Speechless

There are days and seasons of life that are silent.

They are not silent because they are empty. They are silent because they are full.

They are silent in the way that a ripe piece of fruit hangs on the tree, and weighs down the branch. If the branch could talk, it probably wouldn’t. It hangs there with nothing to say because it is about to burst. Countless future trees are weighing it down and it doesn’t even know it. So, it guards the moment with a deep silence.

Our souls are like that sometimes. Something has filled the soul up and it has run out of words or gestures to express it. It feels full and pregnant but has no idea what sort of thing is struggling to be born. It just knows that an inevitable moment is quickly approaching. All that is hidden inside, already felt but not yet revealed, will soon burst forth.

When a believer passes through a day like this – when his or her soul is full in this way – you can always be certain that the Holy Spirit is at work.
We learned from the Sound of Music that “starting at the very beginning is “a very good place to start.” So, whenever we talk about the Holy Spirit, we should begin there, at the beginning.

In Genesis, chapter one – which is about as close to the beginning as one can get – we read that before creation, “the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters.”
I once read a rabbi’s commentary about that passage. He claimed that when we read those words, we should think about incubation and fertilization, as when a hen sits on her eggs. He said that the writer of Genesis is picturing the Spirit hovering over the primal stuff just about to be spoken into existence.

The Genesis passage would not be the last time the Spirit would be so depicted in the Bible. In scripture, the Holy Spirit is nearly always linked to some creative act, some great change, some sort of transformation.

For days I have been writing about the sovereign unpredictability and incomprehensibly of the Holy Spirit. I didn’t mean to imply though that we can’t talk about the Holy Spirit at all. I just mean to say that it is difficult to do it with words.

The writers of the scripture also seem linguistically handicapped when it comes to describing the Holy Spirit. However, they employ symbols to describe the work of the Holy Spirit.

The Old Testament uses wind, fire, breath, water and oil. The writers usually invoke these symbols whenever God is about to do something new, unexplainable, powerful and uncontrollable.

Notice how all of those symbols hint at “unstable,” uncontrollable things. Notice how difficult it is to hold onto and define these things.

The prophet Ezekiel, for example, tells about a vision in which the Wind of God revives a field of dead bodies. He tells us how the various body parts came together (you remember the old song: “the foot bone connected to the ankle bone”…) Then, the prophet says, skin formed upon the bodies. Nonetheless, it was still a valley filled with corpses. Only when the prophet spoke to the Wind did the bodies began to breathe and then stand on their feet.

Another great story is about Moses. He saw a bush burning out in the desert. However, the bush was not consumed. When he got closer he heard a voice coming from inside the fire. So asked that fire who he was.

The fire gave the most cryptic, puzzling response in the Bible!

"I am YHWH.”

That didn’t help because YHWH didn’t mean anything to Moses.

Just try to say those letters!

You hear nothing but breath!

Then again...breath is life.

The letters are actually connected to the Hebrew verb ‘to be’. The word to Moses might have meant, “I am what I am,” or perhaps, “I will be what I will be;” or, as one rabbi put it, “it might have been a way of saying, “you wouldn’t believe it if I told you because I am existence itself.”

You wonder what Ezekiel and Moses felt as they approached this moment that would change their life. The Spirit had led them, step by step, to an encounter with God that had been arranged before the world was created. However, they didn’t know that. They think they are just talking a walk. But I think the air must have been pregnant. Something was hovering, brooding, preparing the setting for what was about to occur.

This is the last day in Holy Week before the events begin to rush into the cascade we call the Easter drama.

Tomorrow is Maundy Thursday, the night when Christ instituted the sacraments of Holy Communion and the washing of feet. After that came the arrest in the garden, followed by a night in prison. Beatings, trials, spit and insults made one event seem to flow into the next as the Lord was drug from one place to the other.

Finally came the crown of thorns, the cross and death by crucifixion.
A descent into Hell came next, with its unimaginable horrors and struggles.

Then, the darkness gasped and surrendered to the first real morning the world had
seen since the loss of Eden.

All had seemed lost.

And then, all was won.

The universe had swallowed the medicine that would eventually heal its mortal wound.
All that happened in a fury of activity exploded in merely three days.

On Wednesday though, no human being knew what was about to happen.

A hovering presence covered the pregnant earth, watching over the events below.

He heard the groans from the man in the garden who prayed for relief, as men always do when they are pregnant with the future. The fruit inside Him was ripe. The branch was too heavy to bear.

The Spirit kept His watch.

What was about to happen would open the door of the world. Soon, the Spirit would not merely hover. He would descend like tongues of fire and enter the souls of those about to be birthed by the pregnant man below.

The Man in the garden groans because He doesn’t see all of this yet and so he can no longer speak.

As for me?

What language shall I borrow to thank Thee dearest friend? For this, thy dying sorrow and pity without end?

I will cover my mouth with my hand. I will speak no more.

This indeed is joy unspeakable and full of glory and the half has never yet been told.

An Artist and A Lawyer

On this date in 1806, the Federal government authorized our first national highway.

It was to begin in Cumberland, Maryland, cross the Allegany Mountains and connect the east coast to the western city of Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia). The road would then proceed to the unthinkable westernmost part of the country: Vandalia, Illinois.

I know a little about the National Road. I used to drive on it every day. Trish and I pastored a little church in Wheeling for a year. Sometimes, while stopped at the traffic light, I would read the historical marker about how I was on the very first federal highway of the Unites States.

Local people claimed that President Washington had a lady friend in Wheeling. That is why the National Road ran right past her front door!

I didn’t jump to conclusions about whether the father of our country had any connections with a certain lady in Wheeling. I did speculate about how or why such an enormous sum of federal money had been spent building that road to Wheeling. It was a good thing for the country, I suppose. So I will just leave it there. The interesting part about this old gossip is that great events and notable projects are often influenced by personal experiences. By the time the National Road was authorized, Jefferson was president. He had a rather expansive idea of national life. So whether the father of our country had anything to do with how that road project evolved is a mystery.

I have been talking about the Holy Spirit in my recent blogs and have noted how difficult it is to speak about Him. That is why most Western Christian theologians have been silent about the subject.

It is worth noting that Western theologians have often been lawyers. Naturally, Western theology has often revolved around definitions of words and the structure of language.

In contrast, Eastern Church theologians have often been artists. In the Christian east, theology was not just about intellect.They were also expected to manifest lives of piety and holiness. Not surprising, Eastern theologians tended to use artistic metaphors when speaking of the Holy Spirit.

The Eastern Churches have been much more comfortable with emotional prayer and mystical experience than Westerners. This resulted in a theology that was more accessible to everyday believers, and which tended to be directed toward the cultivation of one’s spiritual life. Western theology – with some notable exceptions – has tended toward intellectual refection on the meaning and analysis of the natural world. From late medieval times, Western Christianity became increasingly rationalized and therefore resistant to the role of emotion and mystical experience in spiritual life. This changed last century with the eruption of the Pentecostal movement in the United States, first among African-Americans and poor Whites, and later within the historic denominations.

A huge component of Western intellectual tradition is the aim of separating one’s emotions from his arguments. This serves a very useful purpose. No one will give great consideration to a man who claims that fine coffee cures cancer, dries up warts, increases fertility and releases endorphins in the brain just because he breaks down in tears while he makes these assertions. We will probably ask him for charts, statistics, studies and so forth. We are trained to discuss such matters in as non-biased, emotionless atmosphere as possible.

Science has taught Western people to examine theory in this way and it is an important cultural habit.

On the other hand, there are situations in which such an approach is out-of-place.

Imagine a woman asking her fiancee, “do you love me?”

Now imagine her lover replying like this: “Well, lets first define our terms. What do you mean by love? Aristotle and other great philosophers made precise definitions for love … well, on the other hand there are the opinions of many modern scientist who believe that what we call love is a trick our genes play on us in order to get us to reproduce. Now, now dear … don’t get so emotional, we’ll never get to the bottom of this question unless we approach this scientifically!”

(How much money will you be willing to place on the odds that this relationship will never become a mutually enriching one?)

This is the way much of Western theology comes across to the people of God.

When theologians are considering the linguistic roots of a Bible word because they are trying to translate it accurately, they should approach their task with as little of their own private emotion and opinion as possible. If they do that, we are more likely to arrive at the original writer’s intent than the opinion of the translator.

When we speak about the Holy Spirit however, we are talking about love and fire. We are discussing wind and breath.

We are talking about life.

In this situation, the Eastern approach, and dare I say the Pentecostal approach – with all its excess – is more in keeping with the subject at hand.

When married people talk about how to pay the bills, a non-emotional, rational approach is best. When they are making love, too many words get in the way.

I’ll just say it: experiencing the Holy Spirit is more like making love than like paying the bills.

One doesn’t meet the spirit by treating Him like a scientific problem.

Of course, the difficulty of expressing who the Holy Spirit is exactly, or what He is like, is not just a problem for theologians. Listen to Jesus speak about the Holy Spirit in John, 3:
“The Spirit blows where He wishes; you hear the sound but you cannot tell from where He is coming or where He is going.”

Definitions, formulas and explanations about the Holy Spirit are difficult, even for Jesus.

How could it be otherwise?

Who can explain the wind? Oh, we gain something from knowing how wind is created by the variation of global temperatures, the planet’s inclination toward homeostasis and all of that. But for most of us, the wind should be felt and experienced, not merely explained and defined.

In 1806, after making its way through the inevitable messy process of political life, an idea became a thing as some unknown worker scooped up a shovel of dirt in a field. Thirty-three years later, another generation of workers would pound the last shovel of gravel in Vandalia, Illinois over the road they had just completed.

It’s a spooky thing – the way experiences impact thinkers and politicians, moving from mind to mind; from discussion to discussion; meandering through legislation and committees until, finally, someone shovels some dirt.

You can’t see where it comes from and you don’t know where it’s going.

Smell My Finger

A writer once said that America and England are two nations divided by a common language.

Well, almost!

If Webster had had his way, the differences would be much more than they are. He wanted to completely alter American English, which would have probably encouraged even greater pronunciation differences than exists today among English-speaking people. Aside from a few changes (“Savior,” instead of “Saviour,” for example) Americans retained English’s archaic and cumbersome spelling system.

Our language has the habit of dragging along all the layers of our linguistic past as we continually modify it for current and future use. That habit affects our spelling – a lot – but it affects other things too, such as church culture.

Here is an example: think about how some Christians speak of the “Holy Spirit,” while others say “Holy Ghost.”

The reason for this difference is not theological. We use both terms because of our language offers both of them for our use.

English vocabulary comes from two major sources: the German and the French.

Our language was originally a form of German. Those Germanic roots gave us the word “Geist,” which over time became the English “ghost.”

When the French invaded England nearly a thousand years ago and made their language the official tongue of the realm, English also ended up digesting huge chunks of Romance. (The language refers to language, not love. The French tried to give love to Anglo-Saxons but so far they’ve refused the gift.) Romance – “the language of Rome” was in the process of becoming modern French. That’s where we got the word “esprit,” from the French and in time modified it to become a more English-sounding “spirit. “

Ghost and spirit mean similar things then, although we tend to use them differently.

English has thousands of duplicate words like this.

“Get” and “receive,” “father” and “parent,” “cow” and pig” are all examples of how our language draws upon both its Germanic and its Romance roots to create its vocabulary.

A rule of thumb about what words to use for which occasion seems to be this: the lower the class of the speaker, the more primitive his experience, or the closer to his heart, the more an English speaker will use German-derived words. The higher his class, the more refined his experience, or the more abstract the thoughts he wishes to express, the more an English speaker will use Romance- derived words.

Cuss words? All Germanic! For an explosive explicative, the soft sounding syllables of French will not do. People won’t even understand that we’re angry or frustrated.

SHEEFATAMAKENHABUKITZFOTSTS!

See what I mean?

However, when we want to eat, we ask for “a slice of mutton or beef;” not a “hunk of sheep or cow.”

Protocol requires us to choose between Germanic derived and French derived words several times a day.

But I’m off my subject.

Classical Pentecostals, who formed their denominations in the early 1900’s, have tended to use the term “Holy Ghost,” just as most English-speaking Christians did the past. However, since our language, like all languages, keeps changing; the tendency seems to be toward using the Latin based “Spirit” more than the Germanic word “Ghost” for spiritual conversations.

The fact is, both terms, although they may feel a bit different when we use them, mean exactly the same thing.

Whichever we use, “Spirit” or “Ghost,” we face a problem in defining the indefinable Holy Spirit!
Either term, “Holy Spirit” or “Holy Ghost” seems to encourage a mental impression of something like an intangible, ill-defined, floating fog. When we put “Holy” in front of a perception like that, what do we get? Well, a Holy ill-defined fog!

This is especially true if we are thinking about the Holy Spirit as an impersonal force rather than as a Divine Person.

I don’t mean to be irreverent. However, I do want to point out how difficult is it is to describe the Holy Spirit.

Could this be the reason why Western Christians have often avoided discussions about the Holy Spirit?

Even great thinkers like John Calvin, the spiritual father of Presbyterianism, a man who seemed to lack never words about any subject, seems rather tongue-tied when it comes to the Holy Spirit.

It seems that Western theologians have usually preferred to deal with subjects that are more predictable, contain less mystery and are more easily described.

Ever since Roman times, Western Christians have preferred concrete definitions and articulated doctrines. We leave it to the spooky Easterners to use words that point toward some concept that cannot be fully expressed in words.

Most of the time, our preference for concrete words over abstract ones -- and for practical results over mysterious experience -- serves us well. Sometimes this preference makes us – well, so Anglo-Saxon. It can get in the way of spiritual growth.

It’s like the man trying to communicate with his dog about how to find food.

The man points to the bowl over across the room and yells, “FIDO!! OVER THERE! LOOK!

The dog only hears “FIDO!! BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!”

So the dog walks over and smells the man’s finger.

As it turns out, communication problems exist everywhere; not just between the Americans and the English.

Of course, none of this would have been a problem if the French would have remained on their side of the Channel.