THE HOLY WHO?

A sermon by George Pasley

Genesis 1:1-5; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11

I knew a pastor back in Kansas who was also a magician. He was the talk of the town because he regularly performed magic tricks for his children’s sermons. I couldn’t compete with that, and you can’t imagine how jealous his magic abilities made me!

Actually, I do know a little tiny bit about magic acts. They frequently work by getting the audience to look in the wrong place. While we are all looking where the magician ahs directed us and enticed us to look, something happens just out of view, and we are tricked.

It’s our human nature that tricks us, and I think our human nature tricks us when we read the stories about the baptism of Jesus. In all four gospels we are told that the Holy Spirit descends as a dove from Heaven, and the first thing we usually ask is, “Why did Jesus need to be baptized?”

Just last week the ministers I meet with got caught up in trying to answer that question. I suppose it’s a question that we would like to have answered, and I have my theories- though the other ministers shot them all down. But right now I’m thinking that something far more important than Jesus being baptized in the Jordan River happened in today’s Gospel lesson: The spirit descended like a dove on him, and he saw it.

You might think that was something special- after all, it was accompanied by a voice from heaven and THAT didn’t happen when any of us were baptized!

Well, you’re right. Receiving the Holy Spirit IS something special

It is something so special that John the Baptist got all excited telling the people about.

It is something so special that Paul quizzed the believers in Ephesus to make sure they had received it. What he heard must have startled him- they didn’t even know who the Holy Spirit was!

Most of our hymnals have a copy of A Brief Statement of Faith pasted onto the back cover. I ask you to turn, and read with me the portion that describes the work of the Holy Spirit:

The Spirit justifies us by grace through faith,
      sets us free to accept ourselves and to love God and neighbor,
      and binds us together with all believers
      in the one body of Christ, the church.
   The same Spirit
      who inspired the prophets and apostles
      rules our faith and life in Christ through Scripture,
      engages us through the Word proclaimed,
      claims us in the waters of baptism,
      feeds us with the bread of life and the cup of salvation,
      and calls women and men to all ministries of the church.
   In a broken and fearful world
   the Spirit gives us courage
      to pray without ceasing,
      to witness among all peoples to Christ as Lord and Savior,
      to unmask idolatries in church and culture,
      to hear the voices of peoples long silenced,
      and to work with others for justice, freedom, and peace.

That is a very brief summary of what the Holy Spirit does, but let me make it even shorter: we can’t live the life God wants us to live- we can’t be real Christians- without the Holy Spirit’s help.

In fact, if you keep reading in Mark you’ll see that Jesus got into all sort of trouble with the Spirit’s help, and if it hadn’t been for the Spirit’s help, well, who knows what might have happened.

Right off, the Spirit sent him out into the desert, and he was tempted there. But where the Spirit sends us, the Spirit is, and Jesus not only survived, he came out of that trying time proclaiming good news. He drove out Evil Spirits, he healed multitudes, and he even touched lepers and made them clean. Let me tell you, those were acts of confidence and bravery, and he never flinched, not once, and having the Holy Spirit had a great deal to do with that confidence and courage.

So here’s what we need to remember: Jesus was baptized with water, just like us, AND WE ARE BAPTIZED WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT, just like Jesus.

So- did anybody see dives descending the last time we did a baptism here? That would have been little Rhiannon. No?

No, chances are we haven’t seen doves, not descending during a baptism, anyway. But that doesn’t mean we can’t see signs of baptism by the Holy Spirit.

At Ephesus, “when Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied.”

I’ve heard some speaking in tongues, but not in a Presbyterian Church! But there are other signs of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives.

Whenever you love your neighbor, even when that neighbor is difficult, that’s a sign that the Spirit is working in you.

Whenever you speak out against an injustice, whenever you give someone who’s struggling an encouraging word, whenever you gout of your way to do the Christian deed, that’s the Holy Spirit working in you.

But you might be asking, “Why doesn’t that happen all the time?”

One reason, one very important reason, is because we forget.

Another reason is because we don’t listen when the Spirit is whispering in our ears.

Another reason is because we’re so used to running our lives that we never give the Spirit a chance to show us what God could do, if we would just let God be in charge.

But I want to go back to that first reason- our forgetfulness.

Our job as a church is to remind each other- you, and you, and you, all of us- are children of God, just as the voice from heaven reminded Jesus.

But part of our job as individual Christians is to turn to God in our difficult moments and say, “Okay God, I could really use a blessing!”

Many have been the times I said exactly that, and many have been the answers I’ve received.

I can’t recall any that were negative. They didn’t all come right away, and none of them were voices from heaven, and some of them were pretty subtle, but they have taught me I can trust in the Spirit’s leadership.

In fact, the times I haven’t cried out for a blessing have taught me something else: I can pretty much trust my own notions to get me in trouble!

Let me tell you a true story. It’s about a man whose experience of life was pretty formless and void, but when he received the Holy Spirit all of that changed very quickly.

One week a guest pastor was preaching at a church and decided he needed to invite people to come up after worship so he could pray for their healing. About 30 people came up, and he took the time to visit with each one before he prayed, and he hugged each one, and touched their heads with healing oil. He had never done that sort of thing before, but it was something the Spirit was leading him to do.

Four days later he got a phone call from a woman who had been at that church service.

“I want to thank you for praying for my husband. He had cancer.”

The pastor’s heart almost stopped. HAD cancer? What happened? Was he healed?

“He’s dead now,” the woman said, and the pastor thought, “A lot of good my prayers did.”

But the woman continued:

“Before you prayed, my husband was very angry with God. At night he would lie in bed and curse God. It was horrible. The angrier he got at God, the meaner he was to everybody around him. His nastiness kept getting worse and worse and worse. But then you laid hands on him on Sunday morning and you prayed for him.

When he walked out of church that morning I knew there was something different. I could feel it. He was a different person. The last four days of his life were the best four days of our marriage. We laughed, we prayed, and we even sang hymns. My husband wasn’t cured, but he was healed.”

The Spirit justifies us by grace through faith,
      sets us free to accept ourselves and to love God and neighbor,
      and binds us together with all believers
      in the one body of Christ, the church.

You are children of God. Don’t ever forget that, and see what difference that knowledge can make.

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.