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We live in a time now when spiritual fulfillment is more of an acceptable topic around the water cooler and in coffee shops than we would think. One Saturday morning about five years ago, I was in the cycling room at the Y and a man was letting everyone in the room enjoy his ZZ Top playlist while talking to two women he didn’t know about his understanding of God and they were right there with him in the conversation. I thought it better I just listen. I was winded and when I get winded and try to talk, I sound grumpy. The last thing anybody wants to hear is a grumpy minister. Talking about spirituality, about what helps one to get in touch with that transcendent something or other out there is more welcome than you think. That’s the world today. People want to taste the divine. They want to touch something beyond themselves that can give life meaning and orientation. It is not all that uncommon to get invited to a drum circle. It is not or to walk into someone’s home and smell the incense they lit to clear the room of unwanted spirits so that the good spirits can surround them. Spiritual things are a hot topic.
So, it shouldn’t surprise us that the type of Christianity that is growing by quantum leaps globally these days the charismatic and Pentecostal varieties where, I won’t deny, there are real manifestations of God’s power happening. People getting healed. Demons cast out. Just like in the Gospels and the Book of Acts, those things still happen today. Within these movements would seem to be the Christian alternative to this pervasive hunger for a taste of the divine. They can talk about the Holy Spirit and back it up it seems. But…there has also been a quieter movement within the more traditional arms of the church attempting to teach spiritual disciplines like how to pray and read the Bible devotionally in a way that is more meditative, in which it seems God is more “personally” present and felt and communicative. That’s where I feel comfortable.
People want to be spiritual today and so it seems that if we were going to get “relevant” in our communication of the gospel we’d bag all that talk about believing Jesus died for the forgiveness of our sins so that we can go to heaven when we die and how we need to “go and sin no more” and rather start talking about the Holy Spirit and our experience of God. Some have done this and unfortunately have ceased to be the Church, the body of Christ, and turned their own spiritual experience into a god in and of itself disregarding the actual seriousness of the “S-word”, Sin, and why Jesus had to die. If this Sin-thing wasn’t deadly seriously Jesus could have just been another guru who taught us to self-release endorphins into our brains until we feel enlightened. The brain is a wonderful thing.
In these days of spiritual awareness, how do we know it’s the Holy Spirit we’re dealing with and not just brain chemicals or some other spirit? Well, the Holy Spirit never points to himself or to our spiritual experience as the chief end of our existence. The Holy Spirit always points to what Jesus is doing. It is the Holy Spirit who includes us here on earth in Christ Jesus’ heavenly life of worship and prayer before the Father and who empowers us here to carry out the work of witness to Jesus and his reign to which we are called. The Holy Spirit brings us into the very life of God so that we are an adopted part of the loving fellowship of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. He does this by bonding, unioning us to Christ Jesus to be his earthly body as his resurrected body is in the dimension of reality called heaven. A good Ascension Sunday sermon would cover that. Bond to Jesus by the Holy Spirit dwelling in us and in him, Jesus brings us before the Father as his brothers and sisters and the Father looks upon us as his own children by adoption and blesses us. Jesus includes us in his relationship to the Father, his adoration of the Father and he prays for us on our behalf. The blessing he receives from the Father he passes on to us. That blessing is the Holy Spirit dwelling in us transforming us to be like him. A modern scientific analogy would be that God has given us their DNA and it’s changing us.
That’s the picture the Bible paints when we study the work of the Holy Spirit. It may sound like a bunch of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo because we are so accustomed to hearing and practicing a form of Christianity that winds up simply being Law-based and duty-bound in practice. I’ve heard some crazy stuff in my life particularly when it comes to matters of spirituality and, to be honest, to a reasonable person the popular Christian gospel we’ve gotten accustomed to of deciding to believing that Jesus died for my sins so that we can go to heaven when we die takes a prize for being “out there” too. That coercive line of thinking was also condemned at the Council of Orange 529AD as something known as Semi-Pelagianism. That’s your historical trivia for the day.
So let me do something probably more off the wall. I would like to share with you what the Church in the 4th century agreed to be the Gospel; Gospel meaning the proclamation of what God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are doing to save their good Creation from sin, evil, and death because humanity has turned from our created purpose of being God’s image in God’s good Creation. It goes: because God loves us and always intended to fill us with his life, God the Father sent God the Son, through whom all things were created, to become human as Jesus of Nazareth and through his life, death, resurrection, and ascension in a human body he makes us to be participants in the very life of God by sending us the Holy Spirit who draws us into the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share, and who transforms us into the image of Christ, and makes us whole which is what the word salvation means. This, in turn, results in our being healed of Sin and will ultimately put an end to Death and Evil when Jesus returns. That’s the good news. That’s the Gospel. God has drawn near to us in such a way as to draw us into himself and make us participants in the divine life.
This would sound crazy, but the personal presence and work of the Holy Spirit in our midst testifies to us that this is the Truth. The personal presence of the Holy Spirit includes us into the very life of God. He brings us into the loving fellowship or communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All the love and joy that the Father has for the Son the Son receives it and gives it to Spirit who makes it known personally to each of us while joining us together in Christ so that we can respond to God with love and joy, worship and prayer, and receive the blessing of his Holy Spirit in us who works in us transforming us, filling us with the utmost of joy, thankfulness, compassion, and a desire to share the news that what God has done in Jesus Christ for all of humanity is the truth.
It is the work of the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to the truth of the Gospel and he does so in such a way as to make us part of it. I would like to play with the word “remember” for a moment. The Holy Spirit causes us to remember Jesus. On the night of his arrest Jesus took bread and a cup of wine and told his disciples to eat and drink them in remembrance of him. Most communion tables have “In Remembrance of Me” written on them. This seems to indicate that the celebration of Communion should take on a solemn note, like on Remembrance Day as we observe silence and remember those who gave their lives protecting our freedom. And so, at Communion instead of celebrating we go solemn and remember Jesus died for us. But...that solemness distracts us from the work of the Holy Spirit as we gather around the Lord’s table to remember him.
The Greek word for remembrance is amnemnesis. It means way more than just do something to remember someone and what they did for you. Sharing in the Lord’s Supper, as we will today, is not simply about remembering what Jesus did for us. Amnemnesis means to remember someone in such a way that you take on their characteristics and truly become a part of them. You may remember the story of Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Bones. The voice of the Lord told him to speak to the bones and tell them to live. The wind of the Holy Spirit moved over them and we get “the footbone connect to the…legbone” and then flesh comes upon them but they don’t have breath. God tells him to prophecy the them Breath, the Holy Spirit, to come into them and so he does God breathes the breath of the Holy Spirit into them and they live. That story is a foreshadowing of what God is doing in us by the Holy Spirit. They Holy Spirit puts the flesh of Christ on us and becomes the Breath by which this New Humanity lives.
In this meal, which we partake of in remembrance of Christ, is a means of grace through which the Holy Spirit works to make us the body of Christ, to re-member us into the body of Christ. It is Christ’s body broken and shared. His blood shed for our forgiveness. When we join together to partake of this meal we partake of him and are nourished, strengthened by the Spirit and become his body more fully. It is here at this table, where we are nourished on Christ, that all those people in the world who hunger for God can find what they are craving – the very life of the Triune God of grace. God has brought us into the fellowship of his very self. God is in us and we are in God and it is a feast. Amen.
