Breath, Wind and Fire
Galatians 5:16-26
I have not always been a Presbyterian, a part of the frozen chosen, a part of the great dour way. No, when I was 17 it was into a charismatic church which I converted to the Christian faith. I saw it all: tongues, the interpretation of tongues, dancing in the aisles, laying on of hands for healing. Pretty much everything that makes a traditional Presbyterian uncomfortable, I saw it. I have to admit that I, too, was uncomfortable in the worship. It seemed strange, foreign. I loved the worship music, which is what we would call contemporary, but I would have preferred to pass on all the “extras.”
I
love, also, the people of that charismatic church. I still go visit the church’s pastor and his wife, whom I dated in
high school, when I’m in California.
The congregants are good folks.
Salt of the earth. They love
Jesus. They are intelligent, wise and sophisticated. Doctors and lawyers and plumbers and teachers and
homemakers. So I am left to wonder
about what I experience in their midst because they seem so normal in every
other way, but, to me as a Presbyterian, their church seems really, really
weird. I guess their “weirdness,” at
least from my perspective, comes from the fact that they are a “charismatic” church,
which means they practice the charisms,
or gifts, of the Holy Spirit. And let’s face it: the Holy Spirit is the weird
part of God.
*****
Jesus
is easiest to understand. He was human;
we know what humans looks like. He was
a Jew; we have Jewish friends. He was a
carpenter; we have met carpenters in our time.
God the Father is also fairly easy to understand. The Father is not the old man with the white
beard sitting on a throne in heaven that many of us had as a childhood image,
of course. Nor, quite frankly, is
gender really a part of the equation at all since “God is spirit.” Even still, most of us know our human
fathers or mothers and so have some kind of connection to this part of God. But the Holy Spirit is amorphous,
vague. The biblical images don’t help
much; they talk of the Spirit as breath or wind or fire. Yet, given that the
Holy Spirit is the third person of
the God-head, these images don’t help us in our human quest to personify the
Spirit. Breath, Wind and Fire would be
a great name for a Christian band but they don’t help us understand this part
of the personhood of God.
Of
course, maybe the quest to personify the third person of God is the wrong
quest. If we can let go of our human
need to create God in our own image, perhaps we can begin to understand the
Holy Spirit. The biblical images of
Holy Spirit, as metaphors, will serve then to show us what the Spirit does, the work of the Holy Spirit.
Breath, Wind and Fire, as metaphors for the work of the Holy Spirit,
teach us of God’s intimacy, encouragement and judgment.
*****
The
image of Holy Spirit as breath comes from the Hebrew word ruah, which is translated as breath or wind or spirit. For the Hebrew mind, the Spirit of God was
quite literally the breath of God.
Breath conveys intimacy. When I
am holding my wife and we are face to face, our mouths mere inches apart, we
are quite literally sharing breath. I
can smell her breath; receive her breath into my person. It is a moment of intimacy. Jesus, when he
encountered his disciples after his resurrection, “breathed on them and said,
‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:22).
Jesus was conveying the same intimacy with the disciples that I share
with my wife. In first breathing on the
disciples, Jesus conveyed to them the nature of the gift he was imparting: it
was a gift of his very self, his essence, his life spirit into their person.
In
The Silver Chair, one of the
Chronicles of Narnia novels, C. S. Lewis tells the story of how Jill and
Eustace are sent on a mission to save Prince Rilian. Somehow Jill is left behind on a great mountain alone with no way
to get to Narnia to begin the mission, but then Jill encounters Aslan, the
great lion who is the Christ figure in the series:
“Please,” asked Jill, “how am I to get to Narnia?” “On my breath,” said the Lion. “I will blow you into the west of the world as I blew Eustace.” …The voice had been growing softer towards the end of this speech and now it faded away altogether. Jill looked behind her. To her astonishment she saw the cliff already more than a hundred yards behind her and the Lion himself a speck of bright gold on the edge of it. She had been setting her teeth and clenching her fists for a terrible blast of lion’s breath; but the breath had really been so gentle that she had not even noticed the moment at which she left the earth.
What a wonderful image of the way Christ empowers mission among his people: with the Breath of Holy Spirit!
Ruah means wind as well as breath
though. So it was that Jesus could tell
Nicodemus at their clandestine meeting, “The wind blows where it will. You hear its sound but cannot tell where it
comes from or where it is going. So it
is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). Had Jesus been speaking Hebrew, he would have said, “The ruah blows where it will…So it is with
everyone born of the Ruah.” Wind is a powerful force; wind is a gentle
breeze. Wind disturbs the order of
things; wind refreshes along the way.
Behind a sail, wind carries one forward. Before a wing, wind helps create the updraft that makes flight
possible. What a wonderful metaphor for
the Holy Spirit wind is! It is a
metaphor for the encouragement that comes from God, for God’s people, to do
God’s work and God’s will.
Penelope
Stokes contrasts the lone eagle high upon its craggy peak with the bloated
pigeon in the park. For the eagle to
fly, it stretches its wings and waits, listening to the wind, sensing its
rhythm. When the wind tells the eagle
it is time to fly, the eagle free falls forward into the wind and is upheld by
the wind and soars upon the wind. For
the pigeon to fly, it must flap its wings with all its strength, flapping and
squawking until it elevates a few feet above the ground until gravity and the
inertia caused by its own bloatedness slam the pigeon back to earth. Ms. Stokes asks us: what kind of Christian
do we want to be? One that listens to
the Spirit, senses the Spirit, waits for the Spirit and then soars upon the
Spirit’s wind? Or one that tries of our
own strength, our own effort, our own ability to lift off but for only a few
moments?
Fire
as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit comes to us from both John the Baptist’s
preaching about one who will come to “baptize you with Holy Spirit and with
fire” (Matthew 3:11) as well as the “tongues of fire” that alighted on the
disciples on the Day of Pentecost and that “filled them with the Holy Spirit
[enabling them to] speak in other tongues” (Acts 2:3-4). Fire brings purity and power. It separates the precious metal from the
ore; the “refiner’s fire” takes all that is impure away from that which is a
treasure. The hotter the flame, the greater the separation of precious metal
from the impurities that would mar its beauty; fire separates beauty from the
beast. To know the Holy Spirit as fire
is to be under the judgment of God. But
the judgment of God not to punish but to purify; the judgment of God’s Holy
Spirit is to restore oneself according to the true treasure within, even
burning away all that is not pure, if necessary. In such a way, the Holy Spirit brings to the believer the power
of Pentecost, the power to faith, the power to hope, the power to love.
The
judgment of God is what Paul it talking about in Galatians 5 where he contrasts
the sinful nature and the Spirit nature.
Paul acknowledges that we all have a sinful nature that causes us “to do
what we do not want.” Therefore, we
must learn to “live according to the Spirit.”
As we live according to the Spirit our sinful nature, the impurities
that mar our human beauty, impurities such as dissension and jealousy and rage,
are burned away. What is left is the
“fruit of the Spirit.” Notice that Paul
did not say “fruits,” this is not a smorgasbord Paul is offering. Rather, there grows within the one in whom
the Spirit lives a rich and wondrous variety of beauty: love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Do not worry if this fruit is not fully
evident in your life or in my own: the Spirit’s judgment is complete on neither
your life nor mine!
We may never have a clear understanding of the person of the Holy Spirit, but we can all wrap our minds and hearts around these biblical images of Holy Spirit. All of us want to know an intimacy with God, who in the words of the ancient, Christian prayer, “is closer to us than our own breath.” All of us want to know and feel the encouragement of God who is the true “wind beneath our wings.” All of us who have any spiritual maturity at all accept that we still need God’s judgment, for there are parts of our inner person that remain impure.
*****
So where does all this leave us in relation to our charismatic, Pentecostal friends? Is their experience legitimate? Is it of God? If it is, should we, even the frozen chosen, open our minds and hearts to the glossy gifts of Holy Spirit?
I believe the Pentecostal gifts are of God. When I spent a summer in a black Baptist church the pastor spent three weeks teaching on why the Pentecostal gifts are not of God. The entire time the pastor was teaching I was thinking, “I don’t think I can buy this.” The arguments were not compelling. Rather, I believe the charismatic gifts are of God. My friends in my home church are of God. Pastor Bobby Wilson over at Praise Assembly, he is a great man in this community. I serve with Bobby on the board of the Cooperative Care Center. He is a man of God and the charismatic gifts expressed in their worship, I believe, are genuine and true expressions of the Holy Spirit.
Why then do we not practice them in the Presbyterian church? Simple. We don’t practice them here because they are not what is truly important. When one examines the whole New Testament teaching about the Holy Spirit, one realizes very quickly that the Spirit’s work is mostly about bringing God’s people together as one; it’s about lifting up the truth of Jesus Christ; it’s about helping God’s people to love. Do you want tongues? Fine. Give me unity. Do you want the interpretation of tongues? Fine. Give me truth. Do you want to dance in the aisles? Fine! Give me a heart that loves with the love of Jesus. Indeed, when Paul addressed the Corinthian church about their use of the spiritual gifts, Paul honored their use but downplayed them at the same time. Paul told the Corinthians, “let me show you the most excellent way.” The most excellent way, according to Paul, the gifts we should seek, the greatest gifts are the gifts of faith, hope and love.
When the Breath, Wind and Fire of God gives these gifts, we need no others.