The Age of the Spirit

(Acts 2:1-21, The Story of Pentecost, and John 15:26-16:15, excerpts)

I always thought of Pentecost Sunday as the first Sunday of the Season of the Spirit, 

        which begins Pentecost Sunday in May.

But Pentecost Sunday is not the first Sunday of a new season. 

It is the last Sunday of the Easter season.

It is about resurrection as much as it is about Spirit

and it is about Life every bit as much as resurrection is about life.

The story of Pentecost tells how the first followers of Jesus were distraught and confused 

after the crucifixion of Jesus.

They didn’t know what to make of tales of an empty tomb and appearances of Jesus.

The book of the Acts of the Apostles, which is sometimes called “The Acts of the Holy Spirit” 

begins with these apostles, sad because Jesus has left them.

The writer, who also wrote the Gospel of Luke, seems not to have known of  of the Spirit, 

as an Advocate for his followers when he was gone.

For many, the Holy Spirit became another name for God’s grace and presence,

as a way to deal with the absence of Jesus.

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At a conference 20 years ago, I was talking with Paul Laughlin, 

a Bible professor and Methodist who is about my age.

We went to different seminaries in the late '60s and early '70s.

He asked me, “Did you ever think about what we weren’t taught in seminary?”

I replied, I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. 

He said, “We weren’t taught world religions and the Spirit,

the two most significant things about religion since we graduated.”

In the ‘60's mainline Protestant seminaries didn’t teach these things.

E.g., we didn’t know about Pentecostals, now more than a fourth of all Christians in the world 

        and the fastest growing part of Christianity.

But by the early ‘70's, as the world began changing and ever more rapidly, 

people everywhere began to talk about something called “Spirituality.”

Now at my old Presbyterian seminary there is a course on World Pentecostalism,

taught by a professor who is a Bishop in the Church of God in Christ, 

and who sits on the board of trustees at Oral Roberts U.

That’s pretty much of a shock to me.

And the faculty now includes Baptists and Jews and Catholics, so we are left with the questions, 

“What does it mean to be Presbyterian?”  And “What does it mean to be Christian?”

Let’s look at that church name “Pentecostal.” 

It says something about the importance of Spirit

to the large number of Christians who identify with that name.

They emphasize direct personal experience of God through baptism by the Spirit, 

and gifts of the Holy Spirit such as speaking in tongues and supernatural healing.

It began in 1901 when many people were dissatisfied with the organized churches, 

when Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians were the comfortable upper classes. 

Pentecostals would hate sermons like this one.

They wanted a religion of the heart, with emotion, evidences of the love and power of God.

These evidences included the realities that they they overcame racism, 

allowed women to preach, and saw nothing dishonorable about being poor.

We can only imagine what Presbyterians then would have thought of it.

Little wonder that many people called Presbyterians “the frozen chosen.”

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I and others have told you how we are today in a period of great transition 

from the world that we have known, in which we grew up,

to something we cannot yet understand or fully imagine.

There are many writers who think that all this change and perhaps this fear of the future 

is the cause of the decline of churches,  and our national political divisions. 

Last month I spoke of how we live by violence and must learn to live by non-violence.

I think of Spirit as the opposite of violence, 

by which I mean that it is difficult if not impossible to think of, or live with the Spirit of God 

which is the Spirit of the Good, and practice or defend violence at the same time.

As many as 85% of Americans consider themselves “spiritual” in some way.

Perhaps Spirit is so desirable because it is non-violent.

To seek the Spirit is to seek non-violence.

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Spirit is more than just an event or a season or the highest value of particular churches.

It turns out that Pentecostalism and spirituality were not new.

In the 1100s a man you and I have never heard of,

thought the Christian church was in a lot of trouble.

[Joachim of Fiore was] an Italian monk who studied the Bible 

and said some interesting things about world history:

He called the time before Christ the Age of God the Father. 

It was a time of fear.

The time after Christ was the Age of the Son. It was a time of faith, understood as belief.

Believing the right things became more and more important, 

and the followers of Jesus became churches controlled by Popes and Bishops and priests.

A third era began, church structures became destabilized and decentered. 

It would be a time for fewer, but committed and active believers. 

This new time would be the Age of the Spirit. 

It would be an unsettled time, but a time of love.

Father, Son, and then Spirit. Fear, Faith, and then Love.

But the age of the Spirit was postponed, or derailed

        by the Reformation which brought an Age of the Word, 

        with strong emphasis on the printed word and the preached word. 

Spirit was mostly ignored until Pentecostalism arrived 125 years ago.

But some writers think that Joachim’s Age of the Spirit may have begun in the last century.

Those first Pentecostals knew that Spirit means a disturbance of the air 

and is translated in the Bible as breath, or wind, as well as Spirit.

Spirit is about Freedom from church authorities to be in direct connection with God.

Spirit upsets; it is revolutionary; it is the power of love between us.

Spirit brings upheaval; it is uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

There are signs all over the world that millions of people in this new age think great change is needed; 

beyond what we know as civilization,

great change in the ways we live with each other, in our work and in our government.

Spirit is a way we speak of participating in a new world and a new way of being. 

Scripture speaks of being born again, of our becoming a new humanity by the Spirit.

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Worship for many has become a way to create “spiritual” experiences; 

which means more direct experiences of God.

Here is an example of how that works.

On Long Island I brought in a large canvas labyrinth 30' across into the church fellowship hall. 

(You may have walked a labyrinth and know something about the experience of walking one.)

People walked this path in silence.

Several people who walked this path broke into tears,

the experience evoked such strong feelings in them.

They described this special experience as “spiritual.”

We enter this odd ritual, and follow a path, one step after another and it can do something to us.

Surrendering ourselves to walking on this new path, our mental pathways are somehow broken,

        and we find ourselves somehow free and controlled by something bigger than ourselves.

We usually think of the Spirit in such terms of special, out of the ordinary experiences.

For too long the church has expected and hoped for 

        another mountain top experience or another Pentecost, a special revelation, 

that would make everything all right again in the churches and in our lives.

Sometimes in life we have such religious or spiritual experiences, but mostly they don’t last.

Often it is an experience when a teenager at a summer church camp.

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But I have a book that says something different about Spirit.

Joe Haroutunian wrote:  

“The Holy Spirit is not a ghostly presence or being.

To speak of the HS is not to describe a vertical relationship

of the individual with God, but a horizontal relationship with each other.

The HS is not so much in us – as it is among us and between us."

Haroutunian called Spirit "transpersonal," not just interpersonal.

It is what happens in each of us when something happens between us, 

when we speak and interact with another person.

God is both Spirit and Love, as it says several times in scripture,

If God is Spirit, God is what happens in our interactions when the Spirit moves between us.

Spirit then is the life force and creative energy that we know in our living with each other. 

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So what is the result of all our interacting, of all our loving each other?

We speak of the spirit of the age, as the set of ideas, beliefs, and aims 

        that is typical of people in a particular period in history. 

We make the spirit of the age as the spirit is manifested among us.

This was most clearly illustrated answered by Mr. Rogers, 

        the Presbyterian minister, Fred Rogers, who had his own neighborhood on television.

He said – 

    “If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet;

      how important you can be to other people in ways you may never even dream of.

      There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.” 

That other person gives a part of what you gave to them to others.

So what we say and do and give carries the Spirit to others, 

and a huge web of thought and feeling moves through society.

The predominant thoughts and feelings of each year and decade and century 

        shift and change and move in surprising and not so surprising ways.

The spirit working between us and among us makes the culture in which we live.

It impacts what we think and feel, 

and what we think and feel then in turn influences the larger culture.

It can be good or bad.

That is why our culture is always such a mixture of good fruit and awful weeds.

The power of Spirit rising out of our interactions has a dark side

because you and I don’t always think and share what is good. 

We fill the air around us with Good and bad.

        It affects us, and we are mostly unaware of how we contribute to it. 

Sometimes we interact with people who do not respect others as worthy human beings.

So there are good spirits and evil spirits as described in scripture.

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An exercise. An assignment, if you will accept it.

Keep a journal of every encounter you have with another person, 

beginning with your conversations after worship this morning.

This includes face to face conversations, phone conversations, emails, and texts.

Sit down and make a list of the people you have spoken with since worship today.

What have you received from the other?

What have you given to the other?

What do you carry away from that encounter with the other?

What effect does it have on you later?

Does anyone come back to you days later and say – 

“You know that thing you said about family or whatever? 

I’ve been thinking about it and how it applies to me.”

Or do you go back to someone in your family or a friend,

and you tell them how something they said affected you.

That’s the Spirit at work. Spiritual Presence.

I have discovered that I can change the spirit in a grocery store 

by what I say and how I say it to the clerk there.

We can’t see Spirit, but spirit is within us and between us.

Spirit is what happens between us in our interactions.

Spirituality is relational and transpersonal. 

And the meaning of all this stuff that I have made all too complicated is simply: 

We should be nice to each other. We should listen. We should be kind. 

It's catching.

We are making the culture we complain about unless we make the kind of culture we want.

We are doing the work of God here on earth. Or we are not.

"There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”

Let’s leave something good for others and live in the Age of the Spirit.