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May 15, 2005
The Descent of the Dove
Joel 2: 21-29 / Acts 2: 1-4, 14-21
Matthew 3: 16-17
May 15th, 2005
Pentecost
One of my favorite ladies in this congregation asked me when I visited her the first time, “Tell me about the Holy Spirit.” I replied, “Do you have a minute?” I don’t remember what I told her, but she told me very kindly when I finished expostulating, “”That was helpful. I always wondered about the Holy Spirit.”
I would guess that very many people would say they don’t know very much about the Holy Spirit. But it’s not because a lot has not been said of Him.
Maybe you think it odd that I should say “Him” rather than “it” in referring to the Spirit. A basic courtesy we use is to refer to the Holy Spirit as Him rather than “it.” We say “it” when referring to an animal but either “him” or “her” when referring to a person.
Actually the word “spirit” is a feminine word in both the ancient languages of the Bible. But word gender is not the same thing as “sex.” One of the interesting aspects of the Hebrew language is that all the body parts that appear in pairs except one are “feminine.” The one pair that is distinctly part of a woman’s body is masculine in gender!
We stray into something that is simply not intended if we speculate on masculine and feminine in the Trinity. God is not some sort of composite of masculine and feminine as creation enjoys this wonderful divide. God made up this idea for the world to enjoy.
But already I’ve strayed from what I should be saying. What I should be reminding us all, myself very much included, is that it is far more important that the Holy Spirit be granted the directing authority in our day-to-day life than that we know all about Him. “Walk in the Spirit and do not gratify the desires of the flesh,” Paul urges us Christians in one of his letters.
Why, when the flesh is a pretty fascinating gift God has given us? Because “the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit.” The “flesh” is just a bundle of impulses. They are like electric currents that can run wild. When we follow only these impulses that arise within us the result is this: “sexual immorality, impurity of mind, sensuality, worship of false gods, witchcraft, hatred, quarrelling, jealousy, bad temper, rivalry, factions, party-spirit, envy, drunkenness, orgies and things like that.” Turn on the TV and you see just what the Bible means.
By contrast, if the Holy Spirit has found within us a home what we will see is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, fidelity, adaptability and self-control.” For the fruit of the spirit to find a place on our branches we’ve got to say “no” to a lot of impulses of the flesh. That’s hard. Real hard! It’s not something every Christian realizes and no one does easily.
What is important is not how much information about the Holy Spirit we know, but how completely our impulses are under the Holy Spirit’s authority. His is a gentle and good authority.
Since day one Christians have not been lacking in ideas about the Holy Spirit, but it is sure, experiential knowledge that we need. Find the church where love binds one to another throughout the church, there the Holy Spirit is at home. Find the community where joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, fidelity, adaptability and self-control make the place a hospitable climate for human beings, and you can know you are enjoying the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Oddly, Christians have squabbled a great deal about the Holy Spirit. Partly this is because it is hard to nail down “facts” about Him.
Indeed, as the term “spirit” implies, the Holy Spirit is mysteriously beyond us. You and I live in bodies. Though we are aware we are more than bodies, we are in the realm of mystery, of what we cannot experience with our five senses when we think and speak of the Holy Spirit. It is no wonder then, that many books have been written about the Holy Spirit. Alexander Pope observed that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” And Christian scholars rush in to write about the Holy Spirit who is most elusive to understand.
Very often those who write about the Holy Spirit divide their comments into two parts, first, the Person and second, the works of the Holy Spirit. I begin with the work of the Holy Spirit.
When Christians think of the work of the Holy Spirit they are easily led into thinking about outward exhibits of an unusual nature. Last Sunday I briefly mentioned speaking in tongues, the ecstatic speech that takes place mainly but not only in Pentecostal churches. Or you have seen on religious programs on the TV healing services where at least the claim is made that people are healed of many different bodily problems. Some churches focus on “the gift of prophecy,” where a person believes she has received a direct message from God, sometimes about the future.
Each of these outward works of the Spirit is mentioned in the New Testament and I do not doubt that they may be faithful expressions of the Holy Spirit’s presence. But they have very often not been faithful expressions of the Holy Spirit’s presence. Sometimes they are blatantly false. Sometimes people ambitious to gather a following will pretend to have these gifts in order to fool trusting people. In recent years we have seen a few TV preachers reveal how out of control of the Holy Spirit they were by engaging in sexual and financial sins.
A far greater clue to the presence of the Holy Spirit in a church is found when the fruit of the Holy Spirit hangs from every limb, so to speak. This fruit is the deep work of the Spirit.
Paul wrote in a famous passage—as Phillips translated it, “
If I were to speak with the combined eloquence of men and angels and . . . have not love I should do nothing more. If I had the gift of foretelling the future and had in my mind not only all human knowledge but the secrets of God, and if, in addition, I had that absolute faith which can move mountains, but had no love, I tell you I should amount to nothing at all.
The Holy Spirit is much more identifiable by deep changes that come about in us than in any kind of outward exhibit. There is no showing-off about the Holy Spirit. He has often been referred to as “courteous.” As our bodies are animated by something mysterious deep inside that we call our “spirit,” so the Holy Spirit occupies a mysterious presence deep within us if we have invited Him into us. He has to be welcome. In order to be welcome we have to say NO to a lot of impulses that stir and rage inside.
But I must propose some specific details the Bible gives of the Person of the Holy Spirit. We confess the Holy Spirit is the third Person of Trinity. After Jesus was baptized by His cousin, John, in the Jordan River, the Gospels tell us that the heavens opened and He saw the Holy Spirit descend on Him in the form of a dove. John’s Gospel tells us that John the Baptist saw the dove come down. This was how John knew his Cousin Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit.
I have called my message today, The Descent of the Dove. This was the title Charles Williams, a friend of C.S. Lewis, chose for his brief, and very suggestive history of the Church. The descent of the dove gave the spark that ignited Jesus’ followers from dispirited believers into witnesses who launched a world-changing work that we think of as the Church. Christendom should be more dove like then.
How odd that a dove should be the image for the Holy Spirit. The dove is usually thought of as the gentlest of birds, and actually not the brightest. “Harmless as a dove” is a term we use to describe someone totally without aggression. Power is not what you think of when you think of a dove.
But we think of God as all powerful. Wouldn’t the eagle be a better symbol for the Holy Spirit? In Genesis 1 when we’re told about the Spirit of God hovering over the surface of the waters, the word for “hovered” (marachephet) is used elsewhere to describe the eagle as it flutters over its young (Deut. 32: 11). Isaiah promises us that those who trust in the Lord will “mount with wings like eagles,” not like doves. The eagle seems a more fitting bird to stand for the third Person of the Trinity, of Almighty God. But it’s the dove that is the sign of the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Holy Trinity.
When the Bible tells us of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ, there is no mention of power as we think of power. Isaiah wrote about Jesus, “As a lamb before its shearers is dumb so He opened not his mouth.” The Son of God stood seemingly powerless before Pilate who ordered His crucifixion. What’s going on?
Part of what’s going on is this, that God’s idea of power and our idea of power are very different. Our idea of power is shortsighted. We think of short-range objectives. Often our idea of power is self-centered. It has to do with getting what we want.
God’s power works for lasting ends for the good of the world and works out the love and holiness of God. With this in mind let us look at what happened at Pentecost, the great day we celebrate today.
Today is Pentecost Sunday. This is why we have draped from the pulpit the beautiful red pulpit fall Kathleen Kirsch made. Red is symbolic of Holy Spirit. We remember that the Holy Spirit of God came on the assembled disciples who waited in an upper room in Jerusalem. Pentecost was the second great Jewish festival that drew the faithful to Jerusalem. Passover was the first, and the Feast of Booths that comes usually in October was the third great feast. When the Holy Spirit came it was an uncanny experience. There was the sound of a mighty rushing wind, but no wind. Had there been a wind it would have blown out the flames of fire that rested on top of the heads of the disciples.
The little tongues of fire must have been an eerie thing to see. What would you think if this happened here this morning. What did this new sign mean, they wondered? How helpless we would feel in the presence of such a strange sequence of events if they happened here this morning.
Peter who was the leader in the Jerusalem fellowship did not tell all the people to do what they did next. It was seemingly a spontaneous act that sent the people into the streets. Were their faces aglow under an obvious anointing? When Acts tells us that they spoke in other languages as the Spirit gave them speech, did they speak on different street corners at the top of their lungs? Or did each one find himself or herself drawn to this or that person in the streets?
You could tell where people in the streets came from by how they dressed. On the Purdue campus you can tell the young women from an Arab country by her modest dress and head coverings. So in Jerusalem back then it would have been evident who was from North Africa, who was from Spain, who was from Persia, etc, by how people dressed. Each spoke a different language.
To each of these someone from that upper room came speaking his or her language, explaining the Gospel of Jesus with convincing fascination. Their faces were aglow. They must have been irresistible rather than annoying fanatics because they were personally interested in those to whom they spoke.
And thus began obedience to Jesus’ command, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the uttermost part of the earth.” How decentralized and international was this command. The more international is our sensitivity as Christians the more we are into the spirit of Pentecost. The disciples did not batten down their hatches and focus on the importance of their little Galileean gathering. They went global. Little did they realize that in one morning the farthest points of the known world were given the Gospel right from the streets of Jerusalem!
Here in West Lafayette, in this very international community, let our kindness, our hospitality, our personal warmth and our global cove be the means God can use for us to communicate the Gospel—first in deeds and attitude, and then when the door is open, in words young folk from every nation can trust reflects the loving faith of Jesus Christ by which we live.
Jesus said to His disciples, “You shall receive power after the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” What kind of power? It was the kind of power that came from being “baptized in the Holy Spirit,” as John the Baptist used the term.
It seems an odd term, to “baptize with the Holy Spirit.” What does this mean? It means, I think, to be dipped in the Holy Spirit so that you come up wringing wet head to toe. The wetness comes from being soaked with each aspect of the fruit of the Spirit Paul outlines in Galatians 5. You are dripping wet with the Holy Spirit when it is obvious that you are loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, adaptable, and self-controlled. How beautifully wet is a person baptized in the Holy Spirit!
Now there are other aspects to the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit that we might mention. John’s Gospel calls the Holy Spirit the “Paraclete,” the Comforter. He offers guidance. He stirs good ideas by which the work of the Church flourishes. He stirs the conscience. He is usually present with us usually gently, and can be quenched by stubborn attitudes. I could go on and on about what the Bible teaches and about what Christians have experienced, but not today.
I would conclude by saying again what is most important. Regardless of how much you and I know about the Holy Spirit we can experience His gentle power in us. His principal problem in us are the impulses of the flesh, all those self-centered instincts that are short-sighted and very insistent. If we want to follow Jesus we’ve got to learn to say “No!” very forcefully to these impulses inside of us in order to say, “Yes” to the Holy Spirit. Christians have discovered that they must “yield” to the Holy Spirit.
To yield is let loose the desire to control others and to open ourselves to His work. But we know the tendency of His work. It will be to stir in us love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, adaptability, and self-control. This list is like a recipe for us. When we intentionally move in the direction of these traits, we are following the leading of the Holy Spirit. Let us pray that the Holy Spirit, that dove-like, courteous, powerful, mysterious Person may find Faith Church a very home-like place.
Heavenly Father, give to us again and again Your Holy Spirit and may He find in us again and again a true home. In Jesus name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at May 15, 2005 09:30 AM