persons in One God. So today, the first Sunday after the end of the Easter Season, we pause to “acknowledge the glory of the Trinity and to worship the Unity.”

The doctrine of the Trinity is not just tacked on to a general belief in God that we share with other religions. It’s the heart of our belief, and the source of many other features of the Christian faith. The Trinity is the source of the high importance of love in Christianity compared to other religions. The Trinity is also the source of joy in our faith, and the reason for the high importance of community and fellowship. Let me lay these out today—love, joy, faithfulness, and community—with an intermezzo on whether the whole idea is believable, and I will close with how the Trinity allows us to deal with our suffering.

The Holy Trinity is why we say that God is love. God’s love is not some impersonal force, but a personal practice of God within God’s self: the love of the Father for the Son, the love of the Son for the Father, the love of both of them for the Holy Spirit, and the love of the Holy Spirit for all of them—with a love that circles both ways round and rises up and overflows into the world and onto us. God loves us with the love that the three persons love each other with. That’s why we say that “God is love.”

The Holy Trinity is the source of joy. These three persons eternally enjoy each other. This inner joy of God was described by ancient theologians as the dance of God, perichoresis is the word. These three persons dance with each other eternally and joyfully, moving elegantly between each other in-and-out, and then they share their mutual joy with their creation, with the stars and whirling galaxies and waving trees and singing birds and sporting whales that God created to rejoice in and the infants and children that God loves to listen to.

But how can this be? The contradiction is obvious. How can you claim three persons and still have One God? How could Jesus talk as he did in our gospel lesson, of three different persons, and still claim to worship the One God of Israel? We call it a mystery. Is that a dodge? Or can a mystery be a reality, like the mysteries of quantum physics, which we recognize as real, but which defy the rules of logic with apparent contradictions?

So let me say that the apparent contradiction of the doctrine of the Trinity is not totally illogical. It is not nonsensical. Here is how: the God of Israel is not confined to time and space. God is free from the laws of time and space, and God can be anywhere God wants to be at any time and in many places at once. God is free within the laws of time and space because God is the author of time and space and has authority over them.

The same is true of logic and mathematics. God is the author of logic and mathematics. Our first lesson claims this when it says that God created wisdom. “Wisdom” here means what ancient civilizations called all human knowledge, including reason and logic and even mathematics and natural science. If God created all of this, if God is the author of logic and mathematics, then God has authority over them, and so God has freedom in logic and mathematics.
That means that the mathematical number “one” is not more powerful than God—as if while being true of God it can control God and confine God. But God is free to be One and yet also seem not like One according to the rules that we creatures have to follow. God can be One and yet seem plural to us at the same time. God has given logic to us as a gift for our understanding, but logic cannot limit God, or it would be God’s prison. The one-ness of God is not controlled by the one-ness of other things in mathematics or logic.

Now this is not a proof of the Trinity, for it cannot be proven, but it is to say that it is not nonsensical or even completely illogical. My point is that God is always free to be what only God can be. But here’s the next thing: that while God is free, yet God is also always faithful to what God has been. God is the One, and God is the One you can count on. God is free and God is faithful. The Lord our God, the Lord is One!

This faithfulness of the One God is God’s very nature as the Trinity, it is built in to God’s own self as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who are always faithful to each other. This faithfulness is an expression of God’s love within relationships, because relationship is in God’s nature too, the eternal loving and joyful relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Yes, God is One, but not compact like a pebble, or a diamond or a perfect stone, but dense like a heart, a beating heart, with room inside, and inner movement, and tender enough for suffering. A movement, a dance, an inner relationship, an eternal fellowship, a divine community. Shall we not say that this God is the original community?

And if God is by nature loving and relational and faithful, then God will want community with you. With you as a distinct person, distinctly you, with your own name, and eternally you. Some religions teach that we all get absorbed back into a primal unity, but this Trinitarian God loves otherness and enjoys variety and lets you have it too, but in fellowship and communion and mutual rejoicing.

So, of course God wants you in communion with each other. Not a compact community like a clump or a hive or even a tribe, but a fellowship with room and freedom for each other right along with your faithfulness. Our values as a Christian community come from the very nature of the God who is the original source community: our values of room and welcome, of faithfulness, of joy, and of love. If our values are now considered humanistic, that’s fine, but we recognize them first as Trinitarian. Whenever our values are lived out in the world, you can tell that the Holy Spirit is out and active in the world.

In our second lesson St. Paul takes it the other way, from the world back into God—that we enter into the grace of God and we share in God’s glory. We are welcomed into God’s inner circle when we come in the name of the Lord Jesus as his adopted brothers and sisters. So the movement is reciprocal. The love and joy of the Holy Trinity pours out into the world and into us, and we ride that love and joy back into its source inside the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the in-and-out of Romans 5, and St. Paul is daring magnificent thoughts here, thoughts never thought before.

When the Lord Jesus ascended into heaven, bodily, with the hole in his side and the marks in his hands where the nails had been, he must have brought new moves into that inner dance of the Holy Trinity, some new steps to include his resurrected body, with its marks and wounds of suffering. And when God adopts us in as well, God adopts our suffering too. God suffers us as we are, we who are the cause of suffering.

So when St. Paul writes of the cycle of suffering-to-endurance-to-character-to-hope, that cycle is turned by the movement of God, because God suffers us in love, and God endures us in faithfulness, and God’s character is to rejoice in us anyway, and God’s hope is God’s plan and God’s will, which because of God’s love will not be disappointed.

I know that in your experience the cycle can go the other way round, from suffering-to-misery-to-hatred-to-despair. The choice is yours, you have the freedom. I invite you to choose again to turn the suffering of the world to hope for the world, and when you energize your turning by the love of God that rises and the Holy Spirit pours into your hearts, you will not be disappointed in your love.

Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

June 9, Pentecost: Introducing the Holy Spirit

Acts 2:1-21, Psalm 104, Romans 8:14-17,  John 14:8-17, 25-27

This is a teaching sermon. It’s a catechetical sermon. I am not aiming to inspire or convict you, but, on the other hand, you might find the doctrine inspiring on its own. It’s the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

But first, for a moment, please think about your body. Your head, your chest, your arms, your belly, your legs. Where inside your body is your person, your personality, your inner you? In your chest? In your head? Behind your eyes? In your brain? In your mind? Behind your mind? Is your person more intimately you than even your mind? Would that be your soul? Are you a soul, and is your soul the seat of your person, your unique and intimate self, more you than your body is you?

The intimate personhood of God is what we call the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God’s soul. The Holy Spirit is not an afterthought to the Father and the Son, not the Harpo to Groucho and Chico, but the purest essential inner God—if there is a God, and if this God is the one who raised Jesus of Nazareth up from the dead. In our gospel lesson Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to his disciples on the night before he died, and he kept his promise fifty-three days later, at Pentecost, in our first lesson. Pentecost is fifty days after Easter, seven weeks plus a Sunday, and we celebrate the Holy Spirit, that third person of God who while always third is yet most intimately God.

The Holy Spirit is easily and frequently misunderstood, especially by Christians. The Holy Spirit is misunderstood as one-third of God, so that when you have the Holy Spirit inside you have one-third of God inside you. But the Holy Spirit is the whole of God–in the person of the Spirit, just as the Father is the whole of God in the person of the Father and the Son is the whole of God in the person of the Son.

This is the mystery of the Holy Trinity which tests our logic and which makes no sense to Jews and Muslims and Unitarians. But the orthodox Christian claim is that when the Holy Spirit came down upon the apostles at Pentecost, it wasn’t just one third of God but the whole of God who came down upon them, and into them, and out into the world in front of them.

The second misunderstanding is to take the Holy Spirit as more of a What than a Who, as not a person but a force. Well, after all, the Holy Spirit is revealed in fire and in wind, and is described as an energy, the original energy, and sometimes the life-force. And it’s true we don’t experience personality in the Holy Spirit in the same way that we experience God the Father as a personality (not always a nice one!) and that we experience God the Son as a personality (a nicer one!). It’s hard to attribute personhood to someone who doesn’t show much personality, like the Holy Spirit.

Yet the orthodox Christian claim is that the Holy Spirit is a person in her own right, and this must be if the Holy Spirit is the soul of God, God’s most intimate self, God’s unique self, just as in your case as a human being. The world experiences your person in terms of your body and your actions and your history but you yourself experience your person in terms of your inner soul that no one else can see. So if the Holy Spirit is the soul of God, then the Holy Spirit is a person.

Of course, if this analogy works, it may be that we are just projecting our own experience of our personhood as God, as the critics of religion claim, or it may be that the Holy Spirit really is the original person behind the universe from whom all personhood and other persons and personalities derive.

To be a person, you have to be living. If you’re dead you’re not a person any more, not actively so. And this remarkable thing that we call life, this unaccountable force and distinctive energy that is shared by all living things and only by living things, this is claimed by orthodox Christianity to be a gift to the universe especially by the Holy Spirit, who is the Lord and Giver of life, according to our Nicene Creed. And where the Holy Spirit gets this gift to share is from out of God’s own life.

In some religions, the gods are the personifications of the energies of the universe. Hinduism says as much. We experience the energy of life, and we project it as divine, and we call that God. But Christianity turns it the other way around, that God projects the universe and the Holy Sprit shares God’s life with the universe that God projects. It’s like an author who projects a novel, and the author gives to her novel the gift of story, and just as the author is the boss of her novel so the Holy Spirit is the Lord of life. The question is how much freedom do the characters have.

Imagine the novel as a living, open book, and that the author can speak to her characters, so that they can lead their lives within her story. The Holy Spirit is such a speaker. Our Nicene Creed says that the Holy Spirit has spoken through the prophets. Here too is personhood—that we speak. A person is a creature who can make meaning out of words and share those words with someone else. The persons who cannot speak only prove the rule by what we say of them. A person rightly speaks.

Of course many other living creatures communicate with sounds and even complex signals, but again, that proves the rule, when you consider the incalculable difference between the sounds of animals and the speech of human beings—from baby talk to nursery rhymes to poetry to daily gossip to great libraries to the calculations of astrophysics to the gazillion bytes of code that we pour into the universe.

The universe is full of information, because the Holy Spirit speaks, and because we are persons too we take that information and we answer back and elaborate and expand on it, and in so many languages that Jesus never spoke. As Jesus says, “You will do greater works than these!”

So it’s no wonder and yet a joyful wonder that the Holy Spirit reveals herself on Pentecost as speech within her fire, for she is a person with great energy. And, characteristically, the Holy Spirit speaks through the speech of other persons, and not in her own voice. The Holy Spirit is polite and even self-effacing. This is characteristic of love, is it not, as a loving mother wants her children to do works that are greater than her own.

If the Lord Jesus had not ascended, and remained on earth, he might have done great works, but instead, always the gentleman, he yielded his presence to the Spirit for the Spirit’s turn, so that the Spirit might do greater works precisely within you who do your works, as humble and broken and fragmentary as your works might be.

They are broken but the Holy Spirit is your Advocate on your behalf. Your Advocate with God is God’s own self. A mystery. The Advocate is your lawyer, your solicitor, your counsel and advisor. The Spirit tells us what to tell the world on God’s behalf and also what to say to God. And when we cannot find the words The Holy Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. You have this Holy Spirit in you, and she is not confined to your directing her. She does more in you than you can track or trace. She takes responsibility for you, for she is the Lord and Giver of your life.

Let me close with a whole different set of images from our second reading, Romans 8. It’s easy to miss that St. Paul is using Exodus imagery. The Children of Israel were led out of slavery by the Glory Cloud of God, which St. Paul identifies as the Spirit of God. But in their freedom, as they journeyed through the desert, they could not shake their spirit of fear, and they kept begging to fall back to Egypt and the security of slavery, and surrender their inheritance, the Promised Land.

But now, since Pentecost, you are not the Children of Israel but the adopted Children of God. and your are given the same Holy Spirit inside you that was in God’s natural child, Jesus. So, if for Israel the Holy Spirit led them as a cloud up there in the desert sky, so now the Spirit is inside you leading you through the wilderness of human history and development, until you arrive at your inheritance, the ultimate Promised Land, which is the whole redeemed creation.

And as community of Jesus who are the children of God journey through history, the Holy Spirit inspires us to a freedom beyond the freedom from slavery to the positive freedom of children, of play and creativity. Oh, the generosity and love of God to us, that we should have room within God’s plan for our own play and creativity. Oh, the love of God for us, that we may do greater works than even Our Lord himself.

O Lord, how manifold are your works. In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. May the glory of the Lord endure forever, may the Lord rejoice in all his works. I will sing to the Lord as long as I live, I will praise my God while I have my being. May these words of mine please God, I will rejoice in the Lord. Bless the Lord, O my soul, Hallelujah.

Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.