Come, Holy Spirit?

“We are fools for Christ, while you are such sensible Christians” (1 Cor 4:10.) For once, I feel the NEB  chose the right word. Most modern translations follow KJV in rendering phronimoi by ‘wise’ (though the Vulgate had chosen prudentes.)  Paul is contrasting the apparently foolish, costly nature of truly following Christ with the complacent and worldly style preferred by these ‘sensible’ Corinthians.

As we approach the Feast of Pentecost, this seems to me to highlight one of the problems we face as Christians today – at least in England. We want to be ‘sensible’ – not too extreme or different -  so as not to threaten or disturb our unbelieving neighbours.

But work of the Holy Spirit is one of transforming our comfortable habits, and taking us into uncharted water. In the OT, when the Spirit came on people, the results were visible – ecstatic speech and prophecy; once Saul in his rapture lay on the ground for 24 hours! As we know, on the day of Pentecost, the apostles were so overwhelmed that onlookers assumed they were drunk. None of these occurrences were ‘sensible.’ They remind us that the Spirit does not conform to our  ways, but disturbs us and often makes us very uncomfortable.

The truth is, we need God; and so we need the Spirit’s disturbing presence and activity. (Once more the NEB helps us with its translation of the first Beatitude – ‘Blessed are those who know that they are poor.’) We are poor and needy, yet we try to be self-sufficient and in control. Then we wonder why our prayer and our worship fail to satisfy us, and why our churches are shrinking year by year. We are too sensible; we do not want to be shaken or stirred - or to acknowledge our desperate poverty of spirit. After 50 years of charismatic renewal, we cannot say with the disciples Paul met in Ephesus, ‘We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit’ (Acts 19:2) – but for the most part we want ‘it’ to conform to our expectations; we want to limit the effect the Spirit can have on our lives.

In Biblical accounts, the Holy Spirit comes with life-changing, comfort-challenging energy. But the Church has been unwilling to accept that. In Christian art we reduced him/her to an innocuous dove; in traditional liturgy we called him the Holy Ghost, who did little except give our collects a nice ending; and in the life of the church today, we have largely marginalised the Spirit’s role in decision-making and the discernment of God’s will.

One nice example can be seen in John Keble’s hymn, When God of old came down from heaven, which includes the lines:   ‘Softer than gale at morning prime /       Hovered his holy dove.’ One wonders if Keble had really read Acts 2! And we would prefer the Spirit to bring peace, rather than fire, ecstasy and strange ‘tongues.’  Sermons at Pentecost sometimes describe it as a ‘healing’ of the divisions of language at Babel, when it rather implies the gift of a new language, which we cannot control. Christians should not all speak the same – yet often believers appear to conform to some kind of identikit model, often a parody of real humanity. We prefer what we might call ‘Churchianity’ – noting Michael Marshall’s description of that as a ‘decaffeinated Christianity’, which promises not to keep us awake!

The Spirit wakes us up; stirs us, turns us, and the church, upside down and inside out. Pope Francis has recently written: “Take note: if the Church is alive, she must always surprise. It is incumbent upon the living Church to astound. A Church that is unable to astound is a Church that is weak, sick, dying, and that needs admission to the intensive care unit as soon as possible!”

We must allow the Holy Spirit to astound us, to make us not ‘sensible Christians’, but fools - fools for Christ, non-conformists in the true sense of the word. We are called to be fully human, as Jesus was. And if the world thinks us then a bit weird – so much the worse for the world!