We are home to images of God.
Being creatures made of flesh and bone, our minds try to imagine the unimaginable and to turn the indescribable into substance. How else can we understand things? We know the world through the senses of sight, sound, touch, and also the senses of hunger and sorrow and exhilaration. In our minds we paint pictures of the God that we know and we attach names of the ordinary to the divine. And we put those pictures on canvas and plaster and marble. Here is Jesus on the mural, Jesus the shepherd.
Our God has a name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Next Sunday is Trinity Sunday in which the three persons of the Trinity are celebrated as one God. But today is Pentecost. Today is the day for the Holy Spirit, the third person of the three. If the Trinity were a jazz trio, today is the day when the Spirit gets its solo.
The Spirit has always been the difficult one of the three for theologians and for artists. A Father is, you know, a father. Even though the designation can be a problem those for whom “father” is not such a great model and for whom “father” is unnecessarily masculine—even so, it is not so hard to imagine a father. And Son, same thing: child, heir, namesake, baptized, one with whom the father is pleased. The Son of God is born like any son, from a mother, on this earth. But Holy Spirit, what is that?
In the list of the cast of the Bible, the Spirit appears right near the top. The Spirit blew across the waters of chaos in the second verse of Genesis, creating the world. Yet by the time the leaders of the early church met to discuss how God worked with Jesus in the picture, the Spirit was the lesser of three. The split between the Roman church and the Orthodox church was over whether the Holy Spirit was as equal in stature to Jesus.
In art of that time and for centuries, the Spirit had a shadowy presence at best. In pictures of the Trinity, there would be an old man with a beard, a young man with long hair, and a beautiful clear-skinned young girl. Father, Son—and Mother. Mary was easier to paint, evidently, than a deity whose appearance is never described in the Bible. Even when the Spirit was part of the trio, it appeared as a bird (a dove, really, from the scene of the baptism of Jesus, where the Spirit is described as descending like a dove).
Even in the story of Pentecost, the Spirit’s big scene on the New Testament stage, it is unclear how the Spirit works. A sound comes “like the rush” of wind, and “as of fire.” Not actually wind and fire. But like them. And at the same time, the Spirit fills the followers of Jesus. Are fire and wind part of the Spirit’s entourage, or is the Spirit actually in those things? Hard to say.
Part of the problem is that the Spirit seems to have many jobs. How is the Spirit of God that created the Leviathan and the great wide sea related to the Spirit which, according to John, blows us around where it chooses? How is that related to the Spirit which is our advocate? How is that related to the Spirit which prays for us when we do not know how to pray? How is that related to the Spirit which gathers us together to worship here in this church? How is that related to the Spirit who we invite to breathe on the bodily bread and wine of the Eucharist?
It turns out that evidently the Spirit is a general practitioner, and we are its patients. The Spirit is a public defender, and we are its clients. The job of the Spirit, in other words, is us. The assignment of the Spirit is us. Around Martin Luther’s time he got into a debate with a man named Zwingli about whether Jesus was in the bread and wine. The debate centered around where Jesus sat. Did he sit at the right hand of God? And if so, could he sit in the bread, too? You can tell from reading the debate that Zwingli had an image in his head of God sitting on a big throne up in heaven, and Jesus sitting on a slightly smaller throne to the right. But the Spirit has no throne at all. Not even a chair. The Spirit has no place to sit. That’s because the Spirit travels with us, human beings and the rest of creation. God is in the heavens, and Jesus has ascended, as we read about last week, but the Spirit is left behind here with us.
The Spirit is a gift to us. I send you the Spirit, says Jesus. I pour out the Spirit upon all humans, God declares. The Spirit will guide you, will help you dream dreams and create visions of the future. The Spirit helps us in our weakness, says Paul. It speaks for us when we are tongue-tied, when we haven’t the slightest idea what we are thinking, when we want to talk to God and don’t know what to say and don’t know quite how to say it. The Spirit speaks for you and me, who are often enough at a loss for words. The Spirit is for us. It speaks for our hearts and it speaks to our hearts. That is why, among other things, we pray to the Spirit for guidance and why, when we have come to a hard decision, we thank the Spirit for being in our thoughts and discussion.
The word in the Bible for Spirit in both Hebrew and Greek also means breath or wind. It is as close to an image of the Spirit as we have. Something hard to see but easy to detect. Something insubstantial but powerful. Something that at times seems to come out of nowhere and pushes us along on unexpected paths. “I was shaken by the Spirit,” people say. “I was moved by the Spirit.”
The Spirit is of this world just as air is of this world. We are creatures of the air. It is what we live in. It is what brings us life and enables us to work and laugh and love. The air surrounds us and keeps us alive. So we imagine the Spirit like air. If we were fish, I guess we’d think of the Spirit as water. The Spirit is pervasive, essential, and the bearer of persistent life.
It is important to have a part of God that is completely unimaginable. Ineffable, as one scholar said. Not mysterious, really, but a deity to which we cannot easily attach human attributes. We are creatures of flesh and bone; we like a God who is understandable and describable. So when it suits us, we like to characterize God to our advantage. It seems that these days there are a lot of people who feel comfortable describing what God is thinking and feel comfortable speaking for God. We need to be reminded sometimes that God is not made in our image. It is important that we have the Spirit which is totally unknowable yet totally benevolent.
Unlike the Father and unlike the Son, the Holy Spirit has nothing in common with us, so it seems. The Spirit is genderless, never speaks at all, has no emotions or feelings that we know of, is never described in all the Bible. We are under no obligation to the Spirit. The Spirit asks nothing of us. Yet it is the Spirit of God who is closest to us, our counselor, spokesperson, and guide.
The concept of the Trinity is a kind of theological thought based on people’s experience of God. God created the world: the great and wide sea with its living things too many to number. God appeared to us as a person bringing us grace and love and freedom from the power of fear and death. And God whom we cannot describe or understand is with us, guiding us, speaking to us, as close to us as our hearts.
