Lately, where I work, I’ve been on a project that hasn’t been going so well. Actually, it’s not going all that badly, but we seem to have a need to get a lot of people together and pick at the topic of how things are. So what’s happened is that a big group sits together, every day at 4:00, and talks about “the problem.” We sit in a room where someone always closes the door; and there are windows into the hallway with those little venetian blinds, and they’re always shut. I’m not sure if it’s so we’re not distracted by what’s outside, or so that people can’t look in and wonder what on earth we’re doing. And every day, we talk about the same thing, the same agenda of checkpoints. Sometimes a little progress has been made on one. But usually not. We argue a little about what measurements to use to see how we’re doing but mostly what everyone does is feel bad that somehow the people in that room can’t do more to turn a situation around.
Admittedly, this doesn’t have much to do with what we’re here for today. It has a lot more to do with something in the Dilbert comic strip than the Acts of the Apostles or the Gospel of John. If you work in a big company, maybe it sounds familiar. Perhaps I’ve had a little too much time to think about other things during these meetings, but it strikes me that not only is this kind of behavior typical of the way big companies work, but it’s very, very human.
If we face up to the way we spend a lot of our thinking time, it may be a little like this: We all face some kind of stress in our lives, or maybe more a vague sense of disappointment that things haven’t worked out so well, whether it’s our career, or our faith, or what we expected of our families. Maybe death and illness have worn us down, or just a lack of interest in what’s around us. It’s all just not quite what we hoped for, most of the time. What happens is, we gradually find ourselves in a room. It might not be a real room, and maybe we don’t spend all our time there, but it’s some kind of a place where lots of people can’t get to us, or see us or even know who we are, and where we mull the same things over, day after day, maybe with the same people who think the same way we do, kind of wondering how things got to this state. The room, whatever it is for you, isn’t a good, quiet place where we gather strength, but a place where we lose a sense of our real worth, our real mission.
Today’s two readings about the gift of the Holy Spirit, that first reading from Acts and the Gospel, from John, are very different stories about what it looked like and exactly when it happened that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus alive and active in the world, came to the apostles and to us. But the common elements are more striking than any differences.
In both, the disciples are gathered together, in a room, in one place. In Acts, they’re gathered together because earlier, Jesus has told them to wait, it seems; in John, it’s pretty clear: they’re scared of what’s outside, and probably disagreeing about what’s happened to Jesus, what this all meant, and completely uncertain about what to do next. (Perhaps they met every day at 4:00.) And in both readings, the result of the gift of the Holy Spirit is the same thing: they are out of that room, shot out of there with fire and everything else in the Acts reading, touched with the breath of Jesus in the second, and the end result is the same, that a period of fear and confusion and lack of understanding about who they were and what was supposed to happen next was suddenly over, and people who seemed totally directionless suddenly were fanning out all over the place talking with people they’d never seen before and never communicated with before, and, it looks to us, all of a sudden filled with an energy that we only see glimpses of in our own lives.
We hear a lot about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and of course, [pause and ask for it] fear of the Lord. That list of seven is right from the prophet Isaiah, and even our young people who were confirmed on Wednesday night had to learn them, I hear. But you know, sometimes to me they sound a little dull, a lot of virtues we can’t aspire to. What we hear today about the Holy Spirit puts a different face on these gifts. The gift we hear about today is a very frightening gift, but it’s the one we want.
If you pray for the Holy Spirit to come to you, or to this church, or to the people around you, what you are praying for is this: Some sudden charge of knowledge and energy, the sudden rush of knowing that life is not the dull muddle that it usually seems like, that we’re not trapped, and not only are we not trapped, but there is a whole world out there waiting for us to do what God has chosen the most unlikely people in the world for. Us.
Paul tells us we all have a gift, all we lack, it seems, is the fire to really make it ours.