As a number of folks read the scriptures, this time from the New Testament, I invite you to simply listen…listen…for God’s Word.

Lord, I pray that this sermon today would be a little unsatisfying …because it seems that if it is too neat and tidy, it surely will have missed something of the mystery and wildness of your Holy Spirit. So bring forth your Word, Lord, in power and by your Spirit. Amen.

The great story of the Old Testament is an endless lineup of people who were insecure and under confident:

• Abraham,
• Jacob,
• Moses,
• Joshua,
• Esther

…all pretty convinced that they were not able to do what was asked of them. All feeling alone, like they were standing in front of God’s people feeling like a comedian who has forgotten the punch line…or a preacher his second point. To which God says, over and over again: Don’t be afraid. You are not alone. I will be with you.

On Friday I visited two members of our Bethany community who have cancer, Wendy German who has battled it for several years and has just started chemo again…and Tom Roush, who just had surgery a week after discovering a problem. What do you talk about? These are friends who have stared life and death in the face much more directly than most of us have. It is a lonely place to be. We sat and read, and remembered God’s promise: You are not alone. I am with you.

The first followers of Jesus gathered together. They had thought they were part of a great movement of God, they’d invested their lives and careers and reputations, they’d taken a huge leap of faith, and suddenly….Jesus is dead. And despite having one another, they are desperately alone. And perhaps some of Jesus’ words ring in their ears:

“When the Spirit of Truth comes…”
“I will not leave you orphaned…”
“The Father will give you and Advocate, a Counselor, a Comforter…”
“The Holy Spirit…will teach you everything….”
“If I go, I will send the Advocate to you…”

Do you know how it is when you get interested in one particular make and model of car, and suddenly it seems like there are just thousands of them driving around Seattle?! Of course they were there all the time, but you didn’t notice. But now that you are interested, your eyes are open and they are everywhere.

That’s how scripture appears once we start reading for the Holy Spirit. If I had asked when you came in this morning, “Where does the Holy Spirit appear in scripture?” most of us would have said, “The book of Acts.” But once you start to look, the Holy Spirit pops up everywhere in scripture.

The Holy Spirit is in the Old Testament. Earlier we read just a couple of places. Now, for sure, Old Testament references are less frequent. Usually the Spirit appears in the Old Testament for a very specific occasion or purpose, landing on someone to accomplish something.

At the beginning of the New Testament, there is a minor explosion. The Spirit suddenly breaks out everywhere, not the least with the events around the birth of Jesus, and the beginning of his ministry. But the big explosion really comes on Pentecost. Suddenly the Spirit of God is everywhere, doing extraordinary things, doing ordinary things, using people to do things they were way too insecure or under confident to ever do by themselves.

In the Holy Spirit, God says, “I will not leave you alone!” We might sometimes wish He would! Whenever the Holy Spirit comes up, the question inevitably seems to come to this: How do we know if we have the Holy Spirit?

• Pentecostal churches say, “if the gifts of the Spirit, especially tongues, are evident.”
• Holiness churches say, “if the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience—are evident.”
• Reformed churches like Presbyterians like to say, “If scripture is being taught and the sacraments administered, then surely the Spirit is there…”

All, of course, have some degree of truth to them. But the last couple of years I have been intrigued by the idea that we know the Holy Spirit is present…if we are confessing.

The Holy Spirit will come, Jesus says, and convict the world of sin…. It’s an interesting picture, isn’t it?

“There are people who confess their sin…the Holy Spirit must be active there.”

As a community and as individuals…I wonder sometimes if we have become immune to being convicted? When the Spirit of God puts his hand on us, our behavior, our thoughts…what do we do?

We justify ourselves: “Everybody does that. It’s just human nature. I was wronged.“ We can deflect it. Our world has spent a lot of energy and timing making sure that no one ever has a guilty conscience. If you are feeling guilty about something, the first thing is to find someone to assure you that you need not feel guilty, need not carry that burden, or that’s just your inner child or you have a martyr complex, or whatever.

No, the first things we should actually do is look to see if it is true! Maybe the Spirit of God is convicting us!

What we call the conscience is a part of us that I believe God uses mightily to speak by his Spirit. Now, can we “hear” wrong, can we get burdened by something truly not our responsibility? Of course! And so we listen to scripture, and to one another and we pray to hear that authentic nudge of the Spirit. If we do sense the Spirit’s conviction, there is good news and bad news. It may be hard or painful to confess or ask someone’s forgiveness or whatever. But it also may mean the Spirit is active in our life…convicting us of sin.

How do we know the Holy Spirit is present and working? If we are being pointed towards Jesus Christ. In the mystery of this God we call a “trinity” (next week)…the role of the Holy Spirit is most often a support role: working behind the scenes, in the background, nudging, orchestrating…but always, I believe, pointing us towards what God has done in Jesus Christ, drawing people towards Jesus.

Jesus said:

The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name will teach you all things and remind you of all that I have taught you…

When the Counselor comes, he will bear witness to me…

He will convict the world of sin…because they do not believe in me…

The Spirit will glorify me, will take what is mine and declare it to you.

My favorite Bible scholar, Dale Bruner calls the Holy Spirit the “shy member of the Trinity.” Not shy like timid or retiring…but the kind of shyness that can center attention on someone else. The kind that is not self-centered, but other-centered.

The Holy Spirit is not somehow jealous of Jesus, but points us towards him. In fact, when Bruner teaches he draws a stick figure on a white board that is supposed to be Jesus (which always reassures me, since stick figures are the peak of my artistic ability). Then he walks behind the white board, reaches just his hand out and points back at the stick figure and his voice says,

“Listen to him!”

That’s the role of the Spirit.

In that way, it is something like John the Baptist, pointing his own followers towards Jesus, and believing, “I must decrease so that he might increase.”

I’m always interested in the names of churches. There are lots that I don’t like because they just seem to talk about institutions rather than communities of believers. Even “Bethany Presbyterian Church.” Presbyterian is from a word that means “elder,” and it refers to the form of church government we use. “Bethany” is better, it’s in the Bible, but just the name of a place, a town outside Jerusalem. I think I’d rather be “The Part of Jesus’ Family That Meets at 1818 Queen Anne Avenue North.” That’s hard to get on letterhead, though!

My favorite one was a little storefront church in Minneapolis, 54th and Nicollet that was called the “Church of the Living God The Pillar and Ground of the Truth Which He Purchased with His Blood, Inc.” Now that’s specific!

But I drove by one the other day called “the Church of the Holy Spirit.” You see, I think even the Holy Spirit would say “no!” to that. The Spirit always points towards Christ.

• So that we might know we are not forgotten, Christ came here.
• So we might know we are not alone in our sins, Christ paid the price.
• So we might know we’re not alone at death, Christ conquered.
• So we might know we are not alone in life, Jesus has provided for us in the presence of the Holy Spirit…who will bring to our remembrance all that Jesus said…which we have in the scripture, which the Spirit moves through.

And so we are driven to Christ when we are convicted of sin. We are drawn to Christ as we are pointed back to the gospel. And we live our lives in Christ as the Spirit enlivens our hearts. I want to talk about that for just a minute, mostly just to give you some pictures. Most of this sermon I have talked about the Spirit acting in the still, small voice, in the nudge of conviction or action. Many times the Spirit moves in very ordinary ways, orchestrating timing, having us run into someone we need to talk to. But sometimes the Spirit moves in extraordinary ways. And if we are not open to the other times, then we will have effectively domesticated the Spirit.

Some Sundays at Bethany you will hear someone speak a word from God, or speak in tongues and another person interpret. It doesn’t happen every week, but it happens. Two weeks ago such a thing happened, and someone spoke in tongues who never had before. It was during a time of waiting on the Lord…very decent and in good order, mind you! But here’s what the interpretation was:

“To all who have suffered misunderstanding, who have experienced pain, been misjudged, suffered lies…I have borne them Myself. I have taken them upon Myself.”

Such a beautiful word from Christ, through the Spirit.

One of the objections often raised to the things of the Spirit is that “it’s just a bunch of emotion.” I don’t think it is just emotion, but I hope that the Spirit can grab our hearts, our emotions too! Much of the church has spent so much time worrying about being too emotional that we’re like ice cubes. Emotions are part of who we are, too!

Imagine me going home to Anne and saying, “I love you with my whole…intellect!” Wouldn’t that warm her heart?! How ridiculous! I love her with everything I have…heart, emotion, mind.

When we notice that we are truly not alone…we can love God with everything we have.

When our group went to China two years ago, we spent an entire afternoon at one of the leadership training schools for the underground church. We called it the “Holy Spirit day,” and I’ve told you some of the story before. We ended up in an amazing time of worship and God’s Spirit moving for hours. But this weekend I remembered one other little piece of that.

The two groups, the Bethany folks and the Chinese students, spent time praying for each other. When it was our turn to pray, I found myself with someone else praying for a young Chinese woman whom we were later told was a doctor. We laid hands on her and began to pray. She couldn’t understand a word that was said. But as I began to pray, God gave me words to pray. In English. I prayed words I knew nothing about. I knew nothing about her. And I found myself praying for her family in rural China, for her father a farmer, for a move she was making, for a particular thing she was anxious about. And somehow she understood, and the tears absolutely ran down her face.

Last thing. As the Spirit enlivens our hearts, I believe it leads us into worship.

The temptation of our day is to “come to church” and watch. We live in a culture of spectators; we go places to be entertained. It’s the easiest thing in the world to bring that same attitude to worship. Let the ensemble do it. Let Cal do it. Let Dan do it. Let the choir do it. But the last thing worship ought to be is a performance. So we try to leave places throughout the service (and sometimes we’re not so good at it)…to pray silently, to pray out loud. To sing, to listen to God. To listen, to think, to feel. Worship is this amazing chance to come together, and to hear the wind and feel the fire of the Holy Spirit.

I love Annie Dillard’s line that we should wear crash helmets and life preservers into these pews because we are coming to worship this awesome, slightly mysterious and very present God of the universe who is clearly not under our control.

On this Pentecost Sunday…we worship the God who has not left us alone, who will not leave us alone.

Do I have the Holy Spirit? The theologian J.I. Packer says when you believe in Christ, you have the Holy Spirit. But he also says it’s the wrong question.

The question isn’t: Do I have the Holy Spirit? The question is: Does the Holy Spirit have me?

Let’s pray.