The pop star Chynna Phillips (from the group Wilson Phillips) was on Family Feud a while back, and just before she had to answer questions to win money for a charity she needed to psyche herself up, so she started chanting “Holy Spirit Activate.” And apparently it worked because her team won $25,000 for charity. Her chant went viral as a way to express a desire for good things to happen and for the SPIRIT – of love, of goodness, of LIFE itself to flow right through you.
Sermon: Holy Spirit Activate
We start with Baby Suggs who, we are told in the novel Beloved, by Toni Morrison is holy.
Baby Suggs is a former slave, freed by her daughter’s deal-making. The story goes that “When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, Holy, followed by every black man, woman and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing – a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place.
“In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees. After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs, Holy, bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down.
“Then she shouted, ‘Let the children come!’ and they ran from the trees toward her. ‘Let your mothers hear you laugh,’ she told them, and the woods rang.
“Then ‘Let the grown men come,’ she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.
“‘Let your wives and your children see you dance,’ she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.
“Finally, she called the women to her, ‘Cry,’ she told them. ‘For the living and the dead. Just cry.’ And without covering their eyes, the women let loose.“It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got all mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath.
“In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.”
This story of Baby Suggs in the clearing is a story of the Holy Spirit. It’s not named that way exactly, but in Baby Suggs’ pause, and then in her clarity, that is Spirit. And in her call to dance, and in the dancing; the laughter, the weeping, and in the way it all gets mixed up together – that is Spirit.
Most of all in all the bodies, the energy moving there, in the living – this is what we mean to describe when we try to talk about the Spirit. I say try, because whatever our efforts, the Spirit can only be experienced, not theorized about.
Spirit is the feeling among the worshippers in the clearing. Just as it may be the feeling stirring within you right now. Or among all of us on many Sunday mornings, when the songs are working, and the silence hits just right, and the tears flow, and the laughter comes over us. Spirit is what happens in us, among us.
By Spirit we mean the Spirit of Life, of course. The force of energy that animates creation – animals, plants, humans, oceans, stars. Spirit is not material, but would mean nothing without material expression. Spirit of Life, or Spirit of God, in the Hebrew Bible the word is ruach, or v’ruach – the spirit or wind, sweeping over the waters as one of the first acts of creation, compelling prophets to speak, and life to take shape.
Ruach. It even sounds like breath.
And by Spirit we also mean the Spirit of Truth. The transcendent reality across time and space, holding complexity and contradiction, creativity and imagination, paradox, and prophesy, the call to change, to heal, to redeem.
And, by Spirit we also mean, the in-dwelling presence of God. Felt in the silence, in each of us uniquely, the Spirit speaks with a deeper understanding than words can touch. In the silence, the Spirit is reassurance, comfort, and love.
We try to talk about the Spirit, we are trying, I am trying – we give it modifiers and proper names and capital letters, Even though, still, the Spirit refuses all our attempts to tame its wildness, its scorching beauty, its percussive pulse. For this reason, Spirit is dangerous, as it shakes off any efforts to fit into tradition or rules, let alone what you might call orthodoxy.
Which does not mean that people have not tried.
Most notably, a few centuries into the common era, the Emperor Constantine did not appreciate all the many ways church leaders talked about the Spirit, or God, or Jesus – diversity is afterall, hard to control.
And so Constantine called a council in Nicea, in the year 325, and there they decided how the Spirit works. And wrote it all down in the doctrine of the Trinity, that central teaching of Christianity, even today, that says God consists of three co-substantial persons – father, son, and the Holy Spirit. Nicea gave Constantine his orthodoxy, but still could not contain the uncontainable Spirit.
In individuals, and families, in small hidden communities, and across time, the many different ways of understanding, and the questions persisted, all the way until the 16th century when questions became the Protestant Reformation.
One way to think about Unitarian Universalism is as that long line of people who never stopped questioning – and still don’t. We are a part of the Protestant tradition, and we protested so much, we eventually protested ourselves right out of the tradition entirely.
It took another few centuries for that to happen, but in the most radical parts of the Reformation, you can find our roots. There, religious fanatic and proto-Unitarian Michael Servetus was stirring up questions about the Trinity.
According to historian Charles Howe, Servetus was “deeply disturbed that he had found no direct statements in the Bible supporting such a central doctrine [as the Trinity].” Rather than God being three distinct beings in one, Servetus found it more biblically accurate to describe God showing up in three different modes – father, son, spirit – as he wrote, the Holy Spirit is “simply God’s spirit moving within our hearts.”
In 1531, Servetus published On the Errors of the Trinity, and then spent the rest of his life trying to convince everyone else he was right; you might have guessed, he didn’t succeed. In 1553, he was put to death for heresy.
I have to admit, Servetus’ anti-trinitarian obsession has at times baffled me. Despite the name of our faith, and our church being Unitarian – which was originally an insult hurled at anyone who rejected the trinity – I would guess this is true for a lot of us today – it’s hard to understand why these distinctions -trinity, anti-trinity, unitarian….whether or not God is tri-modal or co-substantial…why any of this mattered so much to Servetus, why it was worth dying over.
But then, I remember that just a generation before Servetus wrote his treatise, in his home country of Spain, hundreds of thousands of Jews and Muslims had been forced to swear allegiance to the Trinity or face persecution, including death. Maybe, Servetus had their persecution in mind, and his obsession represented a kind of apology, or hope for redemption.
Maybe. Or maybe Servetus just didn’t know when to let an argument go. Which is sometimes a part of who we are today too.
Regardless, Servetus offers us one example of the ambivalence our faith has held across the centuries, when it comes to the Spirit. Because, on the one hand, we are fundamentally progressive, and as Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams said, our free and liberal churches are based in the understanding that the spirit blows where it will – as it says in the gospel of John.
Here we affirm, truth is ever unfolding, revelation is not sealed, we all have a piece of the truth, and we live in mystery, trusting the love that holds us and calls us ever-on.
And, at the same time, here we appreciate reason, and knowledge, and evidence. We often live in our heads, forget about our bodies entirely, and default to skepticism, and sometimes roll our eyes at woo-woo ideas like Spirit.
Back and forth, across our history, these two polarities have swung – so that it’s not just Jane that wasn’t sure how to answer the question about the Holy Spirit – it’s all of us.
For example, in the 18th Century, American religion was overtaken by what became known as the Great Awakening – which was itself a reaction against the enlightenment and other liberal theories that had tried to insert rationality into religion.
Through tent revivals and passionate extemporaneous preaching, the leaders of the Great Awakening put the untamed power of the Holy Spirit back in the center of worship, and reminded people forcefully of just how much they needed to feel God’s salvation – not just think about it. The Great Awakening was emotional and spontaneous and embodied and the liberal churches of the day would have none of it.
Charles Chauncy, minister of First Church in Boston in 1743 described the dangers of the Great Awakening like this:
He goes on,
“The next thing to be considered is that sudden light and joy so many of late claim to be the subjects of…laughing so far as I am acquainted with the History of the Church is a method of expressing religious joy peculiar to these present times. This practice seems inconsistent with that holy fear and caution which must be thought reasonable where the salvation of the soul is the thing.”
Good thing Charles Chauncy can’t see us most Sundays- way too much laughter – not enough caution.
Still, we might agree with him about the swooning and falling to the ground – a practice we can see today in what is the fastest-growing segment of global christianity – the Charismatic, or Pentecostal church. Centered on the euphoric experience of receiving the gifts of the Holy Spirit, in the Charismatic Church, Spirit is performative, action-oriented, dramatic.
Whether through speaking in tongues, or divine healing, the Charismatic Church – which includes the primarily African American denomination, the Church of God in Christ, as well as Assemblies of God – understands its mandate based on the story of the Holy Spirit that descended after Jesus died.
His followers from many different countries gather for Shavuot, or what in Greek is called Pentecost, but they cannot understand each other – they don’t speak the same language. Until suddenly, a great wind moves through their room, in Greek, the word for this wind is Pneuma.
After wind, comes fire. Tongues of fire descend on each of those gathered, and then suddenly, they understand each other completely.
Spirit breathes, burns, sanctifies, transforms.
When we try to speak of Spirit, we call these attempts pneumatology, after the wind of God that descended in this story, and in the story of creation.
When Charles Chauncy questioned what was happening in the Great Awakening, he revealed his class bias. Official Unitarian history begins in New England, afterall, among the educated and upper class, those places where the Enlightenment was everything. Charles Chauncy and other upper class New Englanders didn’t like the Great Awakening – they said – because it was overly emotional – but just as much they didn’t like it because it was a great equalizer.
It made religious understanding accessible to anyone who felt moved by the spirit, and the Holy Spirit – it turns out – is unconcerned with academic credentials that would indicate who should “properly” receive and dispense wisdom, or have direct access to God.
The Holy Spirit shows up in makeshift tents and pop-up churches wherever the people gather, and cares not one bit about tall steeples, or learned clergy, and as we see in Baby Suggs’ clearing, is instead equally available to anyone and everyone who is open to it.
When we find ourselves being skeptical of Spirit-centered practiced, we need to keep in mind Chauncy’s blindspots, and the way they may live in us, too.
A few decades after Chauncy, however, liberal religion swung the other direction as Unitarian reformers known as the Transcendentalists called for a faith more filled with passion and heart, and for a religion centered around the wisdom of the in-dwelling spirit of God.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson declares in his 1860 essay, “Worship,”“There is a principle which is the basis of things, a simple, quiet, undescribed, indescribable presence, dwelling very peacefully in us, our rightful lord. We are not to do, but to let do, not to work, but to be worked upon.”
A few decades after the Transcendentalists, the Religious Humanists swung us back the other direction, prioritizing reason and the supremacy of science….until, a few decades after that, feminism, and earth-based traditions sent us the other way…..
When we think about our faith as a linear story – from Servetus to Chauncy to the Transcendentalists to the Humanists, to the feminists…our relationship with Spirit feels like a teeter totter – back, and forth, embrace and rejection. It makes you wonder which will ultimately win the day. But what life, and experience, and the James Webb telescope teach us is that the whole of our story, in all of its contradictions and ways of conceiving of truth, lives in us – not in a linear way – but all at once.
Which means that embracing Spirit does not require we abandon the thrill of knowledge and evidence – or vice versa. It does not have to be an either/or.
Both ways of seeking truth can and must work together, not in ambivalence, but in an ongoing creative tension of “pragmatism, and mystery, wonder and hope, chaos and order,” (a phrase from Unitarian ethicist, Sharon Welch as she decribes the Spirit). A creative tension that opens our hearts to truth in the greatest possible sense.
To put the two together is to recognize that not every intuition or great wind should be trusted or followed with abandon, and to know it is right to be skeptical of anyone claiming they are being led by the Spirit.
It is to recognize that we must – as Welch asserts, “learn to be critical, and face the ways in which people claim the mandate of the Spirit as much to control, denounce, and exclude, as to heal, embrace, and transform.”
The Spirit is that feeling that leads us to feel more love for other people, and the profound sense of the inestimable worth, beauty and wonder of others,” which means we must learn to to question those who claim to be led by the Spirit “but use that power to denounce others, or to distance themselves from others self-righteously, or establish fear-based hierarchies.”
This discernment requires a committed community, where we each bring our piece of the truth – from all parts of our individual and collective stories, and where we can help each other listen for those times when we are following the “promptings of the Spirit,” and also those when we are “merely following our own vivid desires, and longings, that would be destructive of ourselves, and community.”
When we make this discernment a part of our promises to each other, and to ourselves, then we can with integrity, meet with openness the overwhelming joy and wild exuberance of the Holy Spirit, that in-dwelling and prophetic spirit that seeks to animate our lives in the direction of love….
Whether that’s by speaking in tongues – you never know….
Or in a call like Baby Suggs makes – to cry, and laugh, weeps and dance – together – freely.
Or, maybe even (don’t tell Charles Chauncy) in the hype-up chant of Holy Spirit Activate!
Thank you to the Rev. Fred Wooden for background insight on the tradition of the Holy Spirit within Unitarian Universalism and in the Hebrew Bible.
Another Possibility 