On Christmas, God became one of us. On Pentecost, God becomes all of us. On Christmas, God became one of us fully in Christ. On Pentecost, God wants to become all of us in the Holy Spirit.
Can you believe it? Can you trust this — that God wants to become who you are? This is extravagant language — it may seem to go too far. But all these weeks since Easter, Jesus in the Gospels has been telling us just that. Read and relish the language we heard in John’s Gospel, chapters 14 through 17. “What the Father and I have, now you will have.” “As my Parent and I are one, how you and I are one, and you are one with my Parent.” “Everything I am, you will be. Everything I do, you will do.”
Of course, it sounds odd to the disciples and obscure to us. Jesus’s presence after Easter seems suddenly to fade away with the Ascension, and his promises sound vague. “I will send you my spirit.” At first, it falls flat. It makes us feel like children who play their best for a great coach all through the spring, but the coach leaves them for the summer. He tells them to keep playing great ball, but they know it won’t be the same without the coach. His parting encouragements cannot overcome their feeling of abandonment and self-doubt.
So what does Jesus mean by “Spirit”? The Holy Spirit is not some vague leftover, but the core of the experience of oneness with God. Because for Jesus, Spirit means an intimacy with God so deep that you can’t tell where God leaves off and where we begin. The Holy Spirit reveals what the mystics say, “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.”
Perhaps some everyday experience can evoke this meaning of Spirit. A couple that I’m close to had been stable together for a few years. Their relationship now reached that point where they had some “issues”. They told their counsellor, “We’re always caught up on the same point. He does something, I react that way. And vice versa. It doesn’t matter what we’re doing, the sticking point is always the same.” The counsellor smiled and told them, “In one way, your problem proves the strength of your relationship, because you are, in fact, two parts of the same spirit. Your issue makes you two parts of a whole.”
That’s how God wants to be with us — is with us: God and we are one spirit.
Even the origins of the word “spirit” suggest something intimate to our being. In the ancient languages, the word for spirit means breath. The Latin Spiritus, the Greek Pneuma, the Hebrew Ruah — the Bible word means breath. The Breath of God. Why is breath important? Because it carries the essence and life of a person.
That is why many world religions find the divine in ourselves by focusing on breath when we meditate. We follow our breath down to a deep awareness of God as the source of our being. Just so, the Bible opens with God’s breathing God’s image and likeness into the man and woman. This means more than inflating a rubber toy — it means that what makes God alive makes us alive too. God’s breath, God’s image are the core of who we are. You can’t tell where God leaves off and where we begin.
So Jesus saves the best for last: he says that he has to go away for us to have the fullest contact with God. We do not just take over where Jesus left off, like a temp who comes in when the specialist is out sick. No. In a mystical way, we become what Jesus is. This is not getting into the show on a borrowed ID. His identity is a fulfillment of our deepest identity. Our being magnifies God’s being.
That is why Jesus cannot fulfill his purposes without us. Listen to this morning’s astounding claim — “You will do greater things than I have done.” Surely not — but it’s true. Jesus could incarnate God as only one man in one culture. We are the Church! We incarnate God’s Spirit in all times and in all cultures. Our being magnifies God’s being. Our Eastern Orthodox friends know this better than we: they call Christian spirituality the process of becoming divine, apotheosis. Like them, the English priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins ecstasized: “I am all at once what Christ is, because he was what I am.”
“I am all at once what Christ is, because he was what I am.” On Pentecost, God becomes all of us.
The Holy Spirit means that incarnation and redemption did not happen once way back then. Incarnation and redemption happen all around us. Jesus becomes the key to seeing what goes on all the time whenever the Spirit takes hold. That’s why Bill Blaine-Wallace tells us so many concrete, current stories — so that we can hear redemption and see incarnation. When the Spirit leads someone to gives up selfish deceptions and cultural compromises — there’s incarnation starting. When the Spirit draws a person, like you, to service in career and family life — when the Spirit overflows in our works of justice, creativity, or even of simple survival — there’s incarnation all over again.
Pentecost means the incarnation of God is not a feature reserved to Jesus. Incarnation is the horizon of our own destiny. Incarnation is not just about a man from Galilee but about Cowardins and Carlsons and Hallbergs and a McBride and a Langbein and a Small and the Kreider-Whites and the Blocher-Iaucos and — now look into the faces of at least five people around you — all becoming what they already are in God’s eyes — true, new, incarnations of God’s Spirit.
The beauty of this is: we do not have to work to achieve this union. It is given, given in baptism, given each time we receive the Eucharist. We need only let God’s Spirit spread into our life, to become what we already are.
So following Jesus does not mean become more like Jesus. It is about God becoming more like each one of us. Following Jesus means becoming more and more yourself. Your being magnifies God’s being. Having the Spirit means rummaging through your sins and desires till you reach that deep life in you coming fresh from God at your corner, in the middle of the block, or wherever God finds a parking space.
The Spirit cannot find enough ways to come into this world. The Spirit needs to be different in Latvia and in South Africa, different in Nicaragua and in Canada. That’s the point of all the languages in the Pentecost story. God needs all these languages to keep God’s story coming in new ways.
God doesn’t even need our strengths to come into the world. Sometimes God needs our weaknesses for God’s purpose. What it means to be people of a Pentecost God means that we can share our weaknesses in a community of reconciliation. Imagine how our weaknesses can open us up, instead of making us pull back from each other. Imagine relying on one another’s grace. As Emmanuel moves into change, growth, loss, and re-direction, we cannot survive if we are not above all a community of reconciliation.
For what it means to be church is to cherish the strong, the mediocre, the weak — trusting God can make of us more than the prophet’s dream.
On this anniversary of Suzanne’s and my ordination as your priests, I recall that to be a priest means week after week to take your offerings — not what you give, but what you are — and to place the priest’s self in that offering, and give it to God. And look — God gives us back Godself in and as the Body and Blood of Christ.
This unlocks the words of Marianne Williamson, so famously used by one of the great spirits of our time. I mean Nelson Mandela, when he recited this:
“Our deepst fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves: ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?’ Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us. It is in every one. And as we let our light shine, we give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence [begins to] liberate [the world].”
Thus far Mandela’s citation.
So God could not be closer to you. On Christmas, God became one of us. Now it is Pentecost — God wants to beccome all of us!
Come, Holy Spirit!