One
of my favorite ways to indulge myself when I’m feeling tired or a little out of
sorts is to read a murder mystery. The best thing about doing this is I’m too
stupid to figure out “who dunnit.” I can probably count on the fingers of one
hand how many mysteries I’ve solved before the sleuth did.
The
other thing that rests me is that in the end, good triumphs over evil. The bad
guy or gal gets rounded up and bundled off to jail. Hurrah!
Earlier
this week I was reading a mystery, and in it, the lead character, the amateur
sleuth, had to present a paper at a conference. She was unsure of her ability,
since she was one of only a few non-professionals presenting. The rest of the
presenters were scholars and historians.
When
she finally fell into an uneasy asleep the night before her presentation, she
dreamt that her conference notes spontaneously burst into flames as she began
her presentation.
When
I read that, I thought, “Oh if only!” If only people realized the power of the
Holy Spirit, the raw energy, and the comforting warmth that envelops us when we
invite the Spirit to enter us.
Most
Episcopalians tend to leave the Holy Spirit out of their equation of three: the
Trinity.
God we can talk
about and try to understand. God is the guy who created everything and made
time and space out of nothing, and led Moses and the Israelites through the
desert. The easy God we don’t have to do much with except to say, “Oh my God,”
when something bad happens.
Jesus, on the
other hand, is an extension of the easy God for many people. You know, the nice
blonde-haired, blue-eyed guy with the tacky robe and Birkenstocks who died on
the cross (ugh) and then managed to rise again (wow) and maybe is still around
watching out for us (whew).
But the Holy
Spirit? I think we’re a little scared of something we can’t seem to control. We
can’t put it in a box, the way do with our Sacrament of Holy Communion, so we
can pick up the box and take it to the sick. It’s “God in a box” and that’s a
safe and confining place.
A
box has a lid, it has a certain shape, it has a handle generally; you can carry
it around and let it out when you need it. What’s inside the box is stored
power waiting to be released.
Those
of us who take that stored power to others and release it in a hospital, or a
nursing home, or a small apartment, know the power of something we have
confined. It’s as though it bursts out of the box and into the mouth and heart
of the person receiving it. That, my dear friends in Christ, is the power of
the Holy Spirit.
The
Holy Spirit is no respecter of persons, of the young, the aged or the frail,
the eloquent or the silent or those of us somewhere in between, nor of the
joyful or the sad, or the movers or the still. The Holy Spirit comes to us all
when we are open to God moving within us and through us.
So
why should we expect this to be a happy ending or the mystery solved? In a murder
mystery, the murder is solved, the murderer ends up dead or behind bars, and
all is well. So why not with the coming of the Holy Spirit?
This
is real life. You heard the story from the Acts of the Apostles three different
times today from three different translations of the Bible. Each translation has a different tone, but the basics are the
same. And the ending is the same, if in slightly different language. “I will
show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and
fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to
blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.”
That
is not a pretty ending. Yet in that ending is the Holy Spirit’s presence,
opening possibilities where others see problems, hope at the brink of the
grave, and light in the deepest darkness.
The real ending
is this: “Then everyone who calls on the Lord shall be saved.”
That is the
ending where we see God face to face through the presence of the Holy Spirit
and hear the voice of the risen Christ calling us to respond. That is our call
to listen; our call to love; our call to pray that our hearts will be set on
fire. Come Holy Spirit, Come. AMEN.
The Rev. Nicolette Papanek
©2018
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