Sermon: Did You Receive the Holy Spirit?

Texts: Mark 1:4-11; Acts 19:1-7

Date: January 8, 2006

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

We’ve had a prodigious amount of rain the last couple of weeks, haven’t we? I’m getting a little tired of it. But there is at least one thing to celebrate: not a single drop of rain has fallen inside the church! That’s a refreshing change from last winter, when we had our days of trying to get buckets in the right places to catch the drips coming through the leaky roof. Many thanks to all of you who gave money to the “Roots and Branches” capital campaign to help us get a new roof.

We worked hard to get a watertight cover over our heads, and we’d be shocked and dismayed if we found rain falling inside the church now. I ran across an account of rain inside another church I want you to hear. This wasn’t a random drip or two through leaky shingles but an actual rain fall inside. Here’s how it happened. This particular church had a quirk that surely was not in the design of the architect who had thought only of beauty when the steel-buttressed ceiling was shaped into a gothic arch. The roof was metal. The morning was warm. The church was full to celebrate a baby’s baptism that day.

Then there was a strange, cool wind that came in a rush over the row of pines near the parking lot. The water on the metal roof suddenly condensed, and a shower of water fell in the church and nobody was ready.

The minister had just put water on the baby’s head and said, “I baptize you” when the water began to fall. Some people screamed a little—the drops were cold. Of course, the pastor hurried out so as not to ruin his robe. A couple of people made umbrellas out of the bulletins. One lady at the end of the pew took a big, round drop off her son’s head and wiped the sticky candy off of his mouth. A few members of the building committee tried to save the new wooden pews by spreading some extra baptismal cloths around. Most people just hurried into the hallway so as to stay dry.

The baby did not seem to mind the rain. He was wet already.

A group of children giggled and tried to catch the falling drops in their hands while some adults watched. And then someone started to laugh. And everyone laughed and laughed and laughed.

It stopped raining when the ushers opened the windows. Everyone sat back down, the minister came back, and the service went on as usual. But some people think of the day it rained in church whenever there is a baptism. It makes them smile.[1]

True story. I wish I had been there. I like the idea of something unexpected happening inside a church. Do you suppose it was the Holy Spirit that was in the cool breeze that caused a rainfall just when the minister said, “I baptize you”? Do you think that congregation received the rain as a gift of the Holy Spirit?

One of the bits of the story I can picture with perfect clarity is the several people who tried to make umbrellas out of their bulletins. It would be a natural impulse, really; I’ve seen all kinds of people who are caught out in the rain unexpectedly try to cover their heads with whatever is at hand—newspapers, magazines, briefcases. It makes me smile to see bulletins on people’s heads in my mind’s eye, as if that thin slice of order is going to protect them against the chill surprise of rain in the sanctuary.

I just hope and pray that this little snapshot of church folk trying to cover themselves with the worship order is not a metaphor for how we who are involved in organized religion are relating to the work of the Holy Spirit as it breezes through the world.

Acts 19. Paul, on one of his epic missionary journeys, stumbles onto a pocketful of disciples while he’s in Ephesus. He says to them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” The story is spare on details, so we don’t get any clues about what the disciples who were questioned were thinking or feeling when he asks. I imagine them having the bottom drop out of their stomachs, having that pop-quiz-in-Geometry feeling as they face up to the charismatic Paul. They blush. They study their sandals. And they confess, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” It’s like the pop quiz in Geometry that covers the theorems you missed when you were out with the flu.

Paul seems incredulous at this answer. “Into what then, were you baptized?” The idea that you could have a Christian baptism and miss out on knowing about and experiencing the Holy Spirit is unthinkable to him. They tell him, “Into John’s baptism.” Aahhh. That explains it. John’s baptism was a ritual of repentance, a cleansing, a turning. But it wasn’t yet what baptism came to be, a sign of commitment to Jesus’ vision and an imitation of Jesus’ life in the world as a Spirit-filled person. John himself says in the gospel traditions, “I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Jesus received the Holy Spirit at his baptism, and immediately began responding to the Spirit’s leadership. The verse right after our gospel lesson ends reads, “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.” That became the expectation for disciples after that—not that everyone would necessarily have the dramatic experience Jesus had at his baptism, but that the newly hatched disciples would begin responding to the often unpredictable urging of the Holy Spirit.

Paul explains the new situation to the disciples who had been left in a sort of time-warp of John’s baptism. He told them about Jesus, whom John was expecting. He must have taught them about the Holy Spirit. Then they were baptized in the name of Jesus, and when he laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came over them and they began to speak in tongues and prophesy.

Baptism is not some kind of a Holy Spirit rain dance. You don’t do the ritual and then expect God to respond by providing a dramatic experience of the Spirit. That would be treating God like a vending machine. Even in the various New Testament accounts of baptisms, the Spirit and the sacrament are not always in synch. Sometimes the sacrament comes first, sometimes the Spirit comes first. The Spirit and the ritual are linked, but more like two ten speed bikes traveling the same direction on the road than a tandem bike.

But it should still be as unthinkable today as it was in Paul’s day that a person could be baptized in the name of Jesus, baptized as a Christian believer, and have no knowledge of or experience of the Holy Spirit. What if someone was questioning you the same way Paul was questioning the believers in Ephesus, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became a believer?” Would any of us be blushing, looking at our shoes, and answering, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” I hate to tell you that I have encountered any number of confirmation students (generally 8th graders) in all of the churches I’ve served who get that pop-quiz-in-Geometry look in their eyes when I ask them if they know what the Holy Spirit is in confirmation class.

I was thinking about this as I was reading an article on the Holy Spirit written by Henry Mitchell, an African-American pastor who was trying to describe for white-bread readers like me how the Holy Spirit functions in many black churches. He starts out saying that in the tradition in which he was brought up, there was never any doubt about the reality of the Holy Spirit. You would never hear someone in his church saying like the disciples in Ephesus they had never heard that there was a Holy Spirit. There may have been questions raised about whether an expression was genuinely Spirit-inspired, based on Biblical guidelines, the wisdom of the community, and reasonableness (which he called “motherwit”), but no one doubted the actuality of the Spirit. The worshiping community welcomed enthusiastic expressions of being touched by God’s Holy Spirit, but there were boundaries and judgments about whether an individual’s expression was authentically Spirit-led. He recalled one instance in which his Grandma Estis said in response to an outburst at a camp meeting, “You know very well the Holy Ghost ain’t the author of no such confusion.”[2]

I think any of us who have worshiped in an African-American or other charismatic type church would agree that there is a world of difference between that style of worship and ours. Our worship tends to be quieter, more head-oriented, less physical. Both styles of worship are good. What I do covet from the culture of the black churches is this easy understanding that the Holy Spirit is real and is very involved in the daily life of the believer. I’m not sure that we have done a great job of teaching about the Holy Spirit and about being open to the often-unpredictable urging of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

It might be simple oversight on our part. It might be confusion. It might be that we haven’t left much room for the Holy Spirit to move in our worship, in our church organization, in our habits. Mitchell writes in his article that “in all cultures, virtually all of the time, the Holy Spirit moves persons within the well established expectations of their culture.” He was making the point that many churches that are reticent about charismatic worship needn’t worry about whether there would be some kind of chaos if they tried to be more open to the Spirit, because cultural expectations come into play in all kinds of churches. This make me wonder about whether our cultural expectations of rationality, self-control, decorum, and so forth have practically squeezed out the Holy Spirit’s movement among us.

Let me illustrate. Suppose I ask Pastor Emily to baptize me with water and the Holy Spirit. The font is all set up for our renewal of baptismal vows. But I need a few minutes to get ready. (Preacher dons a complete set of rain gear and snorkel.)

Obviously, this would be no way to go about preparing for baptism. I should be going the other way with layers of protective gear, right? Not that I’m going to strip now in order to make a point! I think the key word in the Acts passage, the key word in Paul’s question to the disciples is receive. Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers? A gift may be given and not received. A gift may be given and then rejected, or more passively, just “not received.” The Christian tradition is crystal clear that the gift of the Holy Spirit is for all believers. But the gift being given does not guarantee that it has been received. There is an act of will in receiving, in being open to a gift. There is an act of will involved in not receiving as well. We can subtly and not-so subtly react to the gift of the Holy Spirit with a “return to sender” stance.

We can defend ourselves against the Holy Spirit, you betcha. We can put on all kinds of invisible raingear to prevent a drop of living water from touching us. We can keep a tight reign on our practice of faith and on our potential encounters with God, both inside and outside our church building. We can pray the kind of prayers that lay out an agenda for God without ever pausing to listen to what God might be trying to say to us. We can own a Bible without ever opening it to let it read us. We can keep our calendars so packed with work, sports, errands and entertainments that there’s no time to encounter God in serving a neighbor. We can equate Christianity with being nice and polite and leave very little room for the Spirit to maneuver. William Willimon has written, “When our faith is polite, comfortable, marketable, harmless, then nobody gets messy, out of control, embarrassed. Of course, few get judged, converted, ignited, or reborn either.”

We can defend ourselves against the Holy Spirit, even using organized religion as our shield, like the people putting worship bulletins over their heads the day it rained in church. On the other hand, we can choose to receive the Holy Spirit, in the sure hope of being judged, converted, ignited, and reborn.

Of course, there’s always a chance that the Spirit will immediately drive us out into the wilderness, out of our comfort zones, out of safe territory. There’s a chance the Spirit will set us to prophesying—not so much foretelling the future as doing what the classic prophets did, speaking the truth to power.

Guess we’ll have to take our chances.

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[1] Schroeder, Ted “Rain in Church” Alive Now, January/February 1979, p. 62-63

[2] Mitchell, Henry H. “The Holy Spirit: A Folk Perspective” http://www.pulpit.org/articles/the_holy_spirit.asp, linked at textweek.com