May 23,2021 “What’s A Holy Spirit?” Rev. Peter Hofstra
The
Holy Spirit is our focus today. Our Acts
passage is the ‘usual’ for Pentecost. The
promise of the Holy Spirit comes earlier, from Jesus, in John 15. Jesus is going to heaven and is sending
another. As the church receives the Holy
Spirit, a baptism of the Holy Spirit, as did Jesus. From Luke 3: “John…(said)…“I baptize you with
water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming;… He will baptize you with
the Holy Spirit and fire…Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus
also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, 22and
the Holy Spirit descended upon him…like a dove. And a voice came from heaven,
“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Luke wrote Acts, notice the foreshadowing,
baptizing with the Holy Spirit AND fire, the tongues of flame.
In
John 15:26, Jesus speaks of the role of the Spirit. 26”When the
Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth
who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf.” The Spirit testifying on Jesus’ behalf, by
the descent upon the disciples, is establishing the church, the finalized House
of God. And as Jesus finalized so many
things of God begun in the Old Testament, so it is here. In Exodus 35, we find the Holy Spirit at the
establishment of God’s first house, the Tabernacle.
30Then Moses said to the Israelites: See,
the Lord has called by name Bezalel son of Uri son of Hur, of the
tribe of Judah; 31he has filled him with divine spirit, with
skill, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft, 32to
devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, 33in
cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, in every kind of craft. 34And
he has inspired him to teach, both him and Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the
tribe of Dan. 35He has filled them with skill to do every kind
of work done by an artisan or by a designer or by an embroiderer in blue,
purple, and crimson yarns, and in fine linen, or by a weaver—by any sort of
artisan or skilled designer.
The
last half of the Book of Exodus lays out in extraordinary detail what went into
the creation of God’s house. It can be a
snooze-fest to read if we do not remember how significant this is, God dwelling
among God’s people, foreshadowing what is happening here in Acts. The tabernacle was limited, focused. The church is not, she is the tabernacle
perfected through the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, perfected by the
permanent descent of the Holy Spirit to create something beyond simple human
capacity for the worship of God.
Under
the Old Covenant, the Holy Spirit inspired the leaders of God’s people. After the people settled in the Promised
Land, they were led first by the judges, local leaders who rose up to deal with
local emergencies and insurgencies. The
Holy Spirit is recorded as coming upon some of them, people like Joshua and
Gideon and Samson. It made them into
powerful war leaders. The Spirit came
upon the kings as well. When Samuel was
going to anoint Saul as king, we read in 1 Samuel 10:10, we read 10”When they were going from there
to Gibeah, a band of prophets met (Saul); and the spirit of God possessed him,
and he fell into a prophetic frenzy along with them.” But the Spirit could come and leave. David was anointed to replace him and we read
in 1 Samuel 16, “13Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed
him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came
mightily upon David from that day forward. Samuel then set out and went to
Ramah. 14Now the spirit of
the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from
the Lord tormented him.”
What we know about the Holy Spirit in
these instances is that it made those it took hold of into more than they were
before. Artisans became
super-artisans. Men became kings and war
leaders. The power of God took things up
a few notches. But it had
limitations. It did not remove sin from
those it took hold of. We see that as we
watch Saul fall out of favor with God.
Even under the power of the Spirit, sin leads him away. For David too, read the story of his life and
you will see that alongside this faithful man of God there is a tremendous
amount of sin and the suffering that is its consequence. So, the Spirit upon us today is the same, it
makes us more than we are by ourselves, but it does not purge sin from our
souls. Because God’s plan was never
about removing the sin from our beings, but rather forgiving it by the death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
As we
shared last week and today, as Jesus was ascending into heaven, he sent the
disciples to wait in Jerusalem for the coming of another, for the Coming of the
Holy Spirit, which would do for them as it did for Jesus at the beginning of
his ministry. But the difference to what
came before is that the promise of the Holy Spirit is one of permanence, that
God is always with us, through Jesus’ death and resurrection, in fulfillment of
God’s Plan in the world.
So
what then is this Spirit? Is it like a coat
of transcendent paint over the sinful walls of our being? Well, the bible speaks of two parts of the
human construct, the spirit and the flesh.
Throughout the New Testament, the flesh part is the sinful part, while
the spirit is what is being renewed by God-until the Second Coming, when the
flesh will be renewed as well. The key
is renewal, of something already a part of who we are.
I
think we can see this in the creation story.
In Genesis 1, it says we are created in God’s image, male and female, we
were created in God’s image. Genesis 2
talks about the mechanism. Man was created from the dust and God breathed
into this dust the breath of life. Where
theology went sideways was to impose a misogynist view of the ENTIRE bible from
the creation of woman from Adam’s rib.
The church is still, all to often, stuck in ‘woman as helper’,
therefore, second class. Which, in
Jesus, is plain old WRONG. Male AND
female were created in God’s image. And
despite some of Paul’s sidebars, he is the one to remind us that, in Jesus,
there is neither male nor female. We
fall into the sin of hierarchy, a sin undone in the coming of the Holy Spirit.
But
that is a tangent that easily distracts us from the very idea of the breath of
life. It is specified upon humanity, as
being made in the image of God.
Elsewhere, in Ecclesiastes, Solomon, the wisest person ever, builds on
this when he talks about the life of humanity being like, but still different
from, the life of animals. There is
something in being in God’s image, of the breath of life, that establishes
humanity as a creation apart. That folds
into the language of the human spirit, something corrupted in the fall of
humanity, forgiven in the resurrection of Jesus, and renewed in the Holy Spirt.
I
believe the sense of the Bible is that we, as humans, are beings of spirt and
flesh, both fallen to sin. The Holy Spirit
is the divine that, when we surrender to it, renews the human spirit with the
power of God’s own spirit. I think that
is where we get the stories of the calm of martyrs in the early church. They were in the arena, facing off against
lions and whatever other cruelties the Romans could come up with, but there was
peace. They knew what is next, that the
pain and destruction of this life cannot match the peace we have in Christ when
the renewal of our spirit and flesh is made complete in the life to come.
It is
a moment I have been privileged to witness with certain people, who have come
to the end of their journey on this earth, know the peace of God as they
prepare for the next step into the life to come. But that Spirit does not just show up on the
doorstep of death, it can be seen throughout the lives of people who have given
themselves over to the power and wonder of Jesus Christ. You know how every Sunday we offer the peace
of Christ one to another? It is in the
power of the Holy Spirit that makes the possibility of this peace read in our
midst.
The
human spirit is ultimately what makes us so powerful. It is illustrated powerfully in the first Captain
America movie. They wanted to make a
super soldier. And who was Steve
Rogers? Was he the big, gorgeous
specimen that the serum made him into?
No, he was the scrawny kid getting beat up all the time. But with the indomitable spirit that said, “I
can do this all day.” You could kill
him, but you were never going to beat him.
It was that spirit, that moral center of goodness, that sense of
fairness, that made him the ideal candidate for the serum, because those
qualities anchored him in his newly found physical abilities.
There
is a modern day parable for you. The
little guy with the huge spirit, the big heart.
The power of the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is that it renews our
own human spirits into that huge spirit.
Jesus calls the Spirit the Advocate in the gospel of John. The Spirit will glorify Jesus, according to
verse 14, because it will take what is of Jesus and declare to we who have the
Spirit within us. And what is Jesus
about? Love, sacrifice, giving his own
life in place of his friends. It is
Emmanuel, God with us. Jesus with
us. The Holy Spirit upon us. It pushes God from being head knowledge into
heart knowledge, not just something we think about, but something we feel,
something we do things about.
That
is the lead-in to Pentecost. Where do we
go from here? Look up the fruit of the
Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit. Paul
is very eloquent about that. It is
pretty awesome that which we receive from God, by Jesus, through the Holy
Spirit. Its what those men and women
received in Jerusalem some ten days after Jesus ascended into heaven. And, to continue through Acts, it is the Holy
Spirit that is the a game changer. A
hundred and twenty then, if memory serves, to billions today.
No comments:
Post a Comment