Letting the Spirit loose

Text: Romans 8:22-27

So today is Pentecost—or as we in the Lutheran Church call it: Holy Spirit Appreciation Day. This is the day that we give the Spirit a little stage and show it off, just this once, so that it stays happy and doesn’t start to do any crazy things with the church. We might understand that it is God's church and not ours, but still, the last thing we need is tongues of flame and an unruly Holy Spirit on the loose causing people to do unusual things. If the Spirit wants that we can give it the address of the Assemblies of God Church down the street. It can do all sorts of stuff down there!

God forbid we would let the Spirit loose.

Now, I know Midwestern, Scandinavian Lutherans—being one myself—and so I understand the fear we have of letting ourselves go even a little. So, I don’t expect that I’m going to start being interrupted with “Hallelujah” and “Praise Jesus”… but it kind of would be nice. I mean, the Spirit’s big task in life is to put us to death, which sounds kind of like a morbid thing, but in truth dying to yourself is the most “gospelly” you can do. There is profound freedom in simply not caring about what those around you think. In this part of the world—in our culture—shouting out “Hallelujah” or just plain talking about what the Spirit is doing in your life would require some serious disregard for normal conventions; it would require some serious dying to what other people expect of you. There are people in this community who are very comfortable talking about their faith to anybody, anywhere. I thoroughly enjoy them--no matter what it is that they believe--because at least they have the conviction to admit it.

It’s hard to not care what people think of you, but it's also critical to the well-being of the church.

I’m kind of a hopeless optimist (to use a particularly oxymoronic phrase), so rather than focusing on the Acts reading, which is the story of Pentecost, I want to talk about Romans and make this conversation at the same time bigger and yet more specific to our lives. Given that the Spirit is about putting our little wants and desires to death, it’s important that we also know what it is then that gives us life. “In hope we were saved,” says Romans 8:24. We don’t experience new life because we have God all figured out. So to go out and tell people about your faith isn’t to claim that you have all the answers. In fact that is precisely the opposite of the kind of hope that Romans 8 is talking about. Hope requires knowing that you do not know. Hope requires giving up your own importance. Hope requires not seeing.

But not seeing is difficult, right? It's one thing if you hope for a pay raise, which you know is in the realm of possibility, but quite another to hope in Jesus Christ. This is where the Spirit comes in. This is where we need to let the Spirit loose; where we need to stop trying to chain it down to one Sunday a year. Romans 8:26 says, “The Spirit helps in our weakness.” When you’ve lost hope, when you don’t feel it, when life gets really complicated, when (again as Romans says) creation groans, when any bad thing happens, you will lose hope; it’s not something you will hold on to strongly in every moment in your life. It just doesn’t work that way. We are not only incredibly optimistic creatures we are also incredibly volatile. One moment we’re ready to tell the world about how great God is because we found an unopened Twinkie in the recesses of our cupboard, and the next moment we are cursing God because the Twinkie just made us sick.

We don’t know how to pray as we ought. We don’t know how to worship as we ought. We really don’t know how to praise God in any way approaching what God deserves. Creation is groaning and so are we.

That’s where hope comes in. It doesn’t make sense if you look at the world. How many times do you turn on the television to watch the news and immediately lose hope for the world? And yet, removed from those messages of despair, people are innate and strangely hopeful. Psychology could undoubtedly give numerous reasons why we remain optimistic, but I have another explanation; one that is at the heart of Pentecost. It is this: hope is something that can only come from outside of ourselves; not from within. You can’t make yourself more hopeful by working hard at it. On our own we are all Eeyore, but the Spirit does something to us. Even Lutherans who don’t like to talk about the Spirit are filled with it every time we have hope for the future, because hope requires dying to our self, and in the place of our little desires there is room for the Holy Spirit to flex its muscles. Even Lutherans are filled with the Holy Spirit; even if the idea of shouting “Hallelujah” in worship makes us want to hide under the pew, even if the idea of being spiritual makes us just a little nervous, we can be (and often are) filled with the Spirit.

Think about moments in your life when you desperately hoped for something. Now if you thought about little hopes go and throw those out the window and start over. Don’t think about hoping to catch that walleye or hoping to get that video game for Christmas. Throw out all the hopes that have to do with you wanting something for yourself. Now, think of the hopes that have really, really mattered in your life. Think of those things that broke through your Midwestern sensibilities and maybe even physically brought you to your knees in prayer. Sometimes those hopes have been realized; sometimes they haven’t. I don’t want you to focus on whether your hopes came to pass or not. Instead, I want you to focus on what you felt in the moment of desperation when all you had left was to turn to God.

That is where you find the Spirit. That is where the Spirit is destroying your ego. For those of you who are parents, think of that moment when your child was born. When they entered the world all that mattered was the hope that you could bundle up in your arms. That is a spiritual moment. Think of when you first learned that a loved one had died; think of what you felt. That is a spiritual moment. In those moments, your desires became distinct from your sense of self-preservation and in that way the Spirit was interceding for you, as Romans 8 says, “with sighs too deep for words.”

My worry when I look at Lutheranism in America is that we are losing that sense of the Spirit in our daily lives. We still experience it in times of new life and death, but on normal days we mostly go about ho-humming our way through life without any care about what the Holy Spirit is doing. This is not the same thing as being emotional; I don’t want you to think that. I don’t think God really cares if you are emotional or not, but God does care that you stop bearing the weight of self-importance on your shoulders.

I’m not that important, and I think that’s the only reason the Spirit has time for me, because in my best moments I’m capable of admitting that I’m not worth much on my own. Each and every one of you reading this are not that important. You’re just not. You’re important to God, but not because you’re important to the history of the world. You might do great things. You might be the next Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gandhi or Mother Theresa, but even the great things you do will happen only because you will have died to yourself along the way and let the Spirit do its thing. You don’t deserve the credit. And that is a wonderful, wonderfully freeing thing.

This is where Christians are both similar and very different from Eastern Religions. Buddhists believe in emptying yourself to achieve some spiritual nirvana. Nirvana literally means “where there is no wind.” For Christians, the wind is the exact same word as "spirit" in Hebrew; the wind is essential to the very process of letting go.

I want to see a Lutheran Church that gives itself up to the Spirit; that is so humble about itself that the Spirit blows like crazy. I want to see a church that trusts the Spirit to guide it. We’re not there. Frankly, we’re not even close. But I have hope, because it’s not up to us. Our only job is to stop acting so important. Then—and only then—will we be free to really let the Spirit mess this place up. It’s a scary thing.

So was Pentecost.