Awaiting the Spirit: Introduction

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Here we are in Easter Week, also known as Bright Week, the start of what has traditionally been a fifty-day period of celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. But this Easter season is, paradoxically, not an end in itself, but is leading us headlong into another feast that should be of almost as much significance to us: Pentecost.

But it seems silly and even pedantic to talk about Pentecost as thought it’s an important feast for us, because it doesn’t carry with it any of the popular cultural traditions that mark out other big feasts, like Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter. And I think that’s because so many Christians, both today and historically, have simply not known what to do with the Holy Spirit. Indeed, I think a lot of people would relate to that famous old Onion article that spoke of the Holy Spirit being made redundant from the Trinity due to lack of clarity over its (his? her? their?) job. To this point, a few years ago I was leading an education series at a church about spiritual gifts. Someone came up to me afterwards shocked that she’d never heard about this before in fifty years of being a church-goer. But I knew for a fact that there had been several sermons on the topic in the previous year. This woman was clearly engaged and interested in learning about her faith, but somehow just seemed impervious to taking in this teaching. It’s like she couldn’t ‘hang it’ anywhere because the scaffolding or super-structure of her belief system didn’t have any hooks to hang it on.

Last Spring, we talked a bit about the official theology of the Spirit in the series on the Nicene Creed. This year, in the lead up to Pentecost, I thought I’d try to fill in some gaps by taking a few weeks to look at what the Spirit does, according to the Scriptures and traditions of the Church. (Strictly speaking, it would be ‘better’ to do this after Pentecost, but I wanted to use this Easter season as a time of preparation so we can celebrate that feast with expectation and joy and hit the ground running after it.)

I’ll start by going through a bit of the history of the development of beliefs about the Holy Spirit, or Spirit of God, starting with the Old Testament, then taking a step back to look at Creation theology before moving on to conceptions of the Holy Spirit during the Second Temple period, then the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. The second half of the series will look more closely at some of the roles the Spirit plays in our lives.

I think it will be an interesting, enlightening, and inspiring exercise, so I hope you’ll join me.

Come, Holy Spirit, Come.