The Spooky Side of God

In the Christian sub-culture I come from we never really talked much about the Holy Spirit. As someone once said, our Trinity involved the Father, Son and the Holy Scriptures. Sure, we read about the Spirit in the Bible, but the sense I picked up was that the Holy Spirit was like a volcano that had largely gone dormant, except for an intermittent trail of smoke to serve as a reminder of another time. Fire and brimstone may have flowed freely during the early years of the church, but most of that lava had long since cooled, I was assured. Things were stable now.

Over time I met other believers who seemed to talk about the Spirit all the time. These Christians prayed for anointing, they spoke in tongues, they told of prophecies and healings and other wonders unheard of in my childhood world. Basically, they freaked me out. While their sense of expectancy jarred my assumptions about the Spirit’s dormancy, I sometimes got the sense that they had somehow found a magic lamp that could produce a miraculous genie when rubbed in a certain manner.

I’ve now pendulum-swung in my relationship with God enough that I’m familiar with—and also uneasy with—both sides of this contrast. And in both of them I see a common, often unacknowledged struggle: we don’t know what to make of a God who promises to be incarnate among us. Each Christmas we sing about Immanuel God-with-us but we’re not quite sure what to make of it when God actually shows up.

The disciples had the opposite problem. They were scared to death that their Immanuel would leave them. Whenever He would hint of his return to the Father a deep panic would rise up within them. How could He could leave them. That’s when Jesus began to get very specific about the arrival of the Holy Spirit. Without bothering to get into the Trinitarian complexities of it all He simply assured them that He would be with them always, to the very end of the age. He would come in the person of the Paraclete: the come-alongside-to-help-and-guide-you person in the Trinity. (You’ll notice that most New Testaments translations struggle to translate that word, and with good reason.)

So…here we are, with Jesus Christ alive and well and still bringing his changes in our world. Still bothering all the right people and soothing all the wrong ones, just as he did back then. He’s still here, through His Spirit.

I wonder how He reacts to some of the troubles we have with His Spirit? Does he grieve when we pronounce Him dormant, no longer needed for spiritual warfare today like He was in the New Testament? Does He bristle when we start creating instruction manuals spelling out techniques for getting Him to do certain tricks and wonders? (“Rub the lamp with this kind of motion and then genie will come out—just watch!”)

All this makes me more and more grateful for the scriptures. I can turn to the scriptures to find out who the Spirit is, what He has done, and from there I can get some important guidance for what He may be up to. With the scriptures I can test the spirits, finding out which voices speak with the dialect of Christ. Unpredictable? Yes. Unfamiliar? No.

I’m so glad the Holy Spirit isn’t a new development—a recent upgrade available only for those who register. He’s guiding, if we’re willing to keep in step.

No really...I mean it!

It always feels really weird to me to have to say something that I’m not sure I really mean. Or maybe that I’m really sure that I don’t mean. It can feel like marveling at the Emperor’s new clothes.

I remember how difficult that was as a kid. Having to say “thank-you” when I didn’t happen to feel very thankful. Having to say “excuse me” when someone clumsy got in my way. Having to apologize to my brother for something that deep-down I figured he had coming.

Sometime I’d try to hold out against these injunctions: “But I’m not sorry!” However, parents have a way of winning these childhood standoffs, and eventually I’d mumble my contrition even as my demeanor glared my dissent.

That always seemed silly. Why say something if you don’t really mean it? What good does it do to insist to Aunt Sally that you really do love her zucchini-and-peanut butter lasagna? Why say it if you don’t mean it? That only makes sense.

But on the other hand, I think there are times when we might not mean something until we say it. While my views on a toxic casserole might not waver, there have been things that I know I didn’t mean until I started to announce them. Take almost anything having to do with real love, for instance. I have shockingly few moments of spontaneous servanthood; usually I have to prompt myself to be helpful or to apologize or even to let someone else go first through a doorway. Those kinds of things just don’t come naturally to me. There’s a sense in which I can still hear my parents’ instructions: “say thank you…say you’re sorry…”.

My point is that sometimes I won’t really feel something until I say it. The very process of going through the motions helps me situate myself in the attitude that I really want to have. Saying I'm sorry helps me be sorry when it doesn’t come naturally. It helps me mean it better, you could say.

I find that the same kind of thing often happens in prayer. Later this morning our congregation, The Gathering, will be holding a special prayer service. Our people will be led in prayer by our worship leaders, in spoken prayers and in some of the songs we sing. Some of our people will choose to pray with special prayer teams positioned around the room. And I’d bet good money that we won’t fully mean many of the things we say to God in those prayers, at least not at the time that we say them. Like telling God we trust in Him, or that we really want to see His will happen in our crisis situations. We’ll likely profess faith that doesn’t ring very true, or ask for guidance when what we really want is for God to take a few pointers from us.

We’ll say things that we don’t really, fully mean. We’ll join with the father before Jesus in Mark 9: “I believe, help my unbelief!”

And frankly, I’m OK with that. While it’d be great to think that our hearts always feel the right things, some of those things won’t fully change until after we hear a loud trumpet blast. And in the meantime, we’re still sinners, and we’ll still have to say some of these things to help us mean them.

Really.

Better Sinners? (Or, the whole point of this blog)

“This time I’m going to do better”.

The words come muttered with determination: filled with equal parts guilt and gratitude. I’ve just sinned. One of my favorite temptations came along, I saw it for what it was, but I let it get me anyway. No major felonies; just a reminder of my messiness. And now afterwards, my conscience feels bruised, my spirit feels sheepish, and I struggle to convince myself that next time I’ll do better.

I remember once as a child asking my parents once if grown-ups ever sinned. I recall them smiling and trying to explain to me that sometimes grown-ups lost their tempers or did things to hurt people. As a pastor and his wife, my parents knew full well the darkness that still lurks in the sunniest Christian adults. But it was difficult for me to imagine the grown-ups in my church still struggling with sin. From my elementary-school perspective, sin was something eventually to be outgrown, along with the need to go to bed at 8:00. I just had to wait.

You know...I’m still waiting.

It helps me to think about the recovery movement. Alcoholics Anonymous and other groups have helped millions come to terms with addictions that won’t go away. The idea is simple: while an addict won’t be done with the addiction in this life, he or she can still become free from it. The addicts learn to allow God to lead them into a new life that is no longer at the mercy of the addiction. A recovering alcoholic will say that while she is still an alcoholic, she has not had a drink in a decade. Still an alcoholic, but a much healthier one. A better alcoholic, one might say.

What if we looked at sinners in the Bible like this? What if Jacob’s history of deception or David’s relapse with Bathsheba or Peter’s denial were somehow part of that same process of God allowing us to hit bottom, acknowledge our helplessness and finally turn to His higher power to be set free? And what if we viewed the Christian community as a network of “sinners anonymous” groups? That'd actually be pretty cool.

Hi...my name’s Ron, and I’m a sinner.