A Sermon preached on the FEAST OF PENTECOST, May 20, 2018, at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California
Scripture readings (Year B): Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 104:25-35, 37; Acts 2:1-21; John 15:26-27 & 16:4b-15.

The Holy Spirit has to be one of the most difficult topics any one can talk about—right up there with quantum physics, it seems to me. In fact, it may be worse.
Why? Well, think about the word “spirit.” What is “spirit”? At its most basic level, it’s a breath of air: inspiration, expiration. Put more force behind it and it becomes a breeze, then a wind, then a storm. Think of it more metaphorically and it’s something we prefer to talk about in French—esprit—the quality of that enables an individual or a group to focus and summon energy for something and work effectively. Turn it back into English and it can be a indeterminate but powerful force for good or ill—a spirit of generosity, a spirit of malevolence. Give it yet a different turn and it becomes something that seems real, but also seems evanescent, unclear, uncertain—a ghost, maybe, or an apparition.
When we speak of God in terms of “Creator,” “Redeemer,” “Father,” “Son,” “Lover”, “Beloved”, we at least have a metaphor to work with. When we speak of God as “Spirit,” even the metaphor is something that you can’t pin down. You can’t form a picture of it, can’t get any sort of firm grip on.

And that’s just the way it ought to be. Because every time we Christians start to embrace the silly notion that we know all about God, that there is nothing more to understand, that the church as we know it is the final word, all we need to cure that attack of arrogance is to try thinking about the Holy Spirit.
To be sure, we’ve tried bottling the Spirit up in convenient packages called the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Sacraments. And that’s not untrue. The Spirit graciously consents to meet us in those places. The Spirit, after all, is God. And God is all for grace—grace, generosity, forgiveness, all the manifestations of that boundless love by which God created the universe and us in it, that love by which God still comes seeking us in season and out of season.
The only mistake here is if we begin to think that that’s all there is to the Spirit, as if the Spirit were very busy at baptisms and confirmations and ordinations and Eucharists—but spent most of her time (in Hebrew and Aramaic, Jesus’ native languages, “spirit” is a feminine noun, not masculine as in Latin) . . . . spent most of her time relaxing on the beach. No, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Breath, the Holy Wind blows around us all the time, everywhere we go, however little we may notice it.

Think of our first reading this morning, the famous story of Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones. Have you ever wondered where all those bones came from? People of Ezekiel’s time would have known at once. In times of peace, the dead get properly buried. A whole valley full of bones could have only one explanation: war. These are the remains of an army so utterly defeated, a people so ground down by disaster, that there was no one left to bury them. It was a good image for how the people of Israel were feeling in Ezekiel’s day. God even says as much to Ezekiel, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.'” In modern slang, “We’re dead.” And God tells Ezekiel to speak to the breath, the wind, the Spirit—it’s all the same word in Hebrew—and the Spirit will give this people new life.
What was the point of this vision? It’s to tell the people, “You are forgetting about God the Spirit, God the unknowable, God the unpredictable, God the Lover who is never ultimately defeated.” “I will put my breath, my spirit within you,” God says to the people, “and you shall live. . . . ”

But working with the Spirit is never a simple, straightforward matter. Jesus once said, “The Spirit/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.” (John 3:8) Sometimes the Spirit may even seem to disappear just when we most need or want or expect her. Our Psalm this morning reminded us of this:
All [creatures] look to you *
to give them their food in due season.
You give it to them; they gather it; *
you open your hand, and they are filled with good things.
You hide your face, and they are terrified; *
you take away their breath,
and they die and return to their dust.
You send forth your Spirit, and they are created; *
and so you renew the face of the earth. (Ps.104:28-31, BCP translation)
So many great saints have spoken about this reality. St. John of the Cross even gave it a name, “The Dark Night of the Soul.” There are apt to be times in any life when we feel that God has abandoned us, that the Spirit has gone missing. The challenge then is to remember that the love of God remains constant, even when we cannot sense it in the present moment. God does send the Spirit. God does renew the face of the earth.

And sometimes, when the Spirit makes her presence known, she takes us by surprise and launches us off in an unpredictable direction. That’s the story we heard from Acts about the feast of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter, when Jesus’s followers were slowly pulling themselves together after Jesus’ crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension and trying to figure out what they needed to be doing. “And they were all together in one place”—all of them, not just the Twelve, but everybody. “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”
Storm and lightning! The Spirit created a commotion. She effectively forced the disciples into talking with other people about Jesus and who he was and what he taught and what it meant for them. And the people who heard them were caught by surprise, too, and stuck around to listen. They heard that Jesus represented God’s great love for God’s people and that his resurrection foreshadowed God’s ultimate victory over sin and hatred and all kinds of human violence.
The Spirit can whisper quietly when she wants to. But she can also make a loud noise when that appeals to her. And she made a very loud noise that day.

So we can’t expect to pin the Spirit down once for all. We can’t limit her. We can’t channel her in the directions we would prefer. We can’t even imagine predicting her. And that’s scary, isn’t it? What if she goes away, and we are left feeling like those ancient Israelites: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost”? Or it can be scary in another way. It’s easy for individuals to claim that the spirit is leading them in new ways. But sometimes you wonder. After all, how can we tell when the Holy Spirit is at work and when it’s some other spirit? the spirit of jealousy, say, or the spirit of competition or the spirit of deceit or pride or selfishness?
The earliest Christians had problems with that because a lot of people claimed to be speaking for the Spirit and they were contradicting one another and splitting the church. There’s a lot about that in the writings of Paul. And John was also conscious of it and gives us some help with it in our Gospel reading today. Jesus, at the Last Supper, is bidding his disciples farewell. He understands their grief, but he promises them that they will receive, in his place, the Advocate, the Helper, whom we sometimes call, using the ancient Greek word, the “Paraclete.” This Paraclete, he says, is “the Spirit of truth.”
And this Spirit, he promises, will guide us “into all truth.” “Well, thank you,” we might say, “but isn’t that just the problem? How do we tell which Spirit is the true one?” Well, earlier on in this discourse, Jesus said, “the Holy Spirit . . . will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” That’s the key. The Spirit who calls to mind what Jesus told us is the true Spirit.
And what did Jesus speak of? Love. God’s love for us. Our love for God. Our love for one another and for all the world and all the people God loves. When the Spirit speaks to us about that kind of love, we know we are hearing the true Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God.

This feast day, then, gives us news of great joy. Jesus has ascended, but God is still here with us every bit as much as when Jesus walked the roads of Palestine, as much as when God promised, though Ezekiel to revive the people of Israel after their crushing defeat, as much as when God called into being this whole wonderful world around us. The Spirit can never be pinned down; she may make her presence known at unexpected moments and in surprising ways. But we can count on her to proclaim to us again and again the good news of God’s love and to prompt us into living that good news and sharing it with thanksgiving.