Sermon

What the Holy Spirit looks like

Scripture Text:

John 14:15-21

Sermon:

Whenever we talk about the Trinity in Inquirers’ Class during Lent, we often get stuck on the Holy Spirit.  Folks have a lot to say about God the Father and Jesus, but not much about the Holy Spirit.  We have so many images for the other faces of the Trinity: we have four gospels telling us the story of Jesus Christ, and God the Father appears throughout the Old Testament, but we don’t have a image of the Holy Spirit in many places in the Bible.   I wonder if the Holy Spirit is the person of the Trinity who’s like the person in your family who always gets forgotten at family gatherings.   Oh, right!  Sam, yeah he’s over there.  Right.  Yeah.  No one ever knows what to say to Sam… but there he is.  The Holy Spirit can seem very abstract and hard to picture – how can we think about what the Holy Spirit look like?

There are a few fleeting descriptions of the Spirit in scripture… in the first lines of Genesis, we hear that the Spirit or  “a wind from God” hovered over the waters.  The gospel of John, too, says the Spirit is like the wind (John 3).  The Book of Proverbs talks about a spirit of Holy Wisdom that sounds very much like the Holy Spirit.  In a couple of weeks at Pentecost, Luke will describe the Spirit as being like tongues of fire above everyone’s head in the Book of Acts.  But because the Holy Spirit is just that – a spirit, more like the wind than like a person, it’s hard to have a sense for God as Holy Spirit.

Maybe you could imagine that when the wind passes by, it is God, the Holy Spirit, getting your attention.   Or when you’re enjoying a fire or a burning candle, it’s a sign of God, the Holy Spirit.  Or when, you see wind moving over the water, it could remind you of God, the Holy Spirit, moving over the water…

When you feel God in nature, what you’re feeling is probably most accurately described as the Holy Spirit.

Personally, I also like to imagine the Holy Spirit as the face of the Trinity that we can call “She.”  The Hebrew word for “spirit” is a feminine word, and I think it balances the Trinity to imagine one of the persons of God as female.  So, and I realize this may throw you off a little, but I’m going to call the Holy Spirit “She” in this sermon.  You may love this or you may hate it, I realize, but bear with me and hear this as a sort of theological experiment,

Today in the gospel reading, rather than the wind, or water, or a flame, John offers us another, more human face of what God the Holy Spirit is like.  In keeping with this idea that the Holy Spirit is mysterious, the Jesus of John also says that the world can’t see or know the Holy Spirit.  But then Jesus gives Her a very particular sort of name: “the Advocate.”

“Advocate” is sort of a fancy word.  Sometimes it’s a word used for “lawyer” (!) which maybe isn’t a word we usually associate with God!   Advocate also means someone who stands up for you, someone who gives you a helping hand, someone who offers you wisdom and insight into your situation, someone who takes your side, someone who won’t leave you when you’re feeling down.   An Advocate.

So, while the Father is God your Creator, who you can imagine as love and power reaching across the cosmos, the Holy Spirit is the person of God you can imagine as active here on earth.  And so, John also tells us that She looks like Jesus.  (How’s that for a pronoun brain puzzle!)  Jesus says that God the Father will give us “another Advocate,” and Jesus is our first.  Jesus can’t remain with us forever on Earth, but the Holy Spirit can.  Jesus promises not to leave us orphaned, and the Holy Spirit keeps that promise for him.  The Spirit breathes Jesus’ love and presence among us here on Earth.  She mediates between Jesus and human beings, mostly by acting through us as we reach out to one another.  The Holy Spirit isn’t so abstract; She’s God, alive and active, in human beings.

Whenever you’ve seen someone stand up for someone else, whenever you’ve seen someone offering a helping hand to someone down on their luck, whenever you’ve seen someone serving as an advocate for someone else, you’ve seen the Holy Spirit.  She is God among us, helping us hold one another up, helping us find the guidance we need to make it in this life.

Jesus says in John, “You know Her, because She abides with you, and She will be in you.”  “You know her”:  it almost sounds as if we’re being told about someone who we’ve seen so many times – “you might not remember her name, but you’d recognize her if you saw her.”  The Holy Spirit is not so unfamiliar after all.

And so, the Holy Spirit also looks a lot like us whenever we reach out and stand up for someone else.  Whenever we offer a helping hand to someone who needs it.  Whenever we stick by someone’s side.   Whenever we try to be more like Jesus, and spread his love through the world.  St. Teresa of Avila said in the 16^th century:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,

no hands but yours,

no feet but yours,

yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion

looks out on the world,

yours are the feet on which He goes about doing good

and yours are the hands with which He blesses people now.

So the next time you’re not sure how to imagine the Holy Spirit, or how to pray to Her, or how to explain Her to your child or another person, remember these three things:

- God the Holy Spirit looks like the wind or a fire.

- God the Holy Spirit looks like one person being an advocate for another person, one person trying to embody the love of Christ for another.

- And God, the Holy Sprit, looks like YOU, when you reach out and are an advocate for someone else, when you try to share Christ’s love with someone who needs it.

Amen.

 

Uploaded on May 30, 2011 in by RevHeidi

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