One of the things I like about living and worshiping in the South is the church jokes and the preacher jokes. This is one I know is told in black churches, but I'll bet it's been heard elsewhere as well. Just not here, I hope.
In a country church one Sunday morning, the preacher was laying into his flock. "Some people," he declared, "care more about their large houses and their expensive cars than they do about being followers of Jesus." Deacon Jones, sitting on the front pew, called out, "That's right, preacher, you tell 'em!" "And there are some people," the preacher went on, "who care more about their fine clothes and their fancy jewelry than they do about the work of the Lord." "Amen!" shouted Deacon Jones, "give 'em what for, preacher!" "And some people," thundered the preacher, "care more about their liquor and their love affairs than they do about the word of God." Deacon Jones cried out, "Aww, reverend, now you've quite preachin' and gone to meddlin'!"
It does seem that we find it easier to support a prophetic denunciation of the evils of the world than a sermon or a biblical text that meddles with our personal lives. We certainly want injustice to be set right and wars to cease and the captives to be set free; but unsolicited insights that hit close to home can easily feel like just plain meddling.
What I want us to consider on this Pentecost Sunday, though, is that the Holy Spirit is God's way of meddling with us, and in fact is God meddling with us, intervening in our own lives and the larger life of the world, whether we invite that intervention or not. There's a saying that I've seen in several places recently. It's a Latin expression of classical origin. The psychiatrist Carl Jung had it carved over his doorway and on his tombstone. It reads, "Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit": "Invited or uninvited, God will be present." Many people find this a comforting thought, that God will be with us whether we remember to call on God or not. But maybe it's not so comforting, for it also implies that God will come whether we want it or not. We cannot control or command God's presence in our lives, nor what God will do after showing up. There may be times when we would just as soon be left alone, but God will be present anyway.
The opening chapter of the book of Acts presents a group of 120 disciples of Jesus, both men and women, including the twelve apostles and Jesus' mother Mary and his brothers and sisters, persisting in prayer together while they waited for the fulfillment of Jesus' mysterious promise of the Holy Spirit. It doesn't say that they had any idea what to expect, only that they stayed together and stayed engaged in prayer. When the Spirit fell in wind and fire, they must have been as surprised as anyone. Remember, no one told them it would happen on the Jewish feast of Pentecost. It just did.
Peter pretty quickly puts it all together, though, and is able to tell the astonished international and multicultural crowd that was present that this multilingual outburst had to do with two things: with the promises God had given to Israel to pour out the divine Spirit on them, and with the crucified and risen Jesus through whom God was offering salvation to the chosen people. The gathered disciples had indeed been calling on God, but the answer was not something that they had expected, any more than they had expected a crucified messiah, any more than they had expected a resurrection. "Invited or uninvited, God will be present." They had perhaps been inviting God in their wholehearted praying together, but the way in which God showed up took everyone by surprise.
The Holy Spirit has remained a surprising and unexpected, a mysterious and unfamiliar presence in Christian life. Our beliefs about the Spirit are one of the things that sets Christianity apart from most other religions. The New Testament claim is that the Spirit of God is present and available to every believer, and offers us divine power and divine wisdom for the living of our lives as children of God. It is not just for certain spiritual specialists, for prophets or priests, for people who know special practices and rituals to call down the Spirit. No, this Spirit is there for everyone, young and old, male and female, slave and free. It is a radical, radical assertion, this claim that all believers, whatever their level of spiritual competence or worldly attainment, have access to the very Spirit of the living God, the God who made heaven and earth.
The other side of the coin is that we have no control over this holy and invasive Presence. "Invited or uninvited, God will be present." In religions that offer rituals to conjure up gods and spirits, it is expected that they will come and do the bidding of the conjurer, that being pretty much the point. Not so with Christianity. The Bible offers no means that are guaranteed to cause the Holy Spirit to come upon us, no technique for speaking in tongues, no ceremony that will cause us to prophesy. "The wind blows where it chooses," Jesus tells Nicodemus in the gospel of John (John 3:8 We cannot command the Spirit to appear, and we cannot keep the Spirit from appearing. We are at the disposal of the Spirit, and not the other way around.
At any rate, that's what the New Testament writers say. It's certainly not the way most Christians have lived over the centuries, and it's not necessarily the doctrine that most Christian denominations teach. Some groups limit the Spirit's guidance to gathered assemblies of church officials, to synods and councils where creeds are settled and regulations determined. Others declare that the Bible is God's last word to the church, and no more visits of the Holy Spirit are to be expected, or permitted. (Oakhurst only did one of the two things that could have gotten us run out of the Georgia Baptist Convention, the other being toleration of charismatic activities. I've sometimes wished we would try to go two-for-two.)
It's always been curious to me that even Pentecostal Christians tend to have this literalist approach to the Bible, at least nowadays. The very Christians who remind the rest of us that the Holy Spirit still has work to do in God's church seem to be just as worried as everyone else that the Spirit might do something new or unexpected. Perhaps it is too easy to get hung up on spectacular phenomena like speaking in tongues or prophesying or doing miracles, and forget what our reading today from the gospel of John declares: "the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything." "Everything" means even new things, even things Jesus himself did not say, even things that point us in new directions. In the reading, Jesus goes on to say that the Spirit will "remind you of all that I have said to you." So the new teaching will not be inconsistent with the old, but will continue and expand Jesus' message of God's welcoming and forgiving love and God's desire for justice. The early church seems to have been familiar with this activity of the Spirit, and to have accepted it unhesitatingly. That is why the four gospels in the New Testament are so far from being identical, even when they are telling the same story. The gospel writers expected to be led into new teaching, as their communities required in their own situations, even as they were recalling what Jesus had said.
So Christians have by and large been very reluctant to embrace the unexpected and uncontrolled outpouring and activity of the Holy Spirit. I think those two words are precisely the reason: the Spirit's work can be unexpected and uncontrolled, calling us and pushing us into things we had not planned and don't want to do. Therefore we devise the necessary institutional rules and controls to keep everyone who thinks they hear the Holy Ghost whispering in their ear from tearing off into the wild blue yonder. To have some restraints in place is not a bad thing; even Paul wants the gathered congregation to evaluate what Spirit-inspired prophets have to say (1 Corinthians 14:29). But if we become all about rules and controls and restraints, then we are very unlikely to be open to that "everything" that the Holy Spirit desires to teach us. We will have no room for the uninvited God, the meddling God, the God who shows up in times and places that we do not designate or desire.
Because the Spirit of God is available to each and every Christian, we have a kind of responsibility to leave an opening in our life for the Spirit to appear. We cannot command the Spirit's presence, but we can make ourselves unable to notice that presence. We need to cultivate a discipline of openness and alertness, an attentiveness to the Spirit's calling. Doing the kinds of things that the disciples did before Pentecost will be part of this: gathering with our brothers and sisters, staying engaged in prayer. Making room for the unexpected in our lives is also a kind of discipline, one that I personally have a great deal of trouble with. I have a plan and a schedule, and I am generally behind in both of them. So when the phone rings, or the traffic slows down, or someone knocks on my office door, I am unlikely to say, "Holy Spirit, is that you?" I am more likely to say, "What do you want?", or simply "Out of my way!" I guess that's why they call it discipline. I have to learn to take a breath, lift my eyes from the task I'm fixated on, and make that little opening for a word from the Spirit of the meddling God.
In the Pentecost story, Peter quotes the promise of the outpouring of the Spirit from the book of Joel. But as we heard in our reading from Ezekiel, Joel was not the only prophet who promised a new gift of God's Spirit for the people of Israel, and dreams and visions were not the only promised results of that gift. Ezekiel promises a cleansing from idolatry, from false choices that separate God's people from their covenant God. More than that, he promises a new heart, a heart of flesh, a human heart in place of the heart of stone that had kept the people from obeying God's teaching. I don't know about you, but every morning when I hear the body count from Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, this is what I pray for: that the perpetrators of bombings and kidnappings and shootings would find their human hearts again, that somehow the God they claim to serve would confront them with what obedience to God truly means, would penetrate the rock-hard indifference to life and love that they have allowed to imprison them and set them free. It sounds feeble, I know; but I also know that so far no one has invented the bomb or the bullet that will break a cycle of violence for good.
Above all, Ezekiel offers God's promise to put a new spirit, God's own Spirit, within the people, and to bring it about that they live in accordance with God's covenant statutes and laws. Ezekiel makes this promise more than once in his long book. He was writing at a time when the people of Judah had been taken from their homeland into exile in Babylon, when they were trying to figure out whether they had done something so wrong that God had brought this on them, or whether perhaps they simply needed a different God, since this one didn't seem to be working anymore, and when they wondered whether there was any hope for them ever to return. Ezekiel's answer was that there was hope, but that change was needed. They would return home, and God would come home too: they would rebuild the Temple that the Babylonians had destroyed, and God's presence would return there. Even better, God's presence would be found not only in the Temple but among the people and within them. God's Spirit would now enable them to be faithful in a way that they had never managed before.
This is the promise that New Testament writers claim has at long last, six hundred years after Ezekiel's day, been fulfilled in the life of the new Christian communities. God's presence has come to the people of God in a new way; God's Spirit has been spread abroad among the followers of the risen Jesus. And because of the Spirit's presence, lives are being transformed, a new faithfulness is coming about, a new capacity to live in accordance with God's will. Paul, with his typical starkness, says there are two ways to live, the way of self-centered human nature (what he calls "the flesh") and the way of the spirit, the human spirit inspired, empowered, and guided by the Spirit of God. So we heard in our reading from Romans that children of God are led by the Spirit of God, and by means of this Spirit they put an end to the old way of life that centered not on God and on love for other people but on themselves and their own gratification. The Spirit resides in us, and the result is renewed relationship with God and a renewed way of life given by God.
This is not something that is particularly easy to hear in our culture. For one thing, we are told all day every day that ourselves and our gratification is exactly what we should be centering on. Advertisers warn us constantly and with heartfelt sincerity that our lives are not complete, that we are missing out on human wholeness, if we haven't bought, worn, eaten, applied, driven, or reveled in their products. Self-help seems to be a movement, an obsession, and an industry all at the same time, and its basic premise is that I must perfect myself before I can hope to do any good for anyone else. The notion that I might find my life by losing it can scarcely even be understood these days, let alone believed.
Our cultural focus on self-gratification and self-improvement goes hand-in-hand with our deep belief in self-reliance. Even in church, and perhaps especially in churches that place a high value on following Jesus, we often tend to see our ethical lives as projects that we work on, gardens that we tend, with results that we alone are responsible for. We don't particularly expect, and may not particularly want, divine intervention in this process. After all, if it is God who transforms me, what credit do I get for it? And how can I control the transformation?
But "invited or uninvited, God will be present." God is a meddler, an intervener, a busybody. Paul tells us that not only is God's forgiveness a free gift of generous grace, but so is God's transformation. The will of God is written on our hearts by the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit actually enables us to carry out that will, just as Ezekiel promised: this is the moral meaning of Pentecost. Our ethical gardens do not bear fruit because of our diligence and our discipline. Rather, love, patience, kindness, generosity, gentleness, and even self-control are what Paul calls "the fruit of the Spirit" (Galatians 5:22-23). The same Spirit who inspires prophecy and brings about miracles also generates conduct that is aligned with the will of God. For Paul our ethical life is not a matter of obedience to external authorities, such as the law or scripture or social norms or cultural values. No, Christian ethical life is constructed dynamically day by day through our ongoing relationship with the Holy Spirit. It is by opening our lives to this relationship, by entering into dialogue with God's Spirit in thought and word but also in deed, that we are enabled, as Paul will say later in Romans, not to be conformed to this world—to the structures and powers of injustice and selfishness and deceit—but to be transformed by our minds' renewing, and thus to discern God's will, what is good and pleasing to God and completely right (Romans 12:2).
This is not an automatic process, of course. In that later passage in Romans, Paul goes on to urge his readers to take a number of specific courses of action. They need to hear this, as we need to hear it, because the final consummation of God's work is yet to take place. We still must urge ourselves and one another to be guided by the Spirit and by the example of the crucified and risen Jesus. Nevertheless, Paul joyfully and confidently insists that the new Christian life is not only a life of renewed relationship with God but also a new way of life lived out in accordance with God's desires and made possible, not by human effort and dedication, but by the presence and activity of the Spirit of God.
In a materialistic culture in love with autonomy, where we want to determine our own lives with no outside meddling, this is an uncomfortable thought, to say the least. Yet once we move beyond this cultural bias, there is great joy in knowing that we are not on our own, that we have a meddlesome God who desires and longs for our transformation, and will not sit still until it is achieved. It is this active and intrusive God, joyously calling us "further up and further in," dancing before us on the pathway, taking us by the hand and gently and powerfully working within our hearts, who is made known to us as the Holy Spirit, the one whom we celebrate on Pentecost.
Whatever we may do toward justice and peace and freedom, whatever we do for the healing of disease and the righting of wrong, whatever we do to restore God's good creation, we do as people of God's Spirit. Whatever transformation we ourselves experience, whatever growth in love and goodness and faithfulness, is the outcome of God's Spirit at work in us. However much it may hurt our pride to know we aren't doing it on our own, we will find that there is a greater depth and a greater certainty in our maturing as disciples of Christ when we put our project-orientation aside and let the work become a gift. We serve a meddling God, and the more we let God meddle with us, the more our service will truly reflect the Christ who himself did not begin his mission until the Spirit had descended on him. When we offer ourselves and open ourselves to the Spirit of God dwelling in us, then we make ourselves available to a transformation, a power, and a joy that go beyond all expectations.