“The Democracy Of The Spirit"

A Sermon Preached by Rev. Bruce Sanguin
Oct 28th 2007

 Joel 2:23,   Luke 18: 9-14

There was a time, early in my Christian journey, when I sat around the house for two weeks waiting upon the gift of the Holy Spirit. The sign that I had received the Spirit would be that I would start speaking in tongues – as the first disciples did when they received the Holy Spirit. I read in a book this happened to “real” Christians. So, after a week or so, I just started to make it up – spouting gibberish. I thought this might prime the pump and get the flow going. Alas, I gave up after a couple of weeks, secretly believing that I had never received the Holy Spirit. There were two classes of Christians, clearly. The ones filled with the Spirit and the rest of us – the pretenders.

I’ve long since gotten over this, but it does highlight a perennial issue for all spiritual traditions, including Christian. The temptation to divide the world into people who are “spiritual” and those who are not “spiritual” – the unbelievers – is strong. This is the great divide that we create between believers and non-believers, between my faith tradition and those other faith traditions, between my denomination and the other denominations, and even within one’s own denomination, it’s possible to create this division between those who really have the Spirit, and those who are merely cultural Christians, who come to church out of habit or who come a couple of times a year, at Christmas and Easter.

Too much blood has been spilled throughout the course of history, too many religious wars have been fought over this Great Divide, and too many families are still being split apart by the presumption that we have the Spirit and they don’t. The 14th century Sufi poet, Hafiz, writes about this temptation to spiritual arrogance in a poem:

Why Aren’t We Spiritual Drunks?
The sun once glimpsed God’s true nature
And has never been the same.
Thus the radiant sphere
Constantly pours its energy
Upon the earth
As does God from behind
The veil.
With a wonderful God like that
Why isn’t everyone a screaming drunk?
Hafez’s guess is this:
Any thought that you are better or less
Than another
Quickly
Breaks the wine
Glass.

In this poem, humans are portrayed as glasses that are filled up by the outpouring of Spirit, compared to the sun’s energy being poured out upon the earth in the service of life. The poet is mystified that we are not out of our mind with ecstasy and gratitude for a God that gives life in such abundance. He concludes that we are not drunk with love is because of a corrosive attitude of the mind and heart – an attitude by which we tell ourselves and others that we are either better or less than anybody else. The moment we believe this, the glass breaks, and we are no longer vessels that can contain the Spirit.

The reading from Luke’s gospel concerns two men who go to the Temple to pray, one a religious man and the other a “sinner” by the standards of the day. The religious man thanks God that he is not like other people: “thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this sinner” (referring to the other character in the parable). He fasts regularly and gives 1/10th of all his income to the Temple. Notice that the so-called sinner doesn’t compare himself to the religious man or anybody else – his problem is not with inferiority. It’s that he’s done some things that he’s not proud of and wants to turn his heart back toward God.

The religious man, who counts himself as superior, is a broken glass. He is not drunk with the Spirit, crazy for love, or ecstatic with gratitude. Rather, he is sober with moral uprightness, a stickler for rules, and reigned in by a religious habit of comparing his own behaviour with that of others. While he may appear like he’s got it all together, in truth he is shattered by the attitude superiority, while the sinner, who looks into his own cracked heart is on the path to becoming a vessel for Spirit.

The paradigm of scientific rationalism actually helped humanity to transcend this spiritual arrogance, but in doing so it threw the baby out with the bathwater. It told us that there was no Spirit for some to have and others to not have – so get over it. Of course, it just replaced spiritual arrogance with scientism – another form of arrogance that looked down upon the so-called superstition of any and all religious belief. But you can’t get rid of Spirit by simply declaring It to be the phantom of superstitious religious belief. Spirit is beyond the measurements of any science and refuses to be thrown out, because It is the most real thing about life – the ground and substance of all that science can measure, the vitality that animates all life processes. A great many scientists have arrived at this conclusion precisely through their own careful observation of reality. They’ve discovered what Hafiz calls the “wonderful God” precisely through their scientific methods. So, the answer to the problem of spiritual arrogance is not solved by declaring that there is no Spirit in the first place.

The prophet Joel helps us. He takes an initial step toward dealing with this vicious attitude of superiority (Joel 2:28-30).

“Then afterward, I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh;
your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my Spirit.”

If we emphasize that little word “all”, we have the beginning of what I call the democratization of the Spirit. The time is coming, says the prophet, when the Spirit will not be limited to the priests, and the kings, and special holy men. The radical nature of his prophecy can be detected in his choice to highlight the most marginalized as recipients of the Spirit. The nobodies of the world, even young women and slaves, will be bearers of the Spirit.

But Joel takes us only part way. His is still an ethnocentric and apocalyptic vision. His vision is that God will act soon to destroy the enemy and that only those who call the name of his God will be saved from the devastation. His God will destroy the other gods and his God alone can save us from destruction. In verse 27 God says that soon they will know that He is their God and “there is no other”. And yet, while it is ethnocentric – our God, our people, our families – for his day, his vision remains radical. Within the nation of Israel itself, the spiritual hierarchy will be flattened, as the all classes of people will be vessels of this great outpouring.

Let’s follow Joel’s lead, but take the next step in this democratization of the Spirit – the radical availability of the Spirit to all. Let’s use the sun as an analogy. The sun pours its light upon the earth all day, every day, and has been doing so for the past five billion years – it burns 4 ½ tons of hydrogen every second in the service of life on earth. There is no blade of grass, no insect, no microbe that it does not touch. No part of creation could exist were it not for the light of the sun and the early intelligence of the earth figuring out how to use the sun’s energy. All creation is reconfigured sunlight, including us, sitting here this morning. All of life is a solar gift and a solar event. Does it make any sense at all to conclude that the sun plays favorites? Every thing and every body is a magnificent creature of the light.

It makes no more sense, then, to believe that the Spirit would be poured out upon some more than others. Are Christians more Spirit-filled than Muslims or Jews? Are Pentecostals more Spirit-filled than United Church people? Are humans more special than polar bears? Are we any more radiant that a rain forest or a toucan? We may have a distinctive capacity to consciously appreciate the truth that all of creation is Spirit playing with new forms. But this gift of conscious awareness (that may or may not be unique to humans) was meant to be used the way Hafiz suggested – as the reality that turns us into raving lunatics in love with God and all creation. Instead humans have exhibited spiritual arrogance, at least for the last three hundred years, in the assumption that the earth and her creature exist to be colonized and terrorized by us.

We’re at the end of the Industrial Age, an era when humans believed that we were the exclusive bearers of the Spirit, while the spiritless domain of the earth and her creatures are for our consumption and acquisition of private wealth. Our cup is shattered. We are not screaming drunk at the magnificence of the Holy One because of this arrogance – and this attitude is destroying our planet.

I’m taking Joel at this word – the Spirit has been poured out upon all flesh: all religions, and those who profess no religion; and all creation, human and other-than-human. Those who recognize this gift are not superior, just ecstatic. Those who gather to celebrate this gift in religious ceremony have no judgment in their hearts, but rather love born of an awareness of the deep unity of all life. We work to heal the planet and bring justice to the marginalized because we are aware that life is sacred, a radiant expression of the Spirit. Let us pray that God can gather up the remaining shards of arrogance and fashion from them transparent vessels of grace. Let’s get drunk with humility and with gratitude for this precious gift of life on earth.