The Holy Spirit – Sermon by Anneke Oppewal
Readings: Genesis 1: 1-5; John 1: 1-5;
Matthew 28: 16-20
When Peter told me he was doing a series of sermons on the Holy Spirit with you I was excited and daunted at the same time.
I’ve always had a bit of an awkward relationship with the whole idea of the Holy Spirit personally and it was always a bit suspect in the Church I grew up in. It conjured up images of raised hands and ecstatic scenes I, and the Church I come from, didn’t want to be identified with.
A little bit, once a year, on Pentecost Sunday was fine, but for the rest we mostly made sure to steer well clear of it as much as possible. We were more focused on Jesus, as a friend and companion, our saviour and Lord, and the Father, creator and sustainer of the world around us.
I guess we didn’t quite know what to do with the Holy Spirit, and even less with the related concept of the Trinity that seemed even more confusing and hard to understand.
In our scriptures the Holy Spirit is on the scene from the very beginning. It is God’s Ruach to use the Hebrew word which has a difficult to translate
meaning, but means something like breath or life essence that is said to be hovering over the waters from before creation. It is this Ruach, this essence that is said to be present in the Holy of Holies in the Temple, it is what descends in the shape of a dove on Jesus at his baptism, it is what Jesus promises his disciples will stay with them and work with them after he has gone, it is what he breathes onto his disciple when he meets them after the resurrection in an upstairs room in Jerusalem.
In other words: The Holy Spirit is a concept and a presence that is there from the beginning and keeps popping up all through the bible.
But if you feel a little awkward, confused or not entirely sure around the concept of the Holy Spirit or the idea of the Trinity that is connected to it, you are definitely not the only one. It took the Church a couple of centuries to figure it out and find words to define it, and when it did what it came up with in the creed was, and is, more often than not, not experienced as very helpful by many.
I guess that is simply because when we start talking about the Holy Spirit or the Trinity we are trying to find words for something that is very difficult, if not impossible, to define or fully grasp. And perhaps that is the entire point of the exercise, that we discover, when we try to define God, when we try to find words for who and what God is, that we discover that when
we move a little deeper, there are no words that adequately describe or define God. That there is more to God than we can ever grasp or say.
And yet we try, and have tried, as Christians, to say something about what is the essence of God, about our core understanding of God in that concept of the Trinity, saying that God for us is Father, Son and Holy Spirit in equal measure, one yet three, three but one, with the Holy Spirit, at least in our teachings, equal to the Father and the Son, giving expression to what God is together.
Christian doctrine, our faith, says that God can and will be experienced in three main, and very different ways.
As Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, Father of Jesus Christ and of all creatures.
As the Son, saviour, brother, example, guide, a man of flesh and blood who lived our life, suffered our death, and is alive today, walking beside us, now, guiding and caring for us still.
And as Spirit, as breath, movement, energy, inspiration, comfort and a powerful intangible presence that is way beyond what we know or define.
Putting it like that may complicate things, but it also creates room for us to have different experiences of God and relate, at different times and in different contexts to God in ways that are not always the same but may vary, wildly. It means, it tells us, that what we
know of God, what we experience of God, how God may reveal Godself to us, does not necessarily have to be the same all the time. There is room for difference.
God speaks, reveals and relates to us in different ways. As Creator/Father, as Son/brother and as Spirit/ energy.
It may not be a coincidence that these three ways of God relating to us, coincide with the three ways of us being in the world according to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.
He says we all are an ‘I’, a person, an individual that relates to itself. We are aware that we are, individuals, entities, defined and differentiated from what is around us. We are also a you, an entity, and individual, defined and different from others that always are in relation to others. Our ‘I’ not really fully known or knowable until we are, until we encounter others and become a ‘you’.
I am an I, but when I become a you because I relate to another person something is added to who we both are. Me knowing you and you knowing me adds to each of our knowing ourselves and our being known by another.
Confused? If I lived on an uninhabited island all my life and never met anyone but myself I would never learn to speak, express, think, or be as much and as
deeply as when I am there with another, or more than one, other. We get that, right?
But then we are also infinitely more than that. There is a whole host of things that go into us, defining and shaping, forming and transforming us from birth that make us who we are, makes us all into unique individuals. Family, culture, climate, food, people we meet, experiences we have, things we see, gazillions of things that go into us, shaping us, consciously or unconsciously and make us who we are, as an ‘I’ or as a ‘you’.
In God, according to the Trinity, we find three matching ways of being. God as person, an individual entity, creator, sustainer, independent, distinct, different from us, the one from whom all else flows forth and comes back to. God as other, as someone who relates to us and becomes defined in relationship.
God as we encounter him in Jesus, fellow human, as someone we can relate to, enter into relationship with, that mirrors us and invites us to mirror him, a you that meets us as equal.
And then there is God as can be encountered in so much else around us, in our experience of nature, in music and in beauty, in smell and taste, that lives in our gut and touches us in the wind that caresses our skin, that we can hear sometimes in the gurgling
water of a brook or in the wind, stormy, gently or even quietly moving around us on any given day.
God meeting us at all three levels of our being and awareness. As our essence, our ‘I’, as a friend, as a ‘you’, and in so many other less easily definable ways that keep us alive, enliven and inspire us, touch us and change us even where we are may not be consciously aware of it.
What the concept of the Trinity tells us if we look at it in this way is that God can be experienced and encountered in every aspect of our being and relating, deep inside the core of our own being, that part of us that is away from others, our deepest, secret, core self, as well as in and through the part of us that goes out and encounters, relates and connects and is shaped by the connection with others.
As well as what is in and comes through the whole wide world around us that shapes and forms us from birth, consciously, or unconsciously.
God deeply embedded and present in all of that, actively interacting with every part of us, even the most deeply hidden, even the most remotely influential.
We can experience God as creator/parent, we can experience God as saviour, brother, friend, in and through others, and especially and specifically in and
through Jesus. We can experience God as Spirit, mystical, mythical, less tangible, like breath or wind, comfort or glimpses of something other beyond us and all of that is God, in equal measure. There is no hierarchy, it is all, legitimately God.
One of the more practical implications of that for us and how we relate to the world around us is that we know that God’s revealing of Godself is not limited to what we know or understand but is much broader than that. At the end of Naidoc week for instance in that context we may bring to mind how the pre-amble to the constitution of the Uniting Church acknowledges that before Christians were here, before that particular, Christian understanding of God came to these shores God was already here in other ways making Godself known to people, connecting and relating to people. It for instance also means that built into our understanding of God is the idea that we may not know everything there is to know about God and that others, outside our religion, may have answers and revelation we don’t have and can learn from.
In the concept of the Trinity we confess a God who is seeking to encounter us, seeking relationship and connection on every level of our being. Loving and caring for us in all these different ways, inviting and invoking in us ways to bring us closer to that pure love that is at the core of God’s being, God’s expressing and God’s encouraging.
God as Father, the creator that loves the world into being, that sustains the universe that seeks healing and wholeness for the world and its creatures, who holds all that is in his hands somehow.
God as Son, encountering us as a fragile human being, another sharing our life’s journey with us, choosing to be present with us in the sticky, messy, tangled reality of human existence and sharing in it with us, making himself available in flesh and blood, in tangible, relatable ways, in people, in a person, just like us.
And God as Spirit, undefinable, intangible, moving around, among, inside and outside us, at work to make a difference, to move us and all of creation, sometimes with a groaning that is too deep for words, toward a closer synchronicity with what is God’s.
Inviting us, calling us, challenging us to move over and produce fruit from what God has seeded in us for ourselves, for others and indeed for the world: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, peace, justice, wholeness and healing so the world can be transformed into Christ’s.
To let ourselves be fed and nurtured, to open ourselves to be connected on every level of our existence to God, through nature, through creation, through Jesus, and through a myriad of other, less
definable, less tangible, but still ultimately valid and sometimes surprisingly different ways. For the sake of a world where Love, healing and justice comes to reign more and more in all of creation.
Amen. Blessing:
May God keep you and hold you, may you find Christ walking beside you guiding and leading you in life, may the spirit fill you with energy, joy, insight and understanding of what is of God inside you and all around you so you may be nurtured into a caring, healing and flourishing existence where God can be at work in, through and for us in a myriad of ways. Father, creator, son, brother, Holy Spirit, breathing energy and love in and through our lives. Amen.
