John 14:15-27
Rollins Chapel
November 4, 2004
Richard R. Crocker, Ph.D., College Chaplain
I believe in the Holy Ghost. I have not timed this sermon to coincide with Halloween, but it is perhaps providential.
Several years ago, a group of friends and I were in one of those restaurant type places that one sometimes goes to at night, and discussion turned toward ghosts. In the course of the discussion I hypothesized that most people believe in ghosts. My educated friends disagreed. So I made a wager that if we surveyed the people in the restaurant, asking them simply if they believed in ghosts, a great majority would say they did. We did a survey, going around to the tables and making ourselves obnoxious, and I won the wager. It was an unscientific poll, perhaps, and some of the respondents were perhaps too well acquainted with spirits, but I believe it is accurate. Many people believe in ghosts. I think they mean by this that they believe in real persons that we can not see. This should not have been surprising, since Christians, in particular, say that they believe in the Holy Ghost. The terminology has changed, so that "Holy Spirit" is more often used today, but whether we speak of spirit or ghost, we are saying that we believe in a living, unseen presence that infuses reality and is in fact God.
Although the notion of the Holy Spirit is foreign to some believers, it is in fact, I think, the easiest aspect of God for us to understand and experience. The word that we translate as spirit is in Hebrew the same word as breath or wind. So Holy Spirit could be as easily translated as holy breath or holy wind. It is also sometimes known as the breath of life. The genesis story of creation tells us that the Lord God formed a human being out of the dust of the ground, and then breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human one became a living being. (Genesis 2: 1) So, in a sense, every living, breathing person is a temple inhabited by the Holy Spirit, that is, inhabited by God. Far from being the exclusive possession of any group or sect, the Holy Spirit unites us as human beings, overcoming all our divisions. In the story of Pentecost in the book of Acts, when the disciples received the gift of the Holy Sprit, divisions were overcome. This is symbolized by their speaking a language that everyone, people from all over the earth, could understand.
In the Christian tradition, the universality of God's spirit is tied particularly to the witness of Jesus, who promises his disciples that the holy spirit will bring them comfort after he has left them, and that the same Holy Spirit will guide them into all truth. A life lived in the spirit is a life that is open to the winds of inspiration; the spirit becomes known to us through the moments of coincidence or serendipity or unexpected healing or blessing that makes us aware, at a minimum, that we are related to a reality larger than ourselves, and, at a maximum, assure us that we belong to God
Many people today say that they are spiritual but not religious. While people mean different things when they say this, they usually mean, I have discovered, that they feel alienated from religious institutions, but they still do experience God in their lives. This is true because the spirit of God refuses to respect the boundaries that institutions sometimes erect. A friend of mine once uttered a homely truth. He said, “You can’t housebreak the Holy Spirit.�? What he meant was that the Holy Spirit operates entirely outside of our control and does not conform to our expectations of what is proper or polite. Institutions, even churches, like to operate according to rules and policies. The Holy Spirit refuses to be regulated. Institutions like predictability. The Holy Spirit is often surprising. In a way, of course, this Holy Spirit is just like Jesus. Jesus too operated outside the boundaries – eating with sinners – tax collectors and prostitutes. His embodiment of God was startling and revolutionary. And the Holy Spirit, which inhabits this world and guides those who love him, will lead them to do surprising things in surprising ways.
There are a group of churches today that call themselves Pentecostal. They accentuate the gifts of the Holy Spirit, particularly the gift of speaking I tongues, as the disciples did in the Pentecostal story in the book of acts. Speaking in tongues – that is, speaking a language that the speaker does not understand, does sometimes happen. More often, however, the language seems to be something that no one understands. Pentecostal churches are the fastest growing branch of Christianity in the world today. Their charismatic emphasis, their emphasis on the spirit, is a welcome one in world of routine, poverty, emptiness, or oppression. People who feel the spirit do not forget it. I am not a Pentecostal, but I believe in the Holy Ghost. Through the very act of breathing, I become aware of my dependence on God, and experience that God is good, and that life is precious. With every breath we breathe, God’s Holy Spirit reminds us of who we are created to be – if we pay attention. And even when we aren't paying attention, the spirit can break into our lives to remind us that we live in a mysterious reality far greater than we are.
Many people today are interested in meditation and yoga. Often these disciplines are associated with Buddhism. They begin by training us to pay attention to our breathing. I think that’s a very good thing for us all to do. Every single one of us is sustained by the Holy Spirit, the breath of life. And so, as the psalmist says, "Let everything that has life and breath praise the Lord." Amen.
Sermon © 2004 Richard R. Crocker. All rights reserved.
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