Sunday 18 November 2007 Openness to the Spirit – Melanie Groundsell

We pray that God would unlock our hearts from within as we respond to his words without. Amen

I wonder if any of you remember reading this passage from Alice in Wonderland?

‘At this moment Five, who had been anxiously looking across the garden, called out ‘The Queen! The Queen!’ and the three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces. There was a sound of many footsteps, and Alice looked round, eager to see the Queen... When the procession came opposite to Alice, they all stopped and looked at her, and the Queen said severely ‘Who is this?’ She said it to the Knave of Hearts, who only bowed and smiled in reply... My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,’ said Alice ; but she added to herself, ‘Why, they’re only a pack of cards, after all. I needn’t be afraid of them!’

They’re only a pack of cards - and yet to those in this Wonderland, those cards were truly the King and Queen of hearts.

You may wonder what this has to do with this week’s theme – openness to God’s Spirit.

There is a sense in which we live life at two levels – the seen and the unseen. The seen – the ordinary, matter of fact stuff of daily life, is around us constantly. But if we want to see the unseen, we too have to be transported to that Wonderland and to see things in a new light.

When I read passages in the Bible about the Holy Spirit, this passage from Alice in Wonderland often springs to mind, because it shows so clearly how the Holy Spirit can illuminate even everyday objects, and can help us see the hidden-ness, or unseen-ness that is right in front of us - if only we would take a moment to stop and listen to God’s Spirit.

It is the same Holy Spirit that we see in Jesus, who was born both of the Spirit, and was filled with the Spirit. The same Holy Spirit that descended on Jesus at his baptism – announcing ‘This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased’. It is that same Holy Spirit that speaks to us at the very depths of our being:

Casting new light on familiar situations
Calling us out to new things
Prompting us to encounter God in new ways

I have been reading a book by Abbot Christopher Jamieson, called Finding Sanctuary.
Abbot Christopher is based at Worth Abbey, and became known to many people through the television series ‘The Monastery’. On the back cover of the book he comments that many people ask him why he decided to become a monk. It is, he says, a question he finds very difficult to answer, because in many ways it is like asking someone why they got married. It is just something that happens the reasons lie beyond the realms of human understanding.

In a similar way I find it hard to answer questions about why I became a priest. It just happened. I don’t think I had any control over the decision, I just somehow seemed to arrive at my destination. I knew in my heart of hearts that this was the right thing to do. So often in today’s world we skim over the importance of intuition. We look for reasons, logic, evidence. But if we listen to our hearts, we are often tuning into God’s Spirit, who is inspiring us to say or do things we had not planned.

All of this seems to imply an individual response - a calling from within ourselves that we personally take up and follow through. This is true. Yet Paul’s letter to the Corinthians urges us to beware of an emphasis on individual ‘spiritual’ experiences.
He writes to the church warning them that they need to engage together with the scriptures and to play down the prophetic gifts of discernment and teaching. He seems to be reminding them that what they need to emphasise is a shared narrative and a corporate memory.
I think that attached to this should be a government health warning
– responding to the Holy Spirit can cause discomfort.

Nicodemus knew the law; he knew the Jewish traditions; he was a respected figure in the Jewish world; he had a solid foundation. But he knew that something was missing – he knew that in many ways he had to lose the control he had on life, and instead enter into a new world of responding to God’s Spirit. In order to respond to God, he had to lose something that was very precious. For Jesus too, the same Spirit that descended at his baptism, and seemed to bless his ministry, also drove him into the wilderness to be tempted.

There are times when being filled with the Spirit is not always comfortable. Like Nicodemus we may be called to leave behind security, power, knowledge, in order to respond to the promptings of the Holy Spirit within us. Not only is there often a sense of loss involved with listening to God’s spirit, there is also often a heightened sense of conflict. I’m reminded of the words of Fred Craddock:

‘One has only to love impartially and hatred is threatened and stirred to violence. One has only to speak the truth and falsehood takes the stand with pleasing lies. Invite persons of different social and economic backgrounds around the same table and the fellowship is strained, often breaking apart. Announce freedom in Christ Jesus and some turn a deaf ear to the call for restraint for the sake of the weaker brother or sister. Place in church leadership persons who have never led in any other arena and arrogance often replaces service. Plant the cross in a room and the upwardly mobile convert it into a ladder. Evil, by whatever name it is called, will not sit idly by and allow the gospel to transform a community (Fred B Craddock, ‘Preaching to Corinthians’, Interpretation, XLIV, 1990, p. 167)

Inviting the Holy Spirit into any community doesn’t necessarily produce a harmonious environment.
But through that process of transformation emerges a sense of what it means to live an authentic life.

Just as those characters in Alice in Wonderland saw beyond the pack of cards to something unseen, so we must rely on the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to the hidden world that is in front of us, in order for us to have a sense of authenticity and reality.

How then do we get a sense of the Holy Spirit working in our lives?

There are three possibilities :
First, we need to discover the Spirit’s promptings through personal prayer
– I often think of prayer as being ‘Wasting time with God’. Sometimes we need to dwell with God, to pay attention to him, in order to hear the inner voice of his Spirit.
Secondly, like the Corinthians, we need to return to serious study of the scriptures. Engaging with the Bible and struggling to relate its message to our own world is a lifetime’s task – and yet it is only by rigorous study, and constant dwelling with scripture that we will be able to hear the promptings of the Holy Spirit in our own hearts.
Thirdly, we need to seek the Spirit’s leading in all we do
– as a church we need to think especially of the building project. Perhaps we need to seek ways that we as a church community can come together and have a sense of where the spirit is calling.
May we all seek the promptings of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and have the courage to respond and participate in God’s divine grace.
Amen

Questions for discussion:

1. What can we at St Michael’s find as a shared narrative and corporate memory in today’s world?

2. Luther said in his writing on Psalm 5 (1519/20) ‘It’s not reading and studying scripture that makes a theologian, but suffering, dying and being damned’. Is there a sense that in listening to the promptings of the Holy Spirit we must all suffer and lose something of ourselves in order to see the ‘hidden-ness of God’?

3. “This inability to pay attention is much closer to evil than the desires of the flesh. Prayer consists in attention.” (Simone Weil). As a society we have become used to inattention/sound bites/visual media etc. How much do we have to return to a concept of attention in prayer in order to discern God’s Spirit?