Audio Recording
My Grandfather was a good man. He was raised on a farm in tough times
through the Great Depression, fought in World War II, came home and became a
police officer. He retired as Chief of
Police of my hometown of Waynesboro, VA, which is a city about the size of Owen
Sound. He was quiet, calm. I never saw him rattled. I remember one day
he made the news for talking an armed man out of killing himself. There was a bit of a stand off. Granddaddy knew the man. So, he just walked into the house, sat down,
and talked the man out of it. Just
thinking of that still leaves me awestruck.
As far as church went, Granddaddy never went
much. When he did it was Baptist. He rather got his church on TV. I remember one evening we were watching a PTL
Club Camp Meeting and they were singing praise songs and the singing stopped,
things got kind of quiet, and then people started speaking in tongues. Granddaddy
looked at me with a “What the Heck” look on his face and changed to The
Nashville Network. That apparently
struck him as weird.
This was when I was about nineteen. At that time in my life, Jesus had gotten a
hold on me in a very real way. I had
left my Presbyterian roots and started to attend a Nazarene church. At that church, things were different. They didn’t speak in tongues or anything like
that though they did sing a lot of praise songs and wave their hands. The church was different in that the people
didn’t go there because that’s what good people do. They were going because they were experiencing
the presence of God and their lives were changing. They met in an elementary school
cafeteria. I remember the first time I
walked through the doors into their fellowship.
I felt the presence of the Lord…the Holy Spirit. This was new to me. I was nineteen, troubled, broken hearted and
all that and to know that God is real, to know that “It is well with my soul.”…well,
things were changing for me too.
Well, Granddaddy’s world and my world collided one
evening that summer. I was living with
them at the time. It was the summer
before I started university. I happened
to be studying my Bible that evening and came across a passage in Acts where
Paul was in Ephesus and he asked the elders of the church there if they had
ever received the Holy Spirit and they responded that they had never even heard
of a Holy Spirit. A conversation ensued
and the Holy Spirit fell upon them just like he did in Jerusalem in Pentecost and
they began to speak in tongues.
It was a little after ten and Granddaddy was still up
watching TV. I decided this moment had
been ordained for me to probe a little into my grandfather’s spiritual
state. I went to the living room and
read the passage to him and asked him if he had ever experienced the Holy
Spirit. He looked at me with that same “What
the Heck” look and answered, “All those times in the war…I just had to
of.” He stood up and made his way to the
stairs to go to bed and turned at the foot of the stairs and looked at me and
shook his head in confusion wondering what was going on with me and then went
on up to bed, end of conversation. I had
never seen Granddaddy irritated like that before. At that moment, I realized that if you’re
going to talk about the Holy Spirit you better be ready to talk about life in
its most difficult times and about how people make it through by the grace of
God sometimes not even knowing that God is there. Death, grief, trauma, war, victimization,
moral injury these are all times in which we are especially not alone. God is there.
But not everybody feels the presence of the Holy Spirit in them. Just because I was involved in a charismatic
church did not mean we had a monopoly on the Holy Spirit.
But anyway, the Holy Spirit is a difficult person to
talk about. The work of the Holy Spirit is
to make it so we can experience God the Trinity and he does this by coming to
be present with and in us. He is real
and can be felt. This morning I’m going
to take a different approach that what I took with my grandfather. I going to sing a song called All Is Made Well by Glen Soderholm from
his album World at REst. Glen is a
Presbyterian minister, Christian music artist, and a friend of mine. He writes good music. This song very beautifully sums up the work
of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit comes and
shows us the Father
And sings his dream over his
sons and daughters
The Holy Spirit comes and
shows us the Son
And breathes his mercy over
everyone
And all is made well
It is well
In this embrace
The world is placed
And all things are new
The Holy Spirit comes and
shows us Wisdom
And strengthens her people
for the kingdom
The Holy Spirit comes and
shows us each other
And moves us to live as
sisters and brothers
And all is made well
It is well
In this embrace
The world is placed
And all things are new
The Holy Spirit comes
And shows us the Father
And sings his dream over his
sons and daughters
The Holy Spirit comes
And shows us the Son
And breathes his mercy over
everyone
And all is made
It is well[1]
I think this song really says it all when it comes to
the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy
Spirit brings us to the Father through the Son and makes us to know that we are
in their presence regardless of our unworthiness or brokenness, that we’re
there by the loving mercy, the favour, the grace that is in Jesus, which is the
Holy Spirit and his work in us. The Holy
Spirit gives us the Father and the Son, brings us into their relationship so
that we are daughters and sons too who know the steadfast love and faithfulness
of God just as Jesus does; and we get a
taste, a vision, a dream, the Father’s dream of all things new…and it is well.
The Holy Spirit comes and gives us wisdom, the
knowledge of how God wants us to live…an experience of the love of God so that
we can live accordingly. The Holy Spirit
writes the ways of God upon our hearts so that we come to know intuitively how
we are to live. The Holy Spirit builds
community in our midst. He causes us to
see each other as God sees us each. He
causes us to see each other with compassion and helps us to see beyond where
people are at to what they could be and are in Jesus Christ and he moves us to
help them in that journey.
Well, how do you put poetry into prose? The Holy Spirit is with us, working. Know that you are beloved children of the
Father just as much as Jesus the Son is.
Open yourselves up to that reality.
Let the Holy Spirit make you new.
Amen.
