I should have noticed the whooshing sound, but I didn't.
Rob and I headed out early Wednesday morning for the Wilmington train station. We were thrilled about this spontaneous day trip to New York City for a long-awaited family reunion. However, when we arrived, things did not go as planned. There was not a parking spot to be found anywhere near the train station. We circled the block – there were lots of garages, all full. Our search perimeter grew larger as the minutes ticked by and our departure time loomed closer. Red neon signs glowed forebodingly: Lot full. Lot full. Lot full. I look over at Rob, who by now was sweating. “We’re gonna miss our train,” he said. Suddenly, it occurred to me, I forgot to pray.
“Please, God, help us find a parking place,” I prayed.
Seconds later, no kidding, we turn a corner, and immediately spot a green open sign at the entrance to a lot we had driven by several times.
Thanks be to God, we park. We make our train.
This is no fairy tale. This is classic Holy Spirit.
During the days and weeks after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension, the disciples had their own frustrations. They were likely still processing Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension as they gathered in that room in Jerusalem for the Jewish harvest festival of Shavuot.
What happened that Pentecost morning was huge for the Church. The Holy Spirit descends, and followers of Jesus are suddenly equipped with energy, skill, and desire to spread the Gospel far and wide. Stands to reason that this kind of radical change might require time for integration. Perhaps this explains why the Holy Spirit initially took a back seat to the other persons of the Trinity. Some have said that the Holy Spirit spent centuries on the sidelines, riding the pine…sitting the bench…
Some contemporary scholars have recently referred to the Holy Spirit as the “Cinderella” of the Trinity.[1]
Remember when the UMBC basketball team upset UVA in the first round of the NCAA Division I men’s tournament? The UVA Cavaliers were first seed, UMBC Retrievers-16th, yet they managed to pull off a win that’s still remembered as a Cinderella victory.
We love it when Cinderella gets to go to the ball.
No need to be a fan of fairy tales or sports to appreciate this analogy. The Holy Spirit’s on fire! She’s got game! And yes, she is often referred to with a feminine pronoun. But we mustn’t get too far ahead of ourselves. It’s easy to be blown away by the Spirit.
“The wind blows where it chooses,” John writes, “You hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes (John 3:8).”
The feminine Hebrew word for wind, Ruach, evokes the power of God, the movement of God in creation, the uncontrollability, and ineffable nature of God, a wind that moves waters in Exodus (14:21).Interchangeable for both wind and Spirit, is the Greek word pneuma.
The Spirit is also associated with breath. God breathes life into Adam, (Gen 2:7). In the famous story of the dry bones in the book of Ezekiel, heard back at the Easter Vigil, God’s breath restores life (Ezekiel 37:9-10). The post-resurrection Jesus breathes the Spirit into the disciples (John 20: 22-24).
The Spirit hovers over the waters of creation and speaks through the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.[2]She grows the church and inspires human hearts to love (Romans 5:5). She intercedes for us and directs our prayers (Romans 8:26). The Spirit is credited with salvation in this life and in the life to come.[3]She dwells with us.
And then there’s… parking spaces.
But wait, there’s more. The Holy Spirit invites us into relationship with God, with Christ, and with one another. 4th Century theologian and Bishop Basil of Caesarea puts it this way:
“Christ is our way up to God.” Even as Christ is our way to God, the Spirit is our way to Christ. A contemporary theologian adds, “The Holy Spirit is always the means to God, but never the end in itself, which is why it is impossible to specify what the Spirit is in itself.”[4]
Whoosh!
The Spirit leads persons to other persons; the other persons of the Trinity, and one another. How many of us have felt we were mysteriously led to meet someone important?
The Spirit unites us, assisting us with the commandment to love one another.
The Spirit reveals God to us, often through different art forms. Art can be spiritually transformative.
One theologian writes:
Art “quicken(s) into lit presence the continuum between temporality and eternity, between matter and spirit, between man and the ‘other’.”[5]
Whoosh!
At a recent Quiet Day, our own Kathy Arth shared some of her poetry. The same Spirit that breathes inspiration into Kathy inspired Bach, Beethoven, and the Beatles, not to mention Barrett, Beakes, and others of you in this congregation.
In that tumultuous period of the early church, fifty days after Passover, a hundred twenty or so diverse Jews gather in a room for a festival. There’s an intense whooshing sound, like a strong, startling wind blowing through doors and windows. Tongues of fire rest atop each of them. They begin to speak, each in a different language, and yet, remarkably, they can understand one another.
Womanist Cole Arthur Riley writes that on Pentecost, the Spirit’s descent makes language “a portal to the divine, a path to God, to one another, and to a shared imagination.” Riley cautions, “Pentecost reminds us that the Spirit of God rejects assimilation under the guise of unity.”[6]
This wisdom (another aspect of the multi-faceted Holy Spirit) could be a guidepost for us as this community envisions our next steps.
I neglected to share one critical detail about our little parking debacle. We needed to find a parking garage that wouldn’t take the roof off my husband’s ridiculously tall truck.
Like the shoe in the Cinderella story, we, too, must find the right fit for our time away during construction. Are we being called into relationship with another congregation? How might our ministries best continue to flourish? What might we learn from different scenarios? What wisdom might we have to share? As construction draws closer, may we discern wisely, together with the Holy Spirit.
St. Mark’s, do you know you are a dream team? And our time is now! Can you feel it? This unique community of faith is being called to be church in innovative and exciting new ways.
As we dream about various possibilities during our reconstruction, I pray that we will remain open to the movement of the Spirit while holding onto our vision of what is unique about us. In my discernment, before arriving here as Curate, the word I heard over and over to describe St. Mark’s was generous.
The brilliant American theologian Walter Brueggemann, who passed away this week, could have written this for us at this pivotal moment. I am sure the Holy Spirit had a hand in it. They write:
“Sink your generosity deep into our lives
that your muchness may expose our false lack
that endlessly receiving we may endlessly give
so that the world may be made Easter new,
without greedy lack, but only wonder,
without coercive need but only love,
without destructive greed but only praise
without aggression and invasiveness….
all things Easter new…..
all around us, toward us and
by us
all things Easter new.
Finish your creation, in wonder, love, and praise. Amen."
[1] Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 25th Anniversary Sixth Edition (Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell, 2017), 280.
[2] McGrath, 281.
[3] McGrath, 281.
[4] Catherine Mowry La Cugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life, 1. HarperCollins paperback ed., [Nachdr.] (New York, NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 362.
[5] “A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World. 1: Christ and Reconciliation” (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2013), 185.
[6] Cole Arthur Riley, Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human, First edition (New York: Convergent, 2024), 265.
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