THE DISCOMFORTER
Isaiah 6:1-8, John 3:1-17
Jeff VamosLast week, we celebrated Pentecost--the day that commemorates the birthday of the church and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Today, the Sunday immediately after Pentecost, is Trinity Sunday. And we celebrate that today--the Holy Trinity--because we have now a full view of God in all three dimensions. In this slide show that is the church calendar, we see God the creator; God the Christ; and now, the last to come to the party: God the Holy Spirit. Today, I'd like to focus on this last Person of the trinity, the Spirit, which we don't often talk much about (I think of it as sort of the Rodney Dangerfield of the Godhead--gets no respect). What can we say about the work of the Holy Spirit? And, moreover, what does the Holy Spirit mean to us, in our lives?
I might have mentioned in my sermon last week that the writer of John (we've been focusing on John's gospel lately), refers to the Spirit as "the Counselor," or "the Comforter." And I mentioned that Jesus had to leave, had to be absent, for the Spirit (the Comforter) to come--the Comforter, which enables them to know the full impact of Jesus' message. With such a name, we might imagine that the Spirit is the sort of warm and fuzzy aspect of God, that which soothes and consoles the disciples.
And while that is in many ways true, I want to suggest that this may be a kind of ironic title for the 3rd person of the Trinity. If we look closely at the work of the Holy Spirit, we may find indeed that as it enables the early disciples to understand the full impact of Jesus' message in their lives, the implications of that message were anything but comforting. The Bible may show us that if we are truly to experience God in God's full dimension, discomfort may be the more appropriate way of describing the work of the Spirit.
And so, a more appropriate name for this aspect of God may indeed be: The Discomforter.
Jesus, in this passage in John, describes the Spirit as wind. As uncontrollable. It can't be contained in an institution, or controlled by human power.
It blows where it will. We think of the wind as a kind of calming, gentle phenomenon, a cooling breeze that brings relief, but if we think back to those images of Katrina, we also understand the destructive, uncontrollable power of the wind, the spirit.
Think too about the passage from Isaiah that we read this morning: Isaiah is walking by the Temple. He sneaks into the doorway, and he sees a vision--he sees in fact, God, in God's essence. God as God truly is. In Hebrew culture, it was thought that you could not live if you saw that. Seeing God was not a comfortable sight; in fact, it will kill you. And his response to seeing the holiness of God, the complete "otherness" of God was not, "Oh, how great!" Instead, his response was to feel his own finitude, his own woeful human frailty. That is why we have the prayer of adoration preceding the prayer of confession. Our experience of the holiness, the otherness of God, elicits our own finitude and guilt and need for forgiveness. And so he says, "Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." He feels his guilt. And the response of God is not terribly comfortable either: a seraph flies up to him with a burning coal, to touch his lips. Now I don't know about you, but if some strange creature with six wings came flying up to me with a lump of hot incense, I'd run....
Isaiah's experience of the full dimensions of God was not a comfortable one. It called him in fact to go out and to preach an unpopular message. The experience of God led him away from a comfortable life, and into an uncomfortable vocation as a prophet to a stiff-necked people.
The spirit is not just a gentle breeze. Watch out if it blows into your life. You might just find it changing forever.
In this passage from John, we encounter the story of Nicodemus. I think of Nicodemus as a kind of institutional man; a guy who would be akin to a bishop or an executive presbyter in our day. He has a comfortable place in the institutional religion of his time. He's a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council. But he knows that Jesus is onto something, as unpopular as he is with the keepers of the institution of Judaism.
We read that he comes to Jesus at night. That is a very important in understanding the story. It must have been very risky for such a person to visit him. We read in the passage just before this Jesus was knocking over the tables outside the temple--trying (symbolically) to purify the abuses of the institutional religion that had grown up around temple worship. So, Nicodemus comes at night. A kind of half-hearted commitment to Jesus. Checking him out. Hedging his bets.
Jesus makes Nicodemus uncomfortable. Nicodemus can't get what he's talking about. "Being born again--how can you go inside your mother's womb again?" Nicodemus, with his conventional way of looking at the world, doesn't get it. It's like describing purple to someone who's been blind from birth. To see the Kingdom of God, according to theologian Mark Hopper, requires that we develop a new kind of spiritual eyesight--to see things through the eyes of our spirit; to hear things through the ears of our heart, rather than the normal ways of perceiving things. Nicodemus can't do that--too entangled in the institution that gives him power, the conventional way of seeing things.
We don't know what happened to Nicodemus after his encounter with Jesus. We don't know if he eventually gets what Jesus is talking about or not. But, we might imagine that if somehow he develops this kind of vision, the kind of eyes that can see into the Kingdom, it made him uncomfortable. We can even perhaps imagine him giving up his comfortable position in society, on the Sanhedrin. We can perhaps imagine him relinquishing his colorful robes that signified his power, and throwing his lot in with the dusty band of fishermen and peasants and tax collectors who follow the crucified one; followed them into the barrios and backrooms of the Empire, to proclaim a message of love that could not be contained in an institution, but requires that we follow the Spirit--wherever it might blow. And that's always the challenge of the church: how are we to be faithful to that spirit that created this institution, which cannot be contained in any institution?
This past week, a group from our Presbytery visited one of the many places people are now calling "Urban Monasteries"--renegade spiritual communities that have broken away from the institutional church (and yet are accountable to it), leaving the comfort of suburbia, to live in what they call "the forgotten places of Empire," the inner cities and wastelands our society has created to fence off the poor from the well-to-do. We visited a place called Camden House, which was formed by four young people after they graduated from college, who decided they would commit themselves to living together in community with the poor of Camden, NJ. They decided to live a different life: sharing their money, living communally. "Following Jesus is costly," said the leader of the community. "It makes us uncomfortable. But it's also joyful. This way of life--it's a joyful way of life. Most people have lost this kind of joy, this connection with the gospel."
That's what the spirit does--it may blow away our comfort, but that holy discomfort beckons us away from our conventional ways of being to experience the joy that comes from following Jesus Christ.
All this reminded me this week of a story. It's a story I read a little while ago in a sermon by a Pastor in Colorado named Sharyl Peterson. This is the story she tells, about how the spirit sometimes does enter the institution--so bound by its conventions--to remind us of the One whose spirit gave it birth. It's supposedly a true story--about a church in Washington DC.
The church is a large protestant church with a fairly wealthy congregation. Each Sunday, there were several services, and all of them were packed with well-dressed people, who enjoyed being together for the service, and going out afterward for lunch at elegant restaurants.
One Sunday, the service was going on as usual, and they had read the Call to Worship and prayed a Prayer of Invocation, and recited the Apostles' Creed, and sung a couple of hymns, and had gotten to the sermon. The minister had read the scripture lessons, and just begun the sermon, when the back door opened, and a man walked in.
He looked to be in his mid-thirties, filthy dirty, his clothes ragged and torn, and he looked and smelled like he hadn't had a bath or washed his hair in weeks. He reeled a little as he walked, and looked pretty wild-eyed. An usher jumped up to try to grab him, but he pulled free of the usher, and stalked about halfway up the aisle, and stopped there.
The minister was somewhat non-plussed, and didn't quite know what to do, so she decided to go on with the sermon. As soon as she began speaking, the man yelled out, disagreeing with whatever she had just said. She asked him if he would like to sit down and join the worship service, but he yelled at her again, and then stomped all the way down the aisle to the front of the church, where he hurled himself down on the floor. The minister just stood there, not quite knowing what to do. The whole congregation sat frozen.
After a minute of silence, one of the elders of the church, a very distinguished older gentleman, got up from his seat, and made his way slowly down the aisle to the front of the church. He walked with a cane, so he moved slowly, but there was no doubt in anyone's mind that, despite his age and infirmity, he was going to throw this totally inappropriate, smelly, scroungy-looking intruder out of the church, so they could all go on with worship.
What seemed like hours passed, with the elderly man slowly tap-tapping his way down the aisle, and the man in the front rocking back and forth, with his head in his hands, moaning. Finally, the man reached the front of the sanctuary. He dropped his cane on the floor, and very slowly, and with great difficulty, lowered himself to the floor next to the man. He quietly put his hand on the man's shoulder, and sat there with him for the rest of the service, so that he wouldn't have to worship alone. And everyone, including the minister, was completely choked up with the power of what had happened. The minister finally recovered herself and told the congregation that what they had just seen was more powerful than anything she could possibly have told them. And she gave the Benediction, and they went home quietly.1The Discomforter. It's that Spirit of love that Christ unleashed upon the world, which is as much a sword that cuts, as an embrace that comforts. Watch out for the wind! For it blows where it will, and no one knows whence it comes and wither it blows. Amen
1 Charyl B. Peterson, "Born from...Where?" Lectionary Homiletics (2006, 17:4).
June 11, 2006
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