Seen and Unseen

The scriptures referred to are Acts 2:1-21, Romans 8:4-17, and John 14:8-27.

Humans have always believed in spirit. We have always believed in the reality of the unseen. We have always known there is more to this world than that which can be detected by our senses alone. Neanderthals did not just leave their dead behind but buried them with local flowers and flint tools that represented hours of hard work, things that were not only unnecessary to the corpse but which were resources the tribe could have used. Why? To accompany the unseen part of the dead person—his intelligence, wisdom, and personality, that which made him an individual—into an unseen habitat.

Some people have extended the idea of spirit to everything, some have limited it to every living thing, and some have limited it to humans. The idea that we and the people we interact with are merely bodies, the idea that we are nothing more than our sex, hair color, skin color, body shape, organs, and chemicals, is foreign to us. Tell an atheist his arguments against the existence of God are just the side effects of having a complex brain and do not represent anything more valid about reality than his dreams and he will suddenly make a case for the existence of an infallible superior intelligence: his. We all believe there is more to humans than meets the eye. And that affects what we do.

Other animals are motivated by their needs and fears. We are, too, but in addition we are motivated by the unseen. Like the desire not merely to belong but to be acknowledged as valuable. Or the desire to learn about things and create things, like art, that have no apparent survival value. Stephen Fry pointed out that we are the only animals who display more than a passing curiosity about other animals. A gorilla doesn't care if the world contains kangaroos. We send film crews and David Attenborough at great expense to Australia to study and video everything about them and report back to us on PBS.

We also love to communicate. Other animals may sing mating songs and make warning cries and purr with pleasure. We communicate stories and ideas. We teach, not merely by doing, but explaining in great detail things that, again, have no immediate survival value. We tell jokes that depend on mentally shifting another person's perspective on something just to make them laugh. Some people make their living doing this.

We preach. Not merely in churches but in editorials and in articles and in books and in You Tube videos. We tell people they need to improve how they think, speak and act in accordance with whatever our ideology is, whether spiritual or secular. We seek to motivate people to do things that do not always benefit them personally but are for the good of humanity or of other species or of the ecosystem. In certain circumstances, we feel an idea, an immaterial thought, is worth losing your physical life for.

The first followers of Jesus, all Jews, believed in God, of course. It is safe to say that they initially believed Jesus was a human being who was anointed by God's Spirit to act as the promised Messiah. After he rose from the dead, they had to rethink who Jesus was. They concluded he not only spoke for and acted for God but that he was in some sense God in the flesh. When he ascended, they began to experience God in yet another way as God's Holy Spirit within them. They found themselves saying and doing things they would never have believed they could. Jesus had promised them the Spirit but they did not expect what happened on Pentecost.

In our passage from Acts, the main thing the Spirit does is communicate. He communicates to everyone within earshot of the disciples, and in the language of everyone who can hear them. And the Spirit communicates not merely facts but a different interpretation of them. Peter ties the manifestation of the Spirit to a prophesy in the Old Testament. Then he goes on to offer a radically different interpretation of the ministry and recent execution of Jesus. This is the gospel, the idea that what God has done in Jesus and is doing with his Spirit is good news for those who hear and respond.

Though not a joke, the Spirit causes a shift in how things are perceived. Jesus was a popular preacher and healer who was executed by the Romans at the behest of the religious establishment. And that ended the popular idea that he was the Messiah. His death ended it for the disciples too...until his resurrection, which brought the idea that he was the Messiah back to life as well. But the crowd at Pentecost probably did not hear about it. They were Jews from the Diaspora, the ones living outside of Judea from all over the Roman Empire. Some have heard about Jesus, as Peter indicates, (Acts: 2:22) and they may have heard of his death. But Peter tells them that Jesus has risen, and he and the others are witnesses to that. Jesus has been exalted to the right hand of God and has poured out the Spirit on the believers. The evidence of the disciples speaking in various tongues convinces 3000 of the listeners to get baptized.

You may remember that Michael Grant said that as a historian he can't attest to the reality of the resurrection but without it he can't explain the persistence and spread of Christianity after Jesus' death. Certainly that affected the first Christians, who actually interacted with the risen Jesus. But it is the Spirit who worked in the hearts of those hearing the gospel and convinced them of the disciples' testimony.

In his long address on the night he was betrayed, Jesus calls the Holy Spirit “the Spirit of truth” 3 times. Because, he says, “he will guide you into all truth.” (John 16:13) But, if we may quote Pilate's cynical reply to Jesus, “What is truth?”

A strictly scientific look at truth is one that deals only with what can be observed, measured and quantified. That's why, when studying the effects of religion on people, scientists go by how often one attends worship. They can't measure one's faith but they can measure attendance. And that's why, when they find that people who attend worship weekly have lower blood pressure, lower mortality rates, a reduced risk of diabetes and infectious disease, a lower risk of depression and suicide, a greater sense of hope and of a purpose in life, they tend to attribute it to the social support of the church, not to God. Because they can't observe the Spirit of God or quantify his power.

But is the only truth in life that which can be measured? You can look at some couples and tell they are in love. Can you reduce it to data and a spreadsheet? You can tell a really funny comedian from one who is not. But how do you quantify that? You can agree that we should treat others the same way we wish to be treated. But can you test that in an objective, measurable experiment? Here's another truth: science can tell you that some animals eat their young. It cannot tell you why humans shouldn't. That falls outside its domain.

You can't measure all truths, especially spiritual and ethical ones, using the scientific method any more than you can evaluate the truth of a love poem using a microscope. Shakespeare once did a sonnet tongue in cheek, making fun of the poetic language of love. Being as objective as possible, he wrote, “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;/Coral is far more red, than her lips red:/If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;/If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head./I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,/But no such roses see I in her cheeks;/And in some perfumes is there more delight/Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks./I love to hear her speak, yet well I know/That music hath a far more pleasing sound:/I grant I never saw a goddess go,—/My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:/And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,/As any she belied with false compare.” Everything he says in the first dozen lines is factually true, but doesn't capture the truth of his love. And if all his sonnets were written in this manner, they would not have been treasured for 400 years.

By the same token, people need to stop treating the Bible as a science textbook. It was not written to reveal the physical workings of creation but the inner workings of the human heart, especially in relationship with our Creator. It is not interested in questions of “how” when it comes to creation but questions of why we are here and who we are and in which direction should we be going. It's not focused on achieving worldly success but on getting closer to God. It's not about scientific knowledge but spiritual wisdom.

The Holy Spirit is given to us to guide us into the truth of the God who is love and who is revealed in the teachings, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But that is not all the Spirit does. He makes us children of God, as our passage from Romans says.

And in our gospel passage Jesus gives the Spirit another title, which packs a lot into one word. The Greek word is parakletos, which is translated in the NRSV as “Advocate.” It has also been translated “comforter,” “counselor,” “intercessor” and “helper.” That's because it encapsulates all of those functions. It literally means “one who is called in” with the understanding that the person was called in to give aid or assistance. Thus it could be used in the legal world of someone who is called in as a character or defense witness or to plead one's case before another. This is why it is often rendered “advocate” or “intercessor.” And an attorney is still addressed as “counselor.”

But the verb form of the word was used to mean “to exhort or to urge” others. This was used of someone who rallied the troops about to go into battle. This person was to instill courage into them and that was the sense of the word “comforter” at the time of the King James translation. It comes from com fortis, the Latin for “with courage.” A modern form would be “encourager.”

All of this explains why some translations simply go with “helper.” The Spirit is called in by God to assist us with whatever help we need—with the truth, with a defense, with advocacy, with encouragement. The Spirit stands by us.

There is more that the Spirit does and we will touch on that next week. But here I want to emphasize the Spirit's role in giving people the words they need to communicate the spiritual truths that otherwise one might never guess about our existence. This revealed truth is essential because the hand of God in our lives is not always obvious. As we said last week, if you assume there is no God, then there is no hope. There are only animals, humans being the most arrogant and clever, fighting over resources and power, with those who grab the most offering scraps and privileges to those who support them. Morality and rights are just myths we have made up to console ourselves in a ruthless dog-eat-dog world. If our existence is only physical, there is no guarantee of moral progress when it comes to people or society. As we've seen, those rights that have been given to us can be denied and taken away. Ultimately the strongest get their way. And looking at things that way leaves us literally dispirited.

But when you believe that there is more to this world than what can be seen, that things like freedom and justice and grace and redemption are real, and that they can be given form in this world just as God took the form of a man in Jesus Christ, that the Spirit of God is at work in this world, and that we can have access to him, and he can work through us and produce in us love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and generosity and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control, and that we can plant the seeds of the kingdom of God in this world, and that what was and what is are not the limits of what can be, then there is hope. Open yourself to the Spirit of the God who is love, who made all things, seen and unseen, and let him lead you to the way, the truth and the life revealed in Jesus, who is God's love incarnate and who makes all things, including you, new.