DRINKING OF THE ONE SPIRIT
A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan
University Public Worship
Stanford Memorial Church
May 11, 2008
Today’s my opportunity to link the great Christian holiday of Pentecost to Mothers Day. I’ll warn you at the outset that I’m going to do just that. And I actually think it makes a lot of sense. So much that it may offer an important new way to think about Christianity itself.
Let me start at the beginning. What’s Pentecost again? It’s the third most important day in the Christian calendar after Easter and Christmas.[i] It occurs on the fiftieth day after Easter, and it’s described in the New Testament book of Acts as the time that the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus’s disciples after his death, resurrection and ascension.[ii] The central images of the Holy Spirit, as reported in Acts, are of wind and fire: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.” The next sentence in Acts describes what’s become the earmark of so-called Pentecostal Christianity, speaking in tongues: “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”[iii]
There’s another image of the Holy Spirit besides wind and fire that I’d like to emphasize today, though, and that’s water. Peter speaks to a crowd that gathers to hear the disciples speaking in tongues, who suspect that they are “filled with new wine.” Peter explains: “These are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine in the morning. No this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.” Note the water metaphor here. Peter goes on, quoting Joel: “Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit.”[iv]
Today’s gospel reading from John also uses water imagery. Jesus says to a crowd in Jerusalem: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ Now he said this about the Spirit.”[v] Similarly, the reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians explains that “In the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”[vi] More water imagery is conjured up through these passages, as we might remember that the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus when he was standing in the river Jordan being baptized.[vii] Later in his ministry, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well and speaks of “living water” as “the gift of God,” going on to explain that “God is spirit.”[viii]
I personally resonate to the image of the Holy Spirit as water, because it’s in and near the water that I’ve had many of my most spiritual experiences. How about you? I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan and spent countless contemplative hours gazing out across that water. When the waves got big enough, I’d go out body surfing, enthralled by the sensation of being totally enveloped by the water and then hurled toward the shore by this powerful force or energy over which I had no control. I swim here at Stanford as much as I can, as I have throughout my life, and I find doing laps in the pool to be entirely meditational – my whole body is involved, my breathing becomes rhythmic of necessity, and I feel deeply energized. I’m also a scuba diver, and here’s a sample of the kind of letter I can send to friends and family after time under water in the tropics: “I went through the looking glass again, weightless, into a magical realm of the most brightly colored flora and fauna imaginable. I felt excitement, fear, exhilaration, and always awe. I could leap off coral cliffs with a rising gasp of vertigo, only to fall gently as a feather. I could achieve perfect negative buoyancy in a fetal position with 100 feet of water above and below me and nothing but blue for as far as I could see. Why is there such a wonderful world under there that few people ever experience? Why are there such brilliant and beautiful colors, arranged as few artists could conceive, but almost no one to look at them? I cannot wax poetic and mystical enough about that underwater realm.” I should add that I often have very reflective, moving experiences when sailing, kayaking, and canoeing on the water as well.
There’s a prayer for Pentecost by the minister of my sister’s church in Minnesota, Virginia Rickeman which is entitled “Living Water.” It provides imagery of the Holy Spirit as a river: “God of all our being, bear us gently on the current of your love. When we feel overstressed or anxious, may we find respite in some quiet, shaded pool where we can gather strength to go on. If we feel trapped in an eddy going nowhere…may we discover a peacefulness unknown to those swept up in swifter currents.”[ix] Harvard Professor of Comparative Religion Diana Eck has written about how many Christians, as well as Hindus, have stood on the banks of the Ganges River in India and felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. She quotes the German traveler Herman Keyserling from a century ago: “The breath of divine presence hangs over the Ganges more mightily than I have ever felt it anywhere else. Especially in the morning when the faithful cover the ghats [along the river] in thousands, when their prayers flow in golden waves towards the rising sun … the whole atmosphere seems to be divinely transfused.”[x]
Now here comes the connection to Mother’s Day. Everywhere in India Hindus speak of the River Ganges as Mother. As Diana Eck explains, “She [the Ganges] is said to have cascaded from heaven to bring the blessings of renewal to the weary and life to the dead. Pilgrims from all over India come to bathe in the Ganges, to sip the waters of the Ganges, to bring the ashes of the dead to the Ganges.”[xi] Eck, a Methodist Christian, considers the energy of the Holy Spirit likewise to be feminine. She cites the renowned New Testament scholar Krister Stendahl to the effect that She, the Holy Spirit, is creative and generative. She is life-giving energy.[xii]
Biblical scholar Marcus Borg has also pointed out how God as Spirit has been imaged as a mother in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament as well as in the New Testament, with resonances of birthing and nurturing. In the Book of Numbers Moses images God as conceiving human beings, giving birth to them, and then carrying them in her bosom as a nurse carries a suckling child.[xiii] In Isaiah mothering imagery and water imagery are connected: God promises: “I will extend prosperity to her [Jerusalem] like a river and the wealth of nations like an overflowing stream; and you shall nurse and be carried on her arm, and dandled on her knees. As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.”[xiv] Water has to do with fertility and nurturance and growth. The waters of the womb help nurture the fetus as it grows and then flow as it’s born. The word for womb in Hebrew is related to the word for one of the central qualities of God, compassion. As Marcus Borg puts it, “God as a compassionate Spirit feels for us as a mother feels for the children of her womb. Spirit feels the suffering of the world and participates in it.”[xv]
Once this feminine notion of the Holy Spirit, of God, sinks in, there are important new ways available to think about Christian doctrine. Because the Holy Spirit is always present with us post-Pentecost, creation no longer needs to be seen merely as an event in the distant past, enacted by a monarch God, but instead it is an ongoing process in every moment of time. God as generative Holy Spirit is constantly bringing the universe into existence. Creation is always happening, rather than something that happened only “in the beginning.”[xvi]
Secondly, instead of seeing our central human problem as sin and guilt for our disloyalty to a monarch God, from a Holy Spirit perspective our central problem is estrangement or separation from that to which we belong, most concretely imaged as mother. In a Holy Spirit model of God, the divine remains with us unconditionally and for us whether we know it or not, much like the air we breathe and the waters of the ocean (even if we never swim in them). The risk for us is not sin and guilt but not to experience God’s immediate presence -- to be separated from that Holy Spirit which “is all around us, and within us, and to which we belong.”[xvii]
So, I wish not just you who are mothers but each and every one of you a Happy Mother’s Day – that being a theological statement as well as a personal one. I hope you continue to celebrate this great holiday of Pentecost with a sense of the immediate presence of the Holy Spirit to each and every one of us, if only we are open to her. In the words of our closing hymn today, “Healing river of the Spirit, bathe the wounds that living brings. Plunge our pain, our sin, our sadness deep beneath your sacred springs… Well-spring of the healing Spirit, stream that flows to bring release, as we gain ourselves, our senses, may our lives reflect your peace.”[xviii] Amen.
NOTES
1
[i] Dan Clendenin, “From the Inspiration of the Spirit to the Institution of the Church: Pentecost 2008,” in journeywithjesus.net at
[ii] “Pentecost,” HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), p. 834.
[iii] Acts 2: 1-4.
[iv] Acts 2: 17-18.
[v] John 7: 37-39.
[vi] I Corinthians 12: 13.
[vii] Luke 3: 21-22.
[viii] John 4: 10, 24.
[ix] Virginia Rickeman, The Well is Deep: Prayers to Draw Up Living Water (Cleveland: United Church Press, 1999), p. 22.
[x] As cited in Diana L. Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Benares (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), p. 120.
[xi] Eck, Encountering God, p. 139.
[xii] Eck, Encountering God, p, 136.
[xiii] Numbers 11: 12.
[xiv] Isaiah 66: 12-13.
[xv] Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), p. 73.
[xvi] Borg, The God We Never Knew, p. 77.
[xvii]Ibid.
[xviii] Ruth Duck, “Healing River of the Spirit,” from Circles of Care: Hymns and Song (Pilgrim Press, 1996).