Does the Holy Spirit work at Supercuts?

1,974 or so years ago, the Church was born. The church was born at the coming of the Holy Spirit.

From the beginning, the church was animated by a power that disciples understood came from beyond themselves; this animating power gave the church its task, its purpose, even a unique way of being a people together in the world, different than the world around the church. From the beginning, the Christian Church was full of the Spirit: it was spiritual. In today’s language, spiritual--not religious.

This coming Sunday is Pentecost, the 1,974th birthday of the church. It should be a day for celebration. For party hats and birthday cakes.

I may just be one who poo-poos birthdays, but I don’t’ feel much like celebrating the birthday of the church this year. It feels to me more like one of those birthdays that should provoke panic—like happens at times (I hear) in midlife. This feels like one of those birthdays when, instead of celebrating in a wild, delirious, frenzy of beer and fried food (not that I know what that’s like… besides, there are no surviving photographs), it feels like this year, the church that I know is better served by spending time walking down by the river. You know—doing a bit of birthday inventory and soul-searching, contemplating who we are, what we’ve done, and what we’re here to do.

This birthday, I want my churchfolk to touch base and have some QT with the thing that created us in the first place. Because its not that we’re not spiritual—it’s just that I’m not sure its clear what Spirit it is that’s animating us.

Maybe you think I’m being flip about this. I’m not really.

Our congregation has a laudable emphasis on the Spirit. But underneath our talk, we are just like most churches I’ve ever been involved in: concerned too much with power and influence, either struggling to gain power or, in our case, to come to terms with power that feels like it’s slipping away or already lost. We’re a big institution that focuses much of its energy on maintenance. Very few churches I’ve ever seen are content simply to dwell and exist in the power of the Holy Spirit. This one does it better than many, but not as faithfully as it could.

My hunch is that churches lose their bearings because we lose track of what and who the Holy Spirit is. What is this thing that gave birth to the church and that was so much with Jesus and that Jesus promised would be with us those who believed in him? How do we know whether we’ve got it… or lost it?

One reason that the church is spiritually unfocused and is worried about its declining power is that many citizens of this city and the world at large have become much more spiritually aware and alive. We live in this amazing time in which people are into spiritual things. The phrase “spiritual” but not “religious” describes a whole great swath of our society. We are, as a people, in some ways, getting wiser and smarter about what spiritual life is really about--and the church has not kept up and looks provincial and tired much of the time. An example:

I went to get my hair cut this week and sat in the chair with a young woman, Rivka. She’s young and energetic and moved to New York from Buffalo and is making a living doing hair at Supercuts. We got to talking and I told her I am a minister, so I wanted a big, blow-dried pompadour of a hair-cut. She laughed, but I could still tell than my saying that I am a minister was threatening to her. As charming and funny as I tried to be, I represented for her something awful and sinister. “None of my friends are religious,” she said. “I’m definitely not.” She said it proudly. But she still had the affect of being a spiritual person. She was kind and interesting, a twinkle in the eye, a quick mind.

Spiritual, but not religious. Someone like Rivka can be a bearer of Spirit—someone who’s never been to church and doesn’t like it and doesn’t plan on going anytime soon still bears some of the marks of being a person who is living in the Spirit. How painful it is to me and how much does it say about the damage that’s been done by religion and the serious work that the church has to do to repair its public image, when a spiritual person wants nothing to do with the place where the Spirit is professed by believers to dwell? It shows you clearly, I think that the church is where the Spirit is, not the Spirit where the church is.

And yet, I also wonder about Rivka, and all the other “spiritual” people out there who are not religious. What does their spirituality about? Which spirits does she invoke? Does she believe in God or general transcendence? Does she see a world in which many and different spirits animate the universe? Does she believe in the possibility of the supernatural? Or just disbelieve that the material world is all that is? Is spirituality without religion a belief in an abstract God that is everywhere but nowhere in particular? A force, too broad to define and too big to even name? Is an unknown force even God?

Part of me would love to call myself “spiritual but not religious,” too, because so many people I truly like assume this posture. But I tried that in my teens and early 20s. I found that without religion, I didn’t know what spirituality was. My spirituality was lost and without focus without the grounding of a religion. It was selfish without accountability to a community. And I couldn’t love and appreciate and grow in spirituality if I couldn’t root myself in the accumulated wisdom of a religious tradition.

I decided two things: 1) that I am spiritual and 2) I have to be religious because I am spiritual. If spiritual instincts—like love and forgiveness and grace and peace and joy and delight—are real, then I need the solid ground of religion to help me both know and love and cultivate these instincts. I am religious because I am spiritual.

As a Christian, this means that I have to try and get to know and love “the Holy Spirit.”

How do you or I do that?

I can’t say, exactly. The Bible gives leads, but no blueprint.

I can recount a bit about what our Christian tradition says about the Holy Spirit and about what that looks like when the Spirit arrives and hangs out for a bit.

First and foremost, the Holy Spirit is the giver of life. This is not some pre-modern explanation of biology. The Spirit, as I understand it, is the giver of LIFE. Sprit gives to living things a power that both fills and transcends the living thing itself…

I've never been more aware of this since my wife has been pregnant; human beings have the capacity to reproduce and create a life--that’s biology. But there is a life that our child will have that is more than the sum of chromosomes and genes; it will have character and virtue and wonder and love and passion and sympathy; that is life in the Spirit.

As I develop and walk down life’s road, I begin to understand that the life of the Spirit is LIFE THAT IS MORE THAN LIFE. I grow spiritually in my ability to recognize and celebrate moments in life when I transcend the smallness, the narrowness, the self-absorbedness of my own existence.

I see the Spirit most fully at work in Jesus’ life, where the Spirit was everywhere: he was conceived by the Spirit; it descended upon him in baptism to name him as a beloved child of God; leading him into the wilderness where he grew strong and faithful; inspiring him to declare that he had been anointed to proclaim good news to the poor and release to the captives; he preaches when the Spirit is with him and casts out demons by the Spirit. He is put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit. The resurrected life—the life that grows through and up and out of death—is life in the Spirit!

Jesus was filled with the Spirit and filled with life. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says "I have come that those who follow me might have life and have it abundantly." Jesus’ own life in the Spirit shows that he doesn’t mean that abundant life--spiritual life--is one of riches, or self-fulfillment, or even happiness. The life of the Spirit is willing to risk its own life for those whom it loves.

1,974 years ago this week, the Holy Spirit caught up a group of disciples. It was energizing and life-giving. It caused them to believe that there was nothing more sacred in all the world than living the life that Jesus had shown them: turning from sin, studying the scriptures, loving the neighbor and the enemy, teaching, healing, feeding, praying, breaking bread together, and baptizing in the name of God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Spirit life moved them to share their possessions, to create a community of mutual interdependence, to believe that to share in the suffering of the world was the path to glory.

This is the life of the Spirit. It continues to work in the world. I just wonder whether it works at Supercuts as often as it works in the church.