When I was in college I wanted to be a rock star. Of course I was in the wrong business really. I was studying to be an actor. But that was the time of the great glam rockers, the hugely concerts, the incredible seemingly world-shaking events, and I loved to imagine being the guy who made such things happen.
One of my roommates taught me how to play a few chords on a beat up old guitar and I started dutifully practicing. The guitar was a cheap acoustic/electric model, kind of tinny and stiff. I started sounding pretty good, or so I thought.
Sooner or later I got my own guitar, a pretty expensive Fender Stratocaster, the guitar of choice for such blues-based rockers as Jimi Hendrix. That guitar was beautiful. Very very sensitive. You could touch a string in a thousand ways and get a thousand sounds.
What this amounted to for me however was that I could hear every single mistake just as loud as you please. Apparently, the better the guitar, the worse I sounded.
It seems almost like an act of God that I lost that guitar in a fire.
Joel preaches a God who will do two things that appear to be tightly intertwined in Joel's vision: first, God will restore the desolate and wasted land to the paradise of plenty it had once been. Closely connected to this restoration, God will make God's people whole by pouring out the Holy Spirit.
The gift is somewhat strange, It is first of all egalitarian; it's not just for certain classes or ages or genders. Second, it appears mainly to enable a kind of prophetic sight, a God's-eye view if you will. Third, it seems to be connected to a kind of world-shaking cosmic disturbance, darkness and blood and so on. Finally, it seems to enable God's people to escape this disturbance.
Why is it that this gift, which we might expect would lead us to happiness and fulfillment, is connected to this cosmic disturbance?
I think it has to do with the Stratocaster principle. By having our eyes opened to the amazing providence and grace of God, by seeing clearly how little we have to do with the blessings we receive, by understanding on a deep level how abundant God's creation is for all, we are automatically and inescapably confronted by the terrible conspiracy among the human race to pervert and twist and deny and reject that spirit of abundant grace.
Barbara Brown Taylor writes about the six stage pain scale in use in some places, and how she had used it during a hip replacement experience. She reported that she had often used the highest levels of the pain scale to describe her pain. But then she read that level five was supposed to be the kind of pain that might actually drive you to suicide, while level six was simply and utterly unbearable for even a second. It led her to think about about how many people in the world endure various kinds of agony without a single pain medication, not because they choose to but because the world marketplace denies them any mercy.
And the sky grows dark and the moon turns to to blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord. The grating and sour notes of our self-deception ring out starkly in the brilliant glare of God's Holy Spirit.
It's my belief that a deep involvement in the bible, a regular and disciplined life of prayer and study, leads us above all other things to an understanding and recognition of God's Holy Spirit. God's Holy Spirit is more than conscience. It is a living and real being, outside of us, or perhaps buried or locked deep within us, that we are trained by our culture to reject or perhaps suppress. It is indeed a supernatural being. It is not simply to be identified with the wonders of nature, but the wonders of nature are indeed good indicators, good descriptors, as Joel himself points out: the fall of rain that nourishes our crops and feeds and washes our bodies is a wonderful metaphor for the supernatural spirit that nourishes our community and feeds and washes our souls.
God's Holy Spirit is also a spirit of wisdom; it allows us to sit, as it were, on God's shoulder, and see what God sees. Because the human condition is what it is, that is, because we suppress or reject the spirit of God, we commit ourselves to all sorts of rash and disastrous decisions, and those who receive the Spirit of God see from God's perspective the disasters that are here, and the disasters that are coming. And those who are sitting on God's shoulder are also enabled to call upon God for salvation, while those who are perishing in the midst of the disaster know of no God they can call.
The Spirit of God is also a Spirit of deep darkness and cosmic disturbance inasmuch as it reveals to us how deeply and helplessly we are caught up in the web of the world's sin, how completely we collaborate with demons out of self-centered fear, self-deception and self-justification. And this is not, friends, God putting his seal of approval on our weakness. The tax collector doesn't go home with God's approval for his vicious betrayal of his countrymen, but rather God's acceptance of his simple honesty. God can work with tax collector's honesty, but he can't work with the Pharisee's blindness.
The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is a trap, and a very efficient one. Jesus leads us into a comparison between two people and just as we identify ourselves with the humility of the tax collector, we are caught, for we have become the Pharisee. The impulse for self-justification is perhaps the most damning of sins and the most difficult to escape.
God pours out his Spirit, and it is like trading one's cheap and tinny instrument for a finely tuned and sensitive masterpiece. It's first gift to us is the harsh light of truth, so necessary for us to even be able to see the disasters that are unfolding, much less to be saved from them. With enough practice, with enough familiarity with that beautiful Strat, I might someday play very well. But I will first have to face my mistakes every time I touch its strings.
God will pour out his Spirit, but this is not the Spirit of positive thinking or of health and wealth. It is the Spirit of truth, unvarnished and naked. Our motives are false, our desires are selfish, we have just enough faith, as one preacher has said, to hate, but not enough to love. To paraphrase Mark Twain, we're good people in the worst sense of the word. God's Spirit gives us the wisdom to see our own desperate need of him.
God will pour out his spirit on all flesh, no matter what age or station or race or gender, no matter whether blameless or willfully sinful. In Jesus Christ, God opened the path for all of us to receive or reveal the Holy Spirit within us. And for us and for our world, this reception or revelation is like a birth, beautiful and dangerous and hopeful and painful and bloody and messy and awe-inspiring.
The humble are exalted and the exalted are humbled. Salvation is at hand. The kingdom has come near.
Amen.
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