Awaiting the Spirit: A Call to Action

Ever since Easter we’ve been tracing the development of different ideas about the Holy Spirit, through the Old Testament, Second Temple Period, New Testament, and three broad periods of Church History. Today, as we celebrate the great and holy feast of Pentecost, when we commemorate the coming of the Holy Spirit and pray for that same Spirit to be renewed in us, it’s time to bring all of these disparate historical ideas together in some meaningful way.

In the Old Testament, we saw that there were really two parallel ideas about the Holy Spirit: a general belief in the Spirit as the breath of life that creates and sustains all living things, and a particular belief that the Spirit of God empowers specific people for specific tasks, related to the proper leadership of the community of faith. Both of these ideas have proven very stable over the millennia, even as they’ve changed in details and scope as circumstances changed. When Israel’s fortunes were low, the Prophets spoke of a time when God would send a new leader to restore them and bless the whole world in the process. And for some, this blessing included the particular gifts of the Spirit being poured out upon all of the faithful, irrespective of status, age, or sex. These hopes and dreams only grew stronger in the absence of their fulfillment, so that by time of Jesus, expectations had reached a fever pitch.

And it’s through this set of cultural and religious expectations that the first Christians understood their experience of Jesus. His birth narratives have the Holy Spirit in full motion, not only in Jesus’ miraculous conception, but also in inspiring ecstatic prophetic speech from those around him. And in his ministry, Jesus took on the words of a Spirit-filled oracle from Isaiah 61 as his own manifesto, and his teachings of the coming Kingdom of God were punctuated by miracles of healing, exorcism, and raising the dead; and he promised his disciples would do likewise. Then on Pentecost, the Spirit descended upon them in a new and powerful way, and they took to the streets prophesying in different languages, proclaiming that the ‘last days’ prophesied by Joel had come. Thereafter this pouring out of the Spirit upon the faithful became the identifying mark of Christians, and the New Testament writers expected it to empower them all to lead the community in a radically new and holy way of life.

Over the two thousand years since these events, Christians have taken these teachings in different ways. These days, it’s hard to know what we should really believe about the Holy Spirit, and what we should expect the Spirit to do in our lives. For the rest of this post, I’d like to first relate my own story a bit to lay my cards and biases on the table, and then explore some ways of thinking about the Holy Spirit today that I think are helpful, balanced, and appropriate to the Scriptures, to Tradition, and to the lived experiences of Christians today.

I grew up in an Anglican Christian clergy home. My parents had been influenced by Catholic lay revival movements, and while they were not charismatics, they had a strong belief that God, in and through the Holy Spirit, was at work in everyone’s lives. As I grew up, I took this to heart, and became quite open to the charismatic movement. This was, after all, the 1990s, and charismatic revivals were not only making waves in the Church, but even making the nightly news! And while I never spoke in tongues, I did have one very strange but beautiful experience of being ‘slain in the Spirit’. But more importantly, I also had visions — including one that legitimately changed, and quite possibly saved, my faith and life. Perhaps strangely, that experience did not draw me further towards Pentecostalism, but towards the Eastern Orthodox Church. Part of what attracted me to that world was just how pervasive and integrated the Holy Spirit was in the whole theology, liturgy, and life of the Church. While my time in Eastern Orthodoxy proved to be relatively short, that sensibility about the Spirit is something that has continued to be of crucial importance to me. All this to say (if spending six weeks doing a long historical survey wasn’t enough) that I care a lot about the Holy Spirit. I believe it should be central to the life of all Christians, but I’m also very aware of the dangers of an unrestrained and imbalanced understanding of the Spirit’s work.

So what’s the answer? As Jesus himself said, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3.8). We can’t expect a one-size-fits-all solution, or for the Spirit’s work to look the same for everyone. This also means that we have to expect a lot of unpredictability and even contradiction from the Spirit. The idea that keeps coming into my head is ‘dynamic tension’, those ‘positive-positive polarities’ or dialectical truths advocated by some Integral thinkers. After this involved study of the whole history of how people have understood the work of the Holy Spirit, I am more convinced than ever that as Christians we must affirm that:

1. The Holy Spirit is the very breath of life, “everywhere present and filling all things”; but also
2. The Holy Spirit is a gift given to those who follow Jesus (by thought, word, or deed) that empowers them to serve and lead for the good of the community.
3. Most of those gifts are available to everyone and so all are called to be leaders in the Church and wider world; but also
4. Some are called to lead in a more direct way through the charism of ordained ministry.
5. The Holy Spirit is known and made present to us in the public worship, liturgy, and sacraments of the Church; but also
6. The Holy Spirit is known and made present to us in the private prayer, desires, and direct mystical encounter within our hearts.
7. The Holy Spirit can manifest in dramatic experiences; but also
8. The Holy Spirit is most obviously manifest in the Good Fruit our lives bear. If we are seeking the Spirit’s presence in our lives, we should look for it in Good Fruit, not mystical or dramatic experiences. For the point of any such experience is to make us better able to bear Good Fruit!

In these eight affirmations, we have four sets of truths living in dynamic tension with each other: the tension between the universal and the particular; between the royal priesthood of all believers and ordained ministry; between the public and the private (Church and individual; liturgical and mystical); and between the spectacular and the mundane. Not only are all of these important to a biblical and balanced understanding of the work of the Spirit, but the tension between them is precisely where I think we see the most possibility to be challenged, corrected, and changed.

And so, on this Pentecost Sunday, I would encourage us all to keep this in mind as we call upon the Spirit to be renewed in us, and commit ourselves to living into these complex but beautiful truths as we run the race set before us.

And so, let us pray:

O Lord, beginning and end of all goodness and truth, calm haven of the storm-tossed: Open my lips and teach me to pray, and you pray yourself in me. Order and protect my life and show me the paths I should walk. And with your guiding Spirit, establish my faltering mind that it may be directed toward what is good and useful for me, for my neighbour, and for the whole creation, which you have fashioned in your love. Amen.

Holy One, grant me a Spirit of Holiness; Wise One, grant me a Spirit of Wisdom; Beginning and End of all Understanding, grant me a Spirit of Understanding; Counsellor, grant me a Spirit of Counsel; Mighty One, grant me a Spirit of Might; All Knowledgeable One, grant me a Spirit of Knowledge. O Great and Majestic One, grant me a Spirit of Fear of the LORD. Amen.

Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.

Amen! Amen! Amen!