A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

June 11, 2000 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Enemy of Apathy

Calum I. MacLeod
Interim Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Genesis 1:1–5, 2:4–7
Acts 2:1–21

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind.”

Acts 2:2 (NRSV)

She sits like a bird, brooding on the waters,
hovering on the chaos of the world’s first day;
she sighs and she sings, mothering creation,
waiting to give birth to all the Word will say.

She dances in fire, startling her spectators,
waking tongues of ecstasy where dumbness reigned;
she weans and inspires all whose hearts are open,
nor can she be captured, silenced or restrained.

John L. Bell
“Common Ground” Hymnbook

“Twas brillig and the slighy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe,
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”

Now some of you may be thinking I’ve possibly gone mad, and some may be thinking I’m so full of the Holy Spirit that I’m speaking in tongues; but I hope some of you will recognize these words as the first stanza from Lewis Carroll’s well-known nonsense poem, Jabberwocky; a poem that Alice discovers after she has stepped ‘Through the Looking Glass.’ She finds a book and she can’t read the words so she holds it up to the mirror and on it is printed the poem Jabberwocky.

Now Jabberwocky turns up later in ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ you may remember. In Chapter 6, Alice comes across Humpty Dumpty and she knows that Humpty Dumpty is a very wise individual—one might even say an egghead if we were into puns this morning—so she asks Humpty Dumpty to explain to her the meaning of the words of Jabberwocky. During their encounter, Alice starts to become annoyed with Humpty Dumpty because he seems to be just making up the definitions as he goes along. He has a very free approach to the meanings of words. So Alice challenges him and Humpty Dumpty indignantly replies, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Now on the first reading we might just think that this is more nonsense from Lewis Carroll. But I am going to suggest this morning that this is not the case. Rather, that Humpty Dumpty stands as a kind of icon of our age—that age that the scholars have termed ‘postmodern’; an age when the certainties that we have all held to are disappearing; where the social structures and hierarchies which we have always trusted have been folding in on themselves; where even the meanings of words seem to be changing. This is not just my own view. In the religious journal, Christian Century, last week there was a poetry review. Jill Baumgaertner, the reviewer, used this phrase in her piece: “Words can be somewhat slippery in their meaning.”

Now I have found myself particularly agreeing with this view when I take my daily trip to Starbucks for a cup of coffee to keep me going through the day. I’m sure some of you have been to a Starbucks before. When you go into Starbucks you can get coffee in three different sizes. The smallest cup of coffee that you can get is called a “tall” coffee, so Starbucks’ ‘tall’ means the smallest. The meaning is slippery—there’s a whole group of people, and I am one of those, who believes that when I walk into a Starbucks Coffee shop the meaning of tall changes and becomes small. “Words can be slippery in their meaning.”

This can be particularly important for us because words are important to us as people of faith. Words are important to us in our religion. We might even say that Christianity is a religion of the Word. Our ability to form and say and understand words is something which defines our humanity; which differentiates the human species from others. And not only in our communication with each other, but also in the ancient and modern practice of seeking to articulate—to put words to—the experience of that which transcends our words—the experience of God. In one sense, that is what our Scriptures are—the Old and New Testaments—a collected record of the attempts of people through the ages to use language and words to help their community or them as an individual understand their experience of God. The experience of God directly, not as an abstract concept, is what we call the Spirit or the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

The reliance on words to apprehend the word of God can be risky, particularly for us Protestants who use words and language in our worship a lot. I am reminded of the Scottish poet Edwin Muir who wrote a poetic critique of the worst excesses of the Calvinist Church in Scotland. He wrote:

“The Word become flesh / Here becomes word again. God three angry letters in a book / and there the logical hook / on which the mystery is impaled and bent/ into an ideological instrument.”

An important warning to us—language is not meant to restrict God or to explain away the mystery of God’s presence in our lives. Our words about God are always imperfect, never meant to define exclusively. Rather they are to be pointers for us—metaphors and parables, which leave us open to the fullness of God acting in our lives and in our world—a surprising God, a God who knows no bounds and breaks down barriers—a God who startles us. And this is never more so than in the scriptural imagery which surrounds the Spirit of God. These words have a fluidity, a kind of freedom, which in itself says something about the nature of the Holy Spirit. Many are elemental—fire, earthquake, water, wind. Moses meets God in a fire in the burning bush in the desert and when Moses leads the children of Israel out of slavery into liberation, they are led by the spirit of God’s presence in a pillar of fire leading them at night, and then in a pillar of cloud, of wet, of water, by day. In Psalm 29, the psalmist hears God’s presence, God’s voice, in the powerful and threatening thunder of a storm. The prophet Elijah, escaping death and hiding in a cave feels God’s presence not in earthquake or wind or fire, but in a still silent small voice.

But the most familiar, the most dominant description of God’s presence in scripture, is that of wind or breath. In Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek these words are synonymous with the word for spirit. So when we come across spirit in scripture it can also mean wind or breath. In Genesis, chapter 1, and the beginning of Chapter 2, which we have read this morning, are two stories of creation—one is the seven days of creation—one the creation of Adam and Eve in the garden—both are unified by the presence of God’s spirit—the wind of God in Genesis 1, the breath of God giving life in Genesis 2—the same word. In Psalm 104, a Psalm of creation, the Psalmist writes, “When you take away your breath, O Lord, they die. When you send forth your spirit they are created.” And there is the well known vision of the prophet Ezekiel, of the valley of the dry bones, where the lifeless broken skeletons are joined together, given muscle and flesh, and then life when the Lord says, “I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live.”

When I was a young student at Glasgow University and working in a church, I led prayers one Sunday and referred to the Holy Spirit as “it”. The Pastor took me aside afterwards and said, “You must never do that. You must always refer to the Holy Spirit as He.” So I was surprised when I learned in my Biblical Studies classes that in Hebrew and Aramaic the word for spirit is a feminine word. The spirit is referred to as she—the feminine pronoun, and Proverbs, part of the wisdom literature of Israel, picks up on this in Proverbs, Chapter 8 when Wisdom, personified as a woman, talks about being present at creation

This theme was picked up by John Bell, a Scottish hymn writer in a beautiful hymn he wrote called “Enemy of Apathy”:

“She sits like a bird, brooding on the waters,
hovering on the chaos of the world’s first day,
she sighs and she sings, mothering creation,
waiting to give birth to all the Word will say.”

This image of the God’s Spirit as breath and wind is that which is picked up by the Gospel writers. The first words that Luke attributes to Jesus are words which Jesus quotes from the prophet Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” And then in John, Chapter 3, when Jesus has his encounter with Nicodemus, Jesus says, “The wind blows where it chooses.” In the beautiful poetry of the verse in the King James version, “The wind bloweth where it listeth and they heareth the sound thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.”

And it’s that wind, that spirit, that Luke uses to describe the experience the disciples have at Pentecost in Jerusalem. Janet Morley, a British writer and theologian, describes Pentecost as “the outpouring of the sudden power of God to transform a wounded and disillusioned band of stragglers into a community that changed the world.”

And it is to this outcome that all our attempts at language and words point—to the transformation which the presence of the Spirit brings, “like the rush of a violent wind, tongues as of fire.”

So when we read Genesis we see that the wind and breath of God are the agents of creation. It is that which transforms void and chaos into form and meaning, which changes lifeless clay into an animated being.

And so with the Spirit’s new creation, the church born at Pentecost, which we celebrate today; the Spirit bringing meaning out of the hopelessness of the disciples, bringing the promise of dreams and visions out of mourning. And so too in our life today, the wind of the Spirit over the waters of baptism, fastening these little ones baptized today on to the body of Christ, the Church, promising healing and wholeness and forgiveness and grace and reminding each of us of the time that happened to us. And the wind blowing in our daily lives, sometimes disturbing and upsetting our best laid schemes. The wind blowing in our communities, our nation, upsetting the status quo, bringing down the powerful, raising up the humble. . . and sometimes just a quiet whispering comfort, that experience of the Holy Spirit which hymnwriter Brian Wren calls the “breath of love.” A breath suggesting to us that pain and suffering and death are not the final answer, the final outcome, but that, in Desmond Tutu’s words: “goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than fear.”

Denise Levertov is a very fine American poet who died not too long ago. In one of the last poems she wrote before she died she remembered being in Switzerland 50 years ago with her mother and standing by a lake and seeing a column of rain coming across the lake, propelled by the wind and lit by the sun. “I knew this,” she says in her poem “That Day”:

“I knew this. . . ‘The Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters!’ / The column steadily came on / across the lake towards us; on each side of it / there was no rain. We rose to our feet breathless - / and then it reached us took us / into its veil of silver wrapped us / in finest weave of wet, / and we laughed for joy, astonished.”

And so let our prayer this day be that we may all, this Pentecost, know the joy and astonishment of the loving Holy Spirit always blowing where she chooses, the Enemy of Apathy. Amen.