We all know (unless we have been sleeping during sermons!) that 'Spirit' means 'breath', as does its Greek equivalent, pneuma. And that the Hebrew word, ruah, also means 'wind'. As Jesus replied to Nicodemus: "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." (John 3:8)
This wind recalls the rushing wind and tongues of fire of that first Pentecost, when the fearful believers were "gathered in one place". The wind and the flames were a sign not just to them, but to the crowd which gathered, that God's spirit had been "poured out on all flesh" (Acts 2:17, quoting Joel 2:28).
A wind, when it blows, pushes everything before it. But the Spirit is not normally violent or forceful in that way. The expression which some people use, "slain in the Spirit", is not biblical. The New Testament image is more of someone who holds us by the hand, strengthening us and defending us, and gently guiding us. The Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness, and Jesus promises that the Spirit will "lead us into all truth."
Paul uses the same image - the Spirit lives within us and gives us life, and if we let the Spirit lead us, we are "children of God" (Rom. 8:14), and no longer "controlled by the law" (Gal. 5:18).
The idea of being led forward in this way is one that we can welcome, but with caution. It is obvious from the letters of Paul and of John that many new Christians allowed themselves a daring amount of freedom in seeking 'the truth'. The early years of the Church's life saw an astonishing number of experiments in moral behaviour, in worship, in organizing structures to hold together the people who had been struck by the Good News.
The openness to the Spirit which the early church displayed is one that froths over in every period of religious revival, sometimes in extreme ways, as it did at Corinth, as it did shortly after the Reformation, as it did in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is an openness that the church needs, but which always runs the danger of going one step too far.
Every age has the task of listening to what the Spirit is saying, and of following the Spirit's leadership. The scholars of the Reformation who declared that "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation" (the sixth of the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles), were not trying to limit the Spirit's power to lead and to enlighten, but to reduce the human power of church leaders to dictate what others were obliged or were not allowed to do.
Two hundred years ago, the Spirit moved Christians to question the institution of slavery. More recently, people have responded in different ways to what has become known as 'the gender issue'. A hundred years ago, what woman would have worshipped in church bareheaded? What woman would have preached from a pulpit? The Spirit has been at work.
The Spirit is still at work in today's society. The other day I encountered a street preacher. He had a placard which proclaimed, in German, "God hates divorce." Quite apart from failing to explain that hating sin is not the same as hating sinners, the placard said nothing positive to people in twenty-first century Europe, where divorce may bring suffering or relief, and where people often think of marriage differently from households in the Near East at the time of Christ. I wondered how the preacher felt the Spirit was leading him "into all truth."
There is always a danger of the church listening to the voice of social change and failing to detect the voice of the Spirit. But the message of Pentecost is that we must hear and react to both. Whether the issue is polygamy (a no-no in much of Europe), homosexuality (a no-no in much of Africa), global warming or artificial genetic manipulation, God is there, and we must listen.
We must not spend so much time analyzing the details of the trees that we fail to see the wonders - and the problems - of the wood. First and foremost, the message of Pentecost was the Good News of God's powerful deliverance (of all of us!), and the first activities after Pentecost included worship, aiding the poor and relieving the sick. These are what the Spirit is truly leading us to do, for it is these that lie at the heart of the Gospel, and without a spirit of worship, love and compassion, we cannot follow that same Spirit further forwards: towards our true goal of seeing God face to face.
HD