8 June – Spirit-ed
Pentecost
8/6/2025
Romans 8:14-17
Psalm 104
John 14:12-17, 25-27
You’ve heard me say before, but it bears repeating again, that the word “spirit” is the second-most useless word in the Christian vocabulary.
But more than just repeat myself, I want today to connect this with the kinds of things I’ve been saying over the last few weeks about meaning and location in time and space: that meaning is location. In particular, I want to extend this to spirit is location.
The reason “spirit” is so unhelpful as a “Christian” word is that, in our modern context, it arrives as an idea alien to our deeply materialist understanding of ourselves and the world. It’s an “outside” word, and “spiritual” people seem either to be reaching out of the real world or wanting to escape from it.
The problem with this broadly predominant way of thinking is that we are all – so-called “spiritual” or not – always animated by some spirit or other: we are deeply spirit-ed. We speak of the “spirit of the age” – a very real thing which connects us to each other, passes between us, carries our words and gives meaning to our actions. We live according to a capitalist spirit or a socialist one, a patriarchal one or a more egalitarian one. Like meaning – even as meaning – spirit is location, is society, is politics.
To be human is to be spiritual in this broadest sense. “Getting spiritual” is about changing spirits, not turning from some unspirited reality into a spiritual one. And so the only – only – question about spirit is what the spirit is which animates us, what that spirit tells us about ourselves,and whether our particular spirituality enhances life – our life and others’ – or diminishes it.
Though we’ve heard from John’s Gospel on the Holy Spirit this morning, we’ll not look directly at that text but keep it in the back of our minds as we consider the spirit in (and of) the ecumenical Creeds we often recite together in worship, and will again in a little while in a slightly adjusted form of the Nicene Creed.
A principal characteristic of the Creed is its apparent chronological structure: it seems to move from a beginning to an end. Thus, creation of the world comes first, then history and its salvation, and then finally the “end things”. The creed reads like a history. And we say of the claims in the creed that we “believe” them (at least, more or less! ), including the way they are presented.
But while, at the end, we say that we believe “in the Holy Spirit”, what we said earlier about our always being “in” a spirit still applies. That is, it is from within some spirit-ed sense of the world, that we say that we believe in the Spirit.
This sounds rather tangled, but the point is that what we believe is tempered by our location – the meaning or the spirit we bring to that believing. Perhaps more simply: what we think “spirit” is affects what we think we believe. In our modern situation, this means that something like the Creed looks like a “spiritual” commitment, unlike the other commitments we have. As “spiritual” people, here’s a list of stuff we subscribe to.
But, if we are all – “religious” or not (religion being the third most useless word Christians have) – living out of some spirit, then Christians do better to claim their own peculiar spirituality from the outset by beginning with the third article of the Creed and not the first. In view of our all having a spirituality out of which we experience and act in the world, starting the Creed here declares from the outset: this is the Spirit in which we live. And, “We believe in the church”: this is the kind of human community this Spirit makes possible – forgiveness, communion, the marginalisation of death as a power. And so we might understand that third article as a whole slightly differently, as well: less we believe “in” the Holy Spirit than we believe “within” the Holy Spirit.
Now, instead of three sequential stages of history from creation through redemption to consummation, we are opened up to a different experience of ourselves and of God. To believe within the Holy Spirit is not then to believe “in” the church or the community of saints, the reconciled life or the overcoming of the power of death (as the Creed continues), it is to believe “within” these things. The social and political space of the church and the kinds of relationships we are called to become is oriented towards a particular kind of humanity.
This humanity is that which the second article treats: the humanity of Jesus himself. The Holy Spirit is precisely the spirit of Christ, and so forms us into human beings in the world as Jesus himself was human in the world. And our formation in the likeness of his humanity is a formation in the likeness of his experience of God.
A people spirited in this way begin to look and feel like the humanity of Jesus. This is quite a different “outcome” of reading the Creed than the usual top-down way, by which Jesus appears as a kind of “link” to the end things.
And all this changes also our experience of God. On a reading which begins with the Spirit, the faith of the Creed doesn’t begin with the increasingly controversial declaration of faith in God the Father or with the widely misunderstood notion of creation. These are now the last things the church comes to grasp, and not the prerequisites of all belief. The so-called “Fatherhood” of God has nothing to do with masculinity but with the possibility that we might experience God as Jesus did, who just happened to use “Father” to name the one who sent him.
And, perhaps most surprisingly, “creation” is now not what comes first but what comes last. That is, we now know the world as a creation only when we share in the humanity and devotion of Jesus himself. Creation is now not the basis for all that happens in history but the goal of all that happens in history: we become creatures when finally, in this Spirit, we know God as Jesus did – entering into Jesus’ own free and open-to-God humanity.
Much more could be said about this but it is enough today if the creed might become for us more than simply a well-ordered list of things which should be said about God.
Thinking the creed backwards can be a kind of “Spirit-ual” relocating of ourselves by which we might catch a glimpse of something new in what is so familiar.
Starting the creed – or at least, starting unthinkingly – with the first article can be to get to the beginning too soon. Or be to read it in the wrong spirit. Our confession is not only what we believe but how we have come to believe it, which is also about what we have, or are, to become. Instead of reading the creed as a kind of world history, a “macro” history from a chronological beginning to its end, thinking the creed “backwards” tells a history which is not so much a providing of in-formation as it is the beginning of a reformation – a re-form-ation.
It is God the Spirit who enables us to confess, that it might, in the end, indeed be God that we confess.
Let the spirit in which we confess our faith then, be the Spirit which is its very possibility, that our faith be not simply stuff we believe but what and whose we are to become. Amen.
In part adapted from February 9 2014 [Off RCL]