Doubt

[[File:Sergey Korovin - Pentecost.jpg|thumb|Sergey Korovin - Pentecost]]

Pentecost

23 May 2021

Doubt: it’s what’s for dinner. It feels like a strange place to go on Pentecost when we are supposed to be celebrating the birth of the church or the arrival of the Holy Spirit either as tongues of fire, sighs too deep for words, or as our advocate. Pick any one of the options, or for that matter you can choose all of them.

You could say they all smack of something completed, finished. The Holy Spirit is like the icing on the cake. Personally I have found it to be more like completing military basic training; you hit a certain level of competence and cohesiveness but you are not ready for prime time. Receiving the Holy Spirit, birthing a church and sending its members across the Mediterranean basin all seem to say that WE know the truth and there is only one truth. It makes it too simple.

Yet in Pentecost I find uncertainty, doubt. I keep coming back to my favorite Indigo Girls song about the need to let go of certainty to be made whole. The less I look for something definitive, the closer I am to fine.

That’s where I am this Pentecost: closer to fine. Ironically it is because I embraced doubt that I found balance. I read a sermon I preached several years ago at Pentecost and, while I wouldn’t retract the message, I realized I have come to an entirely different place. The Holy Spirit is what allowed me, or rather led me, to higher ground. Well at least I think of it as higher ground.

The spirit of God is given to us. It is, I believe, there from our birth and symbolically given to us at baptism. God as the transcendent being, God as the human who walked on earth, and now God as something or someone we can call on for strength and guidance and sometimes someone who will lead us where we need to go even if we do not want to tread there.

Paul’s message is what stays close to my heart: Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27 And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Our journey through Lent to Pentecost is like our journey in life; sometimes we do walk through dark valleys and through doubt and despair. Ashes to fire. Those of us who tend to be reserved and sedate often are quite discomforted by religion where the Spirit is the COO. Pentecostalism, ecstatic worship are often manifestations of the Holy Spirit at work. But there can be a dark side to Pentecost when what is felt and what one is told are taken as certainty. Everything is either right or wrong and knowing the right way and following it are what it takes for salvation. Doubt becomes failure.

But what happens when you let the spirit loose? What happens when doubt enters your world and things no longer make sense or feel right to you? I call that doubt and it has invaded my world more than once. At first it made, and is still making, me uncomfortable. Do you want your world to change? If not, then steer clear of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit. Avoid it like the plague, or at least keep it firmly confined in a break in proof safe. Otherwise be prepared for what might seem like a long roller coaster ride, or maybe just the Ferris wheel that goes up and down, round and round.

We think of the Holy Spirit as that which empowers us to be the church in the world, but Paul says that the Spirit is an intercessor, just as Jesus does in John’s Gospel. She intervenes in my life and for my life.

So as I have had my doubts over the years, I find that she guides me at times, pushes at others, and pulls me along on my personal spiritual journey as well she reminds me of my role in the world. In the past decade she has taken me from questioning almost every tenet of my faith, helping me to deconstruct the narrow view of Christianity that I held to be the truth and in its place construct, well, nothing. Not “nothing” as emptiness, but “nothing” as something that is fluid, porous, malleable, or better yet like a tent, a good tent, which can weather storms and provide shelter and a place for comradery, but which can be moved and reshaped without losing the property of being a tent. I really prefer living in a spiritual space that does not speak of permanence or even confinement.

The winds blow where they will; so it is with the spirit. I daresay, and I dare hope, that you have matured in your own spiritual journey over time and space, and that you find yourself living in a bigger space than when you were younger. I hope that you sense the spirit as very much alive and working in your own life; helping you envision God’s work in the world, but also gently nudging you to an ever-maturing spirituality.

The spirit leads us individually, but also together. We are led to something we cannot see; something we can only sense. Let us listen to the voice of the spirit as a people; we do not know where it will lead; we have only the kind of certainty that comes with letting go and letting the spirit guide us, from the valley of the shadow of death, to a table prepared for us.

We soon enter that period of green.I hope we can explore where we are as a body and where we might be headed. Soon we will have a new bishop; as a clergy person Alan is the only bishop I have ever known.Let us pray that the spirit guides all of us and, as Paul says But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.