The Stranger Within (John 14:23-29)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on May 1, 2016, Easter VI)

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Are We Unacquainted with the Holy Spirit?

When is the last time the Holy Spirit moved you? Spoke to you? Spoke through you?

If these questions bring a lump to your throat or a clammy coldness to your hands—then welcome to the club. You’re not alone. Almost every Protestant diet suffers from a malnutrition of the Holy Spirit. We know about God, we know about Jesus…those two are all over the Bible. But who exactly is this Holy Spirit?

As a child, I remember hearing its alternative name, “Holy Ghost,” and for years, I half-thought of the Holy Spirit as a ghost that might one day be hovering over my bed when I awoke. The thought terrified me. Which is a bit ironic, because in today’s scripture Jesus describes the Holy Spirit as a parakletos—“advocate” in our translation, but the word more generally means “helper.” The Holy Spirit is here not to terrify us but to help us.

Conventional “Pneumatology”

That’s a simple enough point: the Holy Spirit is a “helper.” But say anything further, and we’re stepping into a fiercely contested territory of belief. For centuries, theology has policed this territory. For centuries, its long beards and longer robes have made the rounds, systematizing what—if Scripture is anything to go by—must surely be unsystematizable.

You’re probably familiar with the conventional theology of the Holy Spirit. It goes something like this: the Holy Spirit is the exclusive property and privilege of Christians. Which means that some people have it, and others don’t. This image of the Holy Spirit contributes, I think, to the dramatic manifestations of the Holy Spirit that we see in some churches. In other words, if the Holy Spirit only belongs to certain people, then there should be a visible difference in these people. They should seem more spirited.

Unfortunately, this way of thinking about the Holy Spirit leaves a lot of Christ-followers in doubt. If they haven’t spoken in tongues, or fainted, or encountered a blinding light—well then, how can they be sure that they have the Holy Spirit? Perhaps you felt this doubt a few moments ago, when you tried to remember the last time you felt the Holy Spirit.

Revisiting the Scene

But perhaps we’ve listened a bit too gullibly to what theology has told us. Remember—theology always arrives late at the scene, a little bit like detectives on the scene of a crime. Someone reports a God-sighting or a God-feeling, and the long beards and robes of theology jump in their cars and rush to the incident. When theology arrives on the scene, it tries to piece together what happened. It gathers witness reports, confers, speculates. But—and it is crucial to remember this—anything theology says is always after the fact, always a human attempt to put the unspeakable into words.

So today, I’d invite us to assume the role of Sherlock, or Columbo, or another eccentric detective of your choice. And rather than accept the standard story that theology has drawn up, let’s go back to the scene of the crime ourselves. Let’s search for evidence of the Holy Spirit ourselves, and see if we come up with anything different.

A Character Sketch of Our Suspect

First, a character sketch of our suspect. In the Greek, “Holy Spirit” literally means “holy breath” or “holy wind.” That important detail leads our investigation back to the very beginning—to creation itself, where we are told that “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (Gen 1:2). This wind of God, or spirit of God, appears time and time again throughout the Old Testament, which might suggest that the Holy Spirit is not limited to the hearts of card-carrying Christians, that the Holy Spirit is in fact a sacred breeze that blows through unsuspecting open windows all over the world.[1]

According to this character sketch, then, the Holy Spirit—or holy Wind—blows beyond the boundaries we draw. It sweeps over all the earth. And therefore we should expect to see it in more places and people than only those who self-assuredly proclaim its presence.[2]

A Holy Hijacker of Hearts?

Now I suspect—and this is me speaking from my own faith—that the Holy Spirit is more down-to-earth than theology would have us believe. I believe in a world full of divine wonder, where the sacred springs from the smallest and most mundane of things. To limit the Holy Spirit only to the most conspicuous and dramatic acts would sap the world of its wonder, would overlook the tiny miracles of the Spirit that happen in hearts as ordinary as yours and mine, as ordinary as the hearts of strangers we will encounter throughout our life.

What, exactly, are these miracles though? How is it that our hearts experience the Holy Spirit? Can we really give an honest, personal answer to that initial question: When is the last time you felt the Holy Spirit?

Jesus puts it simply in today’s scripture: the Holy Spirit is the helping Spirit of God that dwells in our hearts.[3] In plain language, this means that there is someone else, someone not us, living inside us. There is a stranger, a holy stranger, inside our hearts. We generally like to think that we’re in control of our lives. But if this Holy Spirit stuff is real, then that means that there’s someone else inside who seizes control on occasion. There’s a holy hijacker within.

The Feelings That “Take Over”:

Where Do They Come From?

Not long ago, I read a little anecdote from a small-town pastor that describes this holy hijacker in a wonderfully real and earthy way:

I passed two young fellows on the street the other day…. [T]hey work at the garage. They’re not churchgoing...just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They’re always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don’t know why they don’t catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent. [4]

Reading this got me thinking. There are certain things we do, like laughing and crying, that we do not do—not consciously or voluntarily. When I laugh, who is it really that’s laughing? Is it me? Did I decide to start laughing? When I cry, am I the one who decided to start crying? Or is there a mysterious movement within me, something inside that bubbles up through me, that reaches the surface in laughter and tears? Perhaps those tears and that laughter are not entirely mine. Perhaps they belong to a stranger inside me, a holy stranger. Perhaps these emotions that seize us are evidence of the Holy Spirit; perhaps our feelings are fingerprints of the Holy Spirit, still fresh on the scene.

I’m not talking about feelings that we’re supposed to feel: not the obligatory smiles or the sympathetic grimaces that we use to show we’re listening. I’m talking about what surprises us from within, what hits us out of the blue, so that we ask ourselves, “Where did that come from?” To talk about the Holy Spirit this way is not to reduce it to emotion, but rather to infuse emotion with wonder, to reveal the miracle of the Holy Spirit that is within emotion, bubbling up through it. To talk about the Holy Spirit is to talk about more than a psychology of emotions. Psychology only tries to explain and predict emotions. Just like the weather channel tries to predict the weather. But as we know all too well, the weather is unpredictable. And so is the Holy Spirit, the holy Wind, the holy stranger within us that hijacks us and leads us to feel what we ourselves did not intend to feel, inspires us to think what we would never have thought on our own.

Much Holier Than We Think

Our lives are much holier than we think. The Holy Spirit has its fingerprints all over us—in our spontaneous laughter and smiles, our unprompted tears and grimaces, the unsolicited pangs of regret and reflection that seize hold of our willful selves. And according to Jesus, these feelings that the Holy Spirit prompts, remind us of Christ’s words. I’d imagine we all experience this from time to time. When we act vengefully, and afterward remorse washes over us, reminding us of Christ’s call to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies. Or when we witness another person’s ache, and an uninvited tear finds its way out of our eye, reminding us of how Christ himself weeps, how he urges us to look after the sick and welcome the lonely. Or when we hear good news, and a pure smile seizes the corners of our lips, infusing our hearts with hope, reminding us of the gospel of Christ’s redeeming love that will one day reconcile all creation.

So let us have no doubts when it comes to the Holy Spirit. Let that lump in our throats be gone. Instead, let us be filled with the peace of Christ, let our hearts be untroubled and unafraid (14:27). It has never been a question of whether we have the Holy Spirit.  It is the assurance, rather, that the Holy Spirit has us all caught up in its currents. Yes—if we examine our hearts, we will find countless footprints of that holy hijacker, innumerable smudges and traces of its surprising residence within.

When was the last time you felt the Holy Spirit? If your memory fails you, then look ahead, be alert, expect the unexpected. It happens more often that we give it credit for. It happens every day, in the strange stirrings that are within us, that come over us and seize us. The Holy Spirit is not the property of the holy rollers, nor is it the privilege of the pious. As Jesus himself says, it “blows where it pleases” (John 3:8). And thank God, this holy wind that sweeps over the face of all the earth—it is pleased to blow in our hearts.

Prayer

Christ, we love you
And try to keep your word,
But the promise of the Holy Spirit
Is a scary one.
We like being in control.
Even so, we open ourselves to you:
Hijack our hearts, again,
Holy stranger within,
Helping us to become more fully
Ourselves,
And the world to become more fully
Your good creation.
Amen.

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[1] Or as Jesus puts it earlier in the gospel of today’s text, the sacred shepherd calls to sheep in other folds (John 10:16).

[2] In today’s scripture, Jesus promises the Holy Spirit to those who “keep his word” (14:23-26)—or more colloquially, treasure and trust and do his word. Passages like this one—and Jesus’ famous proclamation, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (14:6)—are less narrow than they are commonly read. Jesus displaces discipleship from a literal self-identification with his name to the figures of “following a way” and “keeping a word,” tropes that emphasize what we do over what name or flag or label we identify with.

[3] The promise of the parakletos, the “Helper,” (14:26) appears to be a restatement of the promise of God’s indwelling (14:23).


[4] Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2004), 5-6. Emphasis mine.