April 21, 2024 4th Sunday of Easter
Romans 5:1-5 John 14:15-26
One of the hardest subjects to preach about is the Holy Spirit. God is easy to preach about because God is our creator. I can always talk about the beautiful examples in this world, from sunsets to the glorious Catskill mountains. Jesus is easy to preach about because we have his words and deeds, and we can relate them to our lives. But how do you describe the Holy Spirit?
You can find a lot of poetic references to the Holy Spirit. The Bible talks about the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus like a dove during his baptism. At Pentecost the Holy Spirit is described as a mighty wind, which roars through the neighborhood and brings tongues of fire that alighted on people. The Spirit gives them the ability to speak languages that they didn’t know before so that they could go out and begin to do ministry in other parts of the world.
John Wesley described the Holy Spirit as a warming of his heart that allowed him to know that God’s presence was near him, and the certainty of God’s purpose for him. Some modern descriptions say the Holy Spirit is a God’s breeze, which means that you feel that God is pushing you in a certain direction or showing you where you need to go. Some people say they’ve heard a God’s whisper, where they feel that God has spoken to them either through a feeling or voice within. I’ve heard people use the expression: The answer to my problem came to me and it felt so right. They describe an absolute certainty that settled on their being when they knew they were doing the right thing in the right way.
But even if a gentle or mighty wind happens to you; even if your heart is warmed; even if you feel or hear a whisper how do you know that the Spirit is communicating with you? How do you know that you are truly being led to God’s purpose? How do you know that you are reading God’s message right?
We all know that history – not just our present day – is full of tragic incidences where people claimed that they’ve heard God telling them to pick up a weapon and destroy people with it. (Just look at the Crusades.) People who believed in their hearts that they are Christians have walked into Jewish synagogues and done this. Or there was that incident of a white Christian who walked into a black church and killed a whole bunch of people at a Bible study. Now I admit that these actions are the extreme actions of the question. But those people truly believed that they were somehow being led by God and doing God’s work. How can we recognize the Spirit working in us, and faithfully follow the messages, and keep ourselves on a right path and away from a wrong destructive one?
I’ve talked with people who say: You just have to rely on faith to know what you should do. I have nothing against faith. The definition of faith is the complete trust or confidence in something and a belief that something is going to happen, even if I don’t have the proof for it. The faith and belief that God is going to help me through difficult times sustains me. But I don’t think God wants us to blindly and impulsively follow our feelings because they happen to feel good or right in the moment. God gave us the ability to think our way through problems, and to evaluate our situations and our conditions, before arriving at a conclusion and an action.
I’m not saying that we should disregard those God breezes and whispers; I’m saying we should look at them before we leap.
That’s not easy to do sometimes, but I think the two scriptures that we read today show us a little bit about how we can recognize the Spirit, and discern and understand what God is telling us, when he speaks to us through the Holy Spirit. Jesus says: I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, so truth is what we have to look for.
Jesus then says that if we love him, we’ll keep his commandments, which are the building blocks of how to live a loving life. The first three Commandments are about our relationship with God. First, we love God with all our being. But because it’s hard to love such a great and powerful being that we cannot see and touch, God tells us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. So, we have a triangular relationship of love in our lives: God loves us, and we show our love to God, by loving and treating ourselves and others with respect. And when we love ourselves and others, we are loving God. So, the first way we can evaluate if the Spirit is speaking to us is to say: Does this thought or action promote love?
The next commandment is to not set up a false idol; something that you put before your love of God. In the old days people might have thought that was talking about foreign gods. But I think a shopaholic’s idol might be clothing and jewelry, or someone might be obsessed with having the latest gaming system. Do these things take aways from your love and care of others? If it is, it becomes an idol. Likewise, the action of not giving yourself a chance to connect with God on a Sabbath day is also going to pull you away from your relationship with God. Plus, murder, adultery, stealing, lying about people, disrespecting those who love you, and actively scheming to get what other people have, is not going to promote loving relationships with anyone.
So you see, we can hold up the idea of what we think the holy spirit wants us to do, next to the commandments. If that action goes against a commandment, then don’t do it!
The thing about listening to the Holy Spirit is that you have to train yourself to do it. That’s what Paul is talking about in Romans. Is it easy to be a loving person in a world full of egotism, narcissism, and hate? No, it’s really hard. Paul says that if you try to live as a loving person in a world that doesn’t think that love is valuable then you’re going to have difficulties and maybe even suffer for your faith.
But Paul says that difficulties and suffering produce endurance. He’s not talking about enduring more suffering – he’s saying that when we practice being loving people, we get better at being loving people for longer periods of time. We are going to have moments when we lose our tempers, but the more we practice loving thoughts and actions, the longer we endure being loving people against an unloving world.
And that endurance is a positive feedback loop. It makes our characters more loving, and more holy, and better able to receive and understand the messages of the Spirit. The result is that when we become loving people, we produce hope for ourselves and for others. The more love that has been poured into our hearts, the more we understand what the Spirit wants us to do.
Being a Christian isn’t just a declaration of who you were raised to be. Being a Christian is a practice. Being a disciple of Christ means you follow the discipline of Christ by living the third Great Commandment that Jesus gave to us: To love others as Jesus loves us. So, is your Holy Spirit breeze or whisper reflecting an action that will help you love others as Jesus would?
Faith is not just a feeling, it’s an experience of working with and inside God’s love. The Holy Spirit is a reflection of God’s love which helps us to see how to use that love. When you think of a loving action, that’s the Holy Spirit working in you. When you are inspired by the beauty of God’s creation, that the Holy Spirit working in you. When something says to you: look in the Bible for inspiration, or pray about something, that’s the Holy Spirit guiding you. When you get a flash of insight that gives you an answer to a problem that will help you and others, that’s the Holy Spirit talking to you. And you can know that all those things are the workings of the Spirit because you can litmus-test them against the Commandments of love.
And sometimes the Holy Spirit teaches you a lesson. One year I contacted a new coffee shop in town to ask if they wanted to participate in my church’s silent-auction. I admit that I went in with prejudice. This coffee shop was a branch of one that was in a more “prestigious” town that served the New York City population, and I was sure that the owner wouldn’t be interested in helping our small, local church. They gave us a $75.00 gift card for our auction. And I told the chair of our event: That’s the Spirit hitting me upside the head for my negative and unloving thinking.
Don’t discount the Spirit – it knows what it’s doing, and what you need; and maybe it even knows what you don’t think you need.
Yes, the Holy Spirit is a little difficult to hear, to see, and to figure out. But by practicing love, those breezes and whispers will eventually become mighty winds and roars in your life. And they’ll support you as you make your way through the world with love.
pastorpeg 