John 14: 15-16, 23b-26
I've known a lot of permanent deacons.
Most of us have one thing in common. There was a time when we heard
a little nagging voice telling us to look into being a deacon, and we
ignored it – sometimes for a very long time, before finally giving
in. I first thought about it when I took care of a man whose son was
one of the first deacons ordained in our diocese. I was busy with my
medical career and pushed the idea down into my subconscious. It
kept popping up. Several years went by and my life became busier. I
had six kids and was running a department at Baystate Medical Center.
I also was seeing a full load of patients, and trying to expand our
department's efforts into Greenfield and Ware. In this, perhaps the
busiest part of my life so far, I finally gave in to the pressure.
The Holy Spirit was pushing me in a direction I didn't want to go.
If you want a nice quiet life, don't listen to the Holy Spirit!
So it's that one day of every year
that we turn our attention to the Holy Spirit. And we will be happy
next Sunday when we can get back to God as Trinity, and then Jesus as
our food and drink, and then march through the year contemplating the
life of Jesus. We can handle that. But the Holy Spirit is kind of
scary. It seems that if we let him get too close, he does things to
us; he makes us go where we don't want to go. I don't think Jesus
wanted to be driven into the desert at the beginning of his ministry
– but that's exactly what the Holy Spirit did. . I'm not sure the
Blessed Mother wanted to be an unwed mother in a small town where
people were always looking for someone to talk about, but the Holy
Spirit didn't ask. The angel said, “He will overshadow you”. We
see a lot of examples in the Acts of the Apostles when the Holy
Spirit pushed the followers of Jesus around, making them defy the
leaders of the Jews, making them disrupt the peace all over the
empire. They knew that if they followed the promptings of the
Spirit, it might end up badly. And that is still true – if you let
the Spirit in, he will probably make you go where you do not want to.
Look at our readings. If you were a
frightened apostle in a locked room, and Jesus appeared in the room,
you would probably be quaking in your boots. But after he comforts
you, he promises to send the Holy Spirit – or as we used to call
him in the olden days when I was a kid, the Holy Ghost. Somehow that
isn't as reassuring as it should have been. “You're going to send
us a ghost to keep us company, Lord?” And in the reading from Acts,
here the apostles have been spinning their wheels wondering what they
are supposed to do now? And again they are gathered in a room, when
fire and wind appear, and seemingly push them into action, out into
the crowds, to the very temple at the center of Israel, where they
begin to preach, where foreign languages are coming out of their
mouths, where most astonishingly, people are listening.
So when we really think about the Holy
Spirit, one of the things he brings besides grateful coolness from
the heat, as the Sequence says, is the shaking up of lives. And if
you are like me, you don't want that. You want things to be
predictable, you want to do God's will, of course, but on your terms;
and if you hear the Spirit pushing you to do something new, something
outrageous, something totally out of character, if you are like me,
you say, “I need a sign, Holy Spirit! After all, maybe you are just
a hallucination, maybe you are just wishful thinking.”
And sadly, if I am reasonably
satisfied with the way things are, even if they aren't perfect, the
unpredictability of the Spirit is if anything an annoyance. Maybe if
I don't bother God, he won't bother me. Maybe if I go to church and
say my prayers and stay out of serious sin, he will leave me alone
and let me get on with life. If tongues of fire appeared over your
heads, I'd probably call the fire department.
But sometimes I am nagged by the
knowledge that things aren't the way they should be, not in my life,
not in the life of my family, not in society at large; and I see that
there is something, some little thing that I could do to push things
in the right direction. Someone is nagging me. And that's when I
wish I could remember that those apostles, who hadn't been able to
get their act together out of fear, out of a desire to avoid change –
remember how Peter told his brother apostles after the Resurrection,
after his joy at seeing Jesus return from the dead, – Peter said,
“I am going fishing”. Not only were they pushed into action, but
in that very moment they were assured that God was with them. And
Saint Paul, after a lifetime of being pushed around by the same
Spirit, was able to say, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”
Can there be any more joyful thought?
And here we sit, in our church,
waiting—for God knows what. And the question is: Are we satisfied
with the way things are? In our lives, in our world, in our church?
If so, the Holy Spirit is very likely to leave us alone. We can
safely read these lessons and say a few kind words about the Holy
Spirit and be safe for another year.
But if we are aching and yearning for
something more, if we look upon our lives and upon our world and upon
our church with a combination of fear and hope, fearing that things
won’t get better and hoping in our heart of hearts that they will,
then we had best watch out. It is entirely likely that the Holy
Spirit will soon burst upon us, leading us somewhere we did not know
we wanted to go.
