When my father was growing up, he aspired to be a pilot. He built balsa airplanes and flew them, went to university to study engineering and, when his studies were cut short, joined the U.S. Air Force in the hopes of pilot training. But his eyesight did not meet the required standards, so he spent the next twenty years as a graphic artist and draftsman. And he continued to build models – airplanes and later boats.
I was seven when he bought for me my first plastic model kit. As I opened the box, I saw an array of parts, numbered and attached to plastic ‘branches’. My dad taught me how paint the parts, then remove them from the ‘branches’ and trim any irregularities before gluing the parts together. More importantly he taught me to read the instructions through before starting, to follow them during construction and to be patient.
If I fell prey to the temptation to skip the instructions, I could doom the process of completing the model successfully. Not waiting for the paint or the glue to dry could be disastrous to the finished product.
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,
the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep,
while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
And God saw that the light was good;
and God separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
When God began to create, the universe resembled a newly-opened model box filled with all the pieces necessary for ‘the stars and planets in their courses’ and ‘this fragile earth, our island home.’ Over billions of years, God has lovingly and patiently taken the pieces out of the box and assembled them to bring life-giving, life-sustaining and life-enriching order and shape to creation. The pattern to this creation has been revealed to us in God’s covenants with Noah, Abraham and Moses and in the Word made flesh, Jesus of Nazareth. God’s agent in bringing about this life-giving, life-sustaining and life-enriching order and shape is the Holy Spirit, the wind blowing over the as-yet unordered creation, the dove-like manifestation appearing to Jesus at the River Jordan, the great voice declaring that Jesus is the Beloved.
For more than two thousand years Christians have struggled to understand and to describe how the Holy Spirit ‘works’. Some of our earliest confessions of faith have long paragraphs expressing what we believe about the Father and the Son only to end with a brief ‘And in Holy Spirit’.
During my adolescence and early adulthood Anglicans energetically embraced the charismatic renewal only to fall prey to self-righteous distinctions between ‘real’ and ‘church’ Christians. Some Anglicans opened derided others as ‘charis-maniacs’ and openly mocked the enthusiasm of charismatic congregations.
But we still face the same question: How do we discern the genuine work of the Holy Spirit from its counterfeits? And there are many counterfeits – racism, nationalism, sexism, cults of personality to name a few.
We know we are in the presence of the Holy Spirit when life is being given at those times when we believe our hopes, our aspirations and even our lives are disordered, dying or dead.
We know we are in the presence of the Holy Spirit when our lives, both personal and corporate, are receiving the sustenance they need to persevere in the face of real or imagined obstacles, threats and disappointments.
We know we are in the presence of the Holy Spirit when our lives are enriched, not at the expense of others but in genuine communion with others, so that justice and peace arise and the dignity of every, every human being is respected, nurtured and celebrated.
We know we are in the presence of the Holy Spirit when we discern a Christ-like pattern of self-giving love and action is being shaped in us and around us, modelled and brought into being.
My friends, there will always be powerful people and movements that are life-stealing, life-draining and life-denying, people and movements that believe that evil is stronger than goodness, hate stronger than love, darkness stronger than light and death stronger than life. We’ve experienced them in the distant and recent past. We saw them at work on Wednesday. We shall see them at work tomorrow.
But never doubt that God is working to bring order and shape to our lives and world as year succeeds to year. All the necessary parts are in the box. We have the instructions. Life will be given where only death seemed to reign. Life will be sustained where hopes and resources seemed scarce. Life will be enriched where diversity was thought a curse. The Holy Spirit continues what God began with a ‘big bang’ billions of years ago: the creation of a Christ-shaped and Christ-centred universe where we and all God’s children shall be free and the whole kosmos shall live to praise God’s holy name.
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