Living According To The Future
On the Surprising Nature of the Holy Spirit
Acts 2.1
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.
I was on the phone with a colleague yesterday, talking about plans for Pentecost, when he shared that his church recently purchased a confetti cannon and will be using it in worship on Sunday.
And when I asked why, the pastor replied, “Because we want people to see that the Spirit is full of surprises.”
Will Turner says that the Spirit is the author of all worship, and without the Spirit in worship all of our best efforts are feeble at best and obnoxious at worst. When the Spirit is not present everything is a drag, you have to beg people to praise, cajole those present into involvement, and barricade the door to prevent early exiting.
But when the Spirit is present, we approach the throne of God with praise and thanksgiving; time is nothing but a magazine; singing is as natural as breathing; preaching is the voice of the Lord meant just for our ears.
The Holy Spirit is always full of surprises, full of creativity, full of force. The Spirit goes wherever it wants, unsought, maybe even unwanted, intent on making all things new.
You see, that’s what Pentecost is all about. A whole new creation. Just as the Spirit hovers over the waters in Genesis bringing forth order out of chaos, the Spirit blows through the upper room upending the disciples’ orderliness for something exciting and something new.
It has always been the nature of the Spirit to shake up the church, particularly when the church becomes self-satisfied and content with the status quo.
The great gift of the Spirit is the Spirit of change and of transformation. God, attested by Christ, and through the Power of the Spirit makes manifest the future in the present.
In the church we have a big and fancy expression for this: eschatological presence. That is, the church lives according to God’s future. We act and move and speak in such a way that threatens the world because we actually believe that God has already poured out the Spirit on all flesh, that all people have worth and value, and that salvation is here.
Therefore, when we live according to God’s future in the present, when we support and encourage without limits or barriers, we are obedient to the gifts of the Spirit and we are faithful to the Good News.
In other words, the church ought (and many of you know how loath I am to use that word) to be a showcase for what the Holy Spirit can do.
That’s why Paul can write to the church in Corinth, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” It’s a freedom for the church to be for the world as God in Christ is for the world. The Spirit empowers, shakes, moves, raises, emboldens us to do and say what needs to be done and said.
I, unlike my friend, won’t be launching confetti in worship on Sunday. And yet, the Spirit of surprises will show up in ways we can scarcely imagine. Which, after all, is what makes worship so exciting in the first place.