May 5, 2013

Clay Nelson

Easter 6
     John 14:23-29


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Today’s Gospel foreshadows the third great festival of the church year: the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost Sunday in two weeks. Jesus in his long good-bye to his disciples before his Ascension this coming Thursday is inviting anticipation, just as Advent invites the anticipation of Christmas and Lent does for Easter. But in those cases it is not so difficult to know what we are anticipating. Jesus’ birth and death are concrete concepts we have no difficulty grasping. They are universal human experiences we can identify with. Yes, one is usually a source of joy we eagerly await and the other something we anxiously and perhaps, fearfully, hope to postpone. But we understand what they are, the beginning and end of life in this reality. The Resurrection is a little more challenging, but we have all known the hope we feel when the first signs of Spring appear after a long winter. In those cases we know what we are anticipating. The Holy Spirit not so much. How do we wrap our minds around it? How do we know what to anticipate? And you might be wondering why we should care? What’s it have to do with real life?

How vague is it? The words “Holy Spirit” are about as informative as the dash found between a person’s birthdate on a tombstone and the day of their death. There is whole lot there but it isn’t very specific.

Many progressive Christian churches around the world celebrate this Sunday as Pluralism Sunday, a day dedicated to honouring all the world’s great religions and their sacred texts as being many paths to the same wholeness, the same shalom, the same peace Jesus is offering his disciples today. All the great religions have a concept of spirit permeating the divine cosmos, for example Brahman in Hinduism, Tao in Taoism and Great Spirit among some indigenous peoples. So trying to untangle our Christian understanding of it might be true to the spirit of the day.

Christianity, Judaism and Islam all have a concept of Holy Spirit, but Christianity is the only one that personifies it making it the third person of the Trinity. According to the Nicene Creed the Holy Spirit is the Lord and giver of Life; it is said to be the inspiration for the writing of the scriptures, and the force authorising the church’s interpretation of those scriptures. The Holy Spirit led the Biblical prophets, it descended over Jesus at his baptism in the form of a dove; it is the helper and comforter, our advocate against those who would condemn us, the giver of grace, the one who leads souls to God. In catholic tradition the Holy Spirit is dispensed primarily through the church and its sacraments, which are the way people receive help, comfort, grace and salvation. Our Christian Holy Spirit is very busy and in the employ of the institutional church.

In the case of Judaism the idea of personifying the Holy Spirit as part of the godhead never occurred to them with their strong understanding of monotheism. For Islam, which is younger than Christianity, the concept is specifically rejected as a sin. For Judaism and Islam the Holy Spirit is a quality that belongs to God. It is one of God’s attributes. The Holy Spirit in Judaism is divine presence. Moses couldn’t enter the Tent of Meeting for the cloud rested upon it, and the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle (Ex 40:35). In Islam, the Holy Spirit is an agent of divine action or communication commonly identified with the angel Gabriel.

I have to assume that Jesus had a Judaic understanding of the Holy Spirit, which permeates even John’s non-historical, mystical Jesus assuring his disciples that “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come make our home with them” (Jn 14:23). Understanding the Holy Spirit in this as a presence within us does two things. It connects us to the love of God Jesus embodied and guides us as we walk our journey that is represented by the dash between our birth and death. This presence conserves and creates. It conserves our connection to one another and the source of all life while allowing us to embody that same love and creatively find our way in an ever-changing world, reinterpreting as necessary.

All too often the church has used the authority it claims from the Holy Spirit only to conserve its past interpretations, which often only consolidated its power or reinforced an oppressive culture, forgetting the creative side of the holy spirit that allows us to give new meanings to the teachings of Jesus and scripture as a whole. We see this in the church’s ignoring the ecological crisis on the basis that this earth is only a way station to heaven, or denying gay marriage on the basis of a couple of Paul’s comments, or opposing the ordination of women on the basis of the Pastoral Letters just as we once excused slavery on the basis of the letter to Philemon.

Today’s gospel allows some of us to challenge those who would only use the authority of the Holy Spirit to conserve and not to create. The Holy Spirit embodies all of who we are. We don’t only have scripture and tradition to rely on when seeking to interpret Jesus’ command to love one another. The Holy Spirit also works through our reason and experience. Some of us experience the Holy Spirit not as a wall keeping us safely within established orthodoxy, but like the wind that blows through boundaries challenging us to move unafraid into uncharted territories. If the Holy Spirit is to be personified, each of us is that person. Nor is it something we have to wait for. I would suggest that Jesus simply made his disciples aware of a reality that had always existed: One that calls us to live out our spiritual nature as humanly as possible.

This story may make the point.

“A woman named Hannah was walking through the marketplace in Jerusalem, when suddenly this forty-year-old mother of eight heard someone shouting, ‘Terrorist! Arab!’ A young man ran past her and was tackled by a soldier right at her feet.” The young man’s name was Adman al-Afandi – he was a young Muslim extremist who had just stabbed a 13-year-old Jewish boy. As the crowd closed in, Hannah felt that something terrible was about to happen, and without thinking, she threw herself on top of the young man to protect him. The crowd was shocked. They spit on her, kicked her, cursed her… But she stayed put until the police came and took al-Afandi into custody. Now, Hannah was an orthodox Jew – she was more than that, actually, she was one of the ultra-orthodox – the most theologically conservative of all Jewish sects – a group with strictly-defined roles for women. But Hannah agreed to step outside her role and to go on television with the mother of the boy who had been stabbed. That mother screamed at her – violently angry that Hannah had given sanctuary to the man who had stabbed her child. She said that she would have rather the crowd had killed al-Afandi right there in the market. “Hannah just replied, ‘I gave him sanctuary as a human being – as a child of God – and now I must explain myself?’” [i]

Standing with another child of the universe – giving sanctuary across lines of division, and especially across lines of disagreement or fear – this is one possible action to which our experience of the Holy Spirit abiding in us might lead. What kind of sanctuary do we offer each other across lines of difference?

I don’t have to wait for Pentecost to find out. We have already met the Holy Spirit and it is us.

[i] Fogelman, Eva, Conscience and Courage. pp 149-150