Moving with the Spirit
Last Sunday we celebrated Pentecost – the moment that God poured out the Holy Spirit on the disciples, making their testimony understandable to all who heard it that day in Jerusalem
This gift of the Spirit was promised to the disciples by Jesus as he began to share with them the reality of how his earthly life would end.
He had developed deep relationships with the disciples, and as he approached his own death, he promised a way that they would continue to be in deep relationship with God the Father and Jesus the Son, through the power of the Holy Spirit.
They would somehow continue to be connected…to be in relationship…but he didn’t give a lot of specifics.
Imagine how puzzling that must have been.
“Trust me on this, God the Father will make it possible for us to continue to be together. Somehow. I promise. Just trust me.”
I imagine beloved Peter sort of shaking his head…just exactly how is that going to work?
Our texts for today give us some images and insights about how it is that we can be connected to God, source of life, and Jesus, source of guidance and love, through the life force and wisdom of the Holy Spirit. These texts flesh out some of what Jesus promised the disciples.
In today’s text from the gospel of John, Jesus offers the disciples a metaphor for a life with God. This is the beginning of Jesus’ very long “farewell discourse” found in John’s gospel. It is the last of the famed “I AM” statements. “I am the true vine…”.
Jesus explains to the disciples that they are part of a living system – his image is a grape vine, specifically.
Cultivating vines for fruitfulness means tending the roots, nurturing a strong central trunk, diligently pruning canes that shoot upward from horizontal trellised vines annually. Grape vines require the right soil, the right air circulation, and the right exposure to sun and warmth to be fruitful. They can be rather finicky things if you want them to produce reliable, edible, abundant fruit.
This is such a rich image. It takes me back to early March when we talked a little bit about how it is that we grow healthy roots…how we practice things like prayer and scriptural reflection over and over again so that they become part of our root system, the system that anchors us and strengthens us and nourishes the spread of our branches.
Jesus is using this image to introduce to the disciples how their life might look after he is no longer with them, walking the earth alongside of them. They don’t quite get that yet. In this passage, Jesus doesn’t specifically mention the coming of the Spirit, but he is painting a picture of a living system in which all parts are connected and thriving, living, growing, becoming.
Let’s lay that image of a living system that needs tended to thrive alongside Paul’s closing counsel to the Galatians.
In this letter, Paul is probably not writing so much to a geographic location as he is to a group that is ethnically connected. This group initially heard the gospel good news from Paul, but since that time has been visited by missionaries believed to be Jewish Christians deeply rooted in the Mosaic law.
So as a broad generalization, Paul is writing to this community, responding to the teachings of other missionaries, to assure the Galatians that they do not have to become subject to the fullness of the Law – for example, they do not have to be circumcised to be part of Jesus’ saving grace.
It is in this letter that Paul makes the argument that it is their FAITH in Jesus and the saving power of the resurrection and NOT their commitment to a set of rules that makes them Jesus – followers and ensures their salvation.
And Paul asserts that rather than being guided by the Law, this community should be guided by the Spirit. And that will suffice.
It is important to unpack some words and concepts, because Paul’s writing is always dense and doesn’t necessarily translate well in modern English.
Paul tells the Galatians that rather than called to the Law, they have been called to freedom. Freedom to make good choices. Freedom to choose again and again LOVE over other things. For them, the law is summed up in that single commandment, love your neighbor as yourself.
And so their freedom is NOT freedom to just do as they please. Their freedom is not for their pleasure. Their freedom is to LOVE their neighbor. All their neighbors. They are called to pour themselves out for their neighbor.
The works of the flesh that Paul condemns in this passage are NOT just sensual – they also include actions that work against the unity of community – enmity, strife, jealousy, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy.
I am struck that oftentimes folks use Paul’s list of “fleshy” behaviors in very narrow terms to call out specific things as opposed to seeing the list as an illustration of a pattern - a broad and potentially endless list of ways we tend to our egos rather than the good of community.
And sometimes, because we are focused on the narrow terms, we take a list like this and use it as a scorecard. Like three strikes and you’re out.
But Paul is talking about practice, the work of a lifetime, and Paul knows that it takes practice, day in and day out over time, to live into bad choices or good choices. Practices shape us over time. There is a big difference between one drunken night and a lifestyle of drunkenness that takes us away from our ability to love and be loved by others. Similarly, there is a difference between writing a check once a year to a cause and getting to know people to love them and serve with them.
Paul is calling on this community to open themselves up to life in the Spirit. Life in the Spirit means opening our ears and hearts and our minds to hear what we are being called toward. When we live in the Spirit, we experience fruits like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
As we are more and more attuned to the Spirit calling us to follow Jesus’ leading, more and more of those fruits show up. As more of those fruits show up, they tend to crowd out or overcome the fleshy behaviors. It becomes easier to avoid saying the mean-spirited thing. It becomes easier for us to see the oppression of some of our neighbors. It becomes easier for us to let go of our worldly things for the good of the world.
As Brian McLaren puts it, “the Spirit begins to transform our desires so that God’s desires become our own. Instead of doing the right thing because we have to, we do the right thing because we want to – because we are learning to truly desire goodness. Once our desires are being changed, a revolution is set in motion.”
How is it that we begin each day with the intention of being open to the Spirit?
How is it that we begin each day walking with God, following Jesus, letting the Spirit call us into each next step?
I’m doing a lot of work to build good habits right now. If you read much leadership or management or self-improvement stuff, you know that the psychology of building habits is kind of a trendy topic. What if we applied it to our life with the Spirit?
What if each morning when you first smell that cup of coffee, you pause to practice gratitude – to say thanks to God and to listen for other things that come to your heart for which you are grateful?
What if each evening, as you take you contacts out or wash your face or brush your teeth, you make a practice of thinking about your day and asking the Spirit to show you a place of joy that you might not have initially recognized, or a place where you might have loved another better?
What if anytime you are faced with a decision that seems to make your tummy flip, you take just a moment to ask the Holy Spirit to guide you?
Maybe if you are in a small group, you might develop an accountability question to check in about how you’ve opened yourself to the Holy Spirit since the last gathering.
Habits stick when we anchor them to other habits. Habits stick when they are small changes that we can make work frequently.
If we practice tuning in to the Holy Spirit, might we begin to sense our next best step forward, even when we don’t quite know where we are going? Might the Holy Spirit call us forward? Nudge us in a direction? Offer us an insight that helps guide our steps?
On this journey that we make by walking, our individual habits will build, and our communal habits will build. We’ll find that we hear the Holy Spirit calling us to this place or away from that idea. As we look back over time, we’ll see the places along the journey where we were held or nudged or warned. We’ll build habits and a story of the power of the Holy Spirit together.
Life with the Spirit feels a little bit like the soil or the rain or the air that surrounds that grapevine. Always present, vital to life, and we have to be absorbing the vital nutrients provided by the soil or the water or the air in order to be nourished.
This is life in the Spirit. This is life that follows Jesus. This is life loving God.
Let us journey on together.
May it be so.
Amen.
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