Come Holy Spirit

This Sunday is the Day of Pentecost, one of the principle feast days of the church (i.e. one of our greatest and most important holy days). It's the day when we hear the story (Acts 2) of the Holy Spirit coming upon the disciples with a rushing wind and tongues of fire.  It's a story we know well, but I also suspect that we may have a falty impression of what the story is about. 

It would be easy to read the story of Pentecost and think it's all about deliverance, celebration, victory, and strength. After all, wind and fire - the signs of Pentecost - are mighty. And what is the Holy Spirit if not the new manifestation of God's power on earth, ready to equip and empower us with signs of wonder? And that's correct, in a way. The Holy Spirit is the presence of Christ in the world.

Except, it's the presence of the crucified and resurrected Christ, which means it is not so simple as we might like or prefer. As famed preacher David Lose writes, "In the cross of Christ, we see God's strength mediated through suffering, God's victory achieved through defeat, and new life pledged and provided through death. The crucified and resurrected God we meet in Jesus is a God of paradox, and so we should look for no less in God's Holy Spirit." Maybe it's time to rethink our understanding of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity who we all-too-often forget to fully recognize and claim. The Holy Spirit does not come to solve our problems but to create them.

Think about it: absent the coming of the Holy Spirit, the disciples would have gone back to their previous careers as fishermen. But once the Spirit comes, however, that return to normalcy is no longer an option. With the Spirit in them, they are compelled to travel the world and share the unlikely message that God has redeemed the world through an itinerant preacher from the backwaters of Palestine - who, by the way, was executed for treason and blasphemy.

The Holy Spirit doesn't solve the disciples' problems.  The Holy Spirit creates them.

I hope you had a chance to read New York Times columnist David Brooks recent piece that challenged new college graduates to jetison the American obsession with self-fulfillment (you know, "finding ouselves") and instead "find themselves" in service to others by rising to the challenges they discover all around and outside of them. "Most successful young people," he writes, "don't look inside and then plan a life. The look outside and find a problem, which summons their life.... Most people don't form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling."

The same is true for us as followers of Jesus, as a church, and as people filled with the Holy Spirit to be about God's work in the world. No amount of time spent on developing a mission statement or devising new member campaigns can substitute for looking around us and asking, "Who needs us?" and "What can we do with our resources to bear God's love to this part of the world?"

The Holy Spirit is not here to solve our problems, but to create them by showing us where we are needed--where our talents and skills and passion can and should be to help bring about God's healing and redemption. Being a Christian isn't only about discovering peace and tranquility, but also about being challenged to grow. 

So this Pentecost, I hope you'll come and feel again the power of the Holy Spirit.  Just don't be surprised if your life starts getting wonderfully, meaningfully, joyfully complicated.