THE UNCOMFORTABLE SPIRIT

            Today, the Day of Pentecost, we celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the Christian Church. I suppose this service could be described as the church’s annual birthday party.

            It was the the gift of Holy Spirit which started the church off and the Holy Spirit continues to be essential to the survival and flourishing of the Christian community. Without the Holy Spirit, none of us would be here today; without the Holy Spirit there would quite simply be no church.

            But the strange thing is that although it is the very basis and foundation of the Church, the Holy Spirit is also very often a problem to the Church, a source of worry and difficulty.

            In old English the Spirit was, as you know, called the “Comforter”. The old meaning of that word was something more like “Strengthener”, but when we today hear the Spirit described as the “Comforter” this gives us the impression of a rather cosy Spirit, a source of comfort and reassurance. Whereas, in practice the Spirit is as much a source of discomfort to the Church as of comfort. So I have titled this sermon, “the Uncomfortable Spirit”.

            Why is the Spirit uncomfortable? Well, because the Spirit is not only powerful but also unpredictable.

            Think of the biblical images of the Spirit. They are images of power: wind, fire. Or if you would like a more up to date image, I think you could equally think of the Spirit as being like electricity.

            But these are all images of forces which are not only powerful but also difficult for us to manage, and even potentially dangerous; they can easily get out of hand, they escape from our control.

            So the wind can be a gentle, refreshing breeze – or a destructive hurricane. The ability to make fire is essential to human civilisation – but fire is also dangerous, it can wreak terror and havoc, like the bushfires in Australia. And electricity performs countless useful functions and is absolutely vital to modern living, but if we are not very careful with it, it can give us nasty shocks.

            All this is like the Holy Spirit: powerful, but at the same time unpredictable, unmanageable. As Jesus put it, the Spirit is like the wind that “blows where it wills”. We can never be sure what the Spirit will do next, we can never be sure where the Spirit will well up, where the Spirit will break out. We cannot tie the Spirit down and say: ah, now there we have it. Because whenever we think we have everything cut and dried, whenever we think we have “organised” the Spirit, it bursts out of the tomb we have made for it and does something totally unexpected, quite outside the approved channels.

            And that is why the Holy Spirit is so often a problem for the Church. After all, the Church is an institution, and institutions like to have everything clearly laid down and nicely regulated so that people know where they are. So the Church likes to have things tidy and fixed: its laws, its disciplines, its dogmas and its traditions.

            Now I’m not at all wanting to say that these things are not important and valuable. Traditions, dogmas, disciplines and laws are the inherited wealth of the Church, our heritage, our acquis, and I do indeed believe that the Spirit guides the processes that produce them. So these things are important, and we should maintain them and cherish them. This is what we may call the properly conservative function of the Christian Church, conserving and handing on the riches from the past.

            But: our heritage and our traditions are not intended to be fixed and unchanging. God does not expect us to hand them on in exactly the same condition as we found them. We are not to be like the man in the parable of the talents who said to his master: there, you have your money; I buried it in the ground so that it has remained just the same as when you gave it to me, no more and no less.

            The point is that the Spirit constantly challenges our laws and our traditions and our dogmatic formulations because, despite what we often like to think, these things are only ever provisional, they are never more than approximations to the fullness of divine truth. Jesus promised that the Spirit will “guide us into all truth”, meaning that there is always more for the Church to learn.

            Tradition dies if it remains static and fixed. In every generation we are called to move tradition on, building on what the Spirit has given us in the past, but trusting the same Spirit to go on opening up new treasures for us in the present.

            So the Spirit is the dynamic element in the life of the Church. It is characteristic of the Spirit to stir things up. And that is why the Spirit often makes life uncomfortable for the institutional Church. There will always be a tension, and there needs to be a tension, between the institutional church and what you might call the “charismatic” church, between inherited tradition and new insight, between the conservative and the dynamic aspects of the Church's life.

            And so we see that the Spirit constantly calls out new movements in the Church, movements of renewal, revival and reform. And new movements, which sometimes spring up quite surprisingly from nowhere, often seem threatening to the institutional church, and indeed to all of us rather cautious  Christians.

Movements like the Reformation, like Methodism, like the modern charismatic movement ring alarm bells; people in the traditional church, quite rightly, want to question them, are not at first sure what to make of them. New movements are often associated with powerful personalities, people with a message burning inside them, like the prophets of old; and such people may be gunuine prophets of the Lord or they may allow themselves to become the focus of rather unhealthy personality cults.

In these circumstances, the challenge to the Church is always the same: to discern what is genuinely of the Spirit and what is not. Often this is not at all clear to start with, and it is only after  lengthy uncertainties and indeed disputes that it becomes clear what was of God and what was not.

The other challenge to the Church is to find ways of accommodating the spiritual energy of new movements within the mainstream church without either suffocating them or losing our balance. And the risk is always that new movements feel too confined within the traditional church and end up splitting off. And if this happens, the mainstream church deprived of their energy and  the movements themselves risk becoming isolated and unbalanced.

            It’s not just about new movements. The same sort of principles apply when controversies blow up about new developments in the Church’s teaching and practice. The obvious current examples in our own church being the ordination of women as priests (and now perhaps also as bishops); and the question of whether or not homosexual practice is always wrong.

            In cases like this, the question is always the same: is this new development a movement of the Holy Spirit, or is it not? And usually the answer does not become clear until there has been much argument and dispute, and also – let us hope – much prayer and reflection.

            My point this morning is not that all new developments are  in accordance with God's will. My point is that, where the Spirit of God is at work, this often has the effect of stirring things up, and that this often makes the Church feel rather uncomfortable. And that is why it seems to me that we should think of the Spirit not so much as the “Comforter” as the “Discomforter”.

            And from that we can draw two conclusions:

-                     we should not be unduly surprised or alarmed when the Church finds itself engaged in vigorous controversies and debates (though we certainly should do all we can to make sure our debates take place in a spirit of mutual respect and Christian charity, which sadly of course is often not the case);

-                     each one of us has our part to play in this process of careful and prayerful discernment within the Christian community; and that means that each of us has to be ready to re-examine our traditional assumptions to see whether the Holy Spirit might not indeed be trying to move us on to new apprehensions of the truth.

Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Church

Day of Pentecost, 31 May 2009