"The Holy Spirit I"
The Spirit in Thought and Prayer
Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, April 7, 2002
Text: II Timothy 1:1-7
Amidst all the profound sorrow and death and loss, after the glow of a magnificent Easter and after continually turning the pages of newspapers and of watching on television and listening to on radio the sad and tragic events in the Middle East, this Wednesday I woke up and on my front door was the National Post and I opened it. Finally, some good news.
One of the lead articles had this headline (and I brought it in with me just to prove that I am not telling a fib this morning): "Religious Renaissance - Attendance Rebounds." And the sub-heading: "Teenagers Lead Renewal of Faith in Church Activity. Contradicts the Presumptions that Organized Religion's Grim Forecast Must Now Be Revised, Experts Say." Boy, did I need to read this.
After all the doom and gloom and introspection and wonder about whether the ministry of the church has any validity in this new millennium, we finally receive some statistics that prove that there is good news. But what is interesting is that it arises amongst the young.
The statistics suggest in this particular article that in 1992, 17 per cent of young people in our society went to a religious service on a regular basis, but in the year 2002, 22 per cent of young people attend regular worship services.
The article goes on to suggest that young people have passed by the civil religion and the traditions of their parents and their families and what was expected, but are now looking at the very faith from which they came in a new light, as they are seeking a more profound and spiritual basis for their lives. Young people come to church for various and sundry reasons; many, to find something solid in a life that is often full of shifting sands.
Bonnie Green of our own United Church of Canada was quoted there as saying that the church needs to take a fresh and new approach to the hearts and the minds of young people; that there is a need to seize the day, to be able to grasp the desires of these young people and to present them with something of substance.
I agree with Bonnie on both sides of the equation: that we need to focus on both the hearts and the heads of young people; but not just of young people, but in fact of all of us who are seeking a spiritual foundation for our lives.
This morning, though, I want to concentrate on the latter part, on the intellect, on the mind and on the reason. There is a need, I believe, to do this because over the last few years, Christianity and the proclamation of the Christian faith have very often degenerated into nothing more than a form of emotionalism. We try to appeal to everyone's emotions and provide a balm for the troubled psyches of a world that is dealing with rapid change. In that desire to meet people's emotions, we have sometimes watered down the content of our faith, sometimes reduced it to the level of nothing more than a simple emotional boost once a week that keeps you going for the next few days.
A few weeks ago I was preaching in the United States and on my way out of the church, a woman greeted me and said: "Reverend Stirling, your sermon touched me deeply. It was great. You made me cry."
Now, I wasn't sure whether or not my sermon was so bad I had brought her to tears, or whether it was so emotional that it had brought her to tears of joy. I think it was the latter, but her sentiment is one that many people have: that unless they have cried, unless they have laughed, unless their emotions have somehow been inflamed, then the worship itself has been somehow less than ideal or extraordinary.
My friends, there comes a time also when worship and the ministry of the church, the proclamation and the education of the church, must also meet the mind; for the mind is an important and a crucial part of our lives.
Some time ago, I went into a store and bought something that I had looked for for quite some time - a copy of a Dennis the Menace comic. I have been a huge Dennis the Menace fan for years.
I was sitting on the wall outside the store engrossed, laughing audibly, thoroughly enjoying myself when, all of a sudden, there was a tap on my shoulder. A booming voice said: "Stirling, a good mind is a terrible thing to waste."
Now, surprising as it may sound, I was not a six-year-old at that time. I was 31 and the person who spoke was a Professor of Homiletics at Harvard, no less, as he passed me by. And then he said: "I think you and I should have a coffee."
And so we went into a coffee place in Harvard Square, actually, and we talked. And what was on his mind was much more serious than just that moment. He said: "One of the things that we have been doing in our society is reducing our sense of the intellect and of the mind as it pertains to the Christian faith."
He argued also that we reduce things just to emotional appeal. The problem is that when we do that, if we find that people's minds are not touched, we have left them as empty vacua with nothing to really inspire them or fulfil them when life, for example, reaches difficult times.
The Christian faith, to its credit, has always from its very beginning and its very roots stressed the need for its members and its devotees and its disciples to have solid and informed minds. Whether it was the Apostle Paul appearing before the Council of the Areopagus and debating with the philosophers of the Greek world, or whether it was Tertullianus in his magnificent work, The Apologeticum, where he outlines against the Gnostics the importance of the Incarnation and the importance of the spirit and the importance of the faith in a way that the people of his time could understand; whether it was the great intellectuals like St. Augustine, or St. Thomas Aquinas, or the great scholars like St. Anselm who said, and I quote him in Latin: Fides quaerens intellectum. "It is always faith seeking understanding." There has been this rich tradition that a solid understanding of the faith is a way to reach the mind and the intellect and the reason.
Now, one must never take this too far. The reformers, for example, (and one of the great works, I think, of the medieval period was Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion) always suggest that faith comes first but that in placing faith first it does not mean that we do not address the reasonable, seeking questions of our minds and this becomes so important. It is the reason why even in the modern era the likes of the great Dorothy Soelle, or Karl Barth or Wolfhart Pannenberg have soared again to present the Christian faith to a world that is seeking and is hungry for a solid foundation. And while many of us may not read their works on a daily basis (my gosh, that would be a way to solve insomnia, let me tell you) the fact of the matter is there are people who are struggling with their minds to understand and comprehend and place the faith forward.
One of the best, in my opinion, is a United theologian called Doug Hall. Doug Hall once wrote that Christian thinking is a key dimension in Christian being. Let me repeat that: Christian thinking is a key dimension in Christian being.
I believe that that is all the more important in the context in which we live, where young people are often more sophisticated and better educated than previous generations; where they are bombarded with information every day when they are on the Web, where they are travelling around the world, where they are knowledgeable of things that are going on in many different places in the world. It is important, I believe, that their minds be challenged with the content of the Christian faith and that they be given the opportunity to look at the world in which they live through the eyes of faith; that they be given the tools intellectually to be able to comprehend what is going on around them.
Paul voiced a similar sentiment to young Timothy 2,000 years ago. There is a debate about who may have written this work, but a lot of people agree that there was a Pauline influence.
Young Timothy had grown up in the Christian faith. His grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice had really nurtured his young mind, and the early church had seen in Timothy a mind that could be used and a person who was committed to the Gospel.
Paul reminds Timothy that he laid hands on him and, in the midst of the persecution of Christians by Nero and the Roman Empire, he believed that young Timothy needed to take a strong stand and understand the power of the faith. And so he said to him (and I quote): "I want you to stir up that which is within you, for we have not been given the spirit of timidity but of power and of love," and then that last word, which is often translated as strong courage or of a sound principle. The best translation, I think, is a sound mind. That the Holy Spirit gives us this great gift whereby we can live the Christian life and the Christian faith.
And so I want to look at two dimensions of this, this morning; the first of which is that the Spirit informs our minds.
Plutarch once wrote that the mind is a fire that needs to be ignited, not a vessel that needs to be filled; that the Christian mind is not just something that you cram with information, it is something that needs to be inspired and inflamed.
Young people that we know today have a tremendous intellect, are given so much information when what they need is to have a passion, to have a mind that is focused on the will and the purpose of God. Through that passion, not just by cramming their minds full of information, but by inspiring them, they might desire to know the things of God and apply them to their everyday lives. This, I believe, should be one of the great prayers, one of the great missions of the Christian church.
There is a delightful story told of Hélene Hanff, who wrote Eighty-Four Charing Cross Road. She wrote this play and won an award, which enabled her to go to New York City and to learn to be a playwright for 12 months.
So off she went to New York City and joined a class of 12. The leader of the class came to them and said: "Now look, I want to make sure that every one of you is going to be dedicated to this program from beginning to end. Are you with me?"
They said: "This is a very strange request. Why do you ask?"
"Because" the leader said, "last year two of our key students just took the money and ran off."
So they said: "No, we will stick with it."
And so, over the next 12 months, she and the other 11 students learned to be playwrights. They went on Broadway. They learned to act, to write, to direct. They did everything: stage-work, light-work, camera-work - everything.
At the end of the program, after they had all graduated, not one of them became a playwright. The irony is that the two students who ran off the previous year were Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.
Why? Because they had a passion for it.
I believe the Christian faith is exactly the same. Now, this is not reducing it to emotionalism, don't misunderstand me, but the passionate mind that seeks the Will of God, a passionate mind that is open to the Power of the Holy Spirit, is one of the greatest gifts that we can encourage our young people to seek.
In the Book of Romans, Chapter 8, Paul put it so beautifully this way:
In the same way the Spirit helps us in our weakness, we do not know what we ought to pray, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express and He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for us in accordance with God's will.
In other words, what we need to inflame and invigorate the passion within young people is to know the mind of the Spirit in order that they may know the mind of God, in order that they may seek God in everything and in every facet of their lives.
And this is what I mean by saying that the Spirit informs the mind, because the mind does a second thing: The mind informs our behaviour.
René Descartes once said: "It is no good having a good mind if you don't use it."
The gift of the Spirit to invigorate our minds is in order that our lives might conform to the will of God.
That is why Paul says to young Timothy: "For God has not given us a spirit of timidity but of power and of love and of a strong mind."
For the strong mind principle here is a mind that sets right priorities, that lives in accordance with the will and the purposes of God, a mind that humbles itself to what God desires for us. But so often, my friends, within the church we have opted rather than for a strong mind, for a timid mediocrity, where we have just wanted to have our emotions pandered to rather than our minds informed; where we have just wanted to live an ordinary life rather than a life invigorated by the power of the Spirit for true and meaningful and powerful discipleship.
We are so often like the woman who had grown up in a midwestern town and died as the oldest member of the community. The editor of the local newspaper wanted to write an obituary about the oldest citizen in the community, but he couldn't find anything out about her. He went to every pub. She'd never been in there. He'd been to every nightclub. She had never danced in there. He went to every church. She'd never worshipped there. Every service group, she'd never helped there. He asked everybody from the corner grocer to the local school teacher to the local pastor, and no-one knew anything about her.
Finally, exasperated and not knowing what to write about this woman's life because she had neither been a profligate, nor had she been a saint, she had just simply lived to and by herself, he decided that he needed to get another writer at the paper to see if they could discover anything about her. As it was Monday afternoon and he was desperate, he asked the sports writer if he would write the obituary.
And so the sports writer thought about it a great deal. He went on a search to find out about this woman and still couldn't find anything about her at all, and so finally in the obituary, the sports writer put the following (and this, by the way, is true):
Here lie the bones of Nancy Jones.
For her, life had no terrors.
She lived an old maid.
She died an old maid.
No hits, no runs, no errors.
Well, very often, our faith is No hits, no runs and no errors. We play it safe; we play it in a mediocre way; we think that faith is not something that should be inflamed - just something that should be lived in mediocrity. The problem is that that does not lead to courage. That leads to a life that is timid and a life that has neither power nor love.
The great Martin Luther King in his autobiography tells a story of how, as a young boy, he had to take a bus from one part of Atlanta where he lived over to the west side, to the Booker T. Washington School that he attended. Every day he got on the bus and he found that the front seats were often empty but they had been reserved for whites only and he had to go to the back of the bus. Even if the bus was full, he still had to stand in the back rather than sit near the front. This he did, year in and year out. He said, "You know how I used to deal with this? I used to put my mind at the front of the bus and my body at the back, that's the way I dealt with it. But one day, after I had been praying I woke up and realized that there had to come a day when I put my body and my mind together." There comes a point in which you cannot just think the faith, it has to be a discipleship that acts upon it.
We have young people whom I believe are crying out to know how they should live and what they should do. They're living in a world that is confronted with violence and with oppression, with people in the Middle East who are being led 'way too far by their emotions and not far enough by their minds and certainly not the mind of the Spirit! They're living in that world and they need the invigorating power of the Spirit to inform their minds in order that they may act with courage.
This, my friends, is one of the great challenges facing the church. If what is said in this article is correct, that young people are coming back to church, albeit very slowly, then I think that we need to rise to the occasion by praying that the Spirit might inform their minds and that we might have the courage to lead the way, for we have not been given the spirit of timidity, but of love and power and a sound mind. Amen.