Room for the Holy Spirit

A sermon about leaps beyond all bounds

When I was growing up in the central Jersey suburbs, some of my high school classmates were transfers from Mount St. Mary’s Catholic, up in the hills north of town. They told many tantalizing stories about their parochial school experiences, including one about nuns who would bring along 12” rulers when they chaperoned dances. Rumor had it that whenever the sisters saw a young couple dancing too close they would step up and enforce the “12” rule,” reminding their young charges that they must “always leave room for the Holy Spirit.”

Now a close reading of Scripture would suggest that the Spirit is far more active in drawing people together than in keeping them apart, but there is still something intriguing about leaving room for the Spirit’s movement in our lives. Nobody makes the point better than does Paul in our first reading today.

This tireless apostle has just finished a lengthy church-planting trip around the east end of the Mediterranean, and now he sets out on a second trek, wanting to see how his new congregations are doing. Out Paul heads into what today we’d call southeastern Turkey, and to his delight several churches which had gotten off to a shaky start now seem solid. Paul is pumped, and he heads further inland intending to start several more when—much to his dismay—he reports that the Spirit gags his preaching and won’t let him say a word. In Phrygia he is mum. In Galatia he is silent. In Bithynia he is blocked. He ends up finally on the northwest seacoast, having trudged some 500 miles in the silence, with absolutely nothing to show for it.

He is fit to be tied, tossing and turning all night, no doubt begging God to explain what this Spirit is up to—that’s the point at which we meet Paul in today’s reading. Now all at once in a vision a face appears, and a voice beckons him to give up on his own plans, and go with God’s. Paul is more-than-ready for action. He hops a boat across the Aegean as he’s told, and hikes up the coast of Greece to Philippi, hub of the whole region. He gets into town mid-week and scopes out the local gathering spots where his preaching can reach a wide audience. He gets directions to the synagogue, where he expects he’ll get a good reception. Finally it’s the Sabbath, the day he knows his fellow Jews will gather. He heads out the city gate and down to the river where he’s been told the synagogue is located.

To his shock, what Paul finds is not a minyan of faithful worshippers, men of Israel huddled against stucco walls poring over scriptures and praying. No, it’s a handful of local women in the open air, frequenting the riverbank. To get a feel for Paul’s shock in the moment, consider this proverb that is currently circulating among the synagogue crowd: ‘Don’t talk too much with a woman. The man who does causes evil to himself, and inherits hell.’ Paul’s head spins, his heart sinks…he gives the Spirit room in his life, and this is what he gets?

Yet somehow he begins to speak, and as he does a business woman in the group named Lydia pricks up her ears. What Paul is saying about Jesus touches her heart, and since she is a successful and influential person her rapt attention turns the gaze of others toward Paul. Did somebody say Spirit? Through his own startled eyes Paul sees everything falling into place: one by one the women come away from the water and gather around him. When he finishes speaking Lydia steps up to Paul and asks to be baptized; the others with her follow suit, and when all is said and done Paul has one brand-new, dripping congregation on his hands. Now what? They can’t just keep hanging around the riverbank like this…Again Lydia steps forward, and offers Paul her own home to be used as the place of prayer he’s seeking. Paul takes her up on it, and with their agreement the Christian congregation at Philippi is born, the church destined to become Paul’s favorite. In years to come he will write back to Lydia and the others, “I give thanks to my God at the very memory of you, praying always with joy!”

The Gospel truth is that very little in life, then or now, actually comes off on schedule, as planned. Time and again there is some Aegean Sea we must cross before we can get on with our journey. We’ve run out of steam on the path we’ve been treading, we’re frustrated and stalled on the far shore of our destination, and then—often by means of sheer circumstance— the Spirit prompts us to take a creative leap that strikes us as sheer inspiration. Pay close attention to that word inspiration, because at the heart of it you’ll find the root of Spirit—s-p-i-r. Here are a few examples of how the Spirit moves incognito in our world.

Imagine being a young physicist at Harvard, low man on the totem pole in your department. You pull the assignment of teaching a bunch of liberal arts majors the fundamentals of science. Argh…you’ve slogged through grad school for this? Nonetheless you dutifully run through the ancient physics of the Greeks, and prepare to introduce the methods of modern lab science, when a light bulb goes on in your head. Hey, nobody can get here from there! It isn’t that Aristotle begins building neatly, and then Newton steps in and takes over. No, Newton starts all over again at square one. Well, there goes that class!

Your name is Thomas Kuhn, and after a decade of mulling your “failure” you turn it into a best-seller that rockets the phrase “paradigm shift” to fame. Turns out progress often lurches forward this way, and science is studded with creative leaps like this. For instance the year is 1572, and Tycho Brahe is toying with his homemade telescope when he discovers a new star. Poof! There go thousands of years of everyone assuming all heavenly bodies are fixed and known. The heavens are no longer God’s serene retreat, but open terrain for humans to probe. Hubble here we come. Think of Albert Einstein, who as a teenager plays mind games with images of racing a beam of light. Suddenly the thought of relativity hits him, as he later recalls “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under me, with no firm foundation anywhere on which to build.” Today, E=mc2 is just another T-shirt logo.

Millions of people read Kuhn’s book and begin to recognize the presence of paradigm shifts in their own lives, erratic and revelatory moments when out of the blue something truly new emerges and changes everything. Right here in the congregation this morning we have vast numbers of resident experts who could write their own books about creative leaps. What makes me say that? Because many of you are moms. How many times through the years have you mothers felt like Paul, faithfully slogging along in your roles, when absolutely nothing seems to work as planned. If we were to clip a pedometer to your waistband, you’d easily log 500 miles with no apparent progress. Then without warning you find yourselves at the edge of some Aegean, with your kids hydroplaning toward the far shore. And even though you’re clueless as to where they’re going, you have no choice but to take the plunge and go there too. Kids always seem to open up room for the Holy Spirit in our lives!

Perhaps the best Mothers’ Day card of all would be to tear these pages in Acts from a Bible and let you hold them close to your heart. Hold them close in faith, hope love against that distant day when your child at last will be grown and gone, and you are finally left to look back with Paul and say, “I give thanks to my God at the very memory, praying always with joy!” So may it be for you, Happy Mother’s Day! Amen. Listen to the Sermon: