Take a chance! Spiritual advice to the Spirit-starved church

Scripture: Romans 8:18-38

Happy Holy Spirit Recognition Day! (or as the rest of the Christian Church calls it: Pentecost). The one day where Lutherans tip their cap ever-so-briefly to the Spirit, doing it of course with a sideways glance so we can be sure that the Spirit isn’t actually doing anything, like a dog that we have caged up because it’s just too unpredictable. Yet, we look at it every once in awhile, shake our fingers, and say firmly, “Stay!”

Stay put, Holy Spirit, because you are unpredictable. When you get out people start speaking in tongues, raising up their hands, and even, occasionally, shouting out “Hallelujah!” and “Amen!” even when there is no bold print telling us to say it! And what would become of us if we were to do that? Even our Assemblies of God churches don’t do that up here!

Stay put, Holy Spirit! Sure, if you open the Book of Concord, which I know all of you good Lutherans do for bedtime reading each night, you will find that something like 80% of it is about works of the Spirit. 80% of what makes Lutherans Lutheran is the Spirit moving through our worship and our daily lives. But no, it’s too scary. Keep it locked up.

You think I’m exaggerating, but when one of our children gets the least bit excited during a children’s sermon, what do we do? We laugh. Part of us wants to be that child, free to say what he wants, to worship without the fear of what others think.

It’s frightening that we feel unable to act how we’d like, because that thing we have boxed up that we find scary is the primary way we have to interact with God. We’re all about Jesus—dying on the cross for you and me—but we cannot even know Jesus Christ without the Spirit. If you haven’t noticed, Jesus is long gone—dead, risen, ascended to the Father. We don’t get to experience God in the flesh like they did. We have only the scriptures, which are debated and wrestled over, and point us toward one thing that remains after Christ: God’s Holy Spirit sent for us. We cannot know God apart from the work of the Spirit. We cannot have faith without the work of the Spirit. Nothing that brings us together here can even begin to happen without the work of the Spirit.

But we don’t much care for that, to be honest. We’d rather believe it was something deep inside of us—some good part of our soul so that we can give ourselves the credit—that brings us to faith, that causes us to get up in the morning and come to church, because if it’s something inside of us that does this then we are good people and those who don’t do what we do are less good, and we can stick out our tongues in that most Minnesotan of ways by thinking those most vicious of passive-aggressive Christian words: “I’m praying for you.”

By the way, this is the difference in American Christians from the north and the south. Southerners say “I’m praying for you” and Northerners just think it.

I’m praying for you because you’re not as faithful as me.

I’m praying for you, because it makes me feel better.

Now, I’m not talking about actual heartfelt prayer for somebody for whom you ache, but that kind of prayer that you’re probably not actually going to do anyway, but if you do it’s because it reminds you how much better you are than everyone else. It helps you erect a barrier between you and the Spirit’s work through other people—even people you don’t much like.

So, what do we do instead of inviting the Holy Spirit into our lives to mess with us?

We blog about it. Well, OK that’s what we- millennials do. (Every one of us being the armchair sociologist that we are) We’re the ones who’ve decided the one reason the church isn’t as alive as it could be is because we’re missing from it. Funny. But your generation would have done the same stinking thing if Facebook and Wordpress were a thing when you were an embattled 20-something. All of us feel underrepresented, underappreciated, underwhelmed with programming, under-everything. And I want to suggest that there is a very simple reason for all of this: In our rush to make sure we are heard we have stopped letting the Spirit do anything.

We have become so fearful and scarcity-driven that we have taken the one thing that God uses to give us life—the Holy Spirit—and we have put that Spirit behind bars, locked it up, and sealed the exits, so that it can never get away. And there it will sit imprisoned until the last of us closes the doors of the church for the last time, and it doesn’t really matter when that is, because without the Spirit whatever we do in the meantime won’t mean a thing.

This is not a money issue, it’s not an amount of people issue; it’s a fear issue. God promises us one thing: We will have life in abundance. But that doesn’t mean we can’t slowly strangle ourselves. And sometimes we’d just rather not have life at all.

People up here have some very good personal traits. We are salt of the earth, humble people who don’t judge outwardly and go to lengths not to appear rude. We are mostly nice, welcoming, encouraging, and loving. On the whole, I rather like all of you. In fact, there’s not a whole lot to dislike. But none of those traits make us alive as people in Christ. In fact, a by-product of our humility is a sense of caution that keeps us from wondering together about our faith, because we don’t want to offend and, frankly, we aren’t sure what our faith means to us because we’ve always been so scared to admit that we don’t know much.

This is why I don’t stand up here and say, “As you all know, the book of Romans is Paul’s theological treatise on justification by grace through faith apart from the works of the law.” I don’t say that because you probably don’t know that, and—even if you do—you might have absolutely no idea what that means. But, here’s what your Confirmation teacher never told you: that’s OK! I’d much rather you not know, you wonder aloud, you even—God forbid—change your mind about a thing or two, and actually allow yourself the space to be wrong from time to time. I’m much rather all of that than I would like you to sit still, say “nice sermon” and think, “Man, I’m glad the pastor can think about these things, because it’s just too deep for me!”

It’s only too deep because you’ve never allowed yourself to dive in.

The Spirit is always knocking us upside the head with the fact that we don’t know what on earth is going to happen next, but the only way we see that is by spending our time being open to it and taking a chance because of it. A people who are listening to the Spirit are not afraid to be wrong, they sometimes go down a path for a moment, thinking this is where they’re being led and then they change direction. We have to forever rid ourselves of this idea that what doesn’t work is a failure and what works is a success. The Spirit works in the process, and it brings resurrection out of death, so a person could say, actually, that the Spirit is most present in our risks and absolutely present when we say, “Shoot, that idea didn’t work at all.”

There’s this great story told by Ken Robinson in his TED talk about these three children from the Christmas pageant who come out as the wise men in the wrong order. The first says, “I’ve brought gold.” The second says, “I bring myrrh.” And the third says, “Frank sent this.” When the kids don’t know they just take a chance and go for it. Adults don’t do this. We’d stop and ask for the line. Kids don’t have our fear of failure.

I want to be part of a church that makes mistakes with great frequency, because I can feel the Spirit there.

Unpredictability is a sign of God at work. Predictability is human beings doing their best to hide the Spirit.

You all know this. Where is the place and time where you felt most alive in your faith? Think about it. Seriously, think about. Picture yourself when your faith meant the most to you, when you felt most in the presence of God. Now, ask yourself a question: In that moment, was your life and the lives of those around you on a rather normal trajectory, or did something just happen that had you so off-balanced that you didn’t know where to stand?

The Spirit moves through change and upheaval while we do our best to keep the status quo because it’s comfortable. But the spirit has the final word, because the creation is still groaning, we’re still groaning, and it’s perfectly normal to want to go to our happy place and avoid all that, but as anybody who has been through labor will tell you, it’s coming one way or another. And whether it’s a baby or the resurrection of the dead, the best things require going through the worst.

Mistakes, pain, weakness—all things we spend our lives trying to avoid—all things the Spirit works in and through.

My hope is that we are a people who proclaims the resurrection promise so brilliantly: You are saved because of Jesus Christ, dying on the cross. You were once subject to death in all its stillness, but now you will burst through death into new life. You are saved by grace through your faith in a God who will never let you go. I hope we can embrace that promise so strongly that we let the Spirit wreck havoc with everything else.

Spirit, come. Remind us that we are more than conquerors through Christ who died for us. Then do with us what you may.

Spirit, come. Stir up in us things that we do not want to do, that make us uncomfortable, that make us question ourselves. Stir up in us ideas that won’t work. Give us big dreams that we can’t imagine ever coming to pass. Help us set goals that seem impossible. Make us into failures. Then, change our hearts. Make us to wonder whether anything is ever a failure, make us to wonder what might yet be. Help us not to judge by what worked and what didn’t, but instead by what seems to be spirit-led and what is done out of fear.

Help us to imagine that what we do here might actually be your will, and the proof is not in what has gone by but in what is happening now. This is a spirit-led church. It has to be. Because that’s the only church there is. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter what building we meet in, or whether we put money in the offering plate, or whether the constitution and bylaws say that this is a church or not. All that matters is that the Spirit is doing things with us. If not, then we’re not a church. But that sounds too scarce, too fearful. We are a church, because we continue to be led by a hand we can never quite see. We feed people. We teach people. We share the good news that is in us. And, by the grace of God, the Spirit continues to push us where we otherwise would never go.

Amen.