Loving God, you pour out your Holy Spirit on those who put their faith in Jesus and give each one gifts for ministry.  Help us to recognize your Spirit today and hear your call to us; for we come to you in the name of Jesus, our Saviour and Lord.  Amen.

    Already the past few weeks we have been thinking about the Holy Spirit, and we’ve been asking what the Holy Spirit looks like and how God works through us and others in order to make a difference in this world.  So, why, would you say, did Jesus send the Holy Spirit in the first place? [To continue his work here on earth; To continue to be “God with us”; To give us gifts for ministry; To teach us; To help / advocate for us] Really, lots of different reasons are given in the Scriptures.

    However, here’s something about the Holy Spirit that you may not have heard: “The Holy Spirit does not come to solve our problems but to create them” (David Lose, WorkingPreacher.org).  Now doesn’t that sound odd?  However, once you start thinking about it, it begins to ring true.

    Consider, for a moment, those first disciples of Jesus and what life would have been like for them if the Holy Spirit had never been given.  Wouldn’t they have simply gone back to the lives that they had before they met Jesus?  Wouldn’t they have gone back to fishing and tax collecting and whatever else they had done before?  There’s no way these people would have gone out preaching and teaching and healing people without the gift of the Holy Spirit.  They also would not have ended up being imprisoned and tortured and beaten and stoned to death without the gift of the Holy Spirit.

    It is an absolute paradox.  The same Spirit that gives life in all its fulness and peace and joy creates problems and challenges for people here on this earth.  This is just as true today as it was in the first century, and it is through those problems and challenges that we finally learn how to rely on God’s power for all that is needed.

    I’ve recently been reading the story of K. P. Yohannan, founder of the Gospel for Asia.  In his life, the Holy Spirit both created problems and solved them.  K. P. grew up in the southern part of India and felt the Spirit calling him into service when he was still a teenager.  He had heard about the millions of people in remote villages in India who had never even heard the name of Jesus, let alone believed in him, and K. P. knew that God was calling him to go and share the gospel with these people.

    Eventually, K. P. went out with other young people in gospel teams, travelling from village to village and often sleeping in ditches in order to share the good news about Jesus with people who had never heard.  They travelled without any money for food and with only the clothes on their backs and their Bibles, often going hungry unless somebody shared a meal with them along the way.  Over the course of several years, they rejoiced over those who confessed their sins and professed their faith in Jesus.

    Yet, K. P. and his companions also ran into lots of hostility along the way and were beaten and stoned and threatened with death for sharing their faith in Jesus.  They ended up sleeping in ditches because near non-Christian villages that was the safest place to be for the night.  Certainly, listening to the Holy Spirit created many problems for K. P.!

    However, he also learned that where God guides, God provides.  Later on in his life, K. P. was still seeking to obey God’s calling and still living on very little.  At one point he was despairing because he could not feed his wife and children, and he was wondering if he might need to use some of the donations that had been given to support national missionaries in Asia.  After wrestling with God about this, he sent on the full amount of the donations to the missionaries, knowing that he could not take this money from them.  As soon as he sent off the cheque, there was a knock at the door, and an unknown woman dropped off a box of food for his family.  Once again, the Holy Spirit had created problems, but God had provided.

    There is a second paradox about the Holy Spirit that you also may not have heard, and it is this: “The Holy Spirit doesn’t prevent failure, but invites it.”  In other words, “The Holy Spirit invites us to find fulfilment and victory in and through our setbacks and failures” (David Lose).  Sometimes perhaps we only think about victory and power when it comes to the Holy Spirit.  However, we don’t always hit on the best solution the first time we try something.

    Once again, when we think about this in light of the Scriptures, it rings true.  Today’s gospel takes place right after the disciples had failed miserably by running away when Jesus is arrested and crucified.  However, Jesus appears to them speaking peace and sending them out in the power of the Holy Spirit.

    Later, of course, there are also many occasions when Jesus’ followers try to share the good news and are greeted with hostility and riots and beatings and imprisonments.  Things do not always go well as they share the good news about Jesus.  Yet, they learn to find fulfilment and victory in the midst of these setbacks and failures.

    The same could also be said for K. P. Yohannan.  As a young adult, he returned to some of the villages where he had shared the gospel in order to see how the people were doing.  In pretty much every case, the people had reverted to their old religions and were no longer following Jesus.  After his initial despair over how the gospel had not taken root in these places, K. P. learned from these experiences.  He learned that you can’t just share the gospel with somebody and expect them to grow in their faith all by themselves.  They need a Christian community.  They need teaching and worship.  They need others to support them in the faith.  

    And so, from these first failures he learned how to stay in a village long enough to train some teachers and leaders in order to support people in their faith.  In this way, the gospel not only took root, but continued to expand and to grow as others in the village then shared their witness, too.

    While our life situations might be quite different, God gives to us that same Spirit and that same call to share the good news in whatever ways we can.  Thankfully, we are not likely to be persecuted in the same way for our faith here in Canada.  However, we still run into many difficult choices when we seek to follow Jesus, and many things in this world that conflict with love for God and love for others.  Listening to God’s Spirit and obeying God’s call are certainly not easy.

    However, neither those first disciples, nor K. P. Yohannan, nor any other followers of Jesus would ever tell you that they regret the gift of the Holy Spirit.  While life might have been simpler in some ways without it, not one of them would trade the peace and joy and life in the Spirit that come with loving Jesus for any sort of less complicated and more worldly life.  Life in the Spirit may not be easy, but God always provides for those who seek to be faithful.

    Let us then not be afraid to fail when it comes to God’s work.  Let’s not be afraid to try things and to learn from things that don’t work.  Let’s not be afraid to bring apparent problems to God and to seek God’s will and God’s solutions.  The Holy Spirit will, indeed, work through us and guide us.  And where God guides, God provides!  Amen.

Day of Pentecost (A)                            Acts 2:1-21
June 12, 2011                                John 20:19-23
St. Luke’s Zion Lutheran Church
Pastor Lynne Hutchison

© 2011 Lynne Hutchison  All Rights Reserved