Now if that weren’t confusing enough, he went on to
explain that because of the presence of the Holy Spirit they would be empowered
to bring others to believe in Jesus. It was with these parting words that Jesus
tried to soothe their anxieties about facing the future without him. He
promised that through the Spirit they would be able to hold on to the past as
they awaited the future with confidence knowing that ultimately they would be
with him again. And you know what? That
exact same promise extends to us today!
But what does all that really mean?
Seriously, what or who is this Holy Spirit we talk
about? Have you ever thought about the
number of times you have said Glory to the Father and to the Son and to
the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning is now and will be forever? Probably more times than you could ever
count. You know the funny thing is that whenever we try to imagine what that
triune God might look like I think most of us run into the same problem. Only
one of the three is easy to visualize and that’s principally because only one of
them was incarnate. In other words,
human as well as divine. But it’s also true, however, that most people do have
some image of what God looks like or is like.
Whenever I’ve taught a confirmation class we always talk
about that very thing at the beginning of our time together. What does God look like to you? How do you imagine God?, I ask and I always find that most people can
answer that question fairly easily even though the answers will be wildly
different. The problem, however, comes when we try to talk about God the Holy
Spirit. Asking what that looks like poses a bigger problem for most of us.
If we turn to the Bible for help we find that all four
gospels seem to agree that at least on one occasion the Spirit of God looked
like a dove. It wasn’t literally a dove, but it looked like a dove as it
dropped through a bright crack in the heavens and came to rest on Jesus during
his baptism. On that first Pentecost we’re
told that the Spirit made another appearance in the form of a wind. “And
suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind and it
filled all the house where they were sitting.
And there appeared to them tongues of fire distributed and resting
on each one of them and they were filled with the Holy Spirit.”
After that incident what we know from the record left to
us in the other New Testament accounts of the disciples’ activities after Jesus’s
ascension, is that they never knew when the Spirit would descend upon them
inspiring them as to what to say or do.
Even though they were never forced to obey it they all did because when
they were in the power of the Spirit it seemed as if they were tied to a
current of power at the very source of the universe. They really didn’t have to
know where they were headed or why, all they had to do was to agree to go. Now
several thousand years later, that living current is no less mysterious to us
than it was to them.
Perhaps the Holy Spirit is more verb than noun. Perhaps it’s what connects us to one another over vast gaps of time and space. What enlivens us when we’re down to dry bones. What blows our equations and replaces them with designs as lovely as they are true. Yet we still have that problem of representation. How do you believe in something as invisible as air? How do you explain to yourself much less to anyone else why you trust your life to a Spirit you can’t decipher? Well as improbable as it may seem, modern science has in the last few decades provided us with some startling new metaphors for this inexplicable Holy Spirit.
After 400 years of estrangement occasioned by the Age of
Enlightenment, the explorers of the
physical world and those of the spiritual world are in the process of a most
exciting reconciliation. In the last 20
years books have appeared that defy being easily categorized as science or
religion. Does John Polkinghorne’s The Faith of a Physicist or Belief
in God in an Age of Science belong in science or religion? What about The Physics of Immortality by
Frank Tripler or The Quantum Self by Danah Zohar? These are only a few of many different books
which reflect the work of a variety of scientists, philosophers and theologians
who are exploring the link between physical and metaphysical descriptions of
the universe.
Zohar, for example, introduced the idea of “quantum coherence” which is the
self-organizing capacity of all living systems to take inert unstructured
matter and draw it into dynamic mutually creative dialogues. “Life”, she writes,“seems
always to create more life, more and greater ordered quantum coherence”. Does this sound like physics or the first
chapter of Genesis?
Tripler meanwhile sees the Holy Spirit in universal wave
function which is that all pervasive physical field that gives being to all
other fields. This all determining reality he says is both personal and
transcendent. It’s that “which
gives being to all being, which gives life to all living things and which
itself is generated by the ultimate life which it defines”.
John Polkinghorne, who’s an Anglican priest as well as a
particle physicist, frowns on theological efforts to make the Holy Spirit an
agent of the human psyche alone. In his
view, God isn’t some fitful
interventionist in human affairs.
Polkinghorne sees God at work in the continually unfolding process of
the universe both as creator as well as participant. Which means, that the Holy Spirit isn’t
outside of this process but rather right in the middle of it, groaning along
with all the creation as the future continues to be born. But Polkinghorne is also quick to point out,
this view doesn’t suggest that we should equate the cosmic with the
divine. It’s important to make a clear
distinction between the Creator and the creation if God is to be the ground of
our hope beyond the present physical process. And yet it’s also not possible to
completely disentangle the work of the Spirit from that process. “The
Spirit’s work is concealed within the flow of present process,”
Polkinghorne argues, “but its power derives from the presence of God’s
future within that process”.
Two examples from quantum physics give
some shape to these new theological ideas.
The first is chaos theory which argues that we don’t live in a clockwork
universe. The pioneer most often cited in this field is Edward Lorenz who
discovered in 1961 why the weather is never entirely predictable. While he was
feeding initial weather conditions into his computer, he found quite by accident that the smallest
changes in those conditions produced large scale effects. A butterfly beating
its wings in Beijing today can transform a storm system in New York next month
which is a scientific way of describing the mutuality of the universe.
Chaos is perhaps too strong a word for this phenomenon since the process isn’t one that’s wildly out of control. It’s simply unpredictable because nothing exists in isolation and everything depends upon everything else. So here’s a fact from the physical world that embodies an article of faith which suggests that the creation isn’t governed by a slide rule. It’s governed by God; a God who has knit us together so that even the beat of a butterfly’s wings has a wide ranging effect. In a world like that who knows, the weak may indeed confound the powerful and the foolish just may give the wise a run for their money.
A second phenomenon is the E. P. R paradox named for
Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen who discovered in 1935 that
two particles correlated at their “birth” will continue to act in relationship with
one another even though they may be light years apart. In other words, reverse the spin of one particle in the smog
over Pittsburgh and the other particle will reverse its spin on the far side of
Pluto as if each particle knew what the other were doing. Since this happens instantly, can we
seriously doubt that there’s some form communication at work in the universe
that’s faster than the speed of light? Quantum physicists may not know what to
call it. Believers, however, just might call it the power of the Holy
Spirit. That enlivening wind of God that’s not subject to time or space. That
powerful wind that catches up all creation in one invisible breath.
John Polkinghorne claims that “the ultimate and
total intelligibility of the universe requires that there be an eternal ground
of hope who is the giver and preserver of human individuality as well as the
eternally faithful Carer for creation”. Yet in the end these new
metaphors for the Holy Spirit are no easier than the celestial dove or the
violent breeze of scripture. If the Holy Spirit is what we confess it is, the
Lord the Giver of Life, then it’s proper
that no living thing should know how to describe its maker. It’s enough that we should know what it is to
be sustained, surprised and set into a relationship with this Spirit who
continues to defy our understanding even as it gives us our lives.
Let me close this morning by sharing with you a visual
picture which I think summarizes what I’ve been trying to suggest. There’s a
contemporary painting I’ve read about but haven’t actually seen in which a
little girl stands alone with her back to the viewer. Her feet are firmly planted on the
ground. She could be any affluent modern
child dressed in matching shorts and tee-shirt, a pair of sturdy sneakers on
her feet. She’s looking at a billowing white sheet stretched on a wooden frame
that’s been planted on an open hillside before her. It flaps like a sail in the
wind. Bright light and shadows play on the sheet and on the little girl’s long
straight hair. Her limbs are strong and taunt as if she’d been running only
seconds before and will soon take off again.
Although we can’t see her face, her focus on the captured power of the
wind seems intense as expressed by the tension in her arms and legs and
hands.
What is she thinking as she stares at the sheet? Who placed this frame with its sail on the
hill? Who dug the post holes? Who laid the crossbar and tacked or laced
the white sail to the frame? Whoever
built it provided wood and sheeting but not the wind that ripples over the
cloth. Wind, child, and light are
briefly one. A sanctuary on a hill.
Our challenge, as Jesus’ 21st century
followers in this parish we all love so much, is to continue to tell the story
of our God who loves and cares for each of us so that we can bring others to
God’s healing presence and breathe new life into places of death and
despair. You and I can do that, as
surely as that person erected that sail on the hill, because God has promised
each one of us the gift of the Holy Spirit to empower us.
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