Last Wednesday we held a
mid-week Eucharist here, as we always do.
Quite often there are eight, ten, or even a dozen people at that
service, and they are a tight-knit group that knows and cares for one another
just as we do on Sunday morning. Last
week, though, only five people came, six if you include me. Yet it struck me as I was preparing the table
for the Eucharist that in its own way this small gathering was a perfect
expression of the worship of the church.
It was very simple--no music, very little formal ceremony, just the
Prayer Book and the Scriptures, a brief extemporaneous homily, prayers for the
church, the world, and one another, and the thanksgiving meal of bread and
wine. If someone had just dropped by
casually to see what was happening, they would have seen five older people and
one not-exactly-young-anymore priest, standing around an old table in an old
building saying old words and might have thought that nothing very
extraordinary was going on. They might
not have thought to themselves that the Holy Spirit was present. But I want to say that it was.
We hear a lot of talk nowadays
about “spirituality.” It is the term
many people prefer to use in connection with what used to be called “religion,”
and it has the advantage of being so vague and ill-defined that it can mean
whatever you want it to. In general,
though, it refers to beliefs and practices that produce a subjective
experience. Because it is subjective, people name what
they experience in many different ways.
It might be the same as other people’s spiritual experiences, or it
might be completely different, and there’s no way to say for sure.
But when it comes to
“Christian Spirituality” we are talking about life in “the Holy Spirit”. And this clearly refers not to a generality,
but to a specific. Now, it’s not my purpose
here to get into what are “authentic experiences of the Holy Spirit,” and what
are not. Subjectively speaking, there
might be no difference between what a Christian experiences in the Holy Spirit,
and what any other person’s “spiritual experience” might be. And the difference is not that those
experiences are wrong, or that Christian experiences are better, but that
Christian spirituality is not primarily subjective. That is why we do not speak of the Holy
Spirit as an experience we have, but as a gift that we receive. It comes from beyond the realm of our own subjective
experience, and our acceptance of it puts it to work, quite independently of us,
and gives us life in the Spirit.
In the Judeo-Christian
tradition, the Spirit that matters is the spirit of the creator God, which is
to say, it is the spirit of life. Psalm
104 talks about how God withdraws the breath from living things and they die,
and sends forth his Spirit and they are created, and here breath and Spirit are
the same word. You could say, then,
that at its essence spirituality is simply being alive, being carried on the
pulse of life that runs through and within and between all things.
But something happens when we
add that qualifier “Holy” to the word Spirit, which makes it mean more than
simply the rhythm of life as it is. It
makes it to be also the renewing, transforming, liberating Spirit of life that
is straining toward fulfillment. This Holy
Spirit is not only the one through whom God created the world once, long ago,
and the one who sustains it in harmonious equilibrium now, but also the Spirit who
is guiding the world onward to the fullness of truth. It is the Spirit who seeks to bring about a
further flourishing of life of which all that has been is but a foretaste and a
promise.
And this also is a
distinctively Judeo-Christian way of looking at things. Biblical cosmology does not describe the
universe as an endlessly recurring cycle, arising from the eternal ground of
existence and then dissolving back into it again and again. Instead the Bible puts its emphasis is on the
singular history of this universe,
created by God for love of the beauty and goodness of these particular forms of
existence. Every one of God’s creatures is an utterly
unique and precious member of the one great tree of life, united in the Creator
Spirit with every other creature that is and was and is to be. But what the Holy Spirit further reveals,
first through the law and the prophets, and then in the person and work of Jesus
Christ, is God’s great work of salvation.
God’s word and wisdom are coming into this world to free its precious
creatures from a futile existence, bent toward negation and death, and bring
them to full flower and fruitfulness.
The work of the Holy Spirit weaves
subjective experience, both ours and God’s, into the objective history of life
on earth. More than that, it creates a
particular historic community to carry out God’s mission of saving the world. The memory of this Spiritual history is the
direct line that connects last week’s small gathering on Wednesday at noon, and
this larger one this morning, with the event described in the story of
Pentecost in the Book of Acts. Because
before there was a sound like a mighty rush of wind, and before the divided crowns
of flame came down, and before the curious crowd came running to see, and hear
of the mighty acts of God, each in his or her own native tongue, there was a
community of friends who had come together to remember and to pray.
They came together because there
are some aspects of human experience that really aren’t meant to be kept to oneself,
but need to be shared. These are the
deep and essentially human experiences, such as joy and gratitude for the
wonder of life, thanksgiving for sharing in the existence of all things and for
the privilege of giving and receiving love.
This fullness of experience overflows the vessel of our private
subjectivity, and desires to join with others in song and dance and feasting,
in play and celebration. Also meant to be shared is our experience of deep
sorrow at the transience of life and the loss of love, the burden of sickness
and aging, our weariness of the world and fear of our dying. This is experience that fights against
isolation, that seeks the touch of another’s hand, and the recognition in the
face of an other that we walk this road together. And then there is our longing for
deliverance, the hope that there is more, the need we have to encourage one
another in the faith that God who is in heaven will in time renew the earth,
and all griefs will be mended and every wound be healed.
The people who gathered on
Pentecost Day had shared these experiences together, at a level of intensity
they hadn’t known was possible, in their journey with Jesus of Nazareth. In him they saw revealed, with shattering
objectivity and power, the height and breadth and depth of God’s engagement
with the world. And when they met to
pray that morning, it was with the knowledge that, in their shared memory of Jesus,
they held the promised future of the human race. This is not a promise of becoming god-like,
with supernatural knowledge or miraculous power. It is the promise of becoming Christ-like, of
knowing the Father through seeing the Son, and of receiving the gifts of the
Spirit of truth to do the things that Jesus did.
So that, like him, we can
proclaim the nearness of the kingdom of God, and bless the poor, the gentle,
and the brokenhearted; so that, like him, we can speak words of repentance and
forgiveness, of reconciliation and peace; so that like him we can heal the
sick, and feed the hungry, and welcome the outcast and the dispossessed, breaking
bread with them at the table of God’s friendship; so that like him we can
confront the powers of domination and death and bear witness in their presence
to the invincible life and love of God.
This is the pattern life in
the Spirit, the worship in Spirit and truth, that came down on the church at Pentecost. It doesn’t rule out spiritual exercises or practices
of solitude and contemplation, for Jesus himself went often away alone to
pray. By definition, it does not exclude
any aspect of human experience, including those that contemporary people call
“spiritual.” But neither does it
privilege them over the merest acts of kindness or prayers said in
desperation. Life in the Spirit is
connected with what is universally human, so it can communicate in any
language, and take innumerable forms. But
it does tie all our experience back to a single center, to the remembrance of a
single person, who is the objective revelation of the work of the Holy Spirit
in the world.
